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PARTISAN REVIEW
power of conscience, he was capable, in Leo Shestov's phrase, of des–
troying and creating worlds, and before he was quite twenty-seven
years old he had the audacity to declare his ambition, writing it all
solemnly down in his diary, of becoming the founder of "a new re–
ligion corresponding with the present state of mankind; the religion of
Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism-a practical religion, not
promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth." No wonder, then,
that while approaching the task of mastering the literary medium
with the utmost seriousness, and prizing that mastery as a beautiful ac–
complishment, he could not but dismiss the pieties of art as trivial
compared with the question he faced from the very beginning, the
question he so heroically sought to answer even in his most elemental
creations, in which he seems to us to move through the natural world
with splendid and miraculous ease, more fully at home there than any
other literary artist. Yet even in those creations the very same question
appears now in a manifest and now in a latent fashion, always the
same question: How to live, what to do?
In 1880, when Turgenev visited Yasnaya Polyana after a long
estrangement, he wrote a letter bewailing Tolstoy's apparent deser–
tion of art. "I, for instance, am considered an artist," he said, "but
what am I compared with him? In contemporary European literature
he has no equal. ... But what is one to do with him. He has plunged
headlong into another sphere: he has surrounded himself with Bibles
and Gospels
in
all languages, and has written a whole heap of papers.
He has a trunk full of these mystical ethics and of various pseudo–
interpretations. He read me some of it, which I simply do not under–
stand.... I told him, 'That is not the real thing'; but he replied: 'It
is just the real thing'.... Very probably he will give nothing more
to literature, or if he reappears it will be with that trunk." Turgenev
was wrong. Tolstoy gave a great deal more to literature, and it is out
of that same trunk, so offensive in the eyes of the accomplished man
of letters, that he brought forth such masterpieces as
The Death of
Ivan
Ilych
and
Master and Man,
plays like
The Power of Darkness,
also many popular tales which, stripped of all ornament, have an
essential force and grace of their own, and together with much that is
abstract and over-rationalized, not a few expository works, like
What
Then Must We Do?,
which belong with the most powerful revolu–
tionary writings of the modern age. For it is not for nothing that Tol–
stoy was always rummaging in that black trunk. At the bottom of it,
underneath a heap of old papers, there lay a little
mana-object,
a
little green twig which he carried with him through the years, a twig
