/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21935281]

Update: I finished the Kreutzer Sonata. I liked it. It was my favorite of Tolstoy's shorter works which I've read.

I thought it was interesting that the tale is told from a first-person point of view, which is something Tolstoy rarely does. I can't think of anything else I've read by him where he does this. But what's interesting is that the first-person narrator is clearly not Tolstoy's voice, instead it is Pozdnyshev, while the narrator's voice is that of the reader (me or you). However, it's also important to remember that Pozdnyshev isn't merely a mouthpiece for Tolstoy, that would be a pretty weak form of narrative, but everyone who exists in Pozdnyshev's story is also Tolstoy's character, including the wife.

On one hand, the autobiographical elements of the story are disturbing, because there is the suggestion that Tolstoy may have at some point fantasized about murdering his wife. It is known that Tolstoy's marriage was not the happiest, and Pozdnyshev's considerations of running away from his family to America echo Tolstoy's final moments. On the other hand, Pozdnyshev is in tears by the end of the story, acknowledging in his epiphany the humanity of his late wife and his own. One evil act begets another more evil act.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. Next, I am going to read Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.

[Anonymous No.21935297]

>>21935281
The Kreuzer Sonata by Tolstoy fundamentally expresses and champions the same sentiment. It is a remarkable work of fiction, as the year of its publication, 1889, for Tolstoy symbolizes the greatest and most spectacular fall from artistic and aesthetic grace of any author in the history of literature. Never before has anyone gone from such heights to such depths of abject mediocrity.

The work itself is explained adequately by age-induced impotence before the invention of Viagra. The Kreutzer Sonata was written and published just as he passed 60 years of age.
One would imagine that the cooling of desire that comes about with age would lead to a cooling of temperament, but the pure seething anger contained in this tome by Tolstoy, the absolutely dripping with hatred screed he puts forward in condemnation of fucking, given on the background of a lifetime of raping every serf with a vagina around him, transparently betrays Tolstoy's profoundly sour grapes - this is not the cool-headed and kind-hearted renunciation of carnal desire by a monk in control of his urges, this is rather the unbridled and unrelenting hatred of a man who desires with white-hot intensity what his dick will no longer rise to take.

As mentioned, the Kreuzer Sonata marks the conversion to wilful medicority for Tolstoy - his ill-fated and dreadful new programme of aesthetic philosophy, in which nuance and depth must be eradicated from literature, which is now to serve a singlular utilitarian purpose, namely the moral education of simple-minded peasants. Tolstoy read book X of the Republic and failed to appreciate that Plato, the great artist of the dialogues, was also a great artist of irony.

Tolstoy renounces his former work, and, among other things, the entire authorship of Shakespeare, and he does so because of his conversion to mediocrity - if it is difficult to understand, if it is subtle and refined, if it requires any effort whatsoever on the part of the spectator, it is, according to post-1889 Tolstoy, the devil's work. Art for the sake of art, or art for the sake of beauty, is rejected by Tolstoy as degeneracy. Instead, art should be simple moral fables. That is how you get such tired banalities in his late authorship, like Master and Servant, or How Much Land Does a Man Need?, the latter short story reaching a level of banal mediocrity rivalled only by the likes of Paolo Coelho.

Apart from the plebeian parts of Tolstoy's authorship, favored by those who live in being-without-pussy, Houllebecq is a favorite among the same segment as well.

[Anonymous No.21935537]

>>21935297
What do you mean that Tolstoy experienced a fall? Not to mention the Kreutzer Sonata itself, but Hadji Murat, Father Sergius, and Resurrection were all written in the decade afterward, and those are a few of his best works.

[Anonymous No.21935539]

>>21935537
it's pasta

[Anonymous No.21935542]

>>21935281
>It was my favorite of Tolstoy's shorter works which I've read.
what others have you read?

[Anonymous No.21935567]

>>21935542
I've read Father Sergius, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Devil, Hadji Murad, Alyosha the Pot, and the Cossacks, and some of his scattered fables here and there. It's been many years since I read The Cossacks and Hadji Murad and I mean to revisit them sometime soon.

[Anonymous No.21935633]

How can you even read something written by a Russian after what they did in Ukraine? Some of my friends recommend me Russian literature from time to time but I'm so disgusted by their behavior that I can't bring myself to open any book written by that nation of murderers and rapists.

[Anonymous No.21936855]

>>21935539
In that case, it's pretty high-quality pasta, even though I disagree with it. This is like some rigatoni.