Young Tolstoy in Love One must taste life once in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day before me–those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come from her creator’s hands–and then it becomes clear who is living truly or falsely. Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl. […]
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“Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s Self-Portrait In this semiautobiographical trilogy, Tolstoy imagined a friendship between his boyhood-self, the narrator, and his young-adult self, Prince Dimitri Nechludoff, who is also the hero of hist last novel, Resurrection. Tolstoy was only in his 20s when he wrote the trilogy, but his self-portrait was stunningly accurate. In him there were two personalities, both of which I thought beautiful. One, which I loved devotedly, was kind, mild, forgiving, […]
Read more“What I believe” by Leo Tolstoy
[AKA: My Religion] When I first read War and Peace five years ago, Tolstoy was nothing but a famous name to me. War and Peace was the first epic novel I’ve ever read, and, to me, it was perfect. Now that I’ve read most of Tolstoy’s works, I’d like to think that I have a decent understanding of the artist through his works, which make up a jigsaw portrait of […]
Read moreTolstoy on Slavery
“The misery of a worker, does not consist in his long hours and small pay, but in the fact that he is deprived of the natural conditions of life in touch with nature, is deprived of freedom, and is compelled to compulsory and monotonous toil at another man’s will.” –Leo Tolstoy The Slavery of Our Times
Read moreTolstoy on Shakespeare
[Posted to commemorate the 185th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s birthday] Tolstoy was a bona fide iconoclast, who was not afraid to think and speak for himself, and did so with the force of reason and conviction, as is evident in his critical essay on Shakespeare. Comparing Shakespeare with Homer However distant Homer is from us, we can, without the slightest effort, transport ourselves into the life he describes,…because he believes […]
Read more“Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity” by G. K. Chesterton
[Warning: The following review may be strongly biased. I read Chesterton’s Heretics and Orthodoxy a long time ago, but retained nothing from them, except that he had sharp wit and good sense of humour; On the other hand, I’m a fan of Tolstoy and read the majority of his works] If Chesterton had reviewed his essay on Tolstoy in a more reflective mood, he would have retracted it. It’s a […]
Read more“Plays” by Leo Tolstoy
“The Power of Darkness” is perhaps one of the darkest of Tolstoy’s works, because it depicts the most hideous of human nature. One can hardly believe that the characters are human beings, not some wild beasts, or those driven mad by the gods in the Greek tragedies. C.S.Lewis might have been inspired by “The First Distiller” in writing “The Screwtape Letters”, as it relates the story of how an imp […]
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