Tales of Sexual Desire The Devil, the Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius

Bought a copy from an estate sale because I wanted to read the book that was so controversial that Teddy Roosevelt and the USPS banned it. The only way I can describe this is “absolutely unhinged,” but not in the way Tolstoy was aiming for.

i mean like, it’s fine

really interesting. a lot of the reviews on this website seem to want to throw the baby out with the bath water on this one, but i think there’s a lot of good stuff here! this to me reads as split neatly into two parts, the first being almost purely didactic, the second being the actual psychological/emotional meat of the story. the latter section is brilliant, tolstoy capturing so well how it feels to be psychotically jealous. the first section is a bit more complex. here his prose isn’t what it could be; it’s mildly engaging but just doesn’t stay enthralling for the entirety of his rant on sex and society. further, knowing that this was essentially tolstoy’s actual views on women and sex at the time is upsetting. i want to read into this something resembling a heideggerian epoch—neither the time we are living in nor the time proposed gets any closer to a true way of being; the proposed reality merely makes clear problems in the old. but it is clear that tolstoy earnestly believed the things he wrote. while that doesn’t take away from what i can get to the text, it makes me think a little less of tolstoy. the text is riddled with sexism, but does hit upon good ideas such as the critique of some pseudo-feminist movements that put women into higher stations in society but still treat them as merely sexed objects in those stations. it feels a bit silly and like i’m falling into a trap to be analyzing the politics of a 19th century work so much, but it’s hard not to when, like much of tolstoy’s later work, this is so openly ideologically driven. anyways. pretty good, worth the read.

3.8/5