>>25112385
Evidently the masses, considering he was inarguably the most famous artist on the planet during his lifetime

>>25112399
I thought so, which is odd because this leads to my suspicion that Dutton and Woodley were onto something with their intelligence book. I can't find a normie thay would even slog through Anna, yet alone W&P

>>25112385
Me.

>>25112408
80% of people alive today are literally clinically retarded.

>>25112539
Based

other nobles in my opinion. war and peace originally came about as the first in a trilogy about the decemberists, which was a noble movement born out of the napoleonic wars. if i had to guess he wanted the try and express the sentiment of the movement in a way that other nobles would connect to and maybe they would become more open to treating their fellow man better

>>25112408
Tolstoy's most popular work during his lifetime was actually Resurrection and his short stories like Where Love Is, God Is

>>25112853
Resurrection sold so well because his previous work like Anna Karenina hyped it up.

>>25112385
He wrote it to BTFO the historians of his time.

He wrote it for me :)

On a serious note though, everything he wrote has a ton of value in it, even the stupid stuff like "What is Art?". He never tries to bullshit you in any manner, and just tells you what he honestly thinks, and writes it in a way that is simple to understand, even if what he is talking about is complex. It's much more refreshing reading someone like that, even if I disagree with what he is saying.

>>25112385
the russian reading public, so mostly educated nobility. maybe some scholars of the day, I guess. boundaries were more porous then. but I can't imagine the long historical analysis interludes to be targeted toward anyone other than academics. shoutout my boy Pierre

>>25112385
Not me, he wrote Anna Karenina for me however because I for the life of me can’t understand women, it didn’t help in any way though it was a masterpiece.
Can I just point out, look how fucking dapper this fellow was even as a bald 80 year old.

>>25114602
He was right about everything in What is Art

>>25112408
>which is odd because this leads to my suspicion that Dutton and Woodley were onto something with their intelligence book
The Flynn effect only started failing in the 1970s or so though, the Russian peasantry would have been retarded at large and they demonstrated as much by falling for communism rather than taking after Tolstoy's mystic Christianity

>>25114756
Not everything, but his general point of art requiring a utilitarian function I agree with. In an age of AI it’s kind of impossible not to agree with that if we want to preserve the integrity of art and artists.

>>25115033
The book stipulates thay the Flynn effect is an illusion. They use other proxies to measure intelligence.

>>25112408
He writes fairly accessibly. Books used to be mass entertainment and people were eager to consume more of the same in the same way people are eager to binge very long netflix shows now. Very long novels aimed at a popular audience were not uncommon (count of monte cristo springs to mind).

>>25115291
Even then he was still writing for Russians

>>25115318
>Books used to be mass entertainment and people were eager to consume more of the same in the same way
Has anything changed? That's booktok

>>25115461
For the elites, not the peasantry.

His slaves, for sure.
>Leo Tolstoy inherited about 330 male serfs (along with their families) at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the 1840s. In the Russian system, serfs were usually counted as “male souls” for taxation purposes, so the total number of people living under his ownership (including women and children) would have been significantly higher — likely well over 1,000 individuals.

>>25115611
>he fucked like 500 female serfs, wrote in his diary about it, then gave the diary to his wife
>the women he fucked continued living on his property
kind of a dick move

>>25115661
He wrote a story about this called The Devil and his wife only discovered it after he died; it ends with the narrator either killing himself or killing the serf he has adultery with (rare story with 2 endings)

>>25115465
Yeah, the change is that novels back then were artistic masterpieces and today they're junk where the bestsellers are about minotaurs fucking horny women

>>25115899
Some were, but there was slop like what Schopenhauer's mom or sister wrote, that went forgotten.

>>25115487
+1 exactly, which is why W&P has parts of it written in French. It was the language of the aristocrats in Russia. The peasants couldn't read it even if they tried. His audience was always the elite.