Like Dickens and Eliot, he ruined his potential with too much moralizing.

>>25181817
his moralizing was fine, i would argue its the thing that ties his work together and makes it great, the problem was that he got mixed up in ideology and "systems" and politics which clouded his judgment.

neither war and peace or anna karenina or any of his works would be impactful without his trademark christian moralizing

>>25181860
Nothing kills Art quicker than tedious moralizing. It's not fine.

>>25181860
>Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art.

>What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy.
What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels?

>>25181860
yes, I totally disagree with the idea that Tolstoy only became a moral grandstander after Anna Karenina. He was always like this, it just became more pronounces over time. Anna Karenina is ultimately a story about how whore adulterers are punished at the end of the day.

>>25181879
his earlier works were largely pretty overt morality tales, the difference is that they weren't literal advertisements for his preferred taxation system or whatever

Tolstoy is Pierre from war and peace, moving from one "project" to another trying to figure out the correct way to live and do things, and while he writes some thing like war and peace that has a meta-analysis of his experience trying to navigate life and find a meaningful existence, and this ends up being a great work of art, you also then have his later works essentially become him unapologetically shoving whatever project he is currently obsessed with in that particular moment in your face, which is why shit like resurrection remains essentially forgotten. its not a sincere expression of the human experience, its just him shilling his latest preferred political system

>>25182087
a shame he bet on henry george's longevity. he is totally forgotten today

>>25181808
aura

>>25181860
>t. has never read Redemption

>>25181808
Me too but man was he wrong about Shakespeare.

>>25181808
Read his wife's diaries. He was fucking mental. But then a lot of geniuses are

>>25183556
Overly exaggerated. Tolstoy and his wife exchanged diaries, he read everything she wrote and so it was written with the intention of airing their grievances during their turbulent marriage. At points she became so hysterical she even threatened suicide, and constantly oscillated between hating him and being relentlessly devoted to him. He was a bad husband and it was his greatest error in life but she wasn't the helpless victim she's painted as today either