Home » Orwell on Tolstoy vs. Shakespeare: the theme and variations vs. the symphony

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Orwell on Tolstoy vs. Shakespeare: the theme and variations vs. the symphony — 30 Comments

  1. I was a book reviewer for the L.A. Times for a long time, appearing also in the Washington Post and many other papers, though I doubt any of that carries here or anywhere else these days. Who cares, right?

    In any case, I’ve always vastly preferred Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy, the former’s psychological acuity and insight into is own human, all-too-human condition resonating far beyond the scope of the privileged count — although yes, the latter does have a few nice moments on the battlefield.

    Even Resurrection, a late novel of Tolstoy’s often neglected because it was written when he was obsessed with hatred of the flesh and shame over all the hot sex he’d once had, is still worth reading, better than you might think.

    Both writers are far better than Turgenev, who has not worn well. The writer to revisit, whose work is sometimes underestimated, is Anton Chekhov. The middle to late period stories are incredibly good. “The Duel,” for instance, long enough to be classed as a novella, goes deeper than just about any piece of fiction you’ll ever read.

  2. I haven’t read as much Orwell – or Tolstoy – or Shakespeare – as I’d like to. All three are quirky. A lot of what Orwell says in this essay feels correct.

    It’s at moments like this that I have to love the internet.

    Miklos, I like Turgenev. Sure, he wrote a lot of stories about a guy being hopelessly and chastely in love with his best friend’s wife (a theme and variation guy), but his work is interesting. I never got Chekhov though. It might be that plays don’t really resonate for me as text.

  3. miklos and Nick:

    Here’s a previous post of mine about—of all things—Tolstoy’s opinion of Chekhov. It’s pretty funny, actually.

    It’s also about MY opinion of Chekhov.

    And I see it mentions Tolstoy on Shakespeare, although not the Orwell essay.

    Please forgive what I’m about to say—but Chekhov’s plays remind me of Seinfeld—Russian-style, of course!

    Although with that recommendation of The Duel, I just might have to read that.

    I always liked Dostoevsky the best of them all. However, I have a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t exactly easy to live with, either.

    As for Turgenev, he and Tolstoy were close friends off and on; they kept having major falling outs. Tolstoy didn’t think all that much of Turgenev’s writing when Turgenev was alive, but after his death he came to think he was excellent.

    I had to read Fathers and Sons in college, and at the time I was very impressed with the parallels with people in the 1960s (that’s when I was reading it).

  4. I’m under the impression that few Russians are easy to live with… perhaps that explains the national obsession with vodka? 😉

  5. Interesting that Beethoven should be mentioned. IIRC, Beethoven thought it was immoral for Mozart to write a wonderful opera starring that beastly man, Don Giovanni. And not only that, the Don got some of the best songs…

  6. Here is an interesting passage from Orwell’s essay, relevant to the current political and social situation – which is true of so much of his very prescient work.

    “A sort of doubt has always hung around the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, and he would probably have imposed even greater sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at every step by the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the other hand it is dangerous to take such men as Tolstoy at their disciples’ valuation. There is always the possibility – the probability, indeed – that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at least the desire to coerce others. There are families in which the father will say to his child, ‘You’ll get a thick car if you do that again’, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, ‘Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that?’ And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

    Tolstoy: the first Social Justice Warrior?

  7. Not to divert the conversation, but since the discussion is about Russian novelists and their opinions of each other, here is Ayn Rand on Tolstoy:

    The subtler details of the psychological relationships, such as who says what at which moment, are very skillfully presented; Tolstoy’s characterizations are full of the kind of minute details one would observe if one watched a family tragedy through a transparent wall. But such details merely give one the first layer of motivation in the persons involved–which is all that Tolstoy presents. The deeper meaning of the motives is never given.

    Rand also connected Tolstoy to Shakespeare!

    http://objectivistanswers.com/questions/12078/what-did-ayn-rand-think-about-the-novel-war-and-peace/

  8. The bard wrote for the ages and was universal in scope. Tolstoy was provincial. Russia is neither European or Asian; it is instead Russian, a strange hybrid. As WC noted, “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  9. in his curmudgeonly old age when Tolstoy had turned into an esthetic bully, he had put down a lot of writers for being insufficiently didactic (among them, his former writing self).

    Lots of writers have second thoughts later in life when they wake up and learn what they didnt know when they wrote.

    one of the classics in this was langston huges..

    its very hard to find given the lefts games, but he wanted his early great works destroyed as he changed from communist… though if you read, he is celebrated so much you can hardly find this CHANGE

    Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem “A New Song”.

    In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. While there, he met African-American Robert Robinson, living in Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler. Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.

    Hughes’s poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin’s purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II.

    Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. Jim Crow laws existing while blacks were encouraged to fight against Fascism and the Axis powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after deciding that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home.

    Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote “it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept.”

    In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously supported him on the Radical Left. Over time, Hughes would distance himself from his most radical poems. In 1959 his collection of Selected Poems was published. He excluded his most controversial work from this group of poems.

    similar is true of richard wright..
    who wrote a book you cant find called too smart to be a communist (or simething similar, hard to remember as i got to read it once, and now its gone, all down the memory hole and impossible to find though i have tried)

    its his story of how he wanted to be part of the communist movement, and went to those bookstores in the back rooms and such… but turned out the communists didnt want him because he was too smart and would reveal the game, and not be manipulable.. (for the record some are voluntariliy manipulable – sell outs)

    they even appeared a they did for me on his property to intimidate him and then disappear…

  10. goes deeper than just about any piece of fiction you’ll ever read…..

    try a Mote in Gods eye… thought thats science fiction
    (ie. fiction set in the future or another reality, while regular fiction is past to present)

    The Mote in God’s Eye is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1974. The story is set in the distant future of Pournelle’s CoDominium universe, and charts the first contact between humanity and an alien species. The title of the novel is a wordplay on the Biblical “The Mote and the Beam” parable and is the nickname of a star. The Mote in God’s Eye was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards in 1975. Robert A. Heinlein, who gave the authors extensive advice on the novel, described the story as “possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read.”

    Theodore Sturgeon, describing Mote as “one of the most engrossing tales I have encountered in years,” reported that “the overall pace of the book [and] the sheer solid story of it” excuse whatever flaws might remain, particularly an unexplained key feature in the imagined alien society

    Portsmouth Times reviewer Terry McLaughlin found the novel “a superior tale, told without the pseudo-psychology background that seems to mar many a new science fiction novel.”

    and thanks to looking i have something to read
    Pournelle and Niven followed up with the sequel The Gripping Hand and in 2010 Pournelle’s daughter, Jennifer, published an authorized sequel entitled “Outies.”

  11. I’ve never read King Lear. But it interests me that Orwell says that Tolstoy says that the play should be a comedy or a melodrama rather than a tragedy. A friend of mine believes that Romeo and Juliet is written as a farce comedy but with everyone dying at the end. I’ve noticed that Othello opens with a comic misunderstanding, a sequence that ends with everyone being happy and recognized for their virtue. It’s only after that that the story turns into something horrible. Where I’m going with this: I think Shakespeare played with expectations more than we realize, and more than we pick up on when we label things “tragedy” or “comedy”.

  12. Geoffrey Britain Says: August 31st, 2016 at 7:08 pm I’m under the impression that few Russians are easy to live with… perhaps that explains the national obsession with vodka?

    not true… they can be great to be with, but like the girl with the curl on her forehead, when they are bad they are horrid..

    the drinking is not about that, the drinking, which even all the sattelites have has to do with no opportunity or abilty to change your life or get more or do more (if your male)

    for instance in my own life now as we are more soviet – in the old days, you had an idea and showed it worked, people would want to have it and it was easier to get investors and so on. but today, its turning into much like the soviet union in that the only people who can invent are those who are authorized to invent. so if not authorized and you invent, they dont want what you have from you.. but would have gladly taken it from the approved.

    this is how you prevent people from growing or changing their class through effort… so for the men, there is nothing to do with your time much after work. you cant socailise and so on, as you dont know which of your friends or neighbors or even family members are on KGB payroll… as americans we take the norm of social trust and commisseration for granted.

    but you can see how this is all changing in the colleges, as microagressions, microracism or what not, is causing people to not trust people of color to be with… oh, the people of color are told this will end the discrimination and so on, but it wont, it makes more of it. would you hire someone that if you said something wrong would put your family on the street financially in lawsuits and fines and social ostracization…

    its the same wiht not picking up blacks with your cab, its not the 80% (made up number) that do nothing, work hard or such.. but the 2% that will kill you… rob you… jack you up… etc…

    why chance it when you have years ahead of yourself and a family that requires you be ok to support them so they are not destitute or deported?

    Women in the soviet era though had a different set of rules and could get more by having sex because gifts were allowed… so you could not work to gain more, but women could lay on their backs to have more, and you want a clue why abortion was on demand and free there? (so elites could have all the sex they wanted with desperate pretty young things sexed up wanting a better life, and have no issues)

    now you know why western feminism which is not from the origins, but soviet, sexes up the ladies and had always wanted a return to the – lets use the underclass as a sex source for fun.. which when marraige was man and woman and so on, became a no no for the elite. [weiner would have loved and fit into the french court cause there would be no issue as to his games… however our society has not changed enough yet, and so he gets in an issue – but how much issue did clinton and the sex plane get?]

    So the men sit around, dont talk, drink to extreme extremes, and wait to die… (i am very familiar with this)… and many of the women hope to hook up with a gangster, siloviki, politburo, etc.. and get gifts and perks…

    in my area in ny you can usually tell the russian women.. how so? well, they are so sexed up its not funny… if from the baltics they are usually tall, but others are as well.. you often see them with a man who could break trees.. they are fragile and wear clothes daily that women might only wear out on a night out on holiday when no one can see them

    we have a nice girl here learning to be a doctor, and her kick is thigh high boots with 5 inch heels and mini skirts.. (while there is a whole other class of russian women who are VERY classy, very nice, home focused family focused, etc… and another group that is like dating sociopaths who will destroy you… (even a recent movie of that type came out))

    of course these are generalities and focused on the negative… but there are lots of positives too, which i want to remind those who read and want to think that i think there isnt…
    [edited for length by n-n]

  13. so the sexed up anti sex of feminism is just preparing the ladies for the kind of life that soviet living makes norm… in such a place, miley cirrus would do ok twerking.. and if she had a brother, he would do poorly, as there is nothing he can do to improve anything… so he will drink.

  14. Russian men losing years to vodka
    How Alcohol Conquered Russia – The Atlantic
    Vodka blamed for high death rates in Russia – BBC News
    Why Russian Men Don’t Live as Long – The New York Times
    Russians literally ‘dying for a drink,’ study says – USA Today
    Industrial alcohol ‘is killing Russian men’ – Telegraph

    their population has collapsed due to no children under feminism and equality policy (which is why they shared it with us.. they found a social bomb that eradicates populations just as sure as a neutron bomb would but without a response from the enemy and without any damage!!!!! and with the victims HAPPY they are victims who defend their exturpation by self)

    Drinking deaths are only part of the reason that the Russian demographic picture looks so dire. Birth rates are another. In recent years, the working-age population has also begun to decline quickly, weighing on the productive capacity of the economy. Putin’s state has taken action to stabilize Russia’s demographics, including instituting payments for child-bearing.

    of course i have tried to warn of the same outcome from the same reason here.. but even neo pish toshes as she doesnt understand that there is a 20 year lag before you see the effect.. and that we ignore that the reason to import people from the outside borders is to replace the people who were not born thanks to feminism and go grrrrl promotions by the left socialist/communistgs… now, since they love this all you can be sure they know the outcome of what they are doing…

    [edited for length by n-n]

  15. You make a lot of excellent points, but as perhaps you realize, you’ve diluted your focus a great deal.

  16. As for the Russian writers far above: neo, Chekhov’s plays are a completely separate issue. It’s really too bad so many people think of them first, as they enter not at all — not at all — into my consideration of his work. The three collected volumes of his short adds up to an oeuvre that puts him at least on the same shelf with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and far above Turgenev, who is better tan Andrey Biiely, Maxim Gorky or Ivan Bunin — and “First Love” is a minor classic, not to be missed.

    It’s hard to revist “Dead Souls” after one’s read “Gogol’s Wife,” the long story or novella on which Tommaso Landolfi founded his career, but “Dead Souls” still has its charms.

    As for comparing Chekhov’s “The Duel” to anything in the world of S-F, I’m reminded of when someone said no one had lived unless they’d read Harry Potter. Just… leave the room, okay?

    As far as Soviet-era fiction is concerned, life is too short for Vassily Grossman’s massive “Life and Fate,” Platnov is not quite there, and Solchenitskyn (I can’t spell it correctly without checking, and life is too short yet again) is very good but overly fixated on his one essential point — the reader looking for something with the flavor of the best 19th-century Russian fiction might want to read “The Old Man,” by Yuri Trifonov. Really. Trifonov is seriously worth checking out.

    Tatyana Tolstoya’s not that great. I’ll say no more.

  17. Artfldgr:

    The drinking vodka problem in Russia long long predates both Communism and feminism. Those things are also sources of reasons to drink, but the problem was already there, big time.

    Even the article to which you yourself linked states that history:

    Russia’s history with alcohol goes back centuries.

    In the year 988, Prince Vladimir converted his nation to Orthodox Christianity, in part because, unlike other religions, it didn’t prohibit drinking, as Brown explained in her World Policy Journal article. According to legend, monks at the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin were the first to lay their lips on vodka in the late 15th century, but as Russian writer, Victor Erofeyev notes, “Almost everything about this story seems overly symbolic: the involvement of men of God, the name of the monastery, which no longer exists (chudov means “miraculous”), and its setting in the Russian capital.” In 1223, when the Russian army suffered a devastating defeat against the invading Mongols and Tartars, it was partly because they had charged onto the battlefield drunk, Brown wrote.

    Ivan the Terrible established kabaks (establishments where spirits were produced and sold) in the 1540s, and in the 1640s they had become monopolies. In 1648, tavern revolts broke out across the country, by which time a third of the male population was in debt to the taverns. In the 1700s, Russian rulers began to profit from their subjects’ alcoholism, as Brown, who spent 10 years covering Russia for Forbes magazine, explained. “[Peter the Great] decreed that the wives of peasants should be whipped if they dared attempt to drag their imbibing husbands out of taverns before the men were ready to leave.”

    Peter the Great was also, according to Brown, able to form a phalanx of unpaid workers by allowing those who had drunk themselves into debt to stay out of debtors prison by serving 25 years in the army.

    “Widespread and excessive alcohol consumption was tolerated, or even encouraged, because of its scope for raising revenue,” Martin McKee wrote in the journal Alcohol & Alcoholism. According to Brown, by the 1850s, vodka sales made up nearly half the Russian government’s tax revenues. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin banned vodka. After his death, however, Stalin used vodka sales to help pay for the socialist industrialization of the Soviet Union. By the 1970s, receipts from alcohol again constituted a third of government revenues. One study found that alcohol consumption more than doubled between 1955 and 1979, to 15.2 liters per person.

    Some have claimed that heavy consumption of alcohol was also used as a means of reducing political dissent and as a form of political suppression. Russian historian and dissident Zhores Medvedev argued in 1996, “This ‘opium for the masses’ [vodka] perhaps explains how Russian state property could be redistributed and state enterprises transferred into private ownership so rapidly without invoking any serious social unrest.” Vodka, always a moneymaker in Russia, may have been a regime-maker as well.

  18. Having read “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin really messed me up with regard to Orwell. I know that Orwell was a genius…but Animal Farm is just an extended analogy with one real insight, and 1984 is just “We” with the same insight, and Orwell’s great insight about government coercion seems less impressive when you realize he was still a socialist, and is that one insight enough to make an author a genius?

  19. Nick:

    I haven’t read We, but in my opinion Nineteen Eighty-Four is a masterpiece for three reasons: the treatise on Newspeak contained within it, the concept of Room 101, and some of the other images and statements and characters that are quite haunting (the Two Minutes’ Hate, “do it to Julia,” O’Brien and the interrogation of Winston, the telescreen, the men under the chestnut tree, “I sold you and you sold me”).

    In other words, some of the genius is politics, and some is art. I prefer it to Animal Farm, by far.

    I wrote about Orwell’s socialism here.

  20. Chekhov’s plays are a completely separate issue. It’s really too bad so many people think of them first, as they enter not at all – not at all – into my consideration of his work.

    I think Chekhov would have loved reading that — an excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey:

    In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of “The Wife” or “ln the Ravine”. But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. “Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!” he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. “Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively.”

    A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theatre people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, “I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I’m not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder.”

  21. Orwell’s description of Tolstoy reminded me of what he said about Newspeak: writing with the purpose of limiting the reader’s intellectual choices.

  22. ann; miklos:

    I hope you both followed the link I gave to this previous post, and read what Tolstoy had to say about Chekhov’s plays, and Chekhov’s reaction to it:

    Excerpt by Peter Gnedich, “Memories,” from The Book of Life (1922):

    Lev Tolstoy sincerely loved Chekhov, but did not like his plays. He told Chekhov once, “A playwright should take the theater-goer by the hand, and lead him in the direction he wants him to go. And where can I follow your character? To the couch in the living-room and back–because your character has no other place to go.” They both–Tolstoy and Chekhov–laughed at these words.

    Chekhov told me later, “When I am writing a new play, and I want my character to exit the stage, I remember those words of Lev Nikolaevich, and I think ‘Where will my character go?’ I feel both funny and angry.” Chekhov’s only consolation was that Tolstoy also did not like the plays of Shakespeare.

    Funny stuff, I think.

  23. Loved that “to the couch in the living-room and back,” Neo.

    You mentioned Seinfeld earlier, and that reminded me of Elaine’s talking with a famous Russian author and telling him that she’d heard Tolstoy really wanted to call War and Peace, War: What Is It Good For”.

  24. People forget about how influential Hegel was on European thinking, not just on Marx. Turgenev definitely used the thesis/antithesis thinking in his works. You can even see it in the names of some Russian works: War and Peace, Fathers and Sons, Crime and Punishment.

  25. Russian literature can be fully understood only in context of Russian everyday life and politics, because it never was seen by its creators as purely entertainment or aesthetic exercise. All the authors has their agenda, ideological, political or religious, they all considered themselves as agents of change or counteraction to changes they were seeing as destructive, they reacted by their writings to bitter discussions already taken place in society.

  26. Chase began, several weeks ago, to invoke “the late Tolstoy” as a model for his behavior. He would bring it up at dinners or with anyone, with people high in the U.S. government, with entertainment people, movie people, or with the Japanese. He would say, “When I want to see which way to go, what to do, I try to imagine what the late Tolstoy would have to say.” Or: “When I’m faced with a difficult problem, I try to think of the late Tolstoy.” Or, when told about someone’s situation, maybe how that person had screwed up, Chase would put on a suitably serious expression, shake his head, and say, “It might have helped him if he’d stopped for a moment and considered: What would the late Tolstoy have done?”

    Chase would admit, if questioned, that he had never read much Tolstoy. He would explain that this did not disqualify him from having an impression, which he trusted, as to what was contained in Tolstoy’s work and thought. Just to say “the late Tolstoy” conjured up an image, did it not? You didn’t necessarily have to read the books. The few remembered biographical details, and the aura surrounding the closed books — a great deal could be transmitted in this way.

    The explanation never failed to please. And the rare bibliophile who was intimately familiar with “the late Tolstoy” seemed to find the reference — just bringing up the concept — sort of inspirational, or thought-provoking, and Chase knew when to keep his mouth shut, when it was better to simply raise an eyebrow, or nod, or say, “That’s true.”

    Now, however, the late Tolstoy seemed to have run his course. These sheep in the folk art painting remind Sarah of the old man, how he dressed like a peasant, raging about what he saw as various refusals to look at or tell the truth. If peasants and children did not appreciate Chopin, for instance, then there was something wrong with Chopin. Simplicity was all that mattered. Simplicity meant unmediated truth.

    She looked at the painting, which she took to be set in rural western Pennsylvania, someplace where she’s never actually been. There’s something sort of ominous about these black-faced merino sheep. This isn’t really a very friendly landscape. The acid yellow sun looks poisonous, with a bit of a halo, the tallow sun itself outlined in black. The sky is absolutely blue, light blue, but the day seems dark. Unmoving. These asymmetric trees look unnatural, created rather than grown. The only inhabitants are these two cream-colored big sheep, with thick coats, black faces and feet. Tolstoy could be one of these silent, possibly malevolent, immovable sheep, staring out into this room balefully, not a thought anywhere near the history of its head.

  27. Chase would put on a suitably serious expression, shake his head, and say, “It might have helped him if he’d stopped for a moment and considered: What would the late Tolstoy have done?”

    That’s like Westboro Baptists and Leftists saying “What would Jesus do”, as if they actually were disciples of Jesus Christ.

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