Tolstoy, Woman, and Death

In War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy depicts the chaos and misery caused by men taking upon themselves the risk of battle in order to compete with women, who take on the risks of parturition. In the face of death, men pursue the question, "What do men live by?" - at times inspired by the beauty and spirit of women, and by love. In the end, however, Tolstoy strips his heroine of those qualities that make her so inspiring, and in this act, Holbrook believes, we see Tolstoy's fear of women and his attempt to control them. Yet Tolstoy was able to identify deeply with the female consciousness, and thus to give us the marvelous scenes around childbirth in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Further, he created, from his early bereavement, a pure and ideal mother figure - so pure that no woman could ever take her place. By contrast, sexual love with any real woman seemed an affront to that pure ideal.