Tolstoy on Shakespeare Quotes

“The fate of books depends on the understanding of those who read them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“Speeches, however eloquent and profound they may be, when put into the mouth of dramatic characters, if they be superfluous or unnatural to the position and character, destroy the chief condition of dramatic art—the illusion, owing to which the reader or spectator lives in the feelings of the persons represented...”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium . . . . Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author. . . . far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, . . . can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness. . . . All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language . . . .”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have had to understand that the drama, to have a right to exist and to be a serious thing, must serve, as it always has served and can not but do otherwise, the development of the religious consciousness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“Human life is perfected only through the development of the religious consciousness, the only element which permanently unites men.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“This injury is twofold: first, the fall of the drama, and the replacement of this important weapon of progress by an empty and immoral amusement; and secondly, the direct depravation of men by presenting to them false models for imitation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

“Only a man devoid of the sense of measure and of taste could produce such types as "Titus Andronicus" or "Troilus and Cressida,”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare A Critical Essay on Shakespeare