Diaries

by Leo Tolstoy, R.F. Christian (Editor, Translator ), Raimonda Kavaliauskienė (Translator)

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Classics, Diary, Russian Literature, Nonfiction, Biography, Russia

581 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This diary covers the last fifteen years of Leo Tolstoy's life. It was a period that saw its author ill and severely conflicted with his family, friends, and a whole host of unwelcome petitioners and celebrity seekers. Under those circumstances, I myself could not survive. Yet Tolstoy managed to write in Tolstoy's Diaries Volume 2: 1895-1910 a frequently fascinating picture of his life. At one point, he writes:

I feel that the attitude of people -- the majority -- towards me is no longer the attitude of a man but towards a celebrity, above all a representative of a party or a tendency: either complete devotion and confidence, or, on the contrary, repudiation and hatred.

In the last year of Tolstoy's life, his long-time marriage with Sofia Andreyevna is enduring unusual stresses, with mutual recriminations and (on Sofia's side) spying on her husband's activities -- to the point that part of her husband's diary was kept secret from her eyes.

Sofia wrote her own diary, which was recently published. In it, she does not draw a loving portrait of her husband:

All the things that he preaches for the happiness of humanity only complicate life to the point where it becomes harder and harder for me to live. His vegetarian diet means the complication of preparing two dinners, which means twice the expense and twice the work. His sermons on love and goodness have made him indifferent to his family, and mean the intrusion of all kinds of riff-raff into our family life. And his (purely verbal) renunciation of worldly goods has made him endlessly critical and disapproving of others.

In all, the book is a fascinating read.

[Asha Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 & 1/2 stars!

I must admit how appalled I was to find this book in a blood-boiling ragged state lying strewn in a road-side bookstall. I do not know how else is one supposed to feel or react to the sight of one's favorite author's work suffering a fate like that by ignorant hands but I had to suppress the urge to throttle the stall-keeper since it wasn't totally his fault. The best or all I could do and I did, is that I bought the book right away. Surprisingly, at a unbelievably cheaper price.

The best feeling a reader can go through is read excerpts from the life of the person you admire, feel inspired from and I was so delighted if not overly astonished to learn about Tolstoy's life, given he's been my literary inspiration since childhood.

Okay, about the book now!
This book which is about 150 odd pages is small fragments from the daily life of Leo Tolstoy in his youth days. His customary habits, his routine tasks, preferences of things, his decisions and factors which influenced those are mentioned in not-so-precise details but enough to know a little about the literary icon.

I am quite amazed at the amount of time in his day that was devoted to reading and writing. Its something I am taking away from his diary.

There is only so many people who might like to read this diary of Tolstoy others can suffice it to know that if you are about to read this book, do not expect to come out with immensely heartrending experience. It is just about the regular life of a man who is not the Tolstoy the world knows.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Must grow accustomed to no one ever understanding me. It is a fate which must be common to all men who are not easy to get on with.”

This wouldn’t be a terribly interesting read on its literary or philosophical merits, but it offers good insights that will be of great interest to those curious about who Tolstoy was as a person.

This particular edition is from 1917, and I very much wish an updated translation were available. And while I’m sure many appreciate the footnotes identifying the various people mentioned, I wish I had more information about some other aspects of the text, eg social/cultural standards (eg who was Tolstoy supposed to bow to, and why was he embarrassed he bowed to that one guy?), how we should interpret some of the vague phrases used over and over (“calling things by their right names”), wtf are these medical treatments he was getting and what illness was it, etc.

[Ella]

Half beautiful and insightful, the other half very self-deprecating and dreary to read