Magical Bookshop and the Russian Writers

I found the best bookstore the other day. I’ve passed it a million times but never entered as it’s on a semi-nasty street and covered in grates. I finally entered it and it was like walking into mecca for a book lover like me. Fabulous books from wall-to-wall. I came home with a huge stack. Right now I’m reading an amazing book on Tolstoy’s marriage. I have loved Tolstoy since I read War and Peace at 14 years old. My teacher didn’t believe I’d read it, but she quizzed me on it’s content and I passed with flying colors. She had no choice but to give me credit but she also served to humiliate me by doubting me. 
Rude.
I’d picked it out of my school library because of it’s length. I go though books very quickly and I wanted to find a nice juicy long book that I could savor for a long time. (There were no Harry Potters back then, so for me, it was Tolstoy.) I loved War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The plot lines, the glamorous parts of Russia, the peasants, the passion, the loves…Truth be told, I sped-read over the War parts and savored the Peace parts.
Then when I was at Harvard I fell in love with Tolstoy all over again, but this time with his school, Yasnaya Polyana. He ran the school for peasant children at his family’s estate, and he wrote some really fascinating essays about the education of those children, and the importance of asking the hard question–what is art? What is the meaning of life and death? He believed children should be intimately involved with nature and after leaving Harvard, it was my dream to teach at a school like Yasnaya Polyana, and that is how I found the Waldorf methodology and Plum Hill School on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t think Waldorf is perfect, but for me, it’s close. I loved the rolling pastures and woods and ocean surrounding Plum Hill. I loved the nature-based materials, the oral storytelling, the fairy tales, the emphasis on walks through the woods and children learning to balance by climbing trees and walking on fallen tree trunks instead of plastic playgrounds. The world was so alive for those children, full of wonder and magic and the every day miracles of spiderwebs dripping with raindrops that sparkled like diamonds, thick chunks of moss under their boots, the glow of the candy colored autumn leaves, the surprise and delight of coming upon a hidden group of Lady-slippers, the rare pink flowers that grow in groups in the woods on the island and look just like their namesake.
So now, I’m reading about Lev and Sonja. Apparently, Tolstoy was married for 48 years, most of them happy. I’d much rather have learned this story when I studied writers instead of all the stories of opium addiction and changing partners, drunkenness, misery, and early death.Tolstoy found an intellectual and creative match in Sonja. She didn’t write, but she was the basis of many of his characters. She engaged in fiery debate with him but always with love and adoration. They both wanted to have an open honest relationship and know everything about each other. He gave her all his diaries to read before marriage so she would know everything. Throughout their marriages, they both kept detailed diaries and shared them with each other. He attended her births and encouraged her to breastfeed even though at that time, only peasant women breastfed their babies. I’m still in the beginning of the book, but once again, I find myself inspired and amazed by Tolstoy who seems to step in with me at some very important crossroads in my life.
Those Russians…
My favorite book of all time is Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Fascinating and funny, again not afraid to ask the hard questions, Brothers Karamazov changed my life. It put into words my own feelings about religion, helped me crystallize my own questions (if there’s an all-good all-powerful god, how can there be so much suffering in the world–and not of adults as they can make their own choices, but of children? He talked of an abused child weeping in a corner and said all of heaven was not worth that one child’s tear.) I liked how he used the four central characters to give voice to the warring sides of my own psyches–the wild sensual brother, the intellectual atheist who questions everything, the all-loving faithful brother who questions nothing, and the illegitimate brother who can’t find a place for himself.
And so at my new favorite bookstore, McKeown’s on Tchoupitoulas, I re-ignited my love affair with the Russians. When I bought the book, the McKeown sister that was standing behind the counter looked at the title and said, “Now there’s a marriage for you.”
How very wondrous and exciting to stand on the cusp of learning…