The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 151

Doubtless it is that – but it also sounds a chord of recurrent Tolstoyan concern. How can reading, as a habit of the body and mind, be made less pleasant, less easy, more a goad to action?

It is characteristic of this “Tolstoyan” story of Chekhov’s, and of Tolstoy himself, that the very process of reading is targeted for attention rather than the content of the work being read or witnessed. Dostoevsky tells you straight out that Devushkin is reading Pushkin and Gogol (and precisely which stories); immediately a dialogue starts up between works of literature. But Tolstoy scholars are still debating the identity of the unnamed English novel that Anna Karenina is reading on the train back to St. Petersburg after meeting Vronsky in Moscow, and also – to shift to the performing arts – the identity of the unnamed opera that Natasha watches in War and Peace, which primes her to be seduced by Anatole Kuragin. (There is no consensus on the novel, although it seems to be by Trollope; the most recent hypothesis on the opera is Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert Le Diable.)30 What concerns Tolstoy is not the text, not its specific characters, plots, or ideas, but the physiological effect on the human body of the physically passive but often arousing activitiesof reading, watching, and experiencing art.

The finest example of this concern is Tolstoy’s late story “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889). Not music itself, but remembering how his wife had created such music with the violinist “for no practical reason” is what enflames the jealous husband Pozdnyshev, both against his wife and against Beethoven. Pozdnyshev considers himself a “madman,” and the courtroom that tried him for murdering his wife concurred with the criminal, bestowing a verdict of temporary insanity. But as with all of Tolstoy’s fools and social outcasts – quite distinct from the Gogol–Dostoevsky line of madmen, who are not used in this way – a truth is transmitted through them that is intended to wake up the rest of comfortable humanity. Tolstoy stood behind many of Pozdnyshev’s maddest views. The powerful art of music, like the powerful art of the word, should be deployed only in the service of brotherhood. At the very least, it must not draw attention to itself as art, and whatever emotions it arouses must be usefully discharged, attached to a desired action. If a funeral, then a lament; if a battle, then fife and drum. Since the salon provides no proper moral conduit for channeling the energy released by art – just small talk and sherbet – how could there not be infidelity, jealousy, murder?

Best of all is to show people doing without words altogether. Responsive glances from a loving face will do the necessary work. The most famous of these word-free scenes in Tolstoy, the courtship between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina (Part IV, ch. 13) is based on Tolstoy’s own magical experience proposing marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. Kitty and Levin meet