“This book immediately made me change my mind about Maupassant, and since then I have read with interest everything that was signed by this name. Life is an excellent novel, not only Maupassant’s incomparably best novel, but almost the best French novel since Hugo’s Les Miserables. In this novel, in addition to the remarkable power of talent, that is, that special, intense attention directed to the subject, as a result of which the author sees completely new features in the life he describes, in this novel all three conditions of a true work of art are almost equally combined : 1) the correct, that is, the moral, attitude of the author to the subject, 2) the beauty of the form, and 3) sincerity, that is, love for what the author describes. Here, the meaning of life is no longer presented to the author in the adventures of various libertines and libertines, here the content constitutes, as the title says, a description of the life of a ruined, innocent, ready for anything beautiful, sweet woman, ruined by that very rude, animal sensibility, which in previous stories seemed to the author as if central, over all the dominant phenomenon of life, and all the author’s sympathy is on the side of good. «
L.N. Tolstoy
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