It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything is vile and all must be reworked and rewritten, everything that has been printed needs to be crossed out, dropped and disavowed.
Such were the agonies of Leo Tolstoy about one of his two great novels, with whose central character, writes Viktor Shklovsky, the great man fell in love — as have many readers. Later he said, ‘I am proud of its architecture; the structure is unified not through plot or the relations of the characters, but through an inner unity.’
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984), himself one of Russia’s notable novelists, was a superior critic.
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