Put your drinking cap on, dear reader, because today we’re raising a glass – or, more accurately, several glasses, straight from the bottle, no chaser needed – for the one, the only, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.  Born on this day in 1828, a man so monumentally, so titanically extra that his own life reads like a novel he’d have probably edited down for being too unbelievable.

Let’s be brutally, painfully honest for a moment.  Who amongst us hasn’t, in the throes of some ill-advised, 3 a.m. intellectual fugue state, picked up War and Peace with the genuine, albeit deeply misguided, intention of actually finishing it?  You see its heft, its sheer gravitational pull on your bookshelf, and you think, “Yes.  This is it.  This is the literary Everest I shall conquer.”  Then, 150 pages and approximately 4,729 character introductions later, you’re weeping into your lukewarm coffee, realizing you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  And that, dear reader, is the genius of Tolstoy.  He makes you feel intellectually inadequate from beyond the grave, and you somehow thank him for it.

The man was a walking contradiction.  A bona fide aristocrat who wanted to be a peasant.  A soldier who became a pacifist.  A renowned sinner who spent the back half of his life penning moral treatises with the kind of high-minded sanctimony that would make a saint blush.  Imagine writing Anna Karenina – a sprawling, heartbreaking epic of adultery, societal ruin, and existential despair – and then turning around to become the world’s most famous, beard-stroking moralist.  It’s like a Michelin-starred chef opening a chain of kale-and-air smoothie stands.  The sheer, unadulterated audacity is something to behold.

He wrote with a scope that is, frankly, offensive to lesser mortals.  He wrote about everything: God, death, love, war, farming, family dysfunction, the subtle agony of a high-society dinner party – it’s all in there.  His sentences can be these long, winding , multi-clausal bastards that wrap around you like an anaconda, squeezing the air from your lungs until you finally reach the full stop, gasping, but somehow enlightened.  He’d spend twenty pages on a single battle, and you’d feel every cannonball, every terrified breath, every futile prayer.  Then he’d spend another ten on a girl’s conflicted feelings at her first ball, and you’d feel that, too, with surprising intensity.

So here’s to Leo.  Here’s to the man who gave us characters so real they feel like distant, dysfunctional relatives.  Here’s to the man whose magnum opus is both a literary masterpiece and the world’s most effective doorstop.  And here’s to the glorious, hypocritical, brilliant, maddening complexity of a writer who tried to renounce his own art because it was just too goddamn good.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m 73 pages into The Death of Ivan Ilyich and I’m already feeling the cold hand of existential dread on my shoulder.  Time to find some whiskey.  Tolstoy would have wanted it that way.  Probably.

N.P.: “Back in Black” – Doctorfunk