It seems Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare for being insufficiently Christian. Personally, I dislike Tolstoy for being excessively Christian (or perhaps more accurately being too overt/preachy about it; I understand Dostoyevski was similarly devout, but it didn’t seem to corrupt his work the way it corrupted Tolstoy’s).
Hmmm. Did I offend Christians, or Tolstoy fans? Was I too brief? Or did people just not actually read the Tolstoy essay? On the off chance it was one of the last two, I’ll mention that the essay does, in fact, say that a central part of what’s wrong with Shakespeare is that he’s not Christian enough, though Tolstoy is extremely long-winded and takes forever to get to the point. And a certain narrow-mindedness seems to me to be involved in Tolstoy’s criticisms across the board. Tolstoy assumes he understands people perfectly well, so when something that happens in Shakespeare puzzles him, he assumes it’s because Shakespeare is misrepresenting people, rather than considering that his own insight into humanity may be less than total. It further seems to me that Tolstoy’s confidence in his assumptions about humanity and his confidence in his belief in Christianity are deeply inter-related (and I doubt he would have disputed that point). And, for example, Anna Karenina has always seemed to me to be the work of an author with a supreme and unjustified confidence that he knows exactly how the world works.
It seems Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare for being insufficiently Christian. Personally, I dislike Tolstoy for being excessively Christian (or perhaps more accurately being too overt/preachy about it; I understand Dostoyevski was similarly devout, but it didn’t seem to corrupt his work the way it corrupted Tolstoy’s).
Hmmm. Did I offend Christians, or Tolstoy fans? Was I too brief? Or did people just not actually read the Tolstoy essay? On the off chance it was one of the last two, I’ll mention that the essay does, in fact, say that a central part of what’s wrong with Shakespeare is that he’s not Christian enough, though Tolstoy is extremely long-winded and takes forever to get to the point. And a certain narrow-mindedness seems to me to be involved in Tolstoy’s criticisms across the board. Tolstoy assumes he understands people perfectly well, so when something that happens in Shakespeare puzzles him, he assumes it’s because Shakespeare is misrepresenting people, rather than considering that his own insight into humanity may be less than total. It further seems to me that Tolstoy’s confidence in his assumptions about humanity and his confidence in his belief in Christianity are deeply inter-related (and I doubt he would have disputed that point). And, for example, Anna Karenina has always seemed to me to be the work of an author with a supreme and unjustified confidence that he knows exactly how the world works.