So. I'm taking this Tolstoy class. Tolstoy's always been this enigmatic type of figure to me, this Russian guru of literary awesomeness who was also kinda weird and had interesting ideas about Christianity and religion.
To add to that, War and Peace is so dang long, weighing in at a whopping 1,358 pages, that I've always been afraid of what must be an incredibly ponderous, dry read.
To my puzzled delight, it's not boring.
Not for me at least. But I've realized from the little Tolstoy I've read so far that although Tolstoy was an egotist and thought that everybody who didn't agree with him was wrong, he really was a talented writer. It's in the characters. He knows how to breathe life into them and make me care about them. A few of them, at least.
I've only read about 70 pages of the book so far, but I'm excited for the rest. The next 1,200 or so.
Haven't read Tolstoy, but have done Dostoevsky and like him; though, it may be a Russian thing that you write a lot of pages but not a lot of plot happens. So get ready for 1,200 pages of nothing (plot-wise), probably.
ReplyDelete