TONIGHT: Queer Tolstoy Discussion at Book Soup!

Tonight, I will present Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography at Book Soup! The talk will begin at 7pm, and there will be copies of Queer Tolstoy available for sale at a discount. The event will include a period for questions and answers, plus book signings. My comments will address Tolstoy’s underappreciated queerness, both in life and art, together with Tolstoy’s anti-militarism, in light of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine—almost a year after the full-scale invasion began.

Book Soup is located at 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA, 90069.

Masks are strongly encouraged for this event. Thank you!

Anarchism and Star Trek: Picard

Check out this entertaining interview Joseph Orosco recently held with my mother, María Castro, and myself about our article, “Bibliophilia and Anarchism in Star Trek: Picard.” Our conversation took place on YouTube for the Anarres Project for Alternatives Futures this month, and our review was published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory in October 2022.

Queer Tolstoy and anti-authoritarian struggle today

People and Nature

A guest post by JAVIER SETHNESS CASTRO, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography, just published by Routledge Mental Health

By the end of his long life, in 1910, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy had become the greatest public critic of the Russian Tsarist empire. By destabilising the Romanov autocracy through his writings, which amounted to more than eighty volumes, Lev Nikolaevich became Tsar Nicholas II’s most significant rival.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in 1897 (from Wikimedia Commons)

As a result, the Governing Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, a status he retains to this day. Alexei Suvorin, the editor of New Times [the late 19th century Russian journal], afterwards observed that Russia effectively had two Tsars: namely, Nicholas II and Tolstoy.[1]

Indeed, the Imperial state had raided Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s family estate, in 1862; surveilled him for the last twenty-five years of his life; censored, banned…

View original post 1,963 more words