Tolstoy, woman, and death
Subtitle: a study of War and peace and Anna Karenina
By: David Holbrook.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Madison, NJ; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 273
Subjects: Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.; Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.; Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910 -- Characters -- Women.; Women in literature.; Death in literature.
Description: Tolstoy despised women. He considered them to be dangerous and destructive. In this work, David Holbrook examines Tolstoy's enmity toward women and the possible reasons for it - his mother's lack of attention to him as a baby, her death, his psychopathological behavior toward his own wife, and the deeply disturbed attitudes he exhibited throughout his life. Yet, in spite of all this, Tolstoy created and wrote sympathetically about some of the most fascinating women in all of literature.

In War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy depicts the chaos and misery caused by men taking upon themselves the risk of battle in order to compete with women, who take on the risks of parturition. In the face of death, men pursue the question, "What do men live by?" - at times inspired by the beauty and spirit of women, and by love.

In the end, however, Tolstoy strips his heroine of those qualities that make her so inspiring, and in this act, Holbrook believes, we see Tolstoy's fear of women and his attempt to control them.

Yet Tolstoy was able to identify deeply with the female consciousness, and thus to give us the marvelous scenes around childbirth in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Further, he created, from his early bereavement, a pure and ideal mother figure - so pure that no woman could ever take her place. By contrast, sexual love with any real woman seemed an affront to that pure ideal.

It is impossible to tie Tolstoy down to any oversimplifications, and Holbrook rejects both feminist interpretations on the one hand, and Christian interpreters on the other, finding in the art of this great writer a profound preoccupation with the truth of the human heart.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 268-270) and index.