The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

TOLSTOY ORIGINALLY WISHED to call this short novel Young Manhood but revised both the book and the title after rereading the Iliad. The ostensible protagonist is Olenin, a young nobleman who had been wasting his life in drinking, gambling, love affairs, and aristocratic society. The young Tolstoy went considerably beyond that and was wildly promiscuous, frequently with whores and peasant women, gambled ruinously, struggled with gonorrhea, and I suspect married Sophia Behrs in September 1862 not because he fell in love with her but in the hope of changing his life. He was thirty-four; Sophia was eighteen. In Anna Karenina, Levin, Tolstoy's surrogate, is also thirty-four when he marries Kitty, who is eighteen, but he loves her profoundly.

It is a paradox that Tolstoy, almost Shakespearean in his creation of women, was viciously misogynistic. With his permission, I quote from a letter sent to me by David Bethea, clearly the outstanding scholar of Pushkin: With regard to Tolstoy and women, yes, he portrayed them as accurately as anyone ever has but at the same time they could enrage him with their power over him, especially their sexual power. He never came to terms with this: even in later years he'd see a comely peasant woman on a ladder and he'd want to drag her into the bushes and this brought his anger and resentment to a boil. Why should she, with no reasoning power to speak of, possess this animal attraction to make him want to couple with her? Somehow that must be her or "their" fault. Hélène Kuragin's bare shoulders and bust. That's why the anger played out to an extreme logical conclusion (The Kreutzer Sonata): rejection of biology through abstinence.