Of 'War and Peace': Finishing her mother's work

Dennis Nealon; university magazine

Excerpted from The Brandeis Review:

An expert on 19th-century Russian fiction

brings to publication a manuscript begun by her mother

By Dennis Nealon, M.A. ‘95

Robin Feuer Miller has literally come full circle since her adventurous days in the spring of 1963, when, at 15, she wandered the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana, the Russian estate where the great Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote War and Peace.

Today, Miller, dean of arts and sciences and professor of Russian and comparative literature at Brandeis, is set to have published by Cornell University Press Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, the edited, completed version of a manuscript begun by her late mother, noted Tolstoy scholar Kathryn B. Feuer.

Coedited by Miller and Donna Tussing Orwin, a Tolstoy scholar who is an adjunct professor of Russian literature and member of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Toronto, the work is an examination of rough drafts that were intended for but never published in War and Peace. “The novel that we see in War and Peace is really just the tip of an iceberg,” Miller notes…