My Confession
Leo Tolstoy (1882)
When we were first given this assignment I knew I would have a hard time choosing a novel. This wasn’t because of a lack of great authors to choose from it was just the product of a lack of general knowledge. I, therefore, chose the one author I was most familiar with Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. My only real experience with any of his works were naturally two of his most well-known. War and Peace wrote in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877.
I found myself drawn into this story early on. I feel safe in saying that this story was an introspective biography of a man going through a moral mid-life crisis. Tolstoy who by this time was already considered by many of his peers to be a master of realist fiction literature …show more content…
Tolstoy admits that during this dark period of this life he considered suicide many times as a possible answer to the pain he was feeling. I felt that Tolstoy was making a claim that due to his loss of faith in religion early on that it in some way made him an expert on the subject. He claimed that death was the defining moment in life and that in knowing that fact he could not wait quietly for the inevitable to …show more content…
I found the first example he chose talked about ignorance. Tolstoy said if you remained unknowing that life could be bearable but he found this prospect undoable because he was not, in fact, ignorant of the last stage of life (Death). His second example was through the use of Epicureanism. I admit I had to look this term up. It was a philosophy founded in ancient Athens that viewed mental pleasure as more valuable than physical which was attained through enjoying life to its fullest and the loss of anxiety and mental pain that was the result of a fear of death. Tolstoy’s problem with this was he was well aware of the fact that only a small amount of the people have access to the type of wealth necessary to live this kind of life. In Tolstoy’s third and most final possibility he felt that the only honest answer was to consider suicide because death was a definite and following the assumption that God did not exist. So why wait any longer for the inevitable to happen but he admitted that he was too scared and couldn’t go through with it. Tolstoy’s fourth possibility involved simply doing what you were already doing, just living even though all appears hopeless without
Leo Tolstoy (1882)
When we were first given this assignment I knew I would have a hard time choosing a novel. This wasn’t because of a lack of great authors to choose from it was just the product of a lack of general knowledge. I, therefore, chose the one author I was most familiar with Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. My only real experience with any of his works were naturally two of his most well-known. War and Peace wrote in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877.
I found myself drawn into this story early on. I feel safe in saying that this story was an introspective biography of a man going through a moral mid-life crisis. Tolstoy who by this time was already considered by many of his peers to be a master of realist fiction literature …show more content…
Tolstoy admits that during this dark period of this life he considered suicide many times as a possible answer to the pain he was feeling. I felt that Tolstoy was making a claim that due to his loss of faith in religion early on that it in some way made him an expert on the subject. He claimed that death was the defining moment in life and that in knowing that fact he could not wait quietly for the inevitable to …show more content…
I found the first example he chose talked about ignorance. Tolstoy said if you remained unknowing that life could be bearable but he found this prospect undoable because he was not, in fact, ignorant of the last stage of life (Death). His second example was through the use of Epicureanism. I admit I had to look this term up. It was a philosophy founded in ancient Athens that viewed mental pleasure as more valuable than physical which was attained through enjoying life to its fullest and the loss of anxiety and mental pain that was the result of a fear of death. Tolstoy’s problem with this was he was well aware of the fact that only a small amount of the people have access to the type of wealth necessary to live this kind of life. In Tolstoy’s third and most final possibility he felt that the only honest answer was to consider suicide because death was a definite and following the assumption that God did not exist. So why wait any longer for the inevitable to happen but he admitted that he was too scared and couldn’t go through with it. Tolstoy’s fourth possibility involved simply doing what you were already doing, just living even though all appears hopeless without