/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4894894]

Why is he so perfect /lit/?

[Anonymous No.4894923]

>>4894894
I wouldn't call him perfect, but he's pretty damn good

[Anonymous No.4894953]

>>4894894

part 1

Tolstoy is the wonder that he is because of the congregation of several different factors. There is a very real quote about the nature of Genius, that partially explains its rarity, which states that: “Genius is the happy result of a combination of many circumstances.”; it was made by Havelock Ellis, in his Study of British Genius. Tolstoy, not only a literary genius but one of the supreme literary genius of all time, was, him too, a combination of several factors.

1) First things first: he was a very intelligent person and a very sensitive man. He was always paying attention not only to himself (he wrote obsessively about his own life, personal doubts, problems, achievements, disappointing’s, fears and desires, in a diary which he kept for almost all his life, from 16 onwards), but also to people around him. He was very proud, a huge egocentric, and he searched fervently for the approval of others. Thus he was always paying attention to others, to their expressions, their words, their thoughts, their simple gestures, their facial movements – he was deeply sensitive to that and could read on other what they were feeling. Many intelligent men have only contempt for the public, and walk in their lives inside some sort of bubble: they despise others and remain faithful only to themselves and their spiritual teachers (composers, writers, mathematicians, philosophers, and other mental heroes): this is some sort of defense; they fear the public; they fear rejection, or maybe they simply don’t care with other people – they are sufficient to themselves. Even many writers are like that, but those writers will never be supreme genius (like Shakespeare and Tolstoy), because they lost many of the prisms and facets of humanity that socially ambitious man (again, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy: for Tolstoy desired literary fame and recognition fervently – as well as any recognition he could get - , as is stated in his diaries) absorb during their life’s. Make a test: go to a restaurant and observe that many people just sit down, enoy their meal silently and don’t even look to their sides, while other people are always paying attention, looking to the people in other tables, perhaps thinking about their physical appearance, their clothes, their gestures. Tolstoy was one of those people who pay attention – he was always trying to guess what impact he made on others and what others were thinking of him.

[Anonymous No.4894955]

>>4894894
I haven't read any of his fiction yet. I got hooked on his rendition of the new testament, and from there on I started reading his political/religious stuff. And yes, I think his take is better than that of anyone else of the era. I wouldn't call it perfect though.

I'm procrastinating regarding his fictional work. Where to start /lit/?

[Anonymous No.4894959]

>>4894953

part 2

2) He was a rich man. Tolstoy could live several experiences and know several people because he could afford the luxury of leading a dissolute and carefree life. Most of us leave school to University already needing to sustain ourselves with jobs and loose many important living hours in boring offices. Tolstoy was a heir to a great fortune, and although he always felt some ambivalence toward it (guilt), he also enjoyed with little care. He lived his live when he was young. He gambled (and lost a lot of money); visit hookers; pay gypsies to play music for him and to fuck their girls; visit the great cities of Europe; visit the great cities of Russia; enjoyed balls with the high society (when he almost always didn’t do nothing, just stay there, shy and with fear, contemplating the other dance – he was thought to be a “boring partner” by most of the girls). Also, like a rich man he could choose even to go to war and get out of the war whenever he wanted. So he also had the experience of the battlefield, but not the traumatic experience (which destroys a man forever) of being forced to fight until the very exhaustion of his physical and mental forces.
3) Tolstoy was a very, very, very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace, for example. Whenever his mind settled at something (sports, gymnastics, music, economy, agriculture, theater) his goal was to completely dominate that field, and even to wrote definitive treatises about it (even on gymnastics he planned to write the most complete and definitive treatise). To be fair even his religious quests were moved by ambition. Having succeeded financially, aesthetically, historically, Tolstoy also wanted to be, not only a great landlord and supreme artist, but also a spiritual leader and father. There were no limits for his egocentrism.

[Anonymous No.4894963]

>>4894959

part 3 (end)

4) Tolstoy had enormous amounts of energy, and, as a rich man, he could sleep and eat well, without any preoccupation with the future. He always enjoyed a good health, and could spend hours and hours every day sited in his office reading, writing, rewriting and then rewriting some more. His energy was so exuberant that even his sex life presents huge surges of luxury. His diaries are replete with sexual adventures, to whom Tolstoy crawled, drooling, like a beast at one night, only to repent himself to the very marrow of his soul the next day. He was a powerhouse of a man, and, like I said, he had the time and comfort to recover he’s being.
5) A large organization was needed to deal with the whole mass of leaves and material produced during the process of writing Tolstoy’s major novels, but Tolstoy had in his young wife, Sophia, a great ally: she organized his papers and copied the almost illegible manuscripts of her husband, something that she would make seven times for War and Peace. Had Tolstoy not find such an able, caring and effortful partner, he maybe would not have remained working to War and Peace for the whole time of the project, for example.

Several universal conditions had to meet in order to Tolstoy’s work to be generated.

[Anonymous No.4894965]

>>4894955
Read his major fiction works in the order they were published.

You may want to skip Childhood; Boyhood; Youth however as it's just ok, and not nearly as great as his other work.