Shakespeare vs Tolstoy: The Greatest Writers in History

Tolstoy's Verdict on Shakespeare

In 1906, at the age of seventy-eight, Leo Tolstoy published one of the most famous acts of literary provocation in history. The essay was called Shakespeare and the Drama, and its argument was simple: Shakespeare was a fraud. Not a mediocre writer — a positively bad one. His characters, Tolstoy wrote, were unconvincing puppets who did not speak like human beings. His plots were absurd. His moral perspective was absent or corrupt. And the universal acclaim he received was a collective delusion, maintained by critics too cowardly or too fashionable to state the obvious. Tolstoy had been trying to read Shakespeare for fifty years and found him worse on each attempt.

The essay caused a sensation. George Orwell wrote a celebrated response in 1947 arguing that Tolstoy's attack revealed more about Tolstoy's limitations than Shakespeare's — that a man who had spent his late life reducing all questions to crude moral instruction could not be expected to appreciate a writer of almost boundless imaginative sympathy. Both men were right about something. The disagreement goes to the heart of what literature is for.

Shakespeare's Achievement: Inventing a Language

William Shakespeare was not simply a great writer of English. He was, in a meaningful sense, a creator of English as it is spoken today. Scholars credit him with coining or first recording approximately 1,700 words: bedroom, lonely, generous, obscene, rant, swagger, lackluster, worthless, radiance, cold-blooded, and hundreds of others. He also gave the language phrases so durable they have become invisible: break the ice, heart of gold, green-eyed monster, wild-goose chase, foregone conclusion, a sea change, the lady doth protest too much.

This linguistic creativity was inseparable from his psychological penetration. Hamlet is the first character in literature who thinks — who processes his situation in real time, argues with himself, reverses his positions, and remains mysteriously opaque even after four centuries of analysis. Iago is the first great portrait of pure malice with no motive. Falstaff is the most vital comic character in any language. Lear is the most devastating study of old age and power ever written. These are not simply good characters; they are cognitive models that shaped how Western civilization understands personality, villainy, wit, and grief.

Tolstoy's Achievement: Mapping the Human Soul

Leo Tolstoy invented something Shakespeare, working in theatrical form, could not: the sustained psychological novel that tracks consciousness in real time across thousands of pages. War and Peace (1869) follows five aristocratic families through Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, rotating among hundreds of characters with a precision and empathy that had never existed in fiction before. The novel does not simply narrate events; it inhabits them, rendering the experience of a cavalry charge, a drawing-room flirtation, and a dying man's last hours with equal and terrifying accuracy.

Anna Karenina (1878) went further still. Its epigraph — "Vengeance is mine, I will repay" — hangs over a story of adultery, social destruction, and spiritual crisis in which Tolstoy refuses to assign simple blame, even as he engineers his protagonist's destruction with merciless inevitability. Nabokov, who was ferociously dismissive of most novels, called it the greatest novel ever written. Dostoevsky, who was Tolstoy's only conceivable rival in Russian literature, reportedly wept while reading it. Hemingway said he had learned more from Tolstoy than from any other writer.

The Same Themes, Different Canvases

What is remarkable about placing Shakespeare and Tolstoy side by side is how much they share despite working in different forms, different languages, and across a gap of more than two centuries. Both were obsessed with power and its corruptions. Both wrote about love with unusual honesty — not the sanitized version but the violent, destructive, transformative kind. Both were fascinated by death at a scale that borders on the clinical: Shakespeare gave us more than a hundred on-stage deaths and dozens of meditations on mortality; Tolstoy gave us the most famous deathbed scene in literature, the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which strips dying of every comfort with a frankness that remains almost unbearable to read.

Both operated at vast scale. Shakespeare's dramatic universe encompasses kings and gravediggers, generals and prostitutes, ancient Rome and enchanted islands. Tolstoy's novelistic universe encompasses Russian aristocracy and Napoleonic armies, Buddhist monks and train stations. Neither man was interested in small subjects. They were both, in their different ways, trying to hold an entire civilization up to the light.

The Form Matters: Theatre vs Novel

Some of the apparent contest between these two figures dissolves when you recognize that they mastered entirely different forms, with different constraints and different possibilities. Theatre requires that characters speak their inner lives aloud to strangers in a public building. This makes Shakespeare's psychological complexity a continuous technical miracle: everything Hamlet thinks must be said — in verse, quickly, in a way a 1600 audience in the pit can follow. The miracle is that it still works.

The novel freed Tolstoy from that constraint. He could follow Anna Karenina's thoughts on a train journey across eleven pages, shift without transition to Levin scything a field at dawn, and then inhabit Oblonsky's cheerful moral vacancy at dinner — all within the same chapter. The novel was still a relatively new and contested form when Tolstoy took it up; he effectively defined what it could do at its greatest extent. These are different achievements: one solved the constraint of the stage, the other shattered the limitations of prose.

Legacy: Who Changed More Minds?

Shakespeare's cultural penetration is global and deep. His plays are performed somewhere on Earth every day of the year, in every major language. His characters have entered the collective unconscious: to call someone a Hamlet or a Iago or a Falstaff is to communicate something immediately and precisely, even to people who have never seen or read the plays. The English literary tradition — and through it, the American one — is essentially unthinkable without him. He is the benchmark against which all other writers in the language are measured.

Tolstoy's influence operates at a different register: deeper, perhaps, but more concentrated. His direct influence on subsequent novelists is perhaps greater than Shakespeare's on playwrights. Nabokov, Hemingway, Faulkner, García Márquez, Chekhov, Mann — all cite him as foundational. His moral and philosophical writings influenced Gandhi, who read him extensively and corresponded with him, meaning that Tolstoy's ideas about nonviolent resistance traveled through Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. and into the heart of the 20th century's most important social movements.