>>6135103>>6135427 >not in employment... WASTREL DILETTANTES>>6136077>courtship and romance narrative theme, and>how to create stories with THE MORAL PURPOSE...>using incels I enjoy tracing the literary antecedents of various phenomena, I guess you could take Joris Karl Huysmans À rebours (1884) as an example, I did read this a very very long time ago.
However, for brevity I prefer the charm of this short story, it is by Tolstoy in full MORALISATION MODE didactic overdrive (all of 19th century literature is like this) and it was only published posthumously, maybe he held it back as unfinished for after he died. I have heard that it is almost like a miniature version of War And Peace lol addressing many similar thematic ideas (I have not read War And Peace though)
You can read it here, it is very short
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/243/pg243-images.html#link2H_4_0006It is about an older middle aged man, who reflects on a dance he attended in his youth where he falls in love with a beautiful woman. The young narrator is briefly made jealous when she dances a mazurka with another man, but in the end as a gesture of coquetry she gives him a feather from her fan before she rises for the last dance with her father. He is a military colonel and the narrator notices how he is wearing less expensive regimental boots so that he can afford to dress his beautiful daughter in the most fashionable raiment, and the narrator seems to be impressed by his dignity and honourable bearing.
After departing the dance the narrator is still infatuated with the lady, so he gets up for a night stroll outside as he is still restlessly thinking about her. By chance he encounters some sort of military procession, two columns of soldiers who are beating and flogging a Tartar deserter, leaving gruesome bleeding welts across his flesh as he is made to run the gauntlet. To the narrator's horror, the Colonel ie the military father of his beloved is the one administering this punishment, but the Colonel himself pretends not to recognise him in the street even though they had just met hours before at the Ball. The aged narrator then explains to his listeners that as a result of witnessing this experience, he abandoned any career in either the military or civil service, broke off the romance and never fell in love ever again
>reading this story taught me what a ferronniere is, yayWhy does the narrator identify with the beaten / bloodied Tartar? Instead of standing and pointing and laughing, or making a webm of it to upload onto 4chan? Is it some metaphor for the ordeal of marriage (overseen by his military father in law?) Is briefly fondling a woman and then withdrawing to watch some male bdsm whipping incredibly gay? These are the eternally penetrating spiritual insights attained by Tolstoy in Russian literature
