The Side Effects of Endorphins

Alyosha The Pot -I love this short story.

Before he Alyosha, tells Ustinya that he’s glad they didn’t marry; this way he’s not leaving her a widow. Having no precedent, Alyosha can’t conceive of what happiness they could have had together, but death, he knows, is inevitable, and so he sees no reason why he shouldn’t just die now. “Why should I live, why desire anything, why do anything?” Tolstoy writes in A Confession (1882). “Is there a meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Alyosha, it seems, doesn’t learn to desire until it’s too late, and then he lets it go and learns, too, what that feels like. His life is simple: a pair of new boots, work, and a relationship with a person who teaches him that there is more to life than work—all of which death annihilates. While Alyosha may fulfill an idealization for Tolstoy, despite him giving up the story, Alyosha lingers in my mind because of the way he moves through the world despite how others oppress him, because of how he grows from each discovery even if the change isn’t radical, and because of the curiosity piqued by his last surprise.

Source

The Singular Character of Tolstoy’s Alyosha