Tolstoy and the Novel PDF
Preview Tolstoy and the Novel
LTOLSTOY AND THE NOVEL By John Bayley THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK TOLSTOY AND THE NOVEL Copyright © 1966 by John Bayley All rights reserved Published in 1967 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Library of Congress catalog card number : 67-11037 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS Chapter Page I The Russian Background II Inevitable Comparisons 31 III ‘‘ Nota novel...’ War and Peace 62 Forms 62 & Histories 66 PH Deaths 76 ©I FP Lives 95 ‘Understanding’ and ‘ Making it Strange s 99 HW H Sex 104 Dolokhov and the Family 109 O Pierre 119 Family and System 136 Pastoral 14:7 oO 11 War 163 IV Endings 177 V ‘ This novel...’ Anna Karenina 199 VI Anna Karenina and What is Art ? 234 VII Resurrection 246 VIII The Caucasus 262 IX The Nouvelle as Hypothesis 281 X Tolstoy’s Legacy. Dr Zhivago 294 Index 309 Chronology of Works examined or mentioned in the Text 1828 Birth of Tolstoy. 1851 Goes to Caucasus. Writing Childhood. 1852-1853 Serves with army in Caucasus. Writes Boyhood and stories about army life. Begins The Cossacks. 1855 Serves at Sevastopol. Write Sevastopol Sketches. Begins Youth. 1856 Two Hussars. 1858-1859 Family Happiness. Living mostly at Yasnaya Polyana. 1862 Marries. Finishes The Cossacks and Polthushka. 1863-1869 Writing War and Peace at Yasnaya Polyana. 1873-1877 Writing Anna Karenina. 1879 Writes A Confession, after a severe spiritual crisis. 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Devil. 1889 Finishes The Kreutzer Sonata. 1895 Master and Man. 1898 Finishes What 1s Art ? 1899 Finishes Resurrection. 1901-1904 Working on Hadjt Murad. 1905 Alyosha Gorshok. Death of Tolstoy. 1910 Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Oxford University Press for permission to quote sections from Aylmer Maude’s translation of War and Peace. To Dr Theodore Redpath’s admirable study of Tolstoy in the series Modern European Literature and Thought (Bowes & Bowes) I owe my introduction to the work of some of the Soviet critics I have consulted, notably to N. K. Gudzy’s extremely valuable book on Tolstoy’s manuscripts and methods of composition, Kak Rabotal Tolstoy. I owe a comparable debt to the bibliographical references and the textual and linguistic scholarship of Dr R. F. Christian in his monograph, Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ (O.U.P.) I The Russian Background Life 1s constantly putting to Russians the question: Where are you? CHAADAYEV Two and two still make four, but somehow it seems more lively when it’s Russian. TurGENEV, Smoke I ARATYNSKY, a poet and guardsman, and a friend of Pushkin, wrote that two qualities were needed for the making of a poet: “‘the fire of creative imagination and the cold- ness of controlling reason’’. From another poet at another time, and in a different country, we might be inclined absent-mindedly to accept this as undoubtedly sound but a little obvious. But Baratynsky was born in 1800, at the threshold of Russia’s great literary age. The simplicity of what he says strikes with unex- pected force, for it was not only the truth as he saw it, but the truth as it was about to be embodied in the poetry of Pushkin and the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That is the impressive thing about the remarks of nineteenth- century Russian writers—they mean what they say. And they mean what they say in a way that has little to do with literature and literary traditions. Their awakening into self-consciousness strikes us as having a curious purity, as if it occurred simultan- eously in every department of living and thinking; a penetrating, unblunted intelligence examining itself, its instincts, sufferings and pleasures; greedily devouring the great bulk of literary matter which the West had amassed on these themes, and assessing it with an almost embarrassing directness. Pre- occupied, above all, with ideas, and with ideas as progress. Gogol says: “‘it is essential that life should take a step forward 9 TOLSTOY AND THE NOVEL in the work of a creative artist’’, and again the phrase seems not the dictum of a man of letters but a sort of hurried practical instruction. Swaddled in the inertia of its accomplishment, the complac- ency of its prolongation, Western literature has no comparable critical tone. At our most urgent we still sound literary. ‘“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’”” Chaucer’s tone is already So acquiescent, so resignedly professional. In Russia there was not long to learn: it all had to be done at once. To the English fictional scene in the 1850s it seemed to make little difference if Dickens was saying that the novel was nothing if it was not serious, or Trollope was maintaining that it must end in a feast of sugar plums. Both views dissolve without fuss in the ancient pool of unsurprising precept: that Fancy must be tempered with Judgment; that one must look in one’s heart and write; that the sound should be an echo to the sense. By contrast the critical dicta of the Russians seem like telegrams exchanged by revolu- tionaries after a coup d’état has begun, but before it is known whether it will succeed. If the description of ideas seems so direct and first-hand in nineteenth-century Russia, so does description of objects. In The Execution of Troppmann Turgenev is as transparent and objective as Tolstoy ever was. It is significant that Tolstoy wrote What is Art? when Russian literature had used its own eyesight and produced its great primary works; when it had caught up with European literature and achieved parity in sophistication and emphasis on technique. Tolstoy is calling for a return not to some primal age-old simplicity but to that of fifty years back. The age of ‘nature’ in Russian literature was still so close that for Tolstoy—and in him—it was still alive. He saw no need to distinguish between ancient simplicity and modern simplesse, between naming things and calling them over for the benefit of the literature class. Because in Pushkin’s poetry a nature and a language suddenly light up together, each identify- ing the other, Russian children may be said to learn things by their Pushkin names. With us, the naming of nature in literature happened too long ago and over too prolonged a period. For an English child the cock and hen are not Chaucer’s, or the wind and the rain Shakespeare’s, as the goose, the sled, and the snow- 10
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