Most people in the US probably only know he wrote "War and Peace". I started reading it online, but got bored and quit before long. However, reading about Tols

Most people in the US probably only know he wrote "War and Peace". I started reading it online, but got bored and quit before long. However, reading about Tolstoy as a person, and some of the shorter stuff he wrote is way more interesting, at least to me. Andrea Dworkin wrote about Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata" in the book "Intercourse" and compared it to his real life relationship with his wife. Which seems to have been horrific...according to her, who posterity has not esteemed like her husband. Dworkin focused on misogyny, but other people have found aspects of Tolstoy's thinking or behavior repellent for other reasons. Here is something G.K. Chesterton wrote (since on HN only his fence ever seems to be mentioned) "It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth."