/lit/ - Literature

>In the dialogue, every character’s language corresponds to his social position, temperament, associates and age. The landscape is never set up behind the characters like a cyclorama, but reflects their moods and takes part in their action. The impact of heart on heart, army on army: when he looks up from the last page of the book, the reader feels lost, as though the thread of his own life had been cut. And yet he is not blinded, he has had no revelation, heard no prophecy. Here, Tolstoy is not a visionary; he is not waving a torch above the abyss, like Dostoyevsky; he does not turn his people inside-out like gloves, he does not scare us with our own shadows. His exploration never goes beyond what is directly perceptible to ordinary mortals. But he responds more intensely than ordinary mortals to the appeal of beings and things. Instead of bringing us closer to the Beyond, he brings us closer to the Here-and-Now. Men and plants, stones and animals are on the same plane for him. He observes a piece of carrion as attentively as a flower. The fatigue in the eyes of an aged horse is as significant to him for the comprehension of the universe as the fatuous conceit shining in the captain’s face. The paradox is that this pantheistic process of creation, binding together pure and impure, great and small, beautiful and ugly, animate and inanimate, suffuses the entire work with the majesty of a second Genesis.
Henri Troyat, Tolstoy

War and Peace just blew me away.

What should I read next?

War and Peace. Blows me away every single time.

>>16780209
1. L. Tolstoy
2. H. Hesse
3. J. Williams

>mfw I realize free will isn't a thing