![]() ![]() ![]() Later during that discussion of Tolstoy, Dorothy Day concentrated her attention on Anna Karenina: “I hear people say it is their favorite novel, but I can’t say that, because I get too upset whenever I go back to it, and I do, from time to time. We choose whom to read in accordance with the particular subjectivity which happens to possess us at one or another moment – unless some professor is compelling us to cram a whole list of books down our nervous gullets. She was not thereby making empty talk nor was she unaware of the relationship a novelist can have to one’s psychology. “I have to be in a certain mood to read Tolstoy,” I remember her saying (1970). Like others before and after her, she struggled with Tolstoy, even as he never stopped struggling with himself – the various sides of his intellectual and ethical life which he wanted so hard to reconcile. She, of course, had read (and reread) War and Peace, Anna Karenina, not to mention the later Tolstoy of religious introspection and intense personal anguish (Resurrection, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Confession). ![]() His moral passion was evident even in his early writing (as an observer of war in The Sebastopol Sketches, as an observer of himself and others nearby, in the partly fictional, partly autobiographical Childhood, Boyhood, Youth). It is not hard to understand why Dorothy Day was so taken with Tolstoy. ![]()
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