The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

140 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

interacting can create genuine heterogeneity. In his late treatise What Is Art?, Tolstoy went as far as to call literature that appealed to our logical faculties or stimulated our intellectual curiosity “counterfeit art.” He suspected (again, perhaps unfairly) that the most passionate and intimate relationship experienced by a Dostoevskian hero was with his idea, not with another human being. For Tolstoy, a big self- justifying idea is like a big crisis, a big crime, or a big scandal: it isn’t true, it tells you very little about what’s going on, and it won’t last.

In 1877, Dostoevsky published a two-part review of Anna Karenina in his journal- newspaper Diary of a Writer.18 He dwelt most appreciatively on the scene of spiritual reconciliation between the humiliated lover Vronsky and the deceived but resurrected husband Karenin, which takes place at Anna’s bedside after the birth of her daughter and on the brink of her anticipated death (Part IV, chs. 17– 23). The scene has every mark of a Dostoevskian epiphany: a crisis followed by a threshold moment, when – as Dostoevsky put it – “the transgressors and enemies are suddenly transformed into higher beings.” Dostoevsky had no sympathy at all for Anna’s tragic end, which he considered the triumph of evil, a “gloomy and terrible picture of the full degeneration of a human spirit.” This curiously truncated review of the novel, like Dostoevsky’s equally curious Pushkin Speech delivered three years later, provides little insight into the subject under review but a great deal of insight into Dostoevsky. The genius of Tolstoyan psychology lies not in the peaks but in the slopes. Crucial to watch is how he brings a hero or heroine down off a crisis moment. Only when Anna is again healthy, back into her routine life and needs, does she realize what she has become for real. Then the tragedy starts, for she sees the falseness of the crisis state (her all-but-certain death from puerperal fever) and her inability to sustain its noble-minded, feverish theatricality. Anna wants and loves Vronsky for the long term. She slips back into this desire, and therein resides her truth. She cannot arrange her life so that “having Vronsky” is a habitual, invisible, secure part of her daily routine. This might be degeneration, but is it evil? At this juncture we see clearly the mechanisms – habit on the one side, epiphany on the other – that run a Tolstoyan versus a Dostoevskian world.

Wherein lies the special texture of Tolstoyan reality? Above all, it feels slower and more “filled-in.” We tend to see it before we hear it talking. Even in violent descriptions of war, human gestures seem somehow more ordinary, on a continuum with everyday life. Given the chance, they will slip back to civilian norms – as happens to the astonished Nikolai Rostov during his first battle, noticing the blue eyes of the young French soldier he was on the verge of bayoneting. Nature in Tolstoy is not primarily symbolic, as the Petersburg climate is

Realisms 141

for Dostoevsky, but at all times it is thickly present. Simple bliss at one’s physical surroundings can cause characters to shout with joy (the lengthy pastoral insert on the Rostov family fox hunt in War and Peace is the sublime example). The beauty and pure, stubborn cyclicity of natural processes is for Tolstoy a standard that adult human intervention can only pollute. His final novel Resurrection, in which he exposes and condemns every purported “civilizing” human institution, opens with a lyrical passage:

Although men in hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.19

Tolstoy doesn’t like cities. All Tolstoyan narratives have a stern moral geography. Life in the countryside is healthiest. Messy and profligate Moscow, that “big village,” was tolerated by Tolstoy (his own large family had a town house there); but he loathed rank-obsessed, military-bureaucratic Petersburg. Of course Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky also did not like Petersburg – but they were fascinated by the place and understood the vitality of its myth and the infectiousness of its atmosphere. Tolstoy was simply physically disgusted. Worthy people fall sick in cities and recuperate outside them.

Nature, for Tolstoy, is necessity. He respects it. And nature cannot be rushed. Cities, and the suspicious railroads that connect cities to one another, create the illusion that human goods can be packaged by strangers and rushed from one place to the next. Convictions, like families, are born and mature slowly, on the basis of repeated contact. In Tolstoy’s novels we see people making jam, gathering honey, sewing dresses for balls, slowly giving birth (each contraction) and slowly dying (each spasm) – in what is more a direct presentation than a telling. When Tolstoy compares Moscow on the brink of Napoleon’s entry to a “dying hive” (War and Peace, Book Three, Part III, ch. 20), it is immediately clear to any beekeeper that the author has not only read about beehives but has himself rummaged around inside them. In this Tolstoy resembles his own fictional peasant hero Platon Karataev, prisoner of war in 1812 and jack-of-all-trades; he has been there and learned to do almost everything he describes. Perhaps for this reason he doesnotinserta mockingnarrator between thereader and an event, nor is he concerned with multiplying or obfuscating points of view on this event.

Tolstoy does not banish doubt or self-criticism. In that area Tolstoy is easily Dostoevsky’s equal. He offers us a vast, variegated panorama of confusions,

142 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

uncertainties, and entrapments. But with Tolstoy, sooner or later we sense that all the critics and doubters are, as it were, in the same doubt together. Consider the end of his late, great tale “Master and Man” (1895). A wealthy merchant freezes to death in a blizzard and saves the life of his workman Nikita with the warmth of his own dying body. We then learn that Nikita, “more sorry than glad to have survived,” lived another twenty years, forgave his wife her infidelity, was relieved to release his son from the burden of feeding him – and (here is the stirring final line) “whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.”20 In Dostoevsky, there is no sense that we shall ever all learn the same thing, even after death. Nor is such assurance required.

This Dostoevskian point of faith is illustrated well in one scene from the greatest twentieth-century product of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line in Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Satan, here in the guise of a professor of black magic called Woland, has turned up in Moscow during the 1930s and is hosting his annual ball. Among the summoned guests is the severed head of one unfortunate materialist-atheist, former chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who was decapitated by a streetcar in the novel’s opening pages. Woland assures this poor torsoless creature, whose eyes blink in terror, that the theory he had postulated – that when a head is severed, life ceases – is both “incisive and sound,” but that

“one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into nonbeing, and from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to life

everlasting!”21

In the Dostoevsky line, there is simply no single vantage point from which, as Tolstoy put it with such lapidary assurance, “we shall all soon learn.” In the radical freedom that Dostoevsky will not relinquish, each of us might become our own belief. Not only is the end unknown, so is the path – and these paths are decidedly plural. Even that, however, cannot be known. We are not all in the same doubt. Very possibly this suspicion that dispersal and heterogeneity are natural, not freakish, led Dostoevsky to value above all things the striving for human communion. The self is not saved by a reformed splinter of its own self; it needs a genuine other consciousness.

Tolstoy was never wholly convinced of this need. In fact, in his writings on the far side of his “break,” noticeably in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), the opposite appears to be the case: growing into one’s own courage and wisdom