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'Powerful, densely rich and deeply affecting, The Tolstoy Estate shows Steven Conte to be one of our finest writers.
'From the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award
'In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana - the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trusbetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer's hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, starts becoming steadily more preoccupied and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel...
'From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate is ambitious, accomplished and astonishingly good: an engrossing, intense and compelling exploration of the horror and brutality of conflict, and the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual limits that people reach in war time. It is also a poignant, bittersweet love story - and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: For my mother, Rosemary, and my sister, Eira
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
- Large print.
Works about this Work
-
NRB Readers’ Top 10 for 2020
2020
single work
column
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , December 2020; -
Strange Brew : An Odd Novel about World War II
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 425 2020; (p. 26)
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel 'During Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Germans occupied Yasnaya Polyana – the former estate of Leo Tolstoy – for just forty-five days and converted it into a field hospital. The episode features in the war reportage of Ève Curie (daughter of Marie), and sounds like tantalising, if challenging, source material for a novelist. There’s the brutal irony inherent in the home of a world-famous prophet of non-violence being occupied by, of all people, the Nazis. There’s the human loss and horror of the deadliest military operation in the deadliest war in history. And there’s audacity in invoking and responding to Tolstoy’s great epic of another – Napoleon’s – doomed invasion of Russia: War and Peace (1869).' (Introduction) -
Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 5-11 September 2020;
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'Steven Conte won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, so it’s not hard to imagine that this new book, The Tolstoy Estate, has been much awaited in the 12 years since. The proof copy came with an absurd cover-sized puff about this being “a novel for people who still believe in the saving grace of literature in dark times”, which is enough to put anyone off. But The Tolstoy Estate is in fact a fine novel – grave, moving and engaging – and it will absorb every kind of reader with its weirdly humane war story in which the military characters are German medics. The span of the action – which encompasses a strange dislocated love story yet is also a meditation on literature and Tolstoy in particular – is beautifully handled, with an absolute sureness of step even though its structure seems fractured and not intrinsically probable or, on the face of it, viably shapely.' (Introduction)
-
Lighting Paths to Awareness
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 5 September 2020; (p. 16)
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War — the inaugural winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2008 — told of the German experience of World War II. Seen from the vantage point of a couple attempting to salvage their lives and livelihoods in the wake of the Allied bombings of Berlin, the novel encompassed the intimate and the epic, and revealed Conte’s extraordinary talent for narrative detail.' (Introduction)
-
Steven Conte The Tolstoy Estate
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , September 2020;
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'You don’t need to have read War and Peace to enjoy Steven Conte’s second novel.'
-
Steven Conte The Tolstoy Estate
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , September 2020;
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'You don’t need to have read War and Peace to enjoy Steven Conte’s second novel.'
-
Lighting Paths to Awareness
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 5 September 2020; (p. 16)
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s War — the inaugural winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2008 — told of the German experience of World War II. Seen from the vantage point of a couple attempting to salvage their lives and livelihoods in the wake of the Allied bombings of Berlin, the novel encompassed the intimate and the epic, and revealed Conte’s extraordinary talent for narrative detail.' (Introduction)
-
Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 5-11 September 2020;
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel'Steven Conte won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, so it’s not hard to imagine that this new book, The Tolstoy Estate, has been much awaited in the 12 years since. The proof copy came with an absurd cover-sized puff about this being “a novel for people who still believe in the saving grace of literature in dark times”, which is enough to put anyone off. But The Tolstoy Estate is in fact a fine novel – grave, moving and engaging – and it will absorb every kind of reader with its weirdly humane war story in which the military characters are German medics. The span of the action – which encompasses a strange dislocated love story yet is also a meditation on literature and Tolstoy in particular – is beautifully handled, with an absolute sureness of step even though its structure seems fractured and not intrinsically probable or, on the face of it, viably shapely.' (Introduction)
-
Strange Brew : An Odd Novel about World War II
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 425 2020; (p. 26)
— Review of The Tolstoy Estate 2020 single work novel 'During Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Germans occupied Yasnaya Polyana – the former estate of Leo Tolstoy – for just forty-five days and converted it into a field hospital. The episode features in the war reportage of Ève Curie (daughter of Marie), and sounds like tantalising, if challenging, source material for a novelist. There’s the brutal irony inherent in the home of a world-famous prophet of non-violence being occupied by, of all people, the Nazis. There’s the human loss and horror of the deadliest military operation in the deadliest war in history. And there’s audacity in invoking and responding to Tolstoy’s great epic of another – Napoleon’s – doomed invasion of Russia: War and Peace (1869).' (Introduction) -
NRB Readers’ Top 10 for 2020
2020
single work
column
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , December 2020;
Awards
- 2021 longlisted HNSA Historical Novel Prize — Adult
- 2021 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award — Book of the Year
- 2021 longlisted Colin Roderick Award
- 2021 shortlisted The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
- 2021 longlisted Indie Awards — Fiction
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cRussia,ccFormer Soviet Union,cEastern Europe, Europe,
- 1941