Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Blue
I wasn't belittling Tolstoy for trying to give Shakespeare a chance. I like Tolstoy. It just seemed that he spent too much time trying to give him a chance. According to your quote he spent an exhorbitant amount of time trying to get something worthwhile out of his writings. All I was saying was that if Shakespeare's works didn't appeal to him after several readings and translations, then why continue to beat the dead horse? . . .
|
The quote (or the full essay which is no more than a dozen or two pages:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726...-h/27726-h.htm) is not about Shakespeare "not appealing to him", but about his experiential (and, in the full essay,
reasoned) conviction that Shakespeare was
objectively a bad writer.
What I dubbed "belittling" is your dismissal of this conviction--without even reading his (not overly long, nor onerous) arguments--as "simply a matter of taste".
I am not suggesting you or anybody must, or even should, agree with him, but if an internationally acknowledged and celebrated
Great Writer (who has read Shakespeare in more languages than you and I speak combined) passes a judgment supported by arguments, it seems a little presumptuous to sagely conclude that "it just mustn't have been his thing".
Unless of course you quite generally are of the conviction that literature (and presumably also art?) is without objectively discernible worth and its value is purely subjective (and, presumably, to allow for widely recognized "greatness" also influenced by peer pressure).
Only my first post on this topic was pot-stirring. In the above I am serious, though meaning (and hopefully succeeding) to remain respectful.
If you fundamentally disagree with my assessment of Tolstoy on this matter, obviously we come at the topic from irreconcilable positions, and I do not propose we get our feathers (wait a minute--I haven't got any feathers!) ruffled over it.
Either way, thank you for your posts thus far. I have found them interesting, despite my disagreement!
- Ahi