Tolstoy

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Wed Dec 18 14:52:03 PST 2002


At 05:33 PM 12/18/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I don't know if Tolstoy thought of living without reflection as an
>ideal for himself (and great artists like him), but it is clear that
>he idealized it for women and peasants.

Given his life history, he set a rather high value on reflection and condemned himself greatly for not achieving it. And, at the end of his life, he took up a walking stick and went off on the perennial, Russian, soul-finding journey -- only to die in a railway station not long after of pneumonia. Hard to call such a man complacent.

As for the possibility of leading a reflective and conscious life: there are no characters in Tolstoy that manage it. It's not just the women and peasants that fail in the task. His great achievement was to suggest the possiblity of such a life, through his characters' abject failure to live it.

In Anna Karenina, he created the greatest female tragic figure to date: a woman whose energy and beauty and love could not be realized either in the "traditional family" nor in the prototypical romantic love-affair. Nowhere does Tolstoy suggest that it is her fault or failing....and interestingly, he ends that novel too, with a little boy yearning desperately for a loving and sane world to grow up in.

Joanna



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