The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Tolstoy’s reluctance to work with types is related to the high value he puts on gradual, minute-by-minute effort and change. Idleness, anger, “lying on the couch for months” not so much thinking about that specific pawnbroker as simply not taking oneself in hand to act in a positive way (as Raskolnikov’s best friend Razumikhin acts; he is, for Dostoevsky’s palette, a very Tolstoyan hero): these were the errors that led Raskolnikov to murder, and that will lead Pozdnyshev to murder his innocent wife in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s novels center squarely on the conviction that we act not out of our ideas but out of our bodies. And if ideas have logical consequences, then bodies have needs. Since these needs arise out of our most basic anxieties and hungers, we all recognize them and share them. We build structures to contain them so that our consciousness and energies can be freed up for other tasks. In Tolstoy’s patriarchal, work-oriented, hearth- and agrarian-centered worldview, marriage should be one such structure. Closely connected to marriage is habit. Indeed, for Tolstoy, the most satisfying type of love was not romantic-erotic or melodramatic – selfish states that were bound to collapse – but habitual kindness, attentive to the other’s tiny, ongoing idiosyncratic needs, what he called “active” love.

Tolstoy, perhaps unfairly, did not see enough of this stable, finely differentiated love in the Dostoevskian landscape, love that feared crises rather than flared up eagerly during them. In a related complaint, Tolstoy also professed surprise at Dostoevsky’s “careless,” and in his view often monotonous, narrative style. The charge might appear odd, given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero’s high-pitched life. But Tolstoy’s own fictive scenarios suggest that he considered crisis and hysteria in themselves monotonous, homogenizing behavioral states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike, regardless of what might have triggered the blow-up. For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and

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.