What about Tolstoy?

I have always had a bad impression on Tolstoy. After reading his lengthy Resurrection and Anna karenin, I don't want to read his longer but more famous novels. In my mind, Tolstoy is a noble gentleman, an eccentric old man who likes to preach, and a writer who won his reputation by virtue rather than by thought, let alone by artistic talent.

Later, tempted by Berlin's masterpiece, The Hedgehog and the Fox, which described Tolstoy as a "fox who wants to be a hedgehog", I paid attention to Tolstoy and related materials again. In the process, I found another Tolstoy-an image different from my initial impression. I really wanted to call this Tolstoy "vulgar and kind Tolstoy", but I was afraid of offending public anger, so I changed it to "Tolstoy's other face".

I found that only after appreciating Tolstoy's vulgarity and kindness can we discover and appreciate his magnificent thoughts and art better. Here is the other side of Tolstoy, who likes to preach and is called a religious criminal by Lenin. We appreciate this intimate Tolstoy together.

Tolstoy's comments on previous and contemporary writers are often criticized. For example, he didn't like Shakespeare very much, and wrote a long analysis about it, which reminded me of Newton's "stupid thing" in taking time out of his busy schedule to prove the existence of God. Tolstoy never liked his compatriots Turgenev and Dostoevsky. When I heard that Dana of France claimed to be willing to trade the whole French novel for a page of Dostoevsky's novel, she dismissed it as incredible absurdity. Obviously, Tolstoy committed some sensory blindness, and his taste may be quite questionable, but we can admire his courage.

Of course, Tolstoy not only had courage, but also had profound insights. His criticism of French symbolist poets is so interesting that we want to see Tolstoy.

In the second draft of Childhood (fragment), Tolstoy wrote: When he read that the French poet Lamartin used the metaphor of "like a pearl falling into a silver plate" to describe how beautiful the water drops from the sculls dropped into the sea, Tolstoy commented, "After reading this sentence, my imagination immediately fascinated my maid. I imagine a maid rolling up her sleeves, leaning over a silver plate to wash her wife's pearl necklace, and accidentally dropping some beads-Desperles tombants dans un bassin d 'argent (French: like pearls falling into a silver plate), but I have completely forgotten the picture that Hehai painted for me in an instant with the help of the poet's imagination. "

Tolstoy laughed at aesthetics, but it was actually a cliche "poem". Therefore, Tolstoy was extremely disgusted that the upper class at that time called legends, epics and old sayings "poetic" themes, and regarded girls, shepherds, angels and moonlight nightingales as "poetic" characters and things. The example he gave was quite impressive: an educated but not smart lady asked Tolstoy to listen to her read her novel; At the beginning of the novel, the heroine wears a poetic white dress, her poetic hair hangs freely, and she reads a poem by the water in a poetic forest ... Suddenly, the hero wearing a William Tell hat appears from behind the tree, accompanied by two poetic white dogs. Because Tolstoy hated the "poetry" of earthly life far away from the hubbub, he also felt unbearable for Turgenev's "poetry". In his letter to Fett, Tolstoy criticized Turgenev's description of the heroine in The Night Before, and sarcastically said, "Well, I love you so much ... her eyelashes are very long."

Tolstoy not only showed no mercy to others, but also talked and laughed with himself. In the same letter to a friend, Tolstoy refused to talk about his so-called writing style, and used the metaphor of "blowing your nose" to illustrate that different writers have their own writing characteristics: "Everyone has his own way of blowing his nose. You have to believe what I said. I like to blow my nose. "

Therefore, when we read Proust's analysis of the achievements of Tolstoy and Balzac, we don't have to be surprised that Proust's elegant writing is smooth but poetic. I guess Tolstoy must also like this sentence: "Balzac gives a good impression;" Tolstoy's everything is naturally greater, just as elephant shit is much more than goat shit. The huge scenes of harvesting, hunting, skating and so on in anna karenine, like a large piece of open space deliberately cut off the rest, give people a broader impression. Throughout the summer of W. lenski's speech, it seems that there is a large green pasture that needs mowing. "

It would be incomplete to talk only about Tolstoy's vulgar kindness and not about his serious and solemn side. Tolstoy's vulgarity-let's call it vulgarity-actually contains the worship of life. Gorky recalled that people who talked with Tolstoy for the first time were often shocked by his "vulgar" or even "obscene" words. According to Gorky, Tolstoy can talk about some things between men and women casually, which is completely inconsistent with his impression of the world. Gorky later realized that Tolstoy's vulgarity and indecency reflected his love for all material life on earth. It is precisely because of his insight into Tolstoy's ideological secrets that thomas mann called Tolstoy a "natural person" and compared Tolstoy with Homer. Tolstoy's vulgarity and solemnity were separated only after I saw thomas mann's brilliant insights formed by Merezhkovski's analysis. Merezhkovski regarded Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as outstanding writers who had insight into the secrets of body and soul respectively, while thomas mann heard a more magnificent melody in Tolstoy's thought: "Indeed, the healthy light emitted by Tolstoy's art covered the joy of physical life."

What is this "joy of meat"? Based on the novel War and Peace, Americans changed the film with a strong cast, especially Audrey Hepburn's impressive image of Natasha. Is the quotation from the novel at the end the answer? This passage goes like this: "The hardest and most important thing is to love life, even when you are in pain, because life is everything. Life is God, and loving life is loving God. "