“Cooke has written a valuable contribution to Tolstoy studies, and to evolutionary approaches to literature. Multiple audiences will find things of use. The detail of the readings, and the research done on Tolstoy’s family are wonderful. They betray a true love of the writer and of Russian culture, as well as a decades-long dedication to evolutionary approaches to literature. The insights gleaned from the drafts alone make this a useful work… At the end of the day, Cooke has done something immensely useful. He has left us with a concrete, testable hypothesis that can be applied to other writers, and these are hard to come by in the humanities. A gauntlet has been thrown down. It should be picked up.”
– Tom Dolack, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
“Like War and Peace, which Cooke calls a ‘lovable, ungainly novel,’ this study will strike readers, whether they share its assumptions or not, as different, refreshing, adventurous, idiosyncratic, and a pleasure to read.”
—Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
“One need not be a fan of Richard Dawkins or the selfish gene to be fascinated by Brett Cooke’s meticulous trawl through the outlines, drafts and published versions of War and Peace, seeking signs of kin altruism and tracking mathematical relatedness. Tolstoy did research into real genealogy—only to clean up families he loved (his own) and mercilessly debauch families (the Golitsyns/Kuragins) that caused harm. Literally everyone who matters ends up being related to Leo Tolstoy, and all energies lead up to the birth of the author. Evolutionary psychology is alive and well in the mind of Tolstoy the novelist; sterility becomes a personality defect. But there is also mandatory incest avoidance, so Cooke reminds us of non-fictive bonds as well. Tolstoy’s adored mother was the grandniece of Pushkin’s uncle. A literary lineage cannot get better than this.”
— Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
“In this volume, Brett Cooke investigates the family in both Tolstoy’s fiction and biography, casting much of his inquiry into exploring artistic creativity. Why did Tolstoy’s character-prototypes become more like actual family members as the novel developed instead of less, as one might expect? What does this convey about truth in fiction? The reader’s pleasures lie equally in Cooke’s application of kinship and altruism theories to Tolstoy’s fiction and his identification of multitudinous details of character, object, and event that flow from Tolstoy’s actual world into his created one. Cooke’s project propels us along with an urgency usually reserved for plot-ridden fiction. Can evolutionary psychology explain why Tolstoy’s relatives generally appear in such a positive light in his fiction? Cooke even manages, in Sternean fashion, to locate little Leo Tolstoy, both as a child and perhaps as a fetus at the end of War and Peace.”
—Robin Feuer Miller, Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, Brandeis University
"The author convincingly illustrates Tolstoy’s interest in his family and its history, as well as his use of prototypes in general, referencing myriad drafts of the novel as well as the extensive scholarship on Tolstoy, his family, and his opinions. Aspects of Tolstoy’s writing, such as his use of the names of actual persons for characters in early drafts of the novel, or his complaints about his difficulties in inventing convincing last names for characters, flesh out the literary argument, which represents an impressive synthesis of much of the enormous scholarship about Tolstoy and his novels… [T]he book offers an engaging account of Tolstoy’s family relationships and artistic decisions."
—Mary W. Cavender, Ohio State University, The Russian Review (October 2021)
“This is a work of painstaking research and exciting interdisciplinary horizons. Brett Cooke pores over the novel’s voluminous plans, drafts, and finished product to show how, in transforming real-life prototypes into major characters, the great realist creatively distorts the originals in a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ direction, depending on the internalized pressures of kin selection/inclusive fitness. The idea of family that Tolstoy so brings to life in beloved characters like Natasha and Pierre, Mary and Nicholas, works as powerfully as it does because their trajectories toward something are, evolutionarily speaking, significant. For example, Mary and Nicholas, whose prototypes were Tolstoy’s own parents, improve on their journey into print because two things are happening simultaneously: they are genetically very close (50%) to the son who is fictionalizing their stories and their own sacrifices (‘kin altruism’) vis-à-vis their offspring, however idealized in the process of artistic execution, come across as what is most endearing and 'alive' about them, especially considering the fact that their premature deaths will orphan Tolstoy at a young age. The framework of kin selection is not presented as something inevitably predictive or deterministic, but rather as an additional, yet important factor in Tolstoy’s artistic rendering of the different families. This is a work of daring, yet responsible speculation as well as a major contribution to Tolstoy studies.”
—David M. Bethea, Vilas Research Professor (emeritus), University of Wisconsin-Madison
