CONCERNING TOLSTOY
421
vented or made up to suit the occasion, is very rarely found in his
work. Nor is style an element of composition of which he is especially
aware; he has no interest in language as such; he is the enemy of
rhetoric and every kind of artifice and virtuosity. The conception of
writing as of something calculated and constructed-a conception, first
formulated explicitly by Edgar Allan Poe, upon which literary culture
has become
~ore
and more dependent-is entirely foreign to Tolstoy.
All that
is
of a piece, of course, with
his
unique attitude toward
literature, unique, that is, for a writer of modern times. For Tolstoy
continually dissociated himself from literature whether considered
matter-of-factly, as a profession like any other, or ideally as an auto–
nomous way of life, a complete fate in the sense in which the French
writers of Flaubert's generation conceived of it. In his youth a soldier
who saw war at first hand, the proprietor and manager of Yasnaya
Polyana, a husband and father not as other men are husbands and
fathers but in what might be described as a programmatic and even
militant fashion, .and subsequently a religious philosopher and the
head of a sect, he was a writer through all the years-a writer, but
never a litterateur, the very idea repelled him. The litterateur performs
a function imposed by the social division of labor, and inevitably he
pays the price of his specialization by .accepting and even applauding
his own one-sidedness and conceit, his noncommitted state as witness
and observer, and the necessity under which he labors of preying upon
life for the themes that it yields. It is with pride that Tolstoy exempted
Lermontov and himself from the class of "men of letters" while com–
miserating with Turgenev and Goncharov for being so much of it;
and in his
Reminiscences of Tolstoy
Gorky remarks that he spoke of
literature but rarely and little, "as if it were something alien to him."
To account for that attitude by tracing it back to Tolstoy's
aristocratic status, as if he disdained to identify himself with a plebeian
profession, is to take much too simple a view of his personality. The
point is, rather, that from the very first Tolstoy instinctively recog–
nized the essential insufficiency and makeshift character of the narrow–
ly aesthetic outlook, of the purely artistic appropriation of the world.
His personality was built on too broad a frame to fit into an aesthetic
mold, and he denied that art was anything more than the ornament
.and charm of life. He came of age at a time when the social group to
which he belonged had not yet been thoroughly exposed to the ravages
of the division of labor, when men of his stamp could still resist the
dubious consolations it brings in its train. Endowed with enormous
energies, possessed of boundless egoism and of an equally boundless
