 |
| A Russian soldier laughing at an Ottoman Turk. Before being pitted against each other in WWI, bad blood between Russia and Turkey dated back to the 16th century. source |
All quotes are from Book 8 of Constance Garnett's translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on Project Gutenberg. Go read Book 8, Chapter 1, and then return to this page. The character on whom this article focuses is Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev, the half-brother of Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, at whose estate Sergey Ivanovitch will later in the Book spend some time and from which more quotations will be drawn.
So Sergey Ivanovitch spent years writing a book which he expected "would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world." Instead, after indifference and a devastatingly effective hostile review, "Sergey Ivanovitch saw that his six years’ task, toiled at with such love and labor, had gone, leaving no trace."
Sergy Ivanovitch turned his talents and energies into mobilizing Russian support for Slavic peoples revolting against the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the Serbs and Montenegrins.
