Name: 文学：レオ・トルストイ (LITERATURE: Leo Tolstoy)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:53:25.000Z
Duration: 9 min 33 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

The Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy was a believer in the novel not as a source of entertainment

but as a tool for psychological education and reform.

It was in his eyes, the supreme medium by which we can get to know others

especially those who might from the outside seem unappealing

and thereby expand our humanity and tolerance.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana,

a huge family estate, a hundred miles south of Moscow.

It was to be his home on and off for the rest of his life.

One lecturer described him as being unable and unwilling to learn.

He spent a few years gambling and drinking and chasing gypsy women before

signing on as an artillery officer in the Crimean War.

His wife Sophia, who came from a sophisticated high-cultured background was only 18.

They had 13 children, 9 of whom survived infancy.

There were huge arguments about sex and bitterness on both sides.

What he did there was to write several hugely successful books among them

"War and Pace",  "Anna Karenina" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Tolstoy didn't believe in the idea of art for art's sake.

He was deeply invested in the belief that good art should make us less moralistic and judgmental

in terms of developing our reserves of kindness and morality.

This crusading moralistic side of Tolstoy has often been ignored by modern critics

who don't wish to dirty art with a mission,

but it is in fact the most important side of Tolstoy,

and none of his efforts can properly be appreciated without keeping it in mind.

Tolstoy's first great novel was "War and Peace" published in 1869, when he was 41.

In it, we meet Natasha Rostova, a delightful free-spirited young woman.

At the start she's engaged to Andrei, a kind and sincere man who loved her deeply,

But is also rather emotionally remote and avoidant.

While Andrey is away travelling in Italy,

Natasha meets a handsome cynical waster called Anatole and falls under his spell.

He almost manages to seduce her and persuades her to run away with him.

Though her family managed to stop her at the very last minute.

Everyone is appalled and furious with Tasha.

This sort of madness wrecks her own prospects and deeply shames her family.

By the world standards, Natasha has failed terribly.

If we encountered a news clip about such a person,

we might rapidly come to the conclusion that she lies beyond the range of normal sympathy.

She had so much; she thought only of herself, she got what she deserved.

And yet Tolstoy’s view is that if we grasp what things are like for Natasha inside her mind,

we can’t and won’t withdraw our sympathy.

She isn’t in truth self-indulgent, frivolous or totally lacking in devotion.

She’s just a sexually inexperienced young woman who feels abandoned by her preoccupied boyfriend.

She is someone who has a deeply impulsive and warm nature

and is easily carried away by joy and happiness.

She is also acutely worried about letting other people down,

which is what leads her into trouble with the scheming and manipulative Anatole.

and by doing so, he is getting us to rehearse a move he believes is fundamental to an ethical life:

if we more accurately saw the inner lives of others,

they couldn’t appear to us in the normal cold and one-dimensional way,

and we would treat them with the kindness which they truly need and deserve.

No one should be outside the circle of sympathy and forgiveness.

For Tolstoy, a particular task of the novel is to help us to understand the so-called ‘dislikeable’ characters.

One of the most initially repellant characters in his fiction is the husband of Anna Karenina,

the heroine of his great novel of the same name,

The novel, a tragedy, tells the story of the beautiful, clever, lively and generous hearted married Anna,

whose life falls apart when she falls in love with Vronsky,

Anna’s husband – Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin

is a fussy, status conscious, mannered high-ranking government official

who is often callous towards Anna and  unable to answer any of her emotional yearnings.

As Anna’s affair with Vronsky develops, her husband’s main worry is that

it might lead to social gossip which could undermine his public standing.

He appears to have no sincere feelings at all about the marriage itself.

He comes across as simply cold and brutish.

But then Anna gives birth to her lover’s child,

she is ill, and in a highly touching scene Karenin is deeply moved,

weeps for the infant, for the mother, and forgives Anna:

And yet he suddenly felt a blissful spiritual condition that gave him all at once a new happiness he had never known:

a glad feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart.

He knelt down, and laying his head in the curve of Anna’s arm; he sobbed like a little child.

Thanks to the judicious Tolstoy, we see entirely unexpected aspects of the man.

His inner life is not at all what we would expect, judging from the outside.

But Tolstoy’s point is that Karenin is not really an exceptional character.

He is just the normal mixture of bad and good.

It is highly usual for rather off-putting people to have huge reserves of buried tenderness,

to have dimensions to their characters very different from

and often much nicer than those that their forbidding appearance suggests.

We are invited on a comparable journey in relation to another character in Tolstoy’s fiction,

the hero of the The Death of Ivan Illych,  published in 1886.

At the start of the novel, we meet Ivan, a high court judge at the pinnacle of society

But one day, while helping hang some curtains,

Ivan falls from a ladder and becomes aware of an inner pain

which is the first sign of a disease which is soon diagnosed as fatal.

He will have just a few months left to live.

As his health declines, Ivan spends a lot of time sitting on the sofa at home.

His family, aware at just how inconvenient his death will be to their social and financial standing,