Jordan Hoffman

Sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull and Jordan Hoffman.​​

In each of these two gems of the storyteller’s art, one of the world’s most celebrated  writers of Big Novels gives us a narrator who find himself in the grip of a powerful memory that fires his imagination. In Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, a man trying to pluck a beautiful thistle flower finds that the plant fights him at every point of his attempt: his resulting reflection on human destruction and the unwillingness of the plant to submit to his rough persuasion occasions his recollection of the tribal chief from the Caucasus who had refused to submit to the Russians. Harold Bloom called this little work, published after Tolstoy’s death, his own “personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction."  In Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband, a man is tormented by a past that unexpectedly comes crowding to the forefront of his consciousness with alarmingly vivid clarity, only to find his present confronting him with the widower whose wife had been his lover. Virginia Woolf expected the reader of this work to be “filled with a giddy rapture.”  Reading these two short novels together may furnish occasion for fruitful insight about memory and imagination.    

Online seminars in this series will take place on Thursday evenings, 5:00-6:30PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be mailed the texts. Sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull and Jordan Hoffman. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 1 CEU credit for participating. This six-week series is $550. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $50 through a refund. Payment options are available. 

Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky: Two Short Novels is $550. 
Community of Lifelong Learners subscribers receive a discount of $50 through a refund. 

- NOW ENROLLING --

Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky: Two Short Novels
Thursday Evenings -
November 5 to December 17 - 5:00-6:30PM Pacific

Texts:
Tolstoy - Hadji Murad - Maude translation, Modern Library (ISBN: 9780812967111)

Dostoyevsky - The Eternal Husband - Garnett translation, Dover (ISBN: 9780486465722)

Dates and Curriculum - Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky: Two Short Novels

Seminar One

Thursday, November 5

5:00-6:30PM

Tolstoy - Hadji Murad - chapters 1-8

Seminar Two

Thursday, November 12

5:00-6:30PM

Tolstoy - Hadji Murad - chapters 9-16

Seminar Three

Thursday, November 19

5:00-6:30PM

Tolstoy - Hadji Murad - chapters 17-25

Thursday, November 26

No meeting for Thanksgiving