No time to read anymore?

David McCullough is unimpressed.

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.” 

Teddy Roosevelt on Anna Karenina

Yesterday there was a post about Teddy Roosevelt's response to Russian literature. It’s worth quoting Teddy at length (from a letter to his younger sister dated April 12^th 1886):

“I took Anna Karenina along for the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest and need have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but it is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passions, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva.”

For all its worth, I also like the story of Levin and Kitty much more than that of Anna and Vronsky. But I don’t think that Anna was insane. Now Adele H. certainly was. Her story is told in a great movie but a very sad one. It’s about a woman loving too much and losing everything, including her mind. Would I know where to draw a line? I would not.

Reactions to Russian literature

Can you guess who wrote:

“Tolstoy is a great writer.  Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages?  He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history…”

Well, the answer (if you haven’t googled it yet) might surprise you.  It was a 19th century cattle rancher in the Wild West (the Dakota territory) who later achieved fame as the 26th President of the United States.  They have even named an island after him, right across the Potomac river from the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., which should not be confused with another island of the same name in New York City that was named after someone completely different, though he also was also a President of the U.S.