The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

His major challenge in this matter of uncovering life’s truth was not competition with earlier worldly writers (Gogol or Pushkin) but the very fact, or indignity, of having to pass human experience through the word at all. Language was too convention-driven, the act of writing too prideful, the act of reading too passive. Dostoevsky worked variations (and at times vicious parodies) on earlier writers or plots to whom he was indebted. Chekhov in the early 1880s wrote dozens of slight but amusing parodies of earlier literary styles from Karamzin to Gogol to Turgenev. Tolstoy, however, rarely took on other writers in his fiction. Why add another obfuscating layer of words? In Chapter 10 of his 1852 tale “The Raid,” he remarks on the relationship between Russian courage and French phrase-making on the battlefield. When a man “feels within himself the capacity to perform a great deed, no talk of any kind is needed.”28 Tolstoy had always been eager to shock us out of being a mere audience: not only to other writers, but equally to the products of his own writing self.

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A startling example comes in Tolstoy’s 1855 Crimean War story, “Sevastopol in December,” designed as a “tour” addressed to the reader-“tourist” in the second person.29 Here you see a pile of coal, over there frozen manure, the carcass of a horse, now notice this whizzing cannonball, a cart full of corpses, a gorgeous sunrise, an amputation clinic, and although your first impression is disagreeable, look more closely, for “the truth is altogether different.” But of course looking more closely into his story will never equal being there. Gradually this truth (a complex one) becomes clear to the reader, as we are drawn in to the suffering and heroism of the scene. Once drawn in, we begin to feel guilty for being mere observers via the printed word, whereas the war is being fought by participants whose bodies are dying. It is testimony to Tolstoy’s art in these Sevastopol sketches that the tsar wept at the courage and patriotism he saw displayed there, whereas other readers consider them among the most damning anti-war literature ever written. Later, in a famous episode in Wa r and Peace (Book Three, Part II, chs. 31–32), Tolstoy will fill in all the steps of this incriminating process. His topic is again the (literal) theatre of war: Pierre Bezukhov, in a crisp civilian swallow-tail coat and white top hat, “goes to watch” the Battle of Borodino at what soon becomes one of its bloodiest sites, the Rayevsky Redoubt. He emerges unharmed, but horrified, from the mud and carnage.

Chekhov will use the same second-person ethical “wake-up” device of the guided tour in his grim parable “Ward Number Six” (1892), in order to introduce his reader to the lunatic wing – or prison – of a corrupt provincial hospital. “If you do not mind being stung by nettles,” suggests the narrator, “let us go along the narrow path . . .” The inmate Ivan Gromov (who suffers from persecution mania) and Doctor Ragin (the good-natured but slothful medical man who negligently committed Gromov to the ward years earlier) are intellectual opponents of Dostoevskian intensity. Both incline toward philosophy. Quite by accident, the doctor rediscovers his patient and begins visiting him, for he is “the most interesting person in town.” Citing the Cynic Diogenes, Ragin rationalizes his inability to intervene against evil deeds. Gromov, disgusted, responds with a defense of activism. The story ends as it must: Ragin’s medical staff diagnoses him as ill (that is, imprisons him in the ward) together with his patient; Ragin dies of a stroke on the first evening spent locked inside a reality thathehad not botheredtoregisterorresist whilehewasfree. Both Gromovand Ragin had been passionate readers of books. And remarkable about both the bookish Pierre Bezukhov and the bookish Doctor Ragin – healthy, thoughtful, free men – is the extreme slowness of their waking-up to the difference between reading a book, and being there. “Ward Number Six” is often taken as Chekhov’s criticism of Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-violent resistance to evil.

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Doubtless it is that – but it also sounds a chord of recurrent Tolstoyan concern. How can reading, as a habit of the body and mind, be made less pleasant, less easy, more a goad to action?