Realisms 143
means precisely outgrowing the need for another person, who will sooner distract or seduce you from your path than help you to pursue it honorably. The fact that Ivan Ilyich’s wife, daughter or son might have needed him during his lengthy and painful dying, that he might owe them some gratitude or sympathy and might even benefit from reaching out to them, seems not to have occurred to this terminally sick, self-pitying man (with the exception of several seconds whenhe notices that his son has been weeping). Thehorror of this dying is made clear, but Tolstoy nowhere suggests that his isolation is avoidable or his egocen-trism abnormal. The only dialogue that matters is between Ivan Ilyich and his own death, which becomes his private enlightenment. The validating mark is always the hero’s own solitary “I.” Bakhtin noted this trait early in his 1924–25 lectures on Tolstoy, long before he had worked out the dialogic–monologic distinction, remarking that all of Tolstoy’s work could be distributed between two categories, “how I am for others” (which for Tolstoy was the fraudulent realm of culture) and “how I am for myself” (which was always lonely and alone).22 Bakhtin found such a binary, with the “I” its automatic point of reference, uncongenial and unnecessarily desperate. Many who prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy – and it is routine to prefer one or the other – consider this solipsistic relation that Tolstoy appears to foster a far more serious ethical flaw than the exclusionary intimacy Dostoevsky sets up between a person and his idea.
Of course Tolstoy valued acts of loving. But in his mature years, what he valued more and more was love that streamed out uninterruptedly from the “I” – regardless of what might trigger it and how it might be received. Where, or upon whom, that love landed was of secondary importance. Tolstoy doesn’t do doubles, at least not demonic ones; one suspects that his lonely, questing positive heroes do not need the company of another person sufficiently to undertake the agony of conjuring one up. Like true fools, while looking after themselves they will stumble on to what they need. Pierre Bezukhov bumbles his way around to Natasha Rostova, a most unlikely match; Tolstoy makes certain that Kitty remains unmarried long enough for his favored Levin to get over his injured pride and bumble his way back to her. Meanwhile, if his fictional creations need a friend, Tolstoy himself will be that “friendly other.” First he shows the reader what happens, then he tells us what the characters think about what happened, then he tells us what the author thinks about what the characters do and think. A typical Tolstoyan description of an event is multilayered – but contrary to the presentation of a Dostoevskian event, each Tolstoyan layer tends to reinforce the same perspective rather than to relativize or undermine it. One scene from Anna Karenina, a strong example of this strategy, will illustrate the deep difference in narrative guidance between the stalwart Tolstoy and the sly, more “loopholed” Dostoevsky line.
144 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Count Vronsky makes a surprise visit to Anna on the day of the steeplechase (Part II, ch. 22). While waiting on the veranda for her son Seryozha to return from his walk, Anna informs Vronsky of her pregnancy. We are told that the presence of Seryozha was always an embarrassment to the two lovers, invoking in them the feeling that a sailor might have after glancing at his compass and confirming that he had indeed strayed from the proper course – but the sailor, Tolstoy hastens to add, was unable to stop, because to stop would mean to acknowledge that he was lost. This observation then receives a further gloss: “This child with his na??ve outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”23
These three confirmations (or redundancies) effectively plugupthe meaning of the scene. In Tolstoy’s view, this is not a bad thing. For the task of responsible art lies not in its ability to multiply fictions, positions, or voices (that was Dostoevsky’s passion), but to justify why this particular fiction is true from all sides. This does not mean that truth is simple (or that behaving truthfully is easy or simple). Nor does it mean that experience can be transmitted in generalized terms. In his individualizing, sequencing, and pacing of tiny shifts of emotion, Tolstoy has no equal. But infinitely diverse experiences can, and must, reveal compatible eternal truths.
In his late treatise What Is Art? (1898), Tolstoy made explicit this paradoxical recipe. Individuals are endlessly varied and mutable on the outside, but at one with each other within. Politics, economics, intellectual ideas – indeed, all human institutions – are capable solely of dividing us, exhausting us, and masking our innate brotherhood; only art can uncover a unity beneath our natural variety. Thus art cannot be a “profession,” a specialized language, or a product in thrall to a market. It rarely succeeds in its duties when exhibited or staged. Art is authentic, Tolstoy insisted, when author, narrator, performer, and spectator-reader are all united in one fused spiritual experience, “infected” with the same emotion that had seized the artist during the act of creation. To this end, spontaneous folk songs and well-timed jokes are more likely to qualify as true art than are symphonies and novels. If no such flush of “oneness” comes about, either the artwork is counterfeit, or else it can be shown that we are “not in our right mind” – drugged, drunk, duped by the sloth of upper-class life, stupefied or overstimulated by cigars, caffeine, lust. Part of Tolstoy’s extraordinary faith in the body, which qualifies him as a “seer of the flesh,” is his insistence that all “cleansed” bodies are basically alike and will respond in kindred ways. Like that sailor in the scene from Anna Karenina, each of us “carries the same compass” – which is conscience. We can pollute ourselves and thus blur our vision, we can turn away from the compass or even deny that such an instrument exists, but such actions affect neither the truth of the compass
Realisms 145
nor the orienting poles of the objective world. Like his senior contemporary Karl Marx and his junior contemporary Sigmund Freud, Tolstoy had created a theory that, maddeningly, could not be proved false: if you disagreed with it, either you were displaying your false (polluted, stupefied) consciousness, or you were involuntarily repressing the truth.
Tolstoy’s What Is Art? caused a scandal. Resistance to it helped launch a new aesthetics that preached the autonomy of art and free rights to aesthetic expression, with the more multivalent and mystical Dostoevsky as its patron saint. This Symbolist-Age aesthetics would inspire Russian letters until the Bolsheviks succeeded in stamping it out at home and driving it abroad. But Tolstoy’s moralizing, “communalizing” convictions about the proper functioning of art were quite familiar to Russian literary thought. Karamzin had espoused the same ideal of spontaneous “co-feeling” through his Sentimentalist short story “Poor Liza” in the 1790s. In the Soviet period, Tolstoyan Sentimentalist-style aesthetics were officially revived – and practiced with fervor, even by those who were dissidents to the regime, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
If Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is the twentieth-century pinnacle of the Dostoevsky line, then the “Tolstoy line” culminates in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Wa r d (1968).The novelissaturatedwith referencestoTolstoyandtothe vanities of the dying body (Ivan Ilyich’s fatal disease was probably cancer, which in Tolstoy’s time was undiagnosable). Its touchstone Chapter 8, titled “What Do People Live By?” after one of Tolstoy’s most famous cautionary tales, passes that question through a wide spectrum of patients, ranking them morally by their response. The major heroes – the two doctors and Oleg Kostoglotov, the author’s alter ego – implement Tolstoy’s most precious ascetic ideal: they purify themselves by giving something up. Tempted by others, they choose to remain solitary. By the end of the novel, Doctor Lyudmila Dontsova, the oncologist, most likely has cancer herself. Vera Gangart, a surgeon, lost her fiance? in the war and proudly remains faithful to him. The patient Kostoglotov, whose cancer is successfully arrested, has a chance to pursue both Vera and (more explicitly) the nurse Zoya, but he rejects both women in favor of returning alone to his place of exile. In an insightful passage of Tolstoyan wisdom, Kostoglotov laments the fate of the ex-convict who is freed from labor camp to fend for himself, praising instead the liberating effect of banishment. “He [the banished man] had not sought to come here, and no one could drive him away,” Kostoglotov reasons. “He knew he was following the only path open to him, and this gave
him courage.”24
This ideal of the delimited path, which bestowed on the penitent a freedom from, is characteristic of Tolstoy’s scenarios of spiritual maturation. In the Russian mind it aligned him with the Eastern
