Beginning in September, Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of Literature at Swarthmore College, will present a six-part seminar on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, hosted on Zoom by Lifelong Learning Swarthmore. Professor Weinstein and Lifelong Learning Swarthmore have generously arranged for Martha's Vineyard Library patrons to participate in this program at no charge.
The class will take place every two weeks on Mondays from 7:00-8:30 pm, September 18th, October 2nd, October 23rd, November 6th, November 20th, and December 4th.
At a time when most Americans have trouble thinking positively about Russia, it may be productive to launch a six-part engagement with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Our aim is to come to grips with the literary dimensions of Tolstoy’s big book, not with the problematic history of post-Tolstoyan Russia in the last hundred years. That said, it is not surprising that Lenin was deeply interested in Tolstoy and wrote brilliantly about him. More, Tolstoy’s abiding concerns—the drama of class differences and commonalities, Russia’s relation to European culture and powers, among others—continue to resonate long after his death in 1910.
"Not a novel," Tolstoy said about his epic novel, yet his refusal of novelistic norms does not keep War and Peace from being a supreme example of 19th-century Western fiction. Realistic, recognizable, filled with intricate and sympathetic characters, this novel does what great novels do: it informs, enlarges, deepens, and entertains its readers. It also does more: it seeks not just to rewrite history but to articulate a philosophy of history, intermingling the real and the invented in ways that baffled Tolstoy's critics. Reading 200 pages per session (every two weeks, for three months), we shall take the time necessary to try to do justice to Tolstoy's masterpiece.
Beginning in January, Professor Weinstein will present an additional seminar with Vineyard Haven Library, "Known and Unknown Worlds: Fictions of the 21st Century." Texts for this course will include works by Jonathan Franzen, W.G. Sebald, Edward P Jones, Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett, and Colum McCann. Additional details to be announced.
Philip M. Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Emeritus at Swarthmore College. His numerous publications include Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), and Becoming Faulkner (2009). His newest book is a collection of essays entitled Soul-Error (2022). Professor Weinstein has been offering literary seminars in cooperation with the Vineyard Haven Public Library since 2012, and is the Honorary Co-Chair of the Capital Campaign for Vineyard Haven Library's expansion and renovation project.
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