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Originally Posted by evollove

His fiction certainly got moralistic, but the power of war and especially Anna is the neutral realism, at least for my tastes. The way he describes a wheat harvest or a dog hunt is the major reason I read at all in the first place. He loved life, at least at one point he did, and he got that love on page, which I can't say for too many other writers.

his fiction was *always* moralistic (at least everything i’ve read by him has always had a strong moral core), but in a good way. he wasn’t like angry jezebel commenters calling garbage everyone they disagree with. instead he explored the potentialities of the actions and choices we make and took them to their final consequences.

everyone in anna karenina— levin, kitty, anna, vronsky— follows certain trajectories according to their choices, but they aren’t branded as “good” and “evil” the way the american populace does with its victims. they come to you fresh and neutral and under pressure (from their desires, from their circumstances, from society) and blind to the path ahead of them.

tolstoi sees them think and vacillate and attempt and fail and commit to certain actions, but he doesn’t hate or blame or fingerpoint them— he sees and shows their humanity. he was a moralist, but he wasn’t a fucking puritan.

and you’re right that he was great at realism, but his theory of realism was expounded in a book-length essay, “what is art?”. boils down to this: the job of the artist is to make the familiar unfamiliar. to shine a new light to it. to make it strange. “otstranenie” or something. and yeah, that also explains why crazy people are good artists and squares aren’t— the squares already have fixed concepts of the world. boring fucks.

anyway, to me he was a profound thinker. and his creatures illustrate his depth of thought about vital matters. just a brilliant fucking writer, more important than most. i guess what i’m trying to say is— don’t skip his essays!

oh speaking of angry jezebel commenters, in the kreutzer sonata he does have a character that embodies moralistic rage— the prisoner who killed his wife, which the narrator interviews. but that’s just a character, not the whole work. and still— his condemnation of romanticism, while old-timey and stuck in outdated gender roles, still contains a core of truth that one can relate to today, especially in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s (it’s just that XIX century aristocrats got there much earlier than the rest of the world).

oh, speaking of which— you ever read “dangerous liaisons”? fanfuckingtastic.