Smerdyakov whom he has been actually coaching for murder in a sort of metaphysical way), Ivan who thus becomes so to say an accomplice of Dmitri, Ivan is much more closely integrated in the plot of the book than is the third brother Alyosha. Where Alyosha is concerned, we constantly gain the impression that the author was torn between two independent plots : Dmitri's tragedy on the one side and the story of the almost saintly youth Alyosha. Alyosha is again an exponent (the other was Prince Myshkin) of the author's unfortunate love for the simple-minded hero of Russian folklore. The whole lengthy limp story of the monk Zosima could have been deleted from the novel without impairing it; rather, its deletion would have given the book more unity and a better balanced construction. And again quite independently, sticking quite obviously out of the general scheme of the book, stands the, in itself, very well written story of the schoolboy Ilyusha. But even into that excellent story about the boy Ilyusha, another boy Kolya, the dog Zhuchka, the silver toy cannon, the cold nose of the puppy, the freakish tricks of the hysterical father, even into this story Alyosha introduces an unpleasant unctuous chill.
Generally speaking, whenever the author busies himself with Dmitri his pen acquires exceptional liveliness. Dmitri seems to be constantly illumined by strong lamps, and so do all those who surround him. But the moment we come to Alyosha, we are immersed in a different, entirely lifeless element. Dusky paths lead the reader away into a murky world of cold reasoning abandoned by the spirit of art.
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LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910)
The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on
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Anna Karenin* (1877)
Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev.† This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.
The ideological poison, the message—to use a term invented by quack reformers—began to affect the Russian novel in the middle of the last century, and has killed it by the middle of this one. It would seem at first glance that Tolstoy's fiction is heavily infected with his teachings. Actually, his ideology was so tame and so vague and so far from politics, and, on the other hand, his art was so powerful, so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon. In the long run what interested him as a thinker were Life and Death, and after all no artist can avoid treating these themes.
Count Leo (in Russian Lev or Lvov) Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a robust man with a restless soul, who all his life was torn between his sensual temperament and his supersensitive conscience. His appetites constantly led him astray from the quiet country road that the ascetic in him craved to follow as passionately as the rake in him craved for the city pleasures of the flesh.
In his youth, the rake had a better chance and took it. Later,
after his marriage in 1862, Tolstoy found temporary peace
in family life divided between the wise management of his
fortune—he had rich lands in the Volga region—and the
writing of his best prose. It is then, in the sixties and early
seventies, that he produced his immense
(1869) and his immortal
in the late seventies, when he was over forty, his
conscience triumphed: the ethical overcame both the
esthetical and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his
wife's happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty
literary career to what he considered a moral necessity:
living according to the principles of rational Christian
morality—the simple and stern life of generalized
humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual
art. And when in 1910 he realized that by continuing to live
on his country estate, in the bosom of his stormy family, he
still was betraying his ideal of a simple, saintly existence,
he, a man of eighty, left his home and wandered away,
heading for a monastery he never reached, and died in the
waiting room of a little railway station.
I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers
The beginning of Nabokov's discussion of Tolstoy's life.
and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives—I
*
'Translators have had awful trouble with the heroine's name. In Russian, a surname ending in a consonant acquires a final 'a' (except in the case of such names as cannot be declined) when designating a woman; but only when the reference is to a female stage performer should English feminize a Russian surname (following a French custom:
not 'Mrs. Ivanova' or 'Mrs. Karenina.' Having decided to write 'Karenina,' translators found themselves forced to call Anna's husband 'Mr. Karenina,' which is about as ridiculous as calling Lady Mary's husband 'Lord Mary.' ' Transferred from VN's commentary note. Ed.
†
' When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.' Bracketed note elsewhere in the section. Ed.
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hate the vulgarity of 'human interest,' I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people— pity for the humble and the humiliated—this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his rep resentative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature—and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.
And when he discovered his new religion and in the logical development of this new religion—a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, Jesus minus the Church—he reached the conclusion that art was ungodly because it was founded on imagination, on deceit, on fancy-forgery, he ruthlessly sacrificed the giant of an artist that he was to a rather pedestrian and narrow minded though well-meaning philosopher that he had chosen to become. Thus when he had just reached the uppermost peaks of creative perfection with
