What was Leo Tolstoy's Aim as a Writer?
I'm pondering Leo Tolstoy's reflections on his writing vocation:
"My writer's aim does not consist in resolving the questions posed, but in instilling a love of life in all its innumerable and inexhaustible manifestations. If someone were to tell me that it lay in my power to write a novel explaining every social question from a particular viewpoint that I believed to be the correct one, I still wouldn't spend two hours on it. But if I were told that what I am writing will be read in twenty years' time by the children of today, and that those children will laugh, weep, and learn to love life as they read, why then I would devote the whole of my life and energy to it."
"My writer's aim does not consist in resolving the questions posed, but in instilling a love of life in all its innumerable and inexhaustible manifestations. If someone were to tell me that it lay in my power to write a novel explaining every social question from a particular viewpoint that I believed to be the correct one, I still wouldn't spend two hours on it. But if I were told that what I am writing will be read in twenty years' time by the children of today, and that those children will laugh, weep, and learn to love life as they read, why then I would devote the whole of my life and energy to it."
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