Tangential, I'm reading "War and Peace" right now for my book club, very difficult to slog through; just curious for peeps who've read either "War and Peace" or "Anna Karenina," what is so special about Tolstoy's novels, that makes it different than say their Western counterparts like say "Les Miserables" or "Pride and Prejudice"?
Well, you stated the obvious difference: one set of novels is Western and Tolstoy is not. His sensibility and his viewpoint are Russian. Embedded in his works, especially Anna Kerenina in my opinion, is a prescient understanding of history and if you are the type to infer this sort of thing, human nature.
It's rather interesting that you include Pride and Prejuidice in your examples because that's a novel that a non-westerner would not understand fully. It relies too much on our embedded understanding of a very specific social structure, culture, class dynamic, etc. to the point where even an American who hasn't watched a fair amount of PBS might not fully appreciate it.
It's probably worth picking up a lecture series on the novels and another on Russian history.
And I'm not going into all the deeper, more philosophical content many see in the works.
What sets Tolstoy apart is the unmatched description of the human psyche. The characters in Tolstoy's novels are excruciatingly complex. The only author IMHO who has described the human psyche at the same level of depth, adding more drama though, is Dostojevski.
