Tolstoy on Shakespeare

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Leo Tolstoy, 1906: ‘I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful aesthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: ‘King Lear,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth,’ not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium… Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the ‘Henrys,’ ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ ‘The Tempest’, ‘Cymbeline’, and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth.’ Tolstoy on Shakespeare