Roger Pulvers

His prose is very beautiful, very concise, very clear.

I read Anna Karenina when I was a student and I read it in Russian.

I wasn't entirely taken with it.

Even then I found the morality of it a little bit dated.

But for the time it was very, it was an amazing and

iconoclastic work.

And War and Peace, I read about a third of it in Russia and then I piped out and I read some of the rest of it in English, but I'm afraid I never finished it.

I shouldn't confess that on the radio, but maybe people will find that sympathetic.

He does.

He's a very sensitive man.

He's a sensitive man caught up in a barbaric war, a war that he grows to despise.

And in fact, the main relationship in the novel between him and Katerina Trubitskaya

who's looking after the legacy and the archive of Tolstoy at the estate when the Wehrmacht overruns it.

Their relationship, which grows and grows, is basically based on love of Tolstoy.

She's a Tolstoy expert, and she looks after the library.

And even though his Russian is rather rudimentary,

She had a German governess when she was young and so she speaks German and their common language is German.

Yeah, she's very feisty and argumentative and she's a stalwart communist and she lets that be known to the,

to the Germans, but some of them, you know, tolerate her and put up with her.

I sort of wondered why, but no, that's fine.