/lit/ - Literature

>>21212933
try writing like him

>>21212933
Be born to a rich kike family with 500 slaves
Never work a day in your life
Cheat on your wife regularly
Practice writing for 50 years before producing anything of note

>>21212933
Why would you want to do that? He doesn’t do anything remarkable in the prose department. It’s clean, sure, but he’s no Flaubert, Proust, or Joyce. Hell, even Poe at his best is better where prose is concerned.

>>21212974
idk man, nabokov called anna karenina the best work of prose in the 19th century

>>21212998
He said the same thing of the Metamorphosis for the 20th century and the prose style is fairly unadorned and unremarkable

>>21212933
>How do I write my prose like Tolstoy?
try writing like him

>>21212943
>Practice writing for 50 years before producing anything of note
This is pretty much the trick to any worthwhile piece of prose.

>>21213022
>>21212974
Why does style determine quality to you? Tolstoy is considered the best writer of his time because his writing simply has more clarity and fluidity than any other author. It doesn’t matter that his language is generally simple, it’s still perfectly structured and effective

>>21212998
"Work of prose" means non-poetic fiction. It is the best novel ever written, but that doesn't mean the prose itself is the absolute peak. It is still very good though.

>>21212933
Read Tolstoy and then try to make your writing a bit more like that

>>21212933
why? do you live in 19th century imperial russia? come up with your own writing style.

>>21213667
This is Nabokov we’re talking about. He was clearly referring to the prose.

>>21213534
Example?

>>21214417
Tolstoy

>>21214432
Any more?

>>21213534
The Comte de Lautreamont died at the age of 24 and wrote one of the best works of prose in the French language

>>21214516
>Comte
Sounded like he had the right connections to get his book off the ground. Life isn't fair bros

>>21212943
>rich kike family
...b-bros?

How are we this far down the thread and no one has seriously answered OP's question yet?

ok OP, I'll bite. There are a couple of ways to do this, one of which is relatively automatic. You will probably tend to copy the style of whoever you're currently reading, so all you have to do is write a lot in the same days that you're reading Tolstoy. You will tend to use similar diction and sentence structure automatically.
If, however, you want to be high effort about this, you should take a couple large paragraphs from his books and put them into a text editor. Separate out all the sentences, and start to pay attention to how long they are, what kind of grammatical structures he uses, diction, etc.
This will allow you to make more informed choices in your writing. Lastly, if you want to more than anything just capture the "sovl" of the books, you can make a point of reading the authors who were in vogue at the time in order to understand and make appropriate literary references, use the right turns of phrase, etc. Tolstoy has his characters use a lot of french, for example, so getting familiar with french will allow you to play with language use and formality registers the same way he does.
Of course all this advice falls short of "be russian/learn russian", which wouldn't be a bad exercise regardless. Learning a language with a complex grammatical system, such as Latin or any Slavic language (modern Romance languages can also work to this end, but less effectively), will allow you to get a firmer grasp of how your sentences are shaped.
Hopefully this can act as a starting point.

>>21214718
It's just a pen name. He wasn't that well connected. His dad was fairly rich though.

>>21213769
I don't write.

>>21213022
Are you retarded? Writing with absolute clarity and beauty using simple language is more difficult than writing complex purple prose, it’s probably harder to write like Tolstoy than or Kafka than to write like Proust or even Joyce’s schizo style.

add a bunch of French

>>21215124
Based explainer

I don't know about Karenina, but after War and Piece its far on my reading list. W&P is good book, great in places, but I dislike romanticism of it - trad larping, women always crying, everyone being so emotional , and everything ends up good cuz suffering breeds happiness, or other such platitudes. He repeats himself all the time in his essay. Yeah napoleon is shit, and nation spirit is more important than individual plans, war is nonderministic blah blah yea I got you bro, just don't repeat in every fourth chapter

>>21217057
Proust is fairly clear, far from purple prose

>>21217252
you sound like a very uninteresting person.

>>21217252
I imagine this is what Napoleon as a teenager would say if he had read Tolstoy

>>21217337
This is true. How did you know?