Hi friends!

I hope everyone had a fantastic Easter long weekend. The commercial world has been picking up speed lately, so it was a relief to have four straight days to see friends and get life sorted.

In between listening to Cowboy Carter over and over (current favourite tracks: “Just for Fun” & “II Most Wanted”), I spend the weekend belting showtunes at karaoke, catching up on Shōgun, learning to love Barbara Streisand, absolutely devouring Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and going on a hike for the first time over a month. Even Samuel had some free time — with Went Up the Hill finally, genuinely complete, he’s been able to hibernate a little and slowly re-emerge into the wider world.

Which is to say, this newsletter is a little late. Serves me right for deciding to tackle Shakespeare and Tolstoy (and before I knew it, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin had jumped in to add their two cents). So this is me, barely scratching the surface…

Feud: Tolstoy vs Shakespeare

Recently I’ve been getting back into Russian literature — in particular, the writers from Pushkin to Chekhov who make up Russia’s 19th Century “golden age”. Back in my twenties I devoured their novels and plays one after another, but in the past few years I’ve kept my distance (let’s blame Putin). That is, until George Saunders wonderful A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — in which he uses “the Russians” to teach a version of his famous Syracuse University writing course — inspired me to dip my toes back in, one short story at a time. And no surprise, these writers still fill me with a sense of awe. It’s rare to read work that so nakedly and unapologetically grapples with life’s big questions, from faith to death to how we live our lives.

But even in a room full of literary giants, one man towers above the rest. The master of realist fiction, philosopher of non-violence, political reformer, self-anointed moral sage, and author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina: Leo Tolstoy. A lot of writers believe they’re changing the world… but few of them go on to found their own Christian-anarchic religious movements or can count Gandhi as a disciple. Yet as I was digging around in Tolstoy’s intimidating biography, I came across a fascinating little factoid that sent me on a research spiral.

Tolstoy hated William Shakespeare.

Now Leo Tolstoy hated a lot of things, especially towards the pious end of his life. He hated violence, man-made laws, private property, “elites”, eating meat, all organised religion, and (most of the time) his wife, who dared to point out the gap between his high-minded principles and his lousy behaviour to people around him. But Tolstoy reserved a special vehemence for the Bard of Avon. The fault doesn’t lie with bad translations: Tolstoy tried Shakespeare in Russian, German, and finally the original English. It’s not a Russian quirk either; most of Tolstoy’s peers were big Shakespeare fans. On this point, Tolstoy stood alone.

Like many a clever person who gets up one day and sees everyone around him praising art he thinks is average-at-best, Tolstoy’s response was three-fold. First came confusion — the old “how could anyone like this trash?” Second came the conviction that the world was suffering from mass delusion (he calls it “hypnotic suggestion”). Third, he concluded that people must be lying — they’re just pretending to admire Shakespeare to fit in with the crowd. I’ve had a few versions of this conversation lately with friends who are still completely baffled by the popularity of Taylor Swift (and I thought by now her lyrical reputation was as settled as, well, Shakespeare’s!).

So what exactly was Tolstoy’s beef with the Bard? He ultimately laid out his case in a pamphlet written in the last years of his life. Tolstoy claims to have re-read every single play for the occasion, and found only “revulsion, weariness and bewilderment”. Not only was Shakespeare not a “great genius”, he doesn’t even deserve to be recognised as an “average author”. And Tolstoy endeavours to prove it by dismantling King Lear, piece-by-piece.

The essay that follows resembles a CinemaSins Youtube video circa 1903, in which Tolstoy rages at every plot hole, character inconsistency and historical inaccuracy. Why isn’t it clear why Lear is abdicating? Why do we need this subplot about a second foolish old lord with shitty kids? Why does everyone in this play supposedly set in 800 BC behave like it’s the Middle Ages? Why is the dialogue so over the top and unrealistic? Tolstoy takes no delight in Shakespeare’s poetry, believes all those beautiful speeches are dramatically unnecessary, and on the rare instance he finds something good (or “less bad”) in the play, determines that the credit should go to the author of the original story and not Shakespeare himself.

But what really galls Tolstoy is Shakespeare’s “immorality”. He can’t find any religious foundation to the work, no striving for higher ideals. Instead, under all that poetry Tolstoy perceives only vulgar pragmatism, an “ends justifies the means” ethos, a strain of “english chauvinism”, and, worst of all, a lack of seriousness:

I imagine Tolstoy scowling at Shakespeare like Logan Roy at his disappointing children, lamenting “you are not serious people". However there’s no shortage of writers — great ones too — who prioritise linguistic flourishes, write stories riddled with plot holes, and lack a clear Christian moral. But Tolstoy didn’t choose to write a vicious screed against Homer or Molière. What is is about Shakespeare specifically that earns him this level of vitriol? The answer, I suspect, speaks to the innate character of both artists, and the radically different philosophies that underpin their work.

In 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin published an essay on Tolstoy’s theory of history titled The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he devised up a new method for classifying artists and thinkers. The distinction is inspired by a fragment from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus:

Berlin imagines a great philosophical divide between hedgehogs and foxes. A “hedgehog” relates everything to a single, central vision: a “universal organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance”. Think Dante, Nietzsche or Karl Marx. “Foxes”, on the other hand, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory… moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects”. Think Herodotus, Aristotle or James Joyce.

You might have encountered “the hedgehog and the fox” out in the wild; in the past few decades it’s been cited in business manuals, Woody Allen movies and political punditry. Of course there’s a lot of over-simplification involved, but Berlin argues that it’s a useful analytical tool nonetheless, “a starting point for genuine investigation”. Plus it’s fun game. Who would you say is a hedgehog, defined by their fixed and consistent philosophy, and who is a fox, forever ducking and weaving and changing?

American politics? The staunch socialist Bernie Sanders is clearly a hedgehog, and centrist Hilary Clinton a fox. Cinema? Sofia Coppola hunkers down like a hedgehog with the same themes and imagery across her oeuvre, from Virgin Suicides to Priscilla, whereas the foxy Ang Lee will jump from genre to genre, from Crouching Tiger to Brokeback. Music? I’d call Adele and Taylor Swift hedgehogs (don’t let those Eras fool you), and the wide-ranging Beyoncé a fox (even if Renaissance and Cowboy Carter suggest Queen B is cultivating a larger project).

But when it comes to literature it’s fair to say there’s one fox more fleet-footed than the rest. The foxiest fox that ever did fox.

You guessed it: William Shakespeare.

His foxy credentials are unmatched. He wrote at least 37 plays (plus a host of collaborations and poems on the side), across a wide array of genres. To quote old windbag Polonius, we have “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical…” — and that’s before he invented the romance! Yet despite a vast body of work, it’s almost impossible to glean Shakespeare’s personal, political or religious views from his art.

What does this man believe? He fights injustice in one speech, and implicitly endorses tyranny in the very next scene. Was he a secret Catholic? A devout Protestant? A Mason? An atheist? A homosexual? A misogynist? An anti-semite? A fierce advocate for the down-trodden? A staunch defender of the status quo? A royalist? A revolutionary? You’ll find a dozen dissertations out there arguing for each of those contradictory positions with no end in sight and find a Shakespeare quote for every occasion. His characters seem to have an inner life all of their own that’s impossible to trace back to a single source. Of course he’s got a few recurring tropes: cross-dressing lovers, lost daughters, violent lustful obsessions, gays named Antonio — but for a writer this prodigious, Shakespeare is shockingly invisible in his work. Where’s a clear author-insert character when you need one? Compare him to hedgehogs like Dostoevsky or, more recently, the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante — read a few chapters and you know exactly who they are.

In fact, I’d argue that the Bard’s inherent foxiness is why those conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare are so difficult to quash. Other contenders for the “true author” — from The Earl of Oxford to Marlowe to Queen Elizabeth herself — promise a “Shakespeare” whose work and life form more unified whole. Perhaps these contradictions in his art would be smoothed out if the author was revealed to be a nobleman, a swashbuckler or a super-spy, rather than a middle-class actor from a humble background who made dodgy property deals and cheated on his wife.

So then it might seem safe to conclude that if Shakespeare is the foxiest fox, then the grand, imperious Tolstoy must be his opposite, the prickliest of hedgehogs — and this divide would explain the deep loathing Tolstoy had for the Bard.

Except… the Russian doth protest too much, methinks.

Here Tolstoy’s own art gives him away. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are not the works of a hedgehog. These great novels are as inquisitive and contradictory as Shakespeare, even if the language is less flowery, and the characters more grounded in realism. As Gary Saul Morson writes, Tolstoy constantly grasps at belief systems in his work, “only to shatter them with his relentless skepticism.” His greatest gift as an author is to take us into the heads of all his characters, from Emperors to serfs, and make this multitude of perspectives feel authentic. For clear-sighted empathy, I think his only real rival is George Eliot. This is the man who intended Anna Karenina to be a straightforward morality tale about an unfaithful wife who gets what was coming to her… and yet that’s not the novel we ended up with. Anna comes alive on the page: she yearns and struggles and we go with her, understand her and love her despite — or perhaps even because of — her sins.

Tolstoy isn’t a hedgehog at all, Isaiah Berlin concludes. He’s a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog.

I think what fundamentally offended Tolstoy so much about Shakespeare was in fact the parts of himself that were at odds with his burgeoning philosophy. Shakespeare isn’t just any author — he’s the universally acclaimed avatar of an approach to art that Tolstoy has repudiated, and aimed to purge himself of. As George Orwell puts it in his masterful essay Lear, Tolstoy & the Fool:

Shakespeare was certainly no saint. Tolstoy’s critiques aren’t far off — Shakespeare was a wide-ranging, messy and often contradictory writer with no clear philosophy or principles (or if he had them, they were of the simple, earth-bound variety), and a life that didn’t align with the beauty of his poetry. Worst of all, from Tolstoy’s perspective, this lack didn’t seem to bother Shakespeare at all. This is what elevates Shakespeare from a mere annoyance to “a great evil” in Tolstoy’s eyes. He laments that the Bard’s popularity:

I don’t doubt Tolstoy’s sincerity. Throughout his life Tolstoy strove to be better, to discover the best way for a man to live. And following his conversion in the late 1870s, Tolstoy was finally convinced he had the answers. Fully embracing his new anarchic Christian dogma (which included his own re-writes to the Bible - the man had no shortage of ego), Tolstoy disowned his own early masterpieces as “counterfeit art”, deeming them immoral, and recanted his foxy ways — equating skepticism with faithlessness, empathy with equivocation. His later works — The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Devil, Master and Man — are still brilliant (he is Leo Tolstoy after all), but they are more didactic, more prescriptive in their morality, and less generous to sinners. The old man aimed to quash all ambiguity, and project a single unified vision through his work that promoted Christian brotherly love and drew his readers closer to absolute truth. Perhaps, by the end, he had convinced himself he was a hedgehog after all.

What Tolstoy refused to consider in his failed take-down of Shakespeare is that ambiguity isn’t the Bard’s weakness; it’s his superpower. Professor Emma Smith makes a convincing argument in This is Shakespeare that the plays’ “radical uncertainties” are the key to their longevity. When Shakespeare adapted old tales like King Lear, Othello and Hamlet, he altered or outright removed the original character motivations, denying us easy answers for why, say, Lear abdicates, or Iago hates Othello, or Hamlet equivocates. These are artistic decisions, not signs of incompetent bumbling — the contradictions and open questions are a key part of his art. Shakespeare’s ambiguities invite readers, play-goers and theatre-makers to make up their own minds, stirring up debate from one century to the next. I think Bard believed that mystery and unknowability was an integral part of the human experience.

And so after all these years, the fox is still scurrying around the literary woods, darting this way and that, leading us on a merry chase. Even the great Leo Tolstoy couldn’t catch him.

Writing this piece, I drew a lot from George Saunder’s discussion of Tolstoy’s art in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and three marvellous essays: Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, George Orwell’s Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool and Gary Saul Morson’s Death and the Hedgehog. Highly recommend reading them all!

Film of the Week: Farewell My Concubine (1993)

‘霸王别姬’
Directed by Chen Kaige. Written by Lu Wei and Lilian Lee, based on the novel by Lilian Lee.

Despite its reputation as an epic, no vista in Farewell My Concubine can match the grandeur of Leslie Cheung in close-up. Painted a pristine white as the mythic “Concubine Yu”, Cheung’s anguished, yearning visage is the one constant in a tragedy that spans decades of Chinese history, from republic to war to revolution. The film doesn’t even bother to slather his face in old-age make-up: Cheung’s eyes alone measure the years, the suffering and the heartbreak. I’m not sure any actor has ever been this beautiful.

Like many a historical epic, it’s anchored by a love triangle — but not in the combination you’d expect. Douzi (Leslie Cheung) is in love with his on-stage Opera partner Shitou (Zhang Fengyi), but Shitou, either oblivious or wilfully blind to their intimacy, spurns him to marry courtesan Juxian (Gong Li). These three fundamentally selfish people carry on together across the decades, linked by love, art and, increasingly, resentment. But as they struggle to adapt to war, Japanese occupation and communist takeover, their petty personal betrayals become political ones, with horrifying consequences. The film reaches an extraordinary fever pitch in the fires of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, with a climax that reminded me above all of Orwell’s 1984. Catch it on the biggest screen possible if you can.

Watched 4K Restoration @ Chinese Film Festival. There are still upcoming screenings before the restoration gets a digital release later in the year.

Odds & Ends

• The always-wonderful Rebecca Solnit writes about the sad transformation of San Francisco in recent decades in the shadow of Silicon Valley. 

• A disturbing and insightful piece by historian Erik Baker on the legacy of self-immolation as an act of protest, from Aaron Bushnell to Thích Quảng Đức.

• Fascinating survey of American Chefs in the NYT about what it takes to run a restaurant in 2024.

• And for those like me who are always dissatisfied with the Oscars “In Memoriam” segment (alongside my other annual gripes: “stop complaining the nominated movies are too long” and “stop demeaning the animation category by implying that the films are just for kids”), TCM does a infinitely better job, made with clear love and care:

And that’s it for this week, thanks for reading! I’ll be back soon with some combination of Romans, Samurai and ancient palaeontologists…