Unpopular take: I stopped loving War and Peace after I read about Tolstoy's actual home life

The biography Tolstoy: A Russian Life showed me he treated his wife like hired help while writing pages about peasant virtue, and now I can't finish the book club's 800 page assignment without rolling my eyes every other chapter, has anyone else had a real life detail ruin a classic for them?

2 comments

2 Comments

torres.thea1mo ago

My copy of Anna Karenina sat unread for three years after I found out Tolstoy made his wife copy the entire manuscript by hand seven times. Seven. That's like 2,000 pages of handwriting because he refused to use a typewriter. I get that it was the 1870s and that was normal work for a wife, but I still stared at my bookshelf feeling annoyed every time I walked past it. The worst part is I had just spent forty bucks on the nice annotated edition, so now it's just a fancy paperweight with guilt attached.

ryan_shah3829d ago

I once refused to pick up Dracula for two years after reading about how Bram Stoker was basically a theater manager who wrote it in his spare time while his wife Florence edited and retyped everything. Like, he wasn't even that into the book, he just used her as free labor and then she got stuck dealing with his messy notes after he died. I finally read it last month and I still felt a little bitter the whole time, kept picturing her sitting there with a typewriter and a pile of his handwritten junk. Now my copy just sits on the shelf too, and every time I see it I think, man, she did all that work and people still call it his book.