/lit/ - Literature

The author's close friend Ivan Bunin, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 1933, recalls in the new biography how Chekhov would tell him about Tolstoy: "I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it's because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child's play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare … For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does."