The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The time-space of Tolstoy’s novels differs from Dostoevsky’s in almost every way. Tolstoy, of course, is no stranger to tragedy and crisis, nor even to the most Dostoevsky-style crisis of all, murder. (Two famous Tolstoyan narratives from 1889, “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil,” both involve the killing of a woman out of jealousy.) But he handles the cause and aftermath of such crises differently. In his 1890 treatise, “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?”, Tolstoy remarks in passing that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov did not kill the old pawnbroker with an axe on the day of the murder but had been killing her for months, lying feverishly and resentfully on his couch in his garret, making the possibility of that murder a habit of his mind. Tolstoy sensed that with Dostoevsky, for all that he multiplies perspectives on events and filters them through gossipy untrustworthy narrators, a tragic act (when it finally comes to

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pass) tests not a person but an idea. Does Raskolnikov have the right to kill the old pawnbroker? Does Dmitry or Ivan Karamazov have the right to wish their father dead? In what does freedom consist (the Underground Man provokes us to ask), if not in my right to disappoint your calculations and act “not like a piano key or an organ stop” but according to my own whim? Such tests contrast starkly with Tolstoy’s understanding of human character. Tolstoyan personalities do not represent ideas – in fact, they do not represent any single question that can be put to the test. Tolstoy was explicit about this in his drafts for a preface to War and Peace: he could not force his characters to act or talk in a way that would “prove or clarify some kind of idea or series of ideas.”16 People, he believed, do not act out of an idea (more likely they will slap an idea on a deed or an appetite after the fact, to dignify it); they act out of a bundle of good and bad habits, some conscious, but most not.

In the great Tolstoyan novels before 1880, the ability to assume and then to shed many different ideas while remaining open to a variety of life situations is the defining mark of a successful hero. A great deal of talk goes on in these novels too, but, unlike Dostoevsky’s astonishingly “casual” conversations on cosmic matters, much Tolstoyan talk is “small.” Tolstoy greatly values observation and practical skills – knowing how things work in a hands-on way – but he does not tolerate much abstract philosophy from his heroes. He mercilessly exposes academics and book-writing intellectuals (like Levin’s half-brother Koznyshev in Anna Karenina, who throughout the full length of the novel labors over a book that then receives feeble, miserable reviews), and he pities theoreticians of war (like General Pfu¨hl in War and Peace) who think that a battle unfolds like a “plan.”17 In Tolstoy, a person’s identity is most secure when it is most flexible, that is, when not fastened down to a single coherent unfolding idea.

RecallingourChapter 2on heroes and plots,wemightsaythat Tolstoy doesn’t do “types,” just as he doesn’t do (and doesn’t believe in) formal institutions. The closest his ideal hero comes to one of our categories might be the Fool – not of the holy variety, to be sure, but the bumbling, well-meaning fool, honest where honesty has no place, awkward in society and continually ridiculed by society for his eccentric ways. Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin are both questing fools in this sense, continually surprised by themselves, and Tolstoy richly rewards them for it.

We might make a corollary observation. Tolstoy mistrusted “official authority”: policemen, military recruiters, tax collectors, the arm of the law, the word of the monarch. He felt that official power could only corrupt. In contrast to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky is remarkably kind to policemen and other people who wield power. As a rule, they are merciful and generous to sufferers. Porfiry

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Petrovich, a police investigator, is a key instrument of Raskolnikov’s salvation, and by the end of the novel almost functions as his spiritual foster father and confessor. The police officers on the Petersburg streets of Crime and Punishment are attentive, compassionate professionals, concerned to protect young girls from abuse and to prevent suicides. Makar Devushkin, timid impoverished clerk of Dostoevsky’s earliest “Gogolian variation,” Poor Folk, repeats Akaky Akakievich’s humiliating scene in front of his department chief but with this important difference: where Gogol’s downtrodden clerk receives a bawling out that leads to his death, Devushkin’s boss, seeing his underling’s shabbiness and misery, slips him a 100-ruble note. Given Dostoevsky’s own poverty and experience with punitive institutions – and Tolstoy’s inexperience with both – this difference is worth pondering.