Well, it happened about three o’clock. The gentlemen were playing. There was the big stranger, as our men called him. The prince was there…
Read MoreWhat brought Tolstoy to tennis so late in his life? Or, better, what brought him around to the game? When he was in his forties, he thought tennis was a faddish luxury, a pastime of the new rich, something imported, inauthentic—a child’s game enthused about by well-to-do grownups who refused to grow up.
Read MoreAlyosha was the younger brother. He was called the Pot, because his mother had once sent him with a pot of milk to the deacon’s wife, and he had stumbled against something and broken it.
Read MoreIn To the Lighthouse Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina, thereby putting into practice some of the ideas contained in her essay. For instance, the stillborn marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily.
Read MoreAn elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town…
Read MoreSurat on the Banks of the Tappee, James Forbes, 1813 by Leo Tolstoy In the town of Surat, in India, was a coffee-house where many travellers and foreigners from all parts of the world met and conversed. One day a learned Persian theologian visited this coffee-house. He was a man who had spent his life…
Read MoreBarefoot Tolstoy, Ilya Repin, 1901 From Barnes and Noble Review: Tolstoy spent years on a four-volume, 700-page ABC and reading primer, a work he regarded more highly than War and Peace. (Upon its publication in 1872 it received neither good reviews nor official approval, but with its republication thirteen years later it became a bestseller,…
Read MoreCapture Grivitskogo redoubt at Plevna, Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, 1885 by James Warner Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. The arguments they put forward are surprisingly relevant to our own current wars. A little background – in the summer of 1875, Orthodox Christians in Herzogovina revolted against their Ottoman…
Read MoreJervase Marion knew it all so well, so well, this half-fashionable, half-artistic Anglo-American idleness of Venice, with its poetic setting and its prosaic reality…
Read MoreUnleashed on social networks, the first sentence becomes a sign of recognition, a knowing wink, a cabalistic sign between insiders…
Read MoreImportant as the soup is in To the Lighthouse it is never identified, never seen as “beautiful red soup” or “eternal” tomato soup…
Read MoreAt first I wanted to write only at night. The great romantic writers I admired wrote mostly in the witching hours. Can you imagine Kafka lugging his laptop to Starbucks at seven in the morning?
Read MoreWhether or not The Trespasser helped Woolf shape Night and Day, there may be glints of Lawrence’s novel in To the Lighthouse…
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