Anna Karenina - Lucy's Notes - Google Docs.pdf - october 30...

october 30
Tolstoy
‑ There’s all the great writers in the world, and then way above them in a unique position is
Tolstoy
‑ The most common comment that people make about Tolstoy
‑ “It is not a work of art. It is a piece of life” ‑> there’s nothing artificial about it
‑ “If nature could write directly without a human intermediary, it would write like
Tolstoy”
‑ These comments are just not made about anybody else
‑ There is this very unique status that Tolstoy has, and it clearly is not that he is very clever with
form
‑ He understands the world, and human beings, and the human mind, and the relationship with
the mind and the body in a way that no one has understood before
‑ The wise man who knows everything, who‑‑as people constantly reported‑‑could basically read
your mind (would make a comment about the thought that you had thought but not yet
expressed)
‑ With that persona, he must have been young at some time …
Tolstoy’s History
‑ Born into a famous and wealthy family
‑ almost immediately becomes an orphan and is raised by his beloved aunt
‑ his philosophy
‑ his first published work is a novelization about his childhood (2nd volume ‑ boyhood, 3rd
volume ‑ youth)
‑ in boyhood
‑ he’s discussing what sort of boy he was, how he was obsessed with ideas
‑ the great idea of romantic love ‑‑ which means there is one and only one person
destined to you in all eternity
‑ he also describes how he’d be reading the great philosophers (the stoics)‑‑if you train
your body to endure privation and pain, and train your mind so that you don’t think that
any external thing matters (only your soul matters, and your soul can choose its own
attitude)
‑ tolstoy as a boy reported how he would hold out heavy dictionaries until his arms ached
to train his body
‑ epicureanism (opposite of stoicism), he’d put down the dictionary and gorge himself on
candy
‑ he was most captivated by the idea that things only exist as you perceive it
‑ school
‑ he was homeschooled
‑ goes off to an OK university, does not make a really great career as a student
‑ studies arabic and persian, but he spends most of his time drinking, gambling, and
whoring

‑ he begins keeping a diary
‑ this is important because about 25 or 30 of his volumes are his diaries
‑ he is undoubtedly the most voluminously documented person who’s ever lived because
of those diaries
‑ first line in his diaries ‑ “i think i may have contracted the clap. i got it well in the way
people usually do”
‑ early diaries filled with his obsessions with rules
‑ he thinks you can write rules to explain lives
‑ life cannot be expressed by rules or laws
‑ he has rules: well you shouldn’t gamble, but if you do gamble, etc
‑ eventually you wind up getting rules to get yourself to remember to follow the rules
‑ he flunks out, re‑enrolls in a different faculty (enters the faculty of laws)
‑ crimea
‑ it is harder to get men and supplies from russia to crimea than it was to get them from london to
crimea
‑ gets a position as a journalist for the military newspaper, he publishes a story that all russia
notices, the czar comments on it, Sevastopol
‑ what is it in real life that is usually written in the 2nd person?