James Wood

He dies in 1910.

But I wonder if you just, I gave a rather feeble account just now of what's going on in Tolstoy's life.

I wonder if you just talk a little bit about that, setting the scene for this amazing novella.

I completely agree.

I completely agree about that radical critique and I'm glad you bring it up because this series, which is called Who's Afraid of Realism, began with two episodes on Madame Bovary.

And one of the things I was really digging into with Flaubert, unavoidable of course, is Flaubert's sort of obsessive hatred of the bourgeois.

of bourgeois cliché, of bourgeois idiocy.

His whole unfinished project, the Dictionary of Received Ideas, was going to just be an enormous encyclopedia of foolishness.

And here we have...

It's one way of reading the death of Ivan Ilyich.

If you strip away some of what we were talking about, if you do nothing about the last 20 or 30 years of Tolstoy's life and just... You were in a sort of realism class and you started with Madame Bovary and then you went to the death of Ivan Ilyich.

Well, you'd say...

You'd say, here's a recognizable Flaubertian critique of essentially the bourgeois.

In this case, it gets haute bourgeois.

Here is this well-born chap who's climbing his way up the greasy pole from examining magistrate to magistrate, assistant prosecutor, prosecutor, all this.

He's going up the civil service ranks.

and doing everything just as it should be, comme il faut.

And so what you might say if you were, again, if you didn't know anything about Tolstoy and you were just reading it in your realism class, you'd say, here is the most realistic text ever.

You'd jump on this book and you'd say, the stuff that was annoying me about Flaubert, which is Flaubert is sort of too well written to be realism.

You'd say, here is a writer who's a writer who's stripped everything down and whose critique of the bourgeois is religious in the sense that the thing that the bourgeois won't admit.