Leo Tolstoy

But anyway, Brandon, once he gave himself some space, figured out his health issues, and came back to reading, this is what he said he discovered.

Quote, "I feel like a teenager again, rediscovering the heady drunkenness of falling in love with Pat Conroy or Leal- or Leo Tolstoy." I can't say Leo Tolstoy right now.

[laughs] Leo Tolstoy or Liz Carlyle, my favorite romance novelist.

You know those long syrupy hours when you're young and unattached, and you can feel every word transmit directly into your brain's pleasure center? What I am describing, of course, is the total immersion in a book that becomes harder the older you get, harder not just because of your attention span, but also because you become too knowing, too wised up about publishing and books and life and literature, and all the things you think you know preempt what the author is trying to communicate to you.

When you get older, the self is too much in the way to allow another speaker to fill up all the space there is to be filled.

In fact, this inner crisis is the turning point and core of the book.

There are at this moment only two great Russians who think for the Russian people, and whose thoughts belong to mankind, Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin.

Tolstoy has often told us, in poetical shape, parts of his life.

Kropotkin gives us here, for the first time, without any poetical recasting, a rapid survey of his whole career.

However radically different these two men are, there is one parallel which can be drawn between the lives and the views of life of both.

Tolstoy is an artist, Kropotkin is a man of science.

But there came a period in the career of each of them when neither could find peace in continuing the work to which he had brought great inborn capacities.

Religious considerations led Tolstoy, social considerations led Kropotkin to abandon the paths they had first taken.

He was as conscientious, as true, and as simple as Washington Irving.

Those occasional lapses into dejection notwithstanding it struck me that Mark extracted his humor out of the bounty and abundance of his own nature hence his tinkling grotesquerie unconventionality whimsicality play of satire and shrieking irony between touches of deep seriousness really much of Mark's wisdom began and ended in humor and vice versa there was originality and penetration in everything he said Howells has said of Mark if a trust of his own was betrayed Clemens was ruthlessly implacably resentful for my part in thirty years I never heard him speak ill of any living person except one or two self-appointed editors I first met him in Chicago during the Grant celebration November eighteen seventy-nine when I heard him give the toast on babies but I do not remember a word of his speech for while it lasted I was sitting next to Grant and Grant kept me busy watching and attending his immutable and eloquent silence when Mark and I were fellow correspondents in Berlin I met his wife and family frequently at their home at the Hotel Royal and on public occasions the three girls Jean Susie and Clara were in their teens and both lovely and lively at that time the late William Walter Phelps of New Jersey was American minister in Berlin we had been friends in America and Phelps had also known Mr. Clemens in the States socially like everybody else he delighted in Mark's stimulating company among other distinguished Americans in Berlin in eighteen ninety-one was Ward Hill Lamon Abraham Lincoln's Springfield law partner later his private secretary and marshal of the District of Columbia during Lincoln's administration Lamon was the author of The Life of Abraham Lincoln and Recollections of Abraham Lincoln these books the Lincoln family did not enjoy when the Clemenses went to live in Vienna six years later I happened to be correspondent at the Austrian capital for Dalziel News London and Caligrnani's Messenger Paris and as Mark used to the Berlin dialect found it difficult to acclimatize his German making it chime in with the Vienna variety his own description I was again much in demand as interpreter pathfinder and general cicerone in later years I met Mark repeatedly during his several London seasons for liking his society I called at Brown's or his apartment whenever he came to England myself being engaged in literary work there we were never on terms of particular intimacy hail fellows well met yes hello Mark hello Henry W. you here again we stuck verbally to the formula of the old Chicago days and I was glad to be of use to him when it suited his fancy moreover I was vastly interested in Mark's books short stories and essays but found him rarely inclined to talk shop unless it was the other fellows Rudyard Kipling he used to designate the militant spokesman of the Anglo-Saxon races and he sometimes spoke with near admiration of Bernard Shaw whose plays are popular from London to St. Petersburg from Christiana to Madrid from Havre to Frisco and from Frisco to the Antipodes while mine are nowhere after I visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana he said to me lucky dog you have broken bread with a man who commands and almost monopolizes the thought of the world that the universality of his humor and its humanity made him the peer of these great writers of all his contemporaries in fact seemed to be far from his thoughts his verbal humor like his fancy was as simple in form and as direct in application as were the army orders of the great Napoleon he liked to hear me say that for he knew that some of my forebears had been individually attached to the person of the emperor but the most he ever said concerning his authorship and other writers in his own line was this I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs like you and Susie referring to his oldest daughter I can't spell but I have never stooped to spell cat with a K to get at your funny bone I love a drink but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side one more of his sayings at the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Eugene Field Mark uttered these words by his life he made bright the lives of all who knew him and by his books he cheered the thoughts of thousands who didn't know him Substitute millions for thousands, and you have Mark Twain, the man, and Mark Twain, the writer.

One afternoon, having laughed our fill with The Belle of New York and rejoiced in the London success of the piece, Mark, who while alive enjoyed scant luck as a playwright, yet loved to see others win out.

Our friend and the present writer happened to cross Bedford Square.

Peace, happiness, brotherhood, that is what we want in this world." "Here comes the Kaiser," he continued, "and sends me tickets for his September review.

Of course I will go, but I don't care for military spectacles or for militarism.

Tolstoy was right in calling army life a school for murder.

In Germany today, there are ten million men drilled to look upon the Kaiser as a god, and if the Kaiser says, "Kill," they kill, and if he says, "Die for me," they go out and get themselves shot.

The Russian school is responsible for this.

We see here the logical result of a sedulous aping of those writers such as Tolstoy, Andreith, Turgenith, Dostoevsky, or even Pushkin, whose meteor it was to fill the pages of their books with an inordinate number of characters, many of whom the reader is to encounter but once, let us say, on the Nevsky Prospect or in the Somoli Institute, but all of whom add their particular name.

We believe we will not offend when we refer to Russian names as peculiar to the general confusion of the whole.

In practice, the book is not flawless.

No long and weary struggle with pain, One sudden throe in his clouded brain Closed forever his bloodless reign, With every man his friend.

For death alone did he abdicate; What emperor, prince, or potentate Can long avoid a similar fate, Or win a better end? End of Norton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico by Robert Ernest Cowan

Patriotism and Government by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Alimer Maud from a book called Pamphlets, published 1900.

This is a LibriVox recording.

I gotta say-

It's very Tolstoy.

It's very Tolstoy

...

I don't know if it's the title or if it's the, like, poster art that I've seen on Netflix and so on or what, but I fully assumed that this movie took place in the American South.

I was away at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from hearsay.

But at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me over, Clemens wrote, That man seems to have been to you what Browning was to me.

I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly.

I have forgotten what piece of John Hayes it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely reveled in the vengefulness of William Morris's Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast, and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying the murderer of his brother.

All these people used to meet at his house, where they mingled with persons of the highest rank and standing, such as Count Korff and a former minister, Count Alexis Bobrinski.

Later on, the whole Chertkov family, to which belonged the famous friend of Count Leo Tolstoy, associated itself with them, and indeed displayed the greatest fanaticism in regard to its participation in the doctrines of the new sect.

The Pashkovites, as they came to be called, had nothing at all in common with the Khlysties.

Their morals were absolutely unimpeachable, and what they preached was simply the necessity to conform one's morals were always unimpeachable.

He swallowed one of the stay-wake tablets with a scalding mouth of black coffee.

Well, with one thing and another, it was Tolstoy or Balzac, gin rummy, coffee, tablets, walking, more Tolstoy, more Balzac, more gin rummy, more solitaire.

The first day passed, as did the second and the third.

On the fourth day, he lay quietly in the shade of a rock, counting to a thousand by fives, then to tens, to keep his mind occupied and awake.

Earlier you referenced that.

I think it's from Tolstoy from Anna Karenina at the beginning where he says all families are dysfunctional, but all are dysfunctional in their own way or something like that.

Yeah,

I'm