James Wood

And in this sense, the bourgeois is us, the bourgeois is everyone.

is that he will die.

I like that idea that there's a continuing

I chose that Who's Afraid of Realism with some deliberation as a title for the series.

And indeed, this is a book that we should read with... We're supposed to read it with fearfulness.

It has a strong judgment for us.

And I think I probably...

I probably shared with you when I was younger a kind of, I mean, look, there's no doubt that Tolstoy in these last decades of his life was a crank.

I mean, you know, there was the vegetarianism, the pacifism, the impossibility at home, certainly the patriarchal impossibility at home.

The wife just can't live with him.

He's monstrous to half of the children.

The Acolytes, you wrote about this wonderfully, the sort of the dreaded hangers-on who sort of, who are always in the house.

This was the period for listeners who don't know about, much about late Tolstoy.

You might say this is the moment where the great novelist switches over, certainly in the Anglophone world, he sort of switches over from being the writer of the two great novels to being...

a manifesto writer, a pamphleteer.

Tolstoy societies grow up all around the place, and these dreaded acolytes, sort of journalists, disciples, start glomming on to Tolstoy and insinuating themselves into the family structure, right?

Absolutely.

Well, maybe what we should do is let's just go back to this amazing book.

And just to get our bearings, we'll remind ourselves of the form and shape of

It begins, very interestingly, not quite where you'd expect it to.