United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Tolstoy says: ‘The relations between the sexes are searching for a new form, the old one is falling to pieces.’ Among the manuscript ‘remains’ of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following noteworthy passage occurs: ‘“Free-born men” is a phrase of rhetoric.
The story marches, the little facts, insignificant at first, range themselves into definite illuminations of the theme, just as a traveller afoot on a hot, dusty road misses the saliency of the landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare.
The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs, and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia.
We had often departed from this principle, but had it not in every case been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable expenditure of energy? The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with animation and sincerity, for the moment stirred vague misgivings within me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants?
Everything indicated will have but one name. In Arabic there are hundreds of names for the camel! In the schools of each nation the mother tongue will be taught, as well as the revised Universal Language.” The same questioner said: “I have read much of Tolstoy and I see a parallel between his teachings and yours.
Perhaps Count Tolstoy had never been so unfortunate as to meet certain specimens of the human race which it has been my ill-luck to observe; so we both still held our positions, after a long skirmish, and silence reigned for a few moments. Then the count asked, with that winning air of good-will and interest which is peculiar to him: "Have you ever visited a church of the Old Believers?" "No.
Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I took up 'L'Assommoir, though unconsciously I had always been as much of a realist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascination that I felt the other day in reading his 'L'Argent. The critics know now that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is full of the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but for what he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, that outmasters him, and that is Tolstoy.
It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth. The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance.
In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning over for the purpose a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility. By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon.
Tolstoy set out for Germany in 1857, anxious to study social conditions that he might learn how to raise the hapless serfs of Russia, bound, patient and inarticulate, at the feet of landowners, longing for independence, perhaps, when they suffered any terrible act of injustice, but patient in the better times when there was food and warmth and a master of comparatively unexacting temper.
Word Of The Day