"War and Peace (1/9) Movie CLIP - The Greatest Pleasures (1956) HD". Movieclips. May 18, 2012.
“Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.”--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
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"The chief cause of unhappiness in married life is that people think that marriage is sex attraction, which takes the form of promises and hopes and happiness - a view supported by public opinion and by literature. But marriage cannot cause happiness. Instead, it is always torture, which man has to pay for satisfying his sex urge."--Leo Tolstoy (not a quote from War and Peace).
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"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."--Leo Tolstoy.
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"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."--Leo Tolstoy.
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"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."==Leo Tolstoy
*what do we learn from Tolstoy? (weaponized love versus peaceful love, as hatched by governments which program the militarized masses to perform the deeds of unconscious manipulation).
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"Tolstoy the Spiritual Anarchist: On 'A Confession'". Paul Griffin. December 7, 2013.
After contemplating suicide and renunciation of his former life, Tolstoy. Tolstoy was addicted to sex and could barely control his adverse sexual urges (believed in sleeping downward into the peasant class, even making poorer women pregnant and then discarded as demanded by his "superior" class). This aspect of his life has rarely if ever or never been delineated in mainstream (undoubtedly in obscure feminist papers which I have never read but am aware of such types of writings).
This highly Communistic approach to critical analysis is like the usual male-dominated fixation on male philosophical life ponderings. Mention of domestic violence or abuse or cruelty towards his wife or other women is not mentioned. All the themes that Tolstoy so beautifully elaborated upon except for his dark sexual urges towards women (and with men never mentioned) are left out of the poetic critiques offered by men (I would suggest of the same patter, ilk or whatever you want to call their male bonding affinity towards completely ignoring all issues of abuse towards women by such "lofty" male writings--as Tolstoy had come out of the aristocrat class and as a man of privilege and social status his demeanor towards women remains as a privileged silenced omission in all the accolades for the otherwise "spiritual" and socio-political meanderings through what could not be called "liberal" or progressive ideologies.
In my opinion, the subconscious HATE for women as expressed by exploitation of lower class peasant females, and then his adultery when it came to his wife whom he kept pregnant for something like 15 years on-end--to his denouncement of sexuality towards her, his dark secrets bound up in his controversial novel The Kreutzer Sonatas, and then his death which was spurred by leaving his distraught wife whom he wanted to abandon in his 80th-something year of life. The suicide urge he had, which I suspect stems from his utter disconnection from sexuality and love for women (suppressed homosexuality perhaps?) and his sexual debauchery of women (and probably men, never mentioned in the historical record). This utter disconnect in terms of sexuality and the death urge with his compounded lofty "spiritual" photo-opportunity prose and celebrity fame and then his subsequent lack of appetite for life--the urge towards suicide.
But hear and list to an appraisal based on absolute glowing reviews of the spiritual heights that this reviewer ascribes to Tolstoy. I am not criticizing Tolstoy's complexities or the author himself as much as the lack of balance in the reportage concerning women, sexuality and this confounded death and sex combination, tied to a grasping perhaps in vain at spiritual enlightenment and socio-political challenge to authority but the personal life remained a cold, landscape of the cranking out of endless children and a kind of static sexual lovelessness.
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