James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Close Readings · Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy · 27 Apr 2026
podcast
I chose that Who's Afraid of Realism with some deliberation as a title for the series.
And indeed, this is a book that we should read with... We're supposed to read it with fearfulness.
It has a strong judgment for us.
And I think I probably...
I probably shared with you when I was younger a kind of, I mean, look, there's no doubt that Tolstoy in these last decades of his life was a crank.
I mean, you know, there was the vegetarianism, the pacifism, the impossibility at home, certainly the patriarchal impossibility at home.
The wife just can't live with him.
He's monstrous to half of the children.
The Acolytes, you wrote about this wonderfully, the sort of the dreaded hangers-on who sort of, who are always in the house.
This was the period for listeners who don't know about, much about late Tolstoy.
You might say this is the moment where the great novelist switches over, certainly in the Anglophone world, he sort of switches over from being the writer of the two great novels to being...
a manifesto writer, a pamphleteer.
Tolstoy societies grow up all around the place, and these dreaded acolytes, sort of journalists, disciples, start glomming on to Tolstoy and insinuating themselves into the family structure, right?
Absolutely.
Well, maybe what we should do is let's just go back to this amazing book.
And just to get our bearings, we'll remind ourselves of the form and shape of
It begins, very interestingly, not quite where you'd expect it to.
It begins after Ivan Ilyich's death.
Three judges are in their chambers and they're looking at the obituary of their colleague and in wonderful Tolstoyan mode in that sort of fantastic kind of Homeric authority that he always had as a novelist.
He just brilliantly generalizes and says, as is usual in such cases, all three of them thought, thank goodness that it's him who died and not me.
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