/lit/ - Literature

>>22550144
If someone today wrote a character like Natasha Rostov I feel they would be subject to a lot of feminist criticism. I honestly can't think of a character like that in contemporary fiction even though it is a very real type of person

>>22550144
Wagner was better.

>Kundry is living an unending life of constantly alternating rebirths as the result of an ancient curse which, in a manner reminiscent of the Wandering Jew, condemns her, in ever-new shapes, to bring to men the suffering of seduction; redemption, death, complete annihilation is vouchsafed her only if her most powerful blandishments are withstood by the most chaste and virile of men. So far, they have not been. After each new and, in the end, profoundly hateful victory, after each new fall by man, she flies into a rage; she then flees into the wilderness, where by the most severe atonements and chastisements she is, for a while, able to escape from the power of the curse upon her; yet it is denied to her to find salvation by this route. Within her, again and again, arises a desire to be redeemed by a man, this being the only way of redemption offered by the curse: thus does innermost necessity cause her repeatedly to fall victim anew to the power through which she is reborn as a seductress. The penitent then falls into a deathlike sleep: it is the seductress who wakes, and who, after her mad frenzy, becomes a penitent again.

>>22550162
Lmao Wagner wasnt fit to refill Tolstoy’s ink jar. Take your garage taste back to /pol/

What characters portray the female workings well?

>>22550144
>Best writer of women of all time
You were saying?

Best writers of women were Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Tolstoy is pretty good but he is incapable of writing a woman with a brain, let alone a devious woman with a brain.

Wrong pic, OP.

>>22550265
>writing a woman with a brain, let alone a devious woman with a brain
Trollope writes that sort of woman surprisingly well, especially in his political novels

>>22550198
>t. gets his cultural history from New York Jews

>>22550144
Women pretty much control publishing but are still convinced they are oppressed victims because men don’t kiss their arses properly

>>22550342
Publishing firms are predominantly male owned

>>22550237
This guy can’t even write credible human beings, let alone women.

>>22550155
I doubt even hardcore feminists could hate Natasha for how she was written. She has incredible depth and isn't really ever depicted as a truly bad person, just misguided and easily influenced and preyed on by men like Anatol.

Now Anna on the other hand is a truly haunting depiction of a bad woman that isn't trying to be evil, but it's just her nature. I'm honestly surprised by how many women and booktubers always list Anna Karenina as one of their favorite novels considering Anna encompasses so many flaws that modern women see as virtues.

>>22550347
So is everything else and yet look how gay this planet is.

>>22550433

i mean, anna's story was highly critical of things like soulless aristocratic relationships and the sexist way society treats her compared to how it treats vronsky even though both of them were guilty of wrongdoing

but they definitely take it a step further and actually lionize her for being stupid bitch and pretend she is a victim specifically for not being able to have her cake and eat it too

>>22550433
I think they would call Natasha a sort of manic pixie archetype in a modern context. Also the whole characterization of Anatol as this utterly useless and selfish hyper Chad who she can't resist might be seen as incel-adjcent. They have to literally lock her up lol.

>>22550433
i think at the very least they lack the self awareness to really appreciate her development

Natasha is the ultimate archetype of the ups and downs of youthful vitality. the quintessential young person, just getting her first taste of maturity and awareness of the world around her, and full of unrestrained passion and eagerness to get out into the world and experience what life has to offer, but along with all this comes youthful ignorance and inexperience and naivete, which combined with eagerness, leaves the young person vulnerable to be manipulated and exploited and to make catastrophically bad choices

Natasha of course learns her lesson the hard way and in the end manages to carve out a nice life for herself, but i feel like your modern feminist operates on a sort of sunk cost fallacy regarding their retarded decisions and are absolutely dedicated to perpetuating their mistakes rather than admit they were wrong

for example, if Sonia was a modern feminist, she probably would have been egging natasha on and "yas queen slay"ing about how she should go out and fuck anatole and have fun and not let patriarchal social norms about monogamy and responsibilities society at large prevent her from "living her best life" by runnign away with anatole

>>22550265
>Tolstoy is pretty good but he is incapable of writing a woman with a brain
Woah now, Tolstoy fancied himself a realist, he didnt write science fiction.

>>22550144
A lot of people say this and women themselves often appreciate Tolstoy but then they read Family Happiness and absolutely loathe him

>>22550144
All his works were written by his wife.

>>22551686
Are Tolstoy's lesser known books worth reading? I hardly ever see anyone mention any of his work that isn't W&P, Anna Karenina and the Death of Ivan Illych.

>>22551686
Why?

>>22550144
Women don't stand out by evolutionary design. Like paradise birds, girls all the same, it is men who rise above mediocrity

>>22550646
Coomer detected. Tolstoy didn't write women with a brain because he could understand how women without a brain thought differently from men without a brain, which anyone can do, but had a lot of difficulty imaging how intelligent women thought differently from intelligent men. This is also what trannies fail at: they can act like stupid women (almost a blackface of women) or intelligent men but lack the faculty to act like an intelligent woman.

>>22550377
Human beings aren't just autistic mopey post-slave spectacles of misery and moralfagging. They are embedded in complex networks of multiple organizations controlling and directing and infusing in an often hilarious, over the top, comical way. Pynchon describes human beings better than shakespeare, and shakespeare is pretty damn based

>>22552957
It's an early book he wrote about a girl marrying her dead father's friend who is like 20 years older than her, then after some initial years of happiness she becomes depressed and distant from him. At the end she realizes her role in life is just to be a wife and a mother and becomes satisfied with that. This is essentially the same thing that happens to Natasha and Kitty in his later novels but in Family Happiness this evolution is not as nuanced or deep so women see it as disgusting (Tolstoy later disavowed the book). I'll agree that the ending was rushed but the early parts of the book are magnificent

>>22552216
Yes, many of his short novels are masterpieces in their own right although they aren't as famous as his 2 epic novels. Hadji Murad, The Cossacks, The Forged Coupon are excellent.

>>22550265
>Tolstoy is pretty good but he is incapable of writing a woman with a brain
Indeed. Art imitating life I suppose.

>>22553729
>women see it as disgusting (Tolstoy later disavowed the book).
Because of the response by women?

>>22552216
Literally his later short novels are his strongest work in the opinions of many. Personally I enjoyed Ivan Ilyich, Hadji Murat, the Forged Coupon, and the Kreuzer Sonata more than his doorstopper novels.

>>22550144
as much as i love Tolstoy the best writer of women is, hands down, Ibsen

>>22553758
He didn't think the book was artistically mature enough, women accepting their place as mothers and wives is shown much better in his novels. But his views on women were always the same and you don't see women criticizing War and Peace or Anna Karenina the way they do Family Happiness which I guess shows how powerful art can be. Even if you have the same fundamental message, the way in which you present it can change a person's whole outlook. although most criticism for Tolstoy and women overall is directed towards his own marriage and The Kreutzer Sonata (both are misunderstood I'd argue)

>>22550144
who would want to reas about women in the first place

>>22553783
Yeah I remember watching the 3 hour discussion with Andrea Dworkin and Anthony Burgess (and others) and it got brought up how Dworkin apparently loved Tolstoy's work but loathed how he treat his wife. I haven't read what she actually wrote about it tho.

>>22553783
Problem is he based every woman’s happiness-from-depression arc on his wife but her diaries indicate she never found happiness and he made her want to kill herself up until the end but he was too autistic to notice

>>22553783
You get a lot of criticism of AK for using the tired le woman being independent must be punished trope that runs through 19th century literature (and operas). That's probably the most common critique of it today. It's not like people are down with the message just because it's better written

>>22552216
I liked some of his earlier short works about the caucuses like the woodfelling and the raid. other people mentioned here like the forged coupon are good too

>>22553836
Her husband is not portrayed sympathetically. She also wasn’t looking for independence just for a husband who wasn’t a beta npc. Her issue was abandoning her son that proved the biggest problem and she herself did not want to do that

>>22553836
Some people have a problem with how Anna is treated but they don't usually complain about how Kitty is treated even though Kitty would embody the same "misogynistic" evolution of becoming a wife and a mother.

i still find myself on the fence about hadji murad. it felt extremely out of place among his more devoutly christian works works and i have a lot of mixed feelings about the way he tries so hard to lionize a violent muslim warlord just to own the aristocrats.

even though Tolstoy is probably one of if not my my favourites, theres one thing i really noticed delving into his other works, particularly some of his later stuff, that i didnt like, which is that its clear that his more positive attitudes caused some understandable frustration with the world around him, and frustrated about politics which i get and i can relate too, but it ends up translating into this streak of serious bitterness and in some cases straight up animosity and hostility which just makes for such an ugly contrast the great ad beautiful things he wrote .

i guess in that way you can say his works really do make a show of the whole breadth of the human experience, blemishes and all

>>22553866
The exact details don't really matter when he's reinforcing the same old cliche of killing any woman who breaks the social code. Madam Bovary has to die. Tess of the D'Urbervilles has to die. Nancy has to die. Violetta has to die. Tosca has to die. Nana has to die. Esther von Gobseck has to die.
This will happen to you girls! It's 19th century Reefer Madness. Be dutiful and pure, or you too may be crushed underneath a train

>>22553911
Why don't the details matter? Anna's downfall is perfectly realistic and the people around her suffer as well. Tolstoy's moralfagging is obvious but it's also artistically convincing hence why the book is still so beloved even by women.