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The man is able to lick two drops of honey (representing Tolstoy's love of his family and his writing), but because death is inevitable, he no longer finds the honey sweet. Tolstoy goes on to describe four possible attitudes towards this dilemma. The first is ignorance. If one is oblivious to the fact that death is approaching, life becomes ...
There Are No Guilty People" (AKA: "There Are No Guilty People in the World") is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written in 1909. [1] According to the Cambridge Companion on Tolstoy, the work is directed against the death penalty. It was incomplete, and when published after Tolstoy's death, resulted in a flood of letters, the reaction mixed.
Tolstoy responded and the two continued a correspondence until Tolstoy's death a year later in 1910. The letters concern practical and theological applications of nonviolence, as well as Gandhi's wishes for Tolstoy's health. Tolstoy's last letter to Gandhi "was one of the last, if not the last, writings from his pen." [6] [7]
The hero and namesake of the story was based on a real person. According to the memoirs of Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskaya (Lev Tolstoy's sister-in-law), "the assistant to the cook and yard-keeper was the half idiot Alyosha the Pot, who was, for some reason, romanticized to the point that reading about him, I could not recognize our holy fool Alyosha.
The story concerns the love and marriage of a young girl, Mashechka (17 years old), and the much older Sergey Mikhaylych (36), an old family friend. The story is narrated by Masha. After a courtship that has the trappings of a mere family friendship, Masha's love grows and expands until she can no longer contain it.
"After the Ball" (also known as "After the Dance") (Russian: После бала) is a short story by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, written in the year 1903 and published posthumously in 1911. The short story serves as an example of Tolstoy's commentary on high culture and social governance, as explored through one man's experience with love.
Therefore, death, the return of the soul to God, is, for Tolstoy, moral life. To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life – Life with a capital L." [5]
The story affirms the ideal of man leading a simple, authentic life alongside nature through its portrayal of attitudes toward death. The author himself gave a thorough interpretation of his work in a letter to A.A. Tolstoy: [3] "My thought was: three creatures died -- a noblewoman, a muzhik, [4] and a tree. The noblewoman is pathetic and ...