Concerning Tolstoy*
PHILIP RAHV
THE
critic's euphoria in the Tolstoyan weather. Tolstoy and liter–
ature. The green twig and the black trunk.
The art of Tolstoy is
of such irresistible simplicity and truth, is at once so intense and so
transparent in all of its effects, that the need is seldom felt to analyze
the means by which it becomes what it is, that is to say, its method
or sum of techniques, In the bracing Tolstoyan air, the critic, how–
ever addicted to analysis, cannot help doubting his own task, sensing
that there is something presumptuous and even unnatural, which
require~;
an almost artificial deliberateness of intention, in the at–
tempt to dissect an art so wonderfully integrated that, coming under
its sway, we grasp it as a whole long before we are able to summon
sufficient consciousness to examine the arrangement and interaction
of its component parts.
Tolstoy
is
the exact opposite of those writers, typical of the
modern age, whose works are to be understood only in terms of their
creative strategies and design. The most self-observant of men, whose
books are scarcely conceivable apart from the ceaseless introspection
of which they are the embodiment, Tolstoy was least self-conscious
in his use of the literary medium. That is chiefly because in him the
cleavage between art and life is of a minimal nature. In a Tolstoyan
novel it is never the division but always the unity of art and life which
makes for illumination. This novel, bristling with significant choices
and crucial acts, teeming with dramatic motives, is not articulated
through a plot as we commonly know it in fiction; one might say
that in a sense there are no plots in Tolstoy but simply the unques–
tioned and unalterable process of life itself; such is the astonishing im–
mediacy with which he possesses his characters that he can dispense
with manipulative techniques, as he dispenses with the belletristic
devices of exaggeration, distortion, and dissimulation. The fable, that
specifically literary contrivance, or anyt,hing else which is merely in-
*
Written as an introduction to
The Short Novels of Tolstoy,
scheduled for
publication by the Dial Press in October, 1946.
