Was Tolstoy merely ridiculing middle class values?

read bordiga

>>21947958 (OP)

tolstoy was always a dickhead

I thought the book was about coping with death lol

>>21947958 (OP)

man, yeah, tolstoy was totally the type of guy who barges into a fast food restaurant and ruins everyone's day by forcing them to read foucault. i hate those people. the amount of abuse that SUV-driving middle-class families suffer at the hands of marauding nietzche scholars is staggering. my neighbor sent his kid to school with the new iphone in his pocket and the boy came back with a black eye and quotes from bertolt brecht scrawled all over his body in permanent marker. we need to do better. it's about time consumerism finally became socially acceptable in america

>>21947958 (OP)

This dude is literally just virtue signalling. Fucking pathetic

the review was written by a woman

>i'm such an elite teehee even though I don't even own a house and have 2 cats instead of a husband

way to miss the point man

Not my fault her delusional self-image is a more interesting topic for discussion than her actual paragraph.

hating on the middle class is proto-communism

>>21947958 (OP)

>people won't be rich therefore they can never cultivate anything besides being a mindless prole/consumer 

What a cynical take. Shoo.

You made me laugh, thank you anon

>>21947958 (OP)

Many people actually seethe at Ivan Ilyich because it exposes their own entropy. Ivan Ilyich lived a boring, harmless, mediocre bourgeois life and realized in his final moments how worthless it was. This is how the majority of people in modern society live. They casually get jobs, marry and have children, get annoyed with their wives, rarely have moments of happiness but aren't terribly depressed either, and don't value any sort of transcendent meaning. Society tells them to be educated and get a job and they comply with no protest. When they die, the universe dies with them. And Tolstoy knows that this is wrong because a lack of eternity in a person's life makes them no more valuable than an animal. If you only live for yourself then death will laugh in your face. Ivan Ilyich had no right to ask God why he was punished with a sudden illness when he never thought about God when he was healthy and successful. Most people would not agree with such a message. A mediocre life is totally harmless, so why is Tolstoy saying that most people nowadays are committing a grave evil? But Tolstoy knew the truth. Most lives are being wasted even as they believe they’re being fulfilled, especially in modern times where comfort is the highest priority.

Yeah, that's the point.

>middle class people live for more than just themselves by committing to uncomfortable sacrifices to reduce climate change and create a more sustainable, inclusive and equitable world for all

>noooo not like that!

cope.

@21948778

take your meds

no one is actually doing this and even if they did they still wouldn’t be transcending themselves or the material world

>ya but you'll never do this vaguely defined thing that i arbitrarily move the goalposts on!

cope. church attendance is higher among middle class people than any group.

>>21947958 (OP)

The foreword to the penguin edition of the story also seethes about the message. Rootless cosmopolitans can’t handle it
