Henri troyat tolstoy biography youtube

I have a love/hate relationship with Tolstoy. I love his fiction, and for that reason keep feeling compelled to learn more about his life, but then am driven away by his faults. I should stay away from Tolstoy biographies and just read his novels.

In any event, for happiness-project purposes, Tolstoy is particularly fascinating -- both because he wrote so extensively about happiness and because he made and broke so many resolutions himself.

Spectacularly.

In Henri Troyat's biography, Tolstoy, which I haven't been able to finish yet, because I find Tolstoy so maddening, Troyat includes an excerpt from Tolstoy's "Rules of Life" (I'm still trying to get my hands on the whole list).

Tolstoy wrote these rules when he was eighteen years old:

Get up early (five o’clock)
Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
Eat little and avoid sweets
Try to do everything by yourself
Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for th