Quotes About Tolstoy

Epilogues are for Tolstoy

R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Guerra e paz foi escrito no período mais feliz de sua vida.

O ano de 1866 foi uma espécie de annus mirabilis para Mikhail Kátkov, já que nas páginas de sua revista foram publicados, ao mesmo tempo, Guerra e paz e Crime e castigo. Dostoiévski não era o mais fácil dos escritores, mas nessa época era bem mais responsável que Tolstói.

É preciso ter a coragem e a autoridade de um Tolstói para nadar contra a corrente, desafiar as proibições e o clima geral da opinião pública e fazer o que manda sua consciência do dever".

A opinião geral da tia Toinette, de que se deve odiar o adultério, não o adúltero, era essencialmente a visão de Tolstói, e é essa a razão pela qual Anna Kariênina é um dos personagens literários mais instigantes e complexos já criados.

de ouro para a literatura russa, com Turguêniev, Tolstói e Dostoiévski no auge do vigor criativo. Foi uma época importante também para a música: Tchaikóvski tornou-se aluno do Conservatório de São Petersburgo, fundado em 1862, e imediatamente depois de se formar foi convidado para dar aulas no Conservatório de Moscou, fundado em 1866

Foi um episódio notável não porque Tolstói tivesse achado a palestra interessante (ele a desdenhou como "uma baboseira infantil"), mas sim porque foi a única vez em que ele e Dostoiévski estiveram fisicamente próximos um do outro

All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived—

The analysis is androcentric in the extreme; but still, the story does suggest that the repulsion is not simply deserved by its victims. The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and, ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story-the end of intercourse-is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill women, he said, we must stop fucking them.

In art, [Tolstoy] articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie [his wife], feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her.

Human consciousness at present is a sort of battlefield. And you know what Tolstoy tells us about battles in War and Peace. Nobody really knows what is going on during a battle...

Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk. "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase *resignation of the soul*?

Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...

He read Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief and was deeply influenced by it.

That's why war--explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy--must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it's because some high-level hedgehog--a Xerxes, or a Napoleon--has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They'll stop only when they've bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.

Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, "in no way equal to Dostoevsky," as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism)

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens , I should say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose.

Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.

Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.

Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.