Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
Isn't Saint Telemachus still your bright particular star of Christian sainthood in wartime? And isn't Tolstoy still in your eyes a sort of forlorn hope the most hopeful of modern war-time philosophers? Or have you changed all that? I looked him straight in the eyes, considering. 'I have changed, I said. He looked at me hopefully. He hadn't seen me since I had come back from the war.
Hardy is a great poet as well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also his humor would be enough to endear him to me. I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all these enthusiasms namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy.
As a matter of fact, when Turgenieff was already a famous writer, no one had ever heard of Tolstoy, and, as Fet expressed it, there was only "something said about his stories from 'Childhood."
The Tolstoy household that evening was much interested in the fate of a young Russian spy who had recently come to Tolstoy in the guise of a country schoolmaster, in order to obtain a copy of "Life," which had been interdicted by the censor of the press.
In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief and restricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, is narrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except Tolstoy, are narrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguenief, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most American fashion.
The man of revolutionary moral insight has had to pay the penalty, if not of death as in the case of Socrates or of Jesus-at least of ridicule and ostracism, of excommunication and isolation as, in our own day, with Tolstoy. Many and many a saint who might have been a beacon-light to mankind has lived under the curses or sneers of his fellows and died in loneliness, to be soon forgotten.
R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is pretty well exploded by now.
Turgenieff divined in him Sadistic predispositions; he was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoïevsky was a profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.
Not till we understand the main outlines of the Russian temperament can we realise the individuality of Tolstoy himself: the personality that made him lovable, the universality that made him great.
"If it weren't for the dialects," said Tolstoy, "I think more Europeans would be interested in American literature." "That is true," I said, "and yet, without dialects, you wouldn't get the United States as it really is. There are heaps and heaps of Americans who won't read dialect themselves, but they miss a great deal.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking