The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.

Wherein lies the special texture of Tolstoyan reality? Above all, it feels slower and more “filled-in.” We tend to see it before we hear it talking. Even in violent descriptions of war, human gestures seem somehow more ordinary, on a continuum with everyday life. Given the chance, they will slip back to civilian norms – as happens to the astonished Nikolai Rostov during his first battle, noticing the blue eyes of the young French soldier he was on the verge of bayoneting. Nature in Tolstoy is not primarily symbolic, as the Petersburg climate is