I have a gripe with Leo Tolstoy.
What the hell do I care about the farming problems faced by 19th century Russian landowners? Tolstoy goes on for pages and pages about this in Anna Karenina
. I'll grant that, to a point, it develops some of the character of Levin, in brief flashes giving us his insight and thoughts about farming. But really, all his pinko babble is a universe away from my life today. I really could not care less about the subject. My point is, when I read a book, I want, or expect, to be able to relate to it in some way. I get the love aspect in Anna Karenina fine enough. But this farming? Come on! Sure, there is much value in being able to see the world from another's perspective, but Tolstoy, for me, takes it too far.Perhaps I say what I'm about to because the view I take of history is a product of a movement in the latter half (more like the last four decades) of the twentieth century called Social History. Social historians, in some ways, seek to uncover the history of the more common, majority of people. Many historians before this era in academic history (pretty much all history written or created before the 1960s, in fact) was about the big people, the leaders in history. A good example of this kind of history that might resonate with people today, though not exactly academically rigorous in it's historical detail, is a film that got a lot of Oscar hype, attention, and awards this year: The King's Speech
. It is also, to my great delight to point out, a piece of public history (that is, geared towards a mass, popular audience, as opposed to merely the academic community). It's about England's King George VI, and his attempts to overcome his speech impediment. It's quite a good film (though not my favourite film of the past year), and, if you get my drift, it's about the elite, the king, in fact, not the common people. I'm not deriding this type of history, because it certainly has it's place. But if I'm looking for History, not history, I want to know about more than just the big names of the era (I'll make a little aside here, and say that I realize that Tolstoy wrote a piece of fiction, regarded by some as the very first of it's kind, and not history, so in that regard, I'm being a little harsh on him. But, given that I'm reading it about 140 years after it was written, it's hard not to look at it, to some degree, also as a work of history).So, even if we take Anna Karenina
simply for the historical framework it presents, and the picture it paints of the period in Russian history that it depicts, I dislike and disparage it. The book barely gives light to the common man, but focuses instead on the few, very wealthy, aristocrats living in that time. It certainly gives lip service to the peasantry, but I think that is mostly because of Tolstoy's own misgivings about having been born so privileged when he saw that so many around him suffered so much (Levin, the character in the novel who is most sympathetic to the peasants, who has inner conflict over whether he wants to live, is widely held to be the closest Tolstoy ever came to making one of his characters autobiographical).Thankfully, I'm past the section on the farming, now, and we're back on track with the love and drama and gossip and blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah.
To be honest, I'm tired of reading this book, and I'm tired of doing this writing.
Don't get me wrong! I like both, but I feel like I've shackled myself to this project, and I'm passing up the opportunity to read other books that I really want to read. I will not, however, give up. I am committed, and that is part of the reason why I started this blog: to stick to something over the long haul, and see it through to it's end. It's not something I'm very good at doing, and I need to improve that part of me. So here I am, in all my glory.
Don't judge.
-Bryan
