The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 143

means precisely outgrowing the need for another person, who will sooner distract or seduce you from your path than help you to pursue it honorably. The fact that Ivan Ilyich’s wife, daughter or son might have needed him during his lengthy and painful dying, that he might owe them some gratitude or sympathy and might even benefit from reaching out to them, seems not to have occurred to this terminally sick, self-pitying man (with the exception of several seconds whenhe notices that his son has been weeping). Thehorror of this dying is made clear, but Tolstoy nowhere suggests that his isolation is avoidable or his egocen-trism abnormal. The only dialogue that matters is between Ivan Ilyich and his own death, which becomes his private enlightenment. The validating mark is always the hero’s own solitary “I.” Bakhtin noted this trait early in his 1924–25 lectures on Tolstoy, long before he had worked out the dialogic–monologic distinction, remarking that all of Tolstoy’s work could be distributed between two categories, “how I am for others” (which for Tolstoy was the fraudulent realm of culture) and “how I am for myself” (which was always lonely and alone).22 Bakhtin found such a binary, with the “I” its automatic point of reference, uncongenial and unnecessarily desperate. Many who prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy – and it is routine to prefer one or the other – consider this solipsistic relation that Tolstoy appears to foster a far more serious ethical flaw than the exclusionary intimacy Dostoevsky sets up between a person and his idea.

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.