The History of Literature houses some curious coincidences, the best known being the synchronicity in deaths (they must have been only hours away) between the two universal writers: Cervantes and Shakespeare. This great coincidence comes to collation with the one shared by the author that I bring here today, Tolstoy with his compatriot Dostoyevsky. The two greatest Russian writers, and undoubtedly among the best in universal literature, were also contemporaries.
A kind of connivance of chance, a magical synchronicity, caused this alliteration in the verses of the story. It is so obvious ... if we asked anyone by the name of two Russian writers, they would quote this tandem of letters.
Predictably, contemporaryity involved thematic analogies. Tolstoy was also carried away by the tragic, fatalistic and at the same time rebellious feeling around a Russian society so stratified still ... Realism as a starting point for awareness and the will to change. Pessimism as an inspiration for an existentialist scenography and extremely brilliant in its humanism.
3 recommended novels of Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Shocking for what it means to protest against the amorality of the moment. Perhaps the ideology about what is or is not moral, about what it is to surrender to vice or to exercise some free will has been able to change a lot, but the lean on the double standards of the elitist classes continues to be in force, as well as the parallel disenchantment of the village. Although, what comes the most is the accumulation of feelings, sensations and contradictions of Anna herself, a universal character.
Summary: Although from its appearance it was welcomed as a reaction against the French naturalist movement, Tolstoy follows in Anna Karenina the ways of naturalism until they are surpassed, by not considering it an end in itself.
Classified as the last novel of the author's first style, it is the first in which the continuous moral crises suffered by the writer at that time are revealed. Ana Karenina, shocking story of adultery in the field of Russian high society of the time.
In it Tolstoy reflects his vision of urban society, a symbol of vices and sin, in opposition to the healthy life of nature and the countryside. Ana Karenina is the victim of that foolish and pathological world of the city, who has become a key figure in world literature.
War and peace
There is considerable unanimity that this is Tolstoy's masterpiece. But as you can see, I like to take the opposite from time to time and I end up placing it in second position... it is undoubtedly true that this novel is a more complete reflection, a complete universe of microcosm, of very vivid characters, full of all the sensations and human emotions and around very transcendental historical moments, in which man faces the abyss to end up falling or flying over..., but Anna Karenina has a special point, a concession to the feminine and its internal universes, as markedly intense as any other history.
Summary: In this great novel, Tolstoy narrates the vicissitudes of the lives of numerous characters of all types and conditions throughout some fifty years of Russian history, from the Napoleonic wars to the mid-nineteenth century.
Against this background, the campaign of the Russians in Prussia with the famous battle of Austerlitz, the campaign of the French armies in Russia with the battle of Borodín and the burning of Moscow, the vicissitudes of two Russian noble families, the Bolkonska and the Rostovs, whose members include the figure of Count Pedro Bezeschov as a connecting circle, around whom the numerous and complicated threads that start from the family chronicles are narrowed.
The character of Peter reflects the living presence of Tolstoy in this monumental novel. Mixing history and imagination with supreme art, the author offers the epic of two emperors, Napoleon and Alexander.
It is difficult to match the depth and grandeur of this tale that takes place in the halls of St. Petersburg and in the prisons of Moscow, in majestic palaces and on the battlefields.
Cossacks
If it is truly true and this novel may contain part of Tolstoy's ideology and being, it is always interesting to discover the author in that alter ego. If, in addition, the story has a point of exciting discovery, of a journey towards knowledge of the world and of the individual in changing environments, all the better.
Summary: The theme is that of the hero who leaves the civilized world to face the dangers and moral purification of a journey through distant lands. As in most of his early works, the protagonist, Olenin, is a projection of the personality of its author: a young man who has squandered part of his heritage and embraces a military career to escape his dissolute life in Moscow.
Vague dreams of happiness drive him. And this seems to go to meet him, both because of the deep impression of fullness that contact with the Caucasus produces, with the vast and grandiose spaces of its nature and the simple life of its inhabitants, which, far from all artificiality, personify the eternal force of natural truth, as for the love he professes for the beautiful Cossack Mariana.
Half ethnographic study, half moral tale, this novel has exceptional artistic and ideological importance in the work of Tolstoy. The clear beauty of the landscapes on which the unforgettable figures of the Cossacks stand out - the old Yéroshka, Lúkashka and the beautiful and serene Mariana -, the intense psychological penetration of the elemental man and the direct way of transmitting the epic of a life that is She claims to herself make this short novel of youth a little masterpiece.
Excellent. I am entering that world.