The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 149

on his eightieth birthday, he was interviewed about the cinema. Of course this new technology will be exploited by businessmen – “where are there not businessmen?”, Tolstoy remarked – but films were wonderful: responsive, infectious, and so much more flexible to write for than the stage, which was “a halter choking the throat of the dramatist.” “You will see that this little clicking contraption with its revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,” he insisted. “The cinema has divined the mystery of motion, and that is greatness.”27 At the end of his life, the world’s most famous word-smith and enemy of technology contemplated writing a screenplay. He foresaw in the art of (still silent) film a chance for images to live forever, sacrificing none of their wholeness, visibility, or mobility: one answer, perhaps, to the insult of death. Significantly, it was capturing the motion that mattered. Tolstoy leapt at the possibility of communication that reduced the need for uttered words.

For just because a writer is a superb craftsman with his chosen material – in this case, words – does not mean that he need trust or respect the morality of his medium. Tolstoy often found himself in this dilemma. His despair was not that of the Romantic or Symbolist poet who lamented that inspiration was always so divine and execution so tedious. Tolstoy was just as suspicious of poetic inspiration (in his view, a markedly indulgent form of intoxication) as he eventually became of meat, liquor, grand opera, and sexual arousal. What appalled Tolstoy was second-hand experience, and from that perspective his relation to books is fascinating. One of the best read and most learned men of his age, Tolstoy detected falsehood in almost all formal systems of education. He was a compulsive diarist and a superb letter-writer. But early on, Tolstoy wished to express what he felt to be true more directly, from the point of view of nature itself.

His major challenge in this matter of uncovering life’s truth was not competition with earlier worldly writers (Gogol or Pushkin) but the very fact, or indignity, of having to pass human experience through the word at all. Language was too convention-driven, the act of writing too prideful, the act of reading too passive. Dostoevsky worked variations (and at times vicious parodies) on earlier writers or plots to whom he was indebted. Chekhov in the early 1880s wrote dozens of slight but amusing parodies of earlier literary styles from Karamzin to Gogol to Turgenev. Tolstoy, however, rarely took on other writers in his fiction. Why add another obfuscating layer of words? In Chapter 10 of his 1852 tale “The Raid,” he remarks on the relationship between Russian courage and French phrase-making on the battlefield. When a man “feels within himself the capacity to perform a great deed, no talk of any kind is needed.”28 Tolstoy had always been eager to shock us out of being a mere audience: not only to other writers, but equally to the products of his own writing self.