426
PARTISAN REVIEW
the modern novel is organically alien to Tolstoy. Given the frame–
work in which his characters move we are told everything that we
need to know or want to know about them. The tangled intimate life,
the underside of their consciousness, their author is not concerned
with; he sets them up in the known world and sees them through their
predicaments, however irksome and baffiing, without ever depriving
them of the rationality which supports their existence. For just as in
Tolstoy's religiosity there is no element of mysticism, so in his creative
art there is no element of mystery.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Tolstoy did not pass through
the school of Romanticism, .and perhaps that is the reason he never
hesitated to strike out the dark areas in the space in which he outlined
his leading figures. He has few links with the literary culture evolved
in Russia after 1820; the fact is that he has more in common with
his literary grandfathers than with his literary fathers. Insofar .as he
has any literary affiliations at all they go back to the eighteenth cen–
tury, to Rousseau, to Sterne, to the French classical drama, and in
Russia to the period of Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Novikov, and Radichev.
He has their robustness and skepticism. His quarrels with Turgenev,
his inability to get on with the liberal and radical writers grouped
around the
Contemporary,
a Petersburg periodical edited by the poet
Nekrasov in which Tolstoy's first stories were published, are explained
not so much by personal factors, such as his intractability of temper,
as by the extreme differences between the conditions of his develop–
ment and those of the Russian intelligentsia, whose.rise coincides with
the appearance of the plebeian on the literary scene. Tolstoy's family
background was archaistic, not in the sense of provincial backward–
ness, but in the sense of the deliberate and even stylized attempt made
by his family- more particularly his father-to preserve at Yasnaya
Polyana the patriarchal traditions of the Russian nobility of the eigh–
teenth century. It was a conscious and militant archaism directed
against the "new" civilization of Petersburg, with its state-bureaucracy
and merchant princes. The young Tolstoy was scornful of the
"theories" and "convictions" held by the writers he met in Petersburg
in the 1850's; instead of putting his trust in "theories" and "convic–
tions" he relied on those Franklinesque rules and precepts of conduct
with which he filled his diaries-rules and P.recepts he deduced from
his idea of unalterable "moral instincts." In Nekrasov's circle he was
regarded as a "wild man," a "troglodyte"; and in the early 1860's,
when he set out on
his
first European tour, Nekrasov and his friends
hoped that he would return in a mood of agreement with their notions
