The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 141

for Dostoevsky, but at all times it is thickly present. Simple bliss at one’s physical surroundings can cause characters to shout with joy (the lengthy pastoral insert on the Rostov family fox hunt in War and Peace is the sublime example). The beauty and pure, stubborn cyclicity of natural processes is for Tolstoy a standard that adult human intervention can only pollute. His final novel Resurrection, in which he exposes and condemns every purported “civilizing” human institution, opens with a lyrical passage:

Although men in hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.19

Tolstoy doesn’t like cities. All Tolstoyan narratives have a stern moral geography. Life in the countryside is healthiest. Messy and profligate Moscow, that “big village,” was tolerated by Tolstoy (his own large family had a town house there); but he loathed rank-obsessed, military-bureaucratic Petersburg. Of course Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky also did not like Petersburg – but they were fascinated by the place and understood the vitality of its myth and the infectiousness of its atmosphere. Tolstoy was simply physically disgusted. Worthy people fall sick in cities and recuperate outside them.

Nature, for Tolstoy, is necessity. He respects it. And nature cannot be rushed. Cities, and the suspicious railroads that connect cities to one another, create the illusion that human goods can be packaged by strangers and rushed from one place to the next. Convictions, like families, are born and mature slowly, on the basis of repeated contact. In Tolstoy’s novels we see people making jam, gathering honey, sewing dresses for balls, slowly giving birth (each contraction) and slowly dying (each spasm) – in what is more a direct presentation than a telling. When Tolstoy compares Moscow on the brink of Napoleon’s entry to a “dying hive” (War and Peace, Book Three, Part III, ch. 20), it is immediately clear to any beekeeper that the author has not only read about beehives but has himself rummaged around inside them. In this Tolstoy resembles his own fictional peasant hero Platon Karataev, prisoner of war in 1812 and jack-of-all-trades; he has been there and learned to do almost everything he describes. Perhaps for this reason he doesnotinserta mockingnarrator between thereader and an event, nor is he concerned with multiplying or obfuscating points of view on this event.

Tolstoy does not banish doubt or self-criticism. In that area Tolstoy is easily Dostoevsky’s equal. He offers us a vast, variegated panorama of confusions,