2023-10-13

HOW THE RUSSIANS DEFEATED NAPOLEON

 

TOLSTOY

We read Tolstoy, I hope it is not a crime to indulge in the length of Anna Karenina in these times. Irrefragably, the Russians defeated Napoleon at the cost of many afflictions, heroism, cowardice, betrayals and betrayals.

Lev Tolstoy is the living expression of the intercadent, alternating, contradictory and ineffable Russian soul, tender and hard, angelic and demonic. In short, an enigma.

  His book is the pinnacle of the novel. In it, the writer from Yasnaia Poliana captures his crises of nonconformist mysticism that he alternated with visits to taverns during his youth when he served the tsar in the Caucasus.

He always puts one candle for God and another for the devil. Sometimes he gets excited, sometimes he doubts. He writes everything down, he ruminates on everything. Portentous memory with which he flagellates himself. He sings in church choirs and then visits the toleration houses of Petersburg lying with the wives of the veryiks.

The long shadow of his eponymous heroes is nourished by such ambivalences. Through his introspection he overtakes Kafka. He compasses between the gospel and Rousseau the noble savage, he studies the Greek language to delve deeper into evangelical teachings. He antagonizes the Holy Synod for not agreeing with the priests and is excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, lacking messianic depth he mocks Turgenev's aestheticism and his misogyny.

The day that Alexander III decrees the manumission of slavery is celebrated as one of the most pleasant days of his existence, but he continues to use the whip to make his servants stand up straight as sails and sleeps with the maids.

He was dirty and mean to his family and also abused his wife, whom he divorced and fled to find death in the waiting room of a railway station.

Let's continue with the contradictions of this writing genius; In his works he manifests himself doubly as Zapadniev and Vostoknieski (pro/Western but Russophile). He has no molds.

On the one hand, he defends the eternal value of literature and later says that books are worthless rhetorical mumbo-jumbo. He lived in a commune but the “barin” was a man of bourgeois customs and vices.

He mistreats Turgenev, as he says, because he considers him a bit of a faggot. Tolstoy was consumed with a passion for playing cards. In the game, the property and his submissive wife who helped him in writing his work were played.

He frequented the winds of the steppe and himself appeared like a prince at society balls. He proclaims that art was a beautiful lie. However, he continued to smudge paper until the end of his days.

He was gifted, a favorite of the gods. He was successful with women, with the editors of his books that were translated into all languages and his memory is deeply loved by Russians despite his fickleness and excesses.

  He froze to death in a Trans-Siberian station after an argument with his wife. At 82 years old. The country house where he lived is today a pilgrimage center

Friday, October 13, 2023