The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 145

nor the orienting poles of the objective world. Like his senior contemporary Karl Marx and his junior contemporary Sigmund Freud, Tolstoy had created a theory that, maddeningly, could not be proved false: if you disagreed with it, either you were displaying your false (polluted, stupefied) consciousness, or you were involuntarily repressing the truth.

Tolstoy’s What Is Art? caused a scandal. Resistance to it helped launch a new aesthetics that preached the autonomy of art and free rights to aesthetic expression, with the more multivalent and mystical Dostoevsky as its patron saint. This Symbolist-Age aesthetics would inspire Russian letters until the Bolsheviks succeeded in stamping it out at home and driving it abroad. But Tolstoy’s moralizing, “communalizing” convictions about the proper functioning of art were quite familiar to Russian literary thought. Karamzin had espoused the same ideal of spontaneous “co-feeling” through his Sentimentalist short story “Poor Liza” in the 1790s. In the Soviet period, Tolstoyan Sentimentalist-style aesthetics were officially revived – and practiced with fervor, even by those who were dissidents to the regime, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

If Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is the twentieth-century pinnacle of the Dostoevsky line, then the “Tolstoy line” culminates in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Wa r d (1968).The novelissaturatedwith referencestoTolstoyandtothe vanities of the dying body (Ivan Ilyich’s fatal disease was probably cancer, which in Tolstoy’s time was undiagnosable). Its touchstone Chapter 8, titled “What Do People Live By?” after one of Tolstoy’s most famous cautionary tales, passes that question through a wide spectrum of patients, ranking them morally by their response. The major heroes – the two doctors and Oleg Kostoglotov, the author’s alter ego – implement Tolstoy’s most precious ascetic ideal: they purify themselves by giving something up. Tempted by others, they choose to remain solitary. By the end of the novel, Doctor Lyudmila Dontsova, the oncologist, most likely has cancer herself. Vera Gangart, a surgeon, lost her fiance´ in the war and proudly remains faithful to him. The patient Kostoglotov, whose cancer is successfully arrested, has a chance to pursue both Vera and (more explicitly) the nurse Zoya, but he rejects both women in favor of returning alone to his place of exile. In an insightful passage of Tolstoyan wisdom, Kostoglotov laments the fate of the ex-convict who is freed from labor camp to fend for himself, praising instead the liberating effect of banishment. “He [the banished man] had not sought to come here, and no one could drive him away,” Kostoglotov reasons. “He knew he was following the only path open to him, and this gave

him courage.”24

This ideal of the delimited path, which bestowed on the penitent a freedom from, is characteristic of Tolstoy’s scenarios of spiritual maturation. In the Russian mind it aligned him with the Eastern Orthodox virtue of “emptying