Tolstoy, Leo - Renato Poggioli (essay date 1957)

Renato Poggioli (essay date 1957)

SOURCE: "A Portrait of Tolstoy as Alceste," in The Phoenix and The Spider: A Book of Essays about Some Russian Writers and Their View of the Self, Harvard University Press, 1957, pp. 49-108.

[In the following essay, Poggioli compares Tolstoy's character and philosophical views with those of the character Alceste in Molière's play The Misanthrope.]

I

It is well known that George Orwell drew a parallel between Tolstoy in his old age and King Lear. He did so in a brilliant essay, where he tried to explain the motives that led the Russian writer to single out King Lear in his indiscriminate indictment of the Bard.1 According to Orwell, Tolstoy's extreme dislike for the story of King Lear was due to its strange similarity to the history of his own life:

There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in...

[The entire page is 29005 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass