honestly, i tried really hard to LOVE this book. but you cannot tell me that that’s how it ends! that personally just did not resonate with me at all

The more I learn about Tolstoy, the more he appears less a talented intellectual and more like a delusional self-obsessed hypocrite. I wish they told us this at the Russian classics classes.

1. He never followed whatever he preached. A comparison of his vision of his marriage as described in Anna Katerina through Levin versus his wife Sofia’s diaries is a very clear example. Plus:

He was now a profit, preaching the renunciation of property – although he continued to leave on the family’s aristocratic estate – and sexual abstinence. The arrival of little Vanechka had shown that principle to be hollow. 

2. He groomed his friend’s daughter and married her once she just turned 18. And later switched to grooming her younger sister. 🤮

Sofia had known Tolstoy all her life. Her mother was one of his childhood friends, and the writer loved her family, the Behrs.

3. He didn’t finish the uni cos he was hospitalised after catching gonorrhoea from a prostitute. 😐 And by the time he decided to marry Sofia, he:

…visited dozens of brothels and fathered a child with one of the peasants on his estate.

4. He was a notoriously shitty husband.

When Sofia struggled to breastfeed their first child, he wrote a five-act play called The Infected Family arguing that the women who used wet nurses were unnatural.

5. He plagiarised his wife’s work without ever crediting her input, even though she actually helped him with proofreading and writing (even when sick).

At sixteen, Sofia had written a novella called Natasha, which she gave Tolstoy to read (before burning it along with herother supposedly youthful fripperies). She regretted the destruction later, because it removed the proof for her claim that Tolstoy borrowed her heroine‘s name and experiences for Natasha Rostova in War and Peace.

6. He kept Sofia pregnant most her life refusing contraception - she was pregnant 16 times. 😵 While she was pregnant, he took her younger sister to balls. 🙄 For Sofia, this also meant she never got to have any time for herself:

‘I was wondering today why there were no woman writers, artists or composers of genius,’ wrote Sofia in 1898, when she was in her fifties. ‘It’s because all the passion of an energetic woman is consumed by her family, love, her husband – and especially her children. When she has finished bearing and educating her children, her artistic needs awaken, but by then it’s too late.’

Basically, he married a young girl just to brainwash her into thinking that this crazy unpaid labor is her wifely duty and her life’s purpose is to sacrifice own needs to feed his genius. 🙁 Not the first or last couple like this in history, but few such assholes have been worshipped like gods by the whole country (and all similarly self-aggrandising fans around the world).