novel

             One of the world's greatest novelist, some say the greatest. The history of the novel cannot be written without describing his place in it.
             Contradictions in the character and life of Tolstoy
             1. An aristocrat. He was stiff-necked: after a search by the police, he wrote to the Emperor asking for reparations and received an apology (Maud, 282-3). He had great self-esteem. But at the end of his life, he renounced his background and lived the "simple" life of a peasant and espoused the peasant virtues.
             2. A great rationalist. He kept a diary, analysed himself and others, dissected his conduct, male-female relations, conflicts between the public and private personas, probed contradictions. He was brutally honest. Both he and his wife kept diaries and allowed one another to read their most intimate views. But he also had limited faith in the powers of the intellect. He felt that the human intellect never really can understand the primary causes of personal or societal events. Moments of illumination, crises, mysterious communications with nature, strange turning points in one's emotional and spiritual life do occur, but they often have little to do with the rational part of the mind. Tolstoy trusted to the full emotional response more than the rational.
             3. He was a fox, but dearly wanted to be a hedgehog. Isaiah Berlin has described his skill in depicting the many-sidedness of an event, the roundness of a feeling. But Tolstoy also wanted to penetrate to primary causes, to understand the "one big thing." Later in life, he renounced his earlier great works and tried to move toward writing simple morality tales. He tried to give up being a fox. He told Chekhov: "Shakespeare was bad, but you writing is even worse." He meant by this that there was no unity, no defining moral message in their works. Like a penetrating analyst, he dissected or pulverized order in the belief that an indestructible core existed, always hoping that a real uni...

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novel. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 13:39, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/23589.html