George Steiner'sTolstoy or Dostoevsky has become a classic among scholars of Russian literature. An essay in poetic and philosophic criticism that bears mainly on the Russian masters, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky deals also with larger themes: the epic tradition extending from Homer to Tolstoy; the continuity of a "tragic world view" from Oedipus Rex to King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov; the contrasts between the epic and dramatic modes, between irreconcilably opposed views of God and of history.

Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff ofThe Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wroteTolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and beganThe Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he publishedAnno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War.Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includesProofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.