Done!

yeah, so I learned that blogs are really cool-- in theory. Well, no, they are a great thing to do, but it's hard for me because I like to think out my ideas in my head but always have trouble translating out... This was really a fun class and I'm so glad that you offered this to us. Really, the chance to study a single author in depth aids in our discernment of who the author is. I mean, I still have a long, long way to go, many more novellas, treatises, theories, etc of Tolstoy to read if I wish to have a more complete picture of who he is, but I really appreciated and loved this class!

Thanks Professor van de Stadt! And thanks to all of you guys, the Tolstoyian Quadruped, who helped to make this one of my favorite classes!

Hardy and Tolstoy: Brothers?

Professor Cassidy's Comment: And isn't Tolstoy's reaction to the Adam/Eve dichotomy really just a re-encoding of the same problem? By putting women on a pedestal, they simply don't have the chance to be what they are for themselves and what they want to be. Although he tries to penetrate the souls of the female characters he creates, he ultimately gets tripped up by the drive to make them creatures whose female biology determines them in a way that male biology doesn't determine his male characters.

It's amazing how everything comes together. So I'm taking English 333-The British Novel alongside this class and am writing a final paper about Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Simply put, it was like reading Anna Karenina over again but this time, with Hardy's voice in my ear yelling, "But Tess has no agency in her sexual fall! She is blameless-- Anna got her's!"
But both their stories end in death; for Tess, it is twofold. Anna's self-destructivity ends in her suicide, her crime remains adultery. Tess's crime is murder, but before that, she did achieve a social appeasement for returning to her "rightful" first husband, Alec d'Uberville. Does it matter that the man only receives the title of her husband because he first rapes her? Society is portrayed in both novels as a cruel beast that allows, even encourages such awful happening. Justice for them is as blind as d'Uberville's mother, as Tess's father, and as the provincial Clares.
Yet, both Tolstoy and Hardy move with the same agenda-- to depict the depravity of their modern society and the "falls" it breeds for women. Society bears the greater blame than either woman for their fates. However, that is where Tess and Anna's similarities begin to fade. Anna is emotionally starved and willingly initiates the affair with Vronsky, although she feigns to be unconscious of its initial development. On the other hand, Hardy presents Tess as a woman whose "fleshy tabernacle" of a body "rivets" men's eyes upon her, distorting her true identity to their own needs and desires, despite her own innocence and unconscious seduction of male attention. Tess is a woman who could spend her whole life running it seems, away from men and their hungry gaze but still be blamed as the seductress. Who then, is more innocent? Who deserves are greater sympathy?

I, for one, actually feel more inclined towards Anna because of her waverings between her children, (family), and her own self-consuming desire to be loved, (albeit in the wrong, most destructive manner). She seems more realistic. I don't really think Tess was as oblivious to the intentions of men as Hardy makes her seem. For one, even Hardy seems only able to focus on Tess's physicality and sexuality. It is always her lips, (besides her helplessness and large bust), that his descriptions gravitate around. His angelic Angel Clare, (haha, see I just made a horribly obvious pun), paints Tess into this pagan spiritualized woman only to become obsessed with her beauty:

"How very lovable her face was to him... And it was in her mouth that this culminated.. her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth...that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening.”

I think Tolstoy and the fictional Clare fought the same battle: confusing natural attraction and love with lust, entrapped within one's incessant meditation and struggle involving internal censorship. Professor Cassidy, van de Stadt, and all that we, as a class have come to in regards to a conclusion are correct: woman cannot escape the fatalism of a sexual fall if society makes it so that she is always revered for her "fleshy tabernacle" at the exclusion of her spiritual soul...

More about Pozdnyshev.. My Ranting Continues...

I do hope the deadline for completing our posts was today... I don't have the syllabus and internet is finicky at our house, (we have to go to the library), and I'm in the midst of another final, but I'll try to finish this today :)

The character of Pozdnyshev himself is a cast off of Dicken's own two-dimensional characters, ridden with caricatured facial tics, twitching arms, and corporeal agitation, (thank you Professor McWeeny for describing Dickens like that, lol). The man does not breathe. Pozdnyshev's words rush out as he confesses not out of a desire to seek forgiveness for murder, but for his failure to be that “terrible” figure that succeeds in removing carnality from life.

This is another reason why I did not find Hadji Murat as compelling or likable as others. It's “framed” construction seemed almost chosen because Tolstoy grew tired of his creativity. That was not worded very clearly nor does it allude to what I found at fault with the novella, but the story did not seem to know really what it was saying. Yes, the outside, religious Other happened to be more civilized and moral than the Russian aristocracy, but other than that, what was Hadji Murat? If it was a stance against sexuality like Pozdnyshev, then wouldn't the polygamous Murat be condemned also?

It is sad that as Tolstoy descends deeper and deeper into this neurotic assault against what it means to be human, he displays the very tragic flaw he desperately hoped to root out: his own human imperfection, his “sins” as it were. Tolstoy seemed to feel as if a lack of perfection, perfection being the ability not only to think what is “right” but to ALWAYS “do” what is right,”`was equatable with a death sentence as we see in The Devil where the man kills himself in ending one, and then his mistress in ending two. Death becomes a way of evasion. Death becomes a deceptive savior... Tolstoy is at the end of his rope as he dreamt in The Confessions and I fear that his tightrope snapped.

He was right to condemn conjugal relations when they were based out of lust and a selfish desire for stimulation and physical pleasure. But the essence of conjugal union is not selfish but wholly self-less. It is the image of sacrifice when respected and revered as both the physical but simultaneously spiritual and mysterious union it is.

The Post-Conversion Tolstoy= More Personal?

Taken from a Wikipedia article on the Kreutzer Sonata:

During the international celebration of Tolstoy's 80th birthday in 1908, G. K. Chesterton would criticize this aspect of Tolstoy's thought in an article in the September 19th issue of Illustrated London News, writing: "Tolstoy is not content with pitying humanity for its pains: such as poverty and prisons. He also pities humanity for its pleasures, such as music and patriotism. He weeps at the thought of hatred; but in The Kreutzer Sonata he weeps almost as much at the thought of love. He and all the humanitarians pity the joys of men." He went on to address Tolstoy directly:
"What you dislike is being a man. You are at least next door to hating humanity, for you pity humanity because it is human."

So, from Professor Cassidy's comment, I thought a good final paper would be something that combined Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych, The Devil, Kreutzch's Sonata, and the Confessions with a pinch of What is Art?, all different facets of his post-conversion self so that I would be able to better understand his final thought on death and dying, eternity, etc that comes through so darkly in The Death of Ivan Ilych.

But, I wasn't able to go through everything! I read The Devil and both of its endings before moving on to The Kreutzer Sonata. But 3/4 of the way through, I felt so overwhelmed by the incessant, wayward rantings of the anxious and near-crazed Pozdnyshev that I did something I never thought truly possible...I stopped reading Tolstoy.

For an author whose work I greatly respect, whose powerful depiction of the abyss that results from the dismemberment of his faith into barely disguised nothingness frightened and has captivated me since I was a child, (that one could struggle against so much for so very little...), I definitely thought that, despite my disagreements which his conceptions of a godless religion, (for that is what he ended up with), his influence would be something I continually valued.
But as Tolstoy aged, the man became someone so tortured and ever so deluded by his own graspings after an ideal, unrealistic world, a world where the "body" is condemned and one faces hell for desiring what is natural and good in marriage-- conjugal love. Tolstoy lost sight of himself.
And I hope I don't sound so condemnatory towards Tolstoy myself, but his stories ceased to be works of art but disintegrated into frantic attempts to validate himself through the approval of the outside world. If his theory of sexuality is only disseminated out to the greater world, then peace would be achieved. In blatant violation of his own conception of what art is, he hijacks the fictional medium for for his own agenda. Yes, writing of any kind is inherently selfish-- selfish in that it usually circles back to the author who hopes that the reader receives something in the form of a word or textual experience that he, as author, hopes beneficial. But the methods of these type of “readerly conversions” should never be one of enforcement. Tolstoy, thinly veiled under Pozdnyshev's voice, speaks to put down every voice that rises in opposition of his theories. The people of the train car are particularly not the best candidates to represent the common world, (the woman is so horribly educated, aristocratically simple, etc and the men aren't much better). And the narrative construction of the long, LONG train ride and extremely helpful narrator as a means of giving Pozdnyshev the necessary, uninterrupted time to speak his sermon/story is almost amusing. Really, it is Tolstoy just having a conversation with Tolstoy.