It’s the hundredth anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s death. The Economist’s Prospero revisited the writer and his legacy for Russia in a beautiful piece here. An excerpt:
Devastatingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death is hardly marked in Russia. Tolstoy was a man who opposed state violence, who considered the Church’s union with the state as blasphemous, who denounced pseudo-patriotism, and who wrote to Alexander III asking him to pardon those who assassinated his father. These principles are firmly out of fashion in today’s Russia. By turning Tolstoy into an icon, the Soviets ultimately hollowed him out.
While traveling by train this summer, I finally read Anna Karenina. What I loved about the novel was that it had a strong plot- Anna cheats on her husband and eventually is ruined- but the whole book was just bursting with ideas. Through some remarkable subplots, Tolstoy reveals just how much he was thinking when he was writing.
It’s unfathomable that both Tolstoy and Stalin could have emerged from the same tradition.
