Tolstoy in the Arab World: Adventures in Literary Appropriation

The first colloquium of the Spring semester featured Margaret Litvin, a former DS student and subsequent DS H&P instructor, who is now Chair of the World Languages & Literatures program at Boston University.  Professor Litvin used materials from her forthcoming book on the reception of Russian literature in the Arab world to teach us more about the particular ways in which Tolstoy and his controversial views on gender and religion were received and reshaped by its reception in Arab countries since the late nineteenth century.