Yes - a genius. If you are thinking and writing in English today, you do so in his shadow.
But there is ambivalence. I don't think Shakespeare himself would have thought of himself in that way - and that would nto be false modesty. Taking another example Socrates, who I only know through translation, seems to vacillate on certain ideas. Sometimes life seems incredibly precious to him at other times not really worth much... But that is not a weakness in his thought. He is delineating a very real indetermancy.
In another context TS Eliot when asked about "The Waste Land" - which I believe Tolstoy would have seen as just as bad a Shakespeare - referred to it as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”
I don't believe this is just humblebragging. And this goes back to Orwell's point in the essay that Shakespeare was at times a sloppy thinker, a bad punner, a weak dramatist but an incomparable poet.
Yes - it fails and the result is a pile of fragments which those who remain use to build up again.
But there is ambivalence. I don't think Shakespeare himself would have thought of himself in that way - and that would nto be false modesty. Taking another example Socrates, who I only know through translation, seems to vacillate on certain ideas. Sometimes life seems incredibly precious to him at other times not really worth much... But that is not a weakness in his thought. He is delineating a very real indetermancy.
In another context TS Eliot when asked about "The Waste Land" - which I believe Tolstoy would have seen as just as bad a Shakespeare - referred to it as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”
I don't believe this is just humblebragging. And this goes back to Orwell's point in the essay that Shakespeare was at times a sloppy thinker, a bad punner, a weak dramatist but an incomparable poet.
Yes - it fails and the result is a pile of fragments which those who remain use to build up again.