/lit/ - Literature

Why did he tell people not to have sex despite having sex all his life?

>Leo Tolstoy
“I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.” This is Tolstoy in one of the relatively few diary entries he made during the mid-1860s, when he was deep into the writing of War and Peace. Although he does not describe his routine in the diary, his oldest son, Sergei, later recorded the pattern of Tolstoy’s days at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia.
>From September to May we children and our teachers got up between eight and nine o’clock and went to the hall to have breakfast. After nine, in his dressing-gown, still unwashed and undressed, with a tousled beard, Father came down from his bedroom to the room under the hall where he finished his toilet. If we met him on the way he greeted us hastily and reluctantly. We used to say: “Papa is in a bad temper until he has washed.” Then he, too, came up to have his breakfast, for which he usually ate two boiled eggs in a glass.
>He did not eat anything after that until five in the afternoon. Later, at the end of 1880, he began to take luncheon at two or three. He was not talkative at breakfast and soon retired to his study with a glass of tea. We hardly saw him after that until dinner.
According to Sergei, Tolstoy worked in isolation—no one was allowed to enter his study, and the doors to the adjoining rooms were locked to ensure that he would not be interrupted. (An account by Tolstoy’s daughter Tatyana disagrees on this point—she remembers that their mother was allowed in the study; she would sit on the divan sewing quietly while her husband wrote.) Before dinner, Tolstoy would go for a walk or a ride, often to supervise some work on the estate grounds. Afterward he rejoined the family in a much more sociable mood. Sergei writes:
>At five we had dinner, to which Father often came late. He would be stimulated by the day’s impressions and tell us about them. After dinner he usually read or talked to guests if there were any; sometimes he read aloud to us or saw to our lessons. About 10 P.M. all the inhabitants of [Yasnaya] foregathered again for tea. Before going to sleep he read again, and at one time he played the piano. And then retired to his bed about 1 A.M.

Anyone else here /literarygenius/?

This is not ironic, or a shitpost. I once made my attractive female English professor break down into tears with my genius. It was like the scene in Good Will Hunting where the math professor breaks down after Will easily solves the math problems he was given, saying "there are some days where I wish you didn't exist." She thought it was probably the best thing that she had ever read from the last 20 or so years. Yes, we did have sex eventually. I write the greatest work out there today. You pathetic posers will probably try to project onto me and deny it, but it's true, and I don't need to prove it to a bunch of sad anime-watching, hentai-jerking retards on the internet, so no, I will not post my work. No, I'm not scared or doubtful of my work, I just don't want my name to be ever associated with this sad little website. I have read most of the Western Canon, am fluent in 6 languages (Russian, Mandarin, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and of course, English), and my poetry and prose are both at the level of Joyce's. A different professor of mine once said that if I do not go down in literary history, then literary history has failed us. I once met with Bloom in person, where we had a deep and detailed conversation about Faulkner, and he told me that I was "incredibly competent and wise young man." My philosophy professor praised my work in philosophy, but as my true strength remains in art, also told me that a poem of mine "has the emotional depth of Coleridge and the precise linguistic mastery of Yeats." Upon graduating college, I will publish my masterpiece which will undoubtedly shock the literary world. It is profoundly imaginative, reaches a level of linguistic perfection on the level of Flaubert, and effortlessly dismantles the superficiality and degeneration of modern culture with a violent and powerful personal confession, reaching beyond the modern age to something much greater. I am 6'2" and very good looking, so I have many female admirers, but I have often ignored them for the sake of literary greatness. I have even received a love letter from a lovely petite brunette in my sophomore year. After being accepted into a highly selective program at my university (highly prestigious, of course, but I will not name it for the previously articulated reason), I have had the opportunity to work with the greatest poets alive today, all of whom have been blown away by my work. After publishing my work, I plan to study at Oxford or to travel around Russia, my homeland.

I hope there are some of my kind on this website, with whom I can talk about literature and philosophy at a level that I find appealing and worthy of me. It is difficult to find people like this at university, of course, which is so full of pretention, insecurity and stupidity. My life is not lonely, aside from the fundamental loneliness that affects us all, but the life at the top of the peak is often frustrating, as most of you imagine.

how good is Tolstoy in Russian?

How did your Highschool literature class look like? Here's mine (South Europe):
>native language class, grammar + literature crammed together, as well as foreign literature
>covered everything all the way from the origins of written word to post-modernism
>started with vedes, sumerian, persian, semite literature, which translated to antiquity, classical greek and roman followed by other periods chronologically
>every period was divided on language subgroup which we had to read through - example, realism - went through french (zola, balzac, flaubert), german (don't remember exact authors), russian (dostoevsky, gogol, turgenev, tolstoy), english, american, italian etc. plus our native language works
>had to read about 30-40 books per HS year, poetry not included. Then we had weekly discussions and exams which included essays in which we had to explain character psychology, motivation and plot structure and how it affected the character and vice versa.

It's just funny when people here speak about reading Tolstoy in their mid-20s for the first time. They still have that type of highschool here called "Gymnasium" that crams about 20 different classes each year for four years, ranging from math and chemistry to literature. This is what our /lit/ classes were like.

>>15648967
Used to be back in my day newfags got ridiculed on the spot, now they've taken over and parade around their census thread advertising that they're 18, 19, 20 years old. Things just ain't like it used to be, no sir indeed-y

>Read what you enjoy, stop reading what you don't. Reading should always be for enjoyment

>Don't give up on a book just because you're finding it difficult or hard to understand. Push yourself to improve your abilities and experience new things.

Both of these statements look valid, yet contradictory. How to reach a conclusion?

In awe at the size of his hands. Absolute units.

>"...he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him- not clever women who when listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds, and when opportunity offers to re-tell it, or wish to adapt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their own little mental workshop.
"but the pleasure real women give who are gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself.

.

>>14588916
old Tolstoy

>>14575931
In awe at the size of her hands. Absolute units

Which does /lit/ prefer, War and Peace or Anna Karenina? And why?

I literally don't get this author. His wisdom is full of cliche, no single memorable lines, yet his writing gives me a feeling of reading something incredibly profound. Can someone critique this phenomenon for me?

What the fuck I hate Shakespeare now

It is actually saddening that the young boys and men on this board prioritise Dostoyevsky over Tolstoy.

Tolstoy is Mozart and Dostoyevsky is Salieri

>>13069185
lmao your a faggot OP

Did you ever stop reading regularly? How did you get back into it?

As a kid and in high school I used to read all the time, it was probably my main hobby. However, as I get further into college, I've almost completely stopped reading for fun. Has anyone experienced anything similar?

>>13015444
So? All fiction boils down to
>man goes on a trip
>stranger comes to town

One anon posted about he decided to re-read Anna Karenina and started to take note of every detail that Tolstoy writes, so in this post, I ask how was he able to do this and observe everything?

>And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzche’s half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others.
>If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgetting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzche’s works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this. Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument do these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so-called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.

In what order should I read Tolstoy's fiction? Should I go chronologically? Start with his classics? Short stories? Lesser known novels?

>tfw actual literary genius but too lazy to actually sit down and write a full novel

How do I develop the discipline to sit down and write everyday? I’m an extraordinary writer with a talent for both lyrical prose and hyper-realistic depictions of life (my professors and peers have all told me so, if you don’t believe me), but I admittedly find the craft of writing to be somewhat boring. What books are there that would help me out with this?

my Tolstoy's arrive from amazon this week. what should i read in the next few days to prepare? what am i in for?