/lit/ - Literature

>>14464510
He preaches at the reader with the subtlety of being attacked by a cartoon character wielding a mallet, yet his worldviews are all ivory tower holier-than-thou pedantery entirely untested by real world situations. He's a very educated child and wrote his major works as a young adult. They were written for and celebrated by other ivory tower aristocrats and pushed onto everyone else, above everyone else. Yet even Tolstoy himself later realized how embarassingly naive and shallow were his philosophies and his own lack of humility in showcasing them, and the latter half of his life was spent trying to redeem himself in his own view. He went crazy, gave away his fortune, and started pushing a plow as a farmer. But even as he himself redacted his faith in his works, we still read them as if they were perfected material.

Reading Tolstoy is the errand of a fool.