The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 153

contradictory demands on herself (unwilling to give up society, son, or lover, she is aware that no structure exists capable of containing them all). She will punish Vronsky for that fact, not for the infidelity of which she accuses him even as she knows her suspicions are unfounded. Everyone she sees on that fatal ride to the train station is reduced to mean-spirited caricature. She is not in delirium – that is the terror of the passage – but she understands her needy self with absolute clarity and does not wish to entertain any other opinion about it: “my love grows ever more passionate and self-centered, and his keeps fading and fading . . .” (p. 763). Only at the final moment of her life does the candle flare up “by which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil” (p. 768). In addition to lies and grief, that book might have contained truth – but Tolstoy, here as with the dying Ivan Ilyich, gives his questing heroes access to it only at the final irreversible moment, after the wretched pattern of their lives has claimed its due.

Anna’s awful death prompts one additional contrast between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: how best to come to terms with one’s guilt. In a Tolstoyan world, which is intensely concerned that each autonomous “I” improve its behavior, the worst possible habit I can acquire is to insist on my helplessness and inability to initiate, on my own, some small betterment in my life. In a Dostoevskian world, relying on oneself is no special virtue – but the “I” does have obligations. Here, the worst habit for any character is to say that someone else is guilty. Best always is to insist that “I am guilty,” I am responsible to all. The guilty Dostoevskian “I” is not Tolstoy’s, however, and herein lies the meat of the comparison. Even if technically you are innocent – as Dmitry Karamazov is innocent of parricide, and as his brother Ivan is innocent – admit your guilt anyway, take responsibility. Let someone else say (as Alyosha says to his brothers): “It wasn’t you.” For Dostoevsky, it is the task of others to absolve you of your worst suspicions; it is not for you to reason it out and absolve yourself. The more wary, stubborn, guilt-ridden Tolstoyan personality does not invite others inside to share the burden or negotiate the terms. In this difference we see the core of Tolstoy’s radical and brave individualism, and Dostoevsky’s radical and brave dialogism.

Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov)

The controversial opposition above, between single-voiced (or individualistic) monologism and multivoiced (other-dependent) dialogism, we owe to Mikhail Bakhtin – who assigned Tolstoy, his less loved example, to one side of the divide and Dostoevsky to the other. But Bakhtin initiated an even more controversial