United States or Western Sahara ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Strakhof brought the draft of the will with him, and laid it before Lyoff Nikolaievich. After reading the paper through, he at once wrote under it that he agreed with its purport, and then added, after a pause: "All this business is very disagreeable to me, and it is unnecessary.
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karenina" this time, my father wrote: "You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and what I think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright. Of course I am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does not follow that everybody will understand it as you do." But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to Strakhof.
He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that the only people who took to criticism were those who had no creative faculty of their own. "The stupid ones judge the clever ones," he said of professional critics. What he valued most in Strakhof was the profound and penetrating thinker.
Strakhof described a second visit to Yasnaya, when he came to attest the same will as a witness. When he arrived, he said: "The countess had not yet come down. I breathed again." Of his departure, he said: As I said good-by to Sofya Andreyevna, I examined her countenance attentively.
Strakhof began to consider what he must do next, whether he should go back with empty hands, or whether he should argue it out.
In 1878, when the novel was nearing its end, he wrote again to Strakhof: "I am frightened by the feeling that I am getting into my summer mood again. I LOATHE what I have written. EVERYTHING in them is BEASTLY, and the whole thing ought to be rewritten, all that has been printed, too, scrapped and melted down, thrown away, renounced.
In concluding, I wish to say a few words about my father's own opinion of "Anna Karenina." In 1875 he wrote to N. N. Strakhof: "I must confess that I was delighted by the success of the last piece of 'Anna Karenina. I had by no means expected it, and to tell you the truth, I am surprised that people are so pleased with such ordinary and EMPTY stuff."
When he addressed my father, he always said "Lef Nikolayevitch" instead of Lyoff Nikolaievich, like other people. He always stayed down-stairs in my father's study, and spent his whole day there reading or writing, with a thick cigarette, which he rolled himself, in his mouth. Strakhof and my father came together originally on a purely business footing.
As to the writing of the third we are fully informed by Mr. F. Strakhof in an article which he published in the St. Petersburg "Gazette" on November 6, 1911. Mr. Strakhof left Moscow at night. He had calculated on Sofya Andreyevna, whose presence at Yasnaya Polyana was highly inexpedient for the business on which he was bound, being still in Moscow.
Tolstoy promised to think it over, and left the room again. At dinner Sofya Andreyevna "was evidently far from having any suspicions." When Tolstoy was not by, however, she asked Mr. Strakhof what he had come down about. Inasmuch as Mr. Strakhof had other affairs in hand besides the will, he told her about one thing and another with an easy conscience. Mr.
Word Of The Day