The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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¨ıve 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