424
PARTISAN REVIEW
there is a contradiction between the artist and the moralist in him, his
personality retains its basic unity, transcending all contradictions.
Boris Eichenbaum, one of the very best of Tolstoy's Russian critics,
has observed that the spiritual crisis did not operate to disrupt his art
because it was a crisis internally not externally determined, the pre–
requisite of a new act of cognition through which he sought to re-arm
his genius and to ascertain the possibility of new creative beginnings.
Thus
My Confession}
with which Tolstoy's later period opens and
which appeared immediately after
Anna Karenina}
is unmistakably a
work of the imagination and at the same time a mighty feat of con–
sciousness.
Six years after writing
What is Art?
Tolstoy finished
Hadji Murad
( 1904), one of the finest
nouvelles
in the Russian language and a
model of narrative skill and objective artistry. Is not the song of the
nightingales, that song of life and death which bursts into ecstasy
at dawn on the day when Hadji Murad attempts to regain his free–
dom, the very same song which rises in that marvelously sensual
scene in
Family Happiness}
a scene bathed in sunlight, when Masha,
surprising Sergey Mikhaylych in the cherry orchard, enjoys for the
first time the full savor of her youthful love?
Hadji Murad
was writ–
ten not less than forty-five years after
Family Happiness.
And in
The
Devil-a
moral tale, the product; like
The Kreutzer Sonata}
of Tol–
stoy's most sectarian period and extremest assertion of dogmatic
asceticism-:-what we remember best is not Eugene Irtenev's torments
of conscience, his efforts to subdue his passion, but ·precisely the des–
cription of his carnal meetings in the sun-drenched woods with Stepa–
nida, the fresh and strong peasant-girl with full breasts and bright
black eyes. The truth is that in the struggle between the old moralist
and the old magician in Tolstoy both gave as good as they got.
The rationalist and anti-Romantic in Tolstoy. Sources in the eigh–
teenth century. Divergence from the intelligentsia. Creative method.
Tolstoy has been described as the least neurotic of all the great
Russians, and by the same token he can be said to be more committed
than any of them to the rational understanding and ordering of life
and to the throwing off of romantic illusions. Unlike Dostoevsky, he
owes nothing either to the so-called natural school of Gogol or to the
Romantic movement in western literature. The school of Gogol is a
school of morbidity, whereas Tolstoy is above all an artist of the
normal- the normal, however, so intensified that it acquires a poetical
truth and an .emotional fullne...c;,s which we are astounded to discover in
