Marriage for Tolstoy’s heroic men is not the be-all and end-all of a life well lived. Romantic love compromises marriage, to the detriment of both women and men. The well-married are good at the prosaic love of family life, not just falling in love. They find romance and fulfillment in joyfully executing the necessities of [...]
Leo Tolstoy shows us the character of Napoleon and shows us the hope of near-repentance, and the devastatingly fearful return to a world of artificial phantoms. I recently wrote an essay about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Here, I discuss another Russian novel, published at the exact same time, in the exact same periodical: Leo [...]
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from [...]