Tolstoy, Leo

Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Лев Николаевич Толстой) was born in 1828, a little south of Moscow.

9 September 1828 Tula Governorate, Russian Empire
20 November 1910 Ryazan Governorate, Russian Empire

Tolstoy is today best known for War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). These works are widely seen as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. Tolstoy’s fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Family Happiness (1859), and Hadji Murad (1912). He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.

At some point in the late 1870s he experienced a self-described “profound moral crisis,” followed by what he regarded as an “equally profound spiritual awakening.” This is documented in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. Interestingly, his thoughts on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th c. figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Tolstoy’s contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky admired and was delighted by Tolstoy’s novels (and, conversely, Tolstoy also admired Dostoyevsky’s work). Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, “What an artist and what a psychologist!”

The 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold opined that “A novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life.”

Virginia Woolf declared him “the greatest of all novelists.” James Joyce noted that “He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!” Thomas Mann wrote of Tolstoy’s seemingly guileless artistry: “Seldom did art work so much like nature.”

Vladimir Nabokov heaped superlatives upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of War and Peace, and sharply criticized Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

ENGLISH LIT.

The English language
“Elizabethan era” / “Love letters”
French in English / Latin in English
Anthology / Chronology / Terminology
Phrases & idioms (with their etymologies)
Literary criticism: analysing poetry & prose
Glossary of works, writers and literary devices:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
📙 Books 📕 Poets 📗 Thinkers 📘 Writers

READING LISTS ETC.

WRITERS

POETS

PHILOSOPHERS

PSYCHOLOGISTS

POLITICAL FIGURES

BOOKS OF FICTION ^⅋

NON-FICTION BOOKS ^⅋

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French writer, philosopher and political activist. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. — The Second Sex

A Room of one's own — A Room of One’s Own

War and Peace is the 1869 novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as a classic of world literature. (The novel chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.) Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel. — War and Peace

The Trial, by Franz Kafka (1914 [1925]) -- A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral. — The Trial

Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist (one Bernard Marx). In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number five on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th c. — Brave New World

Beloved is a 1987 novel by the late American writer Toni Morrison. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and, in a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times, it was ranked the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. The work, set after the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Garner was subsequently captured and decided to kill her infant daughter rather than have her taken into slavery. — Beloved

The Prophet “If you love somebody, let them go, if they don’t return, they were never yours.”	The Essential Rumi “Lovers do not finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.”
Ways of Escape: a journey of sorts A short excerpt from the book: “I was dead, deader than dead because, I was still alive.”	The Significance of Literature A podcast series that chronologically charts the key works of poetry and prose.

Like this: