The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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