Tolstoy, for me, has always seemed like one of those annoying masses of contradictions. He did all sorts of nice things for his serfs (short of actually freeing them), but had sex with the serf women he owned, and seems to have seen this as his right as their owner. He lived during a time when he could “free” his serfs (they still wouldn’t have the status of free persons, but they wouldn’t be subject to corporal punishment), but instead petitioned the Tsar to abolish serfdom, leaving his own serfs to work for him. until that time His writing was very critical of middle class life, with its card games and parties, but he very much participated in this life himself. But there’s more than that: I just don’t trust him.
His writing is full of bland indictments, implicit claims of moral superiority, religiosity, and I don’t believe that he believed a word of it. I feel, and this might be something peculiar to me, that I’m being lied to when I read him, that there’s something deeply dishonest about him. When he describes a sunset I feel like I’m hearing the description from someone who’s never seen a sunset. Perhaps the only honest sentiment I’ve felt from him is in his descriptions of mediocrity and his (self-)disgust with it.
I guess, most of all, like a lot of nineteenth century Russian intelligenty, I just don’t feel like he knew what he was talking about. His idolization of serfs and serf life was a version of a myth that drove much of Russia for nearly a century, but in the end it wasn’t even a myth that could sustain life, but just another mode of expressing dissatisfaction with this life.
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Khrushchev in love 