CONCERNING TOLSTOY
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return to a life closer to nature-a return, however, involving a self–
consciousness and a constant recourse to reason that augurs
ill
for the
success of any such experiment.
Tolstoy's art is so frequently spoken of as "organic" that one is
likely to overlook the rationalistic structure on which it is based. This·
structure consists of successive layers of concrete details, physical and
psychological, driven into place and held together by a generaliza–
tion or dogma. Thus in
The Cossacks
the generalization is the idea
of the return to nature; in
Two Hussars
it is the superiority of the
elder Turbin to the younger, that is to say, of the more naive times of
the past to the "modern" period. (The original title of the story was
Father and Son.)
The binding dogma in
Family Happiness
is the in–
stability arid deceptiveness of love as compared with a sound family
life and the rearing of children in insuring the happiness of a married
couple. Yet the didacticism of such ideas seldom interferes with our
enjoyment of the Tolstoyan fiction. For the wonderful thing about it
is its tissue of detail, the tenacious way in which it holds together, as
if it were a glutinous substance, and its incomparable rightness and
truthfulness.
Parallelism of construction is another leading characteristic of
the Tolstoyan method. In
War and Peace,
in the chronicle of the lives
of the Bolkonsky and Rostov families, this parallelism is not devised
dramatically, as a deliberate contrast, but in other narratives it is
driven toward a stark comparison, as between Anna and Vronsky on
the one hand and Kitty and Levin on the other in
Anna Karenina,
or between two generations in
Two Hussars,
or between Lukashka and
Olenin in
The Cossacks.
One writer on Tolstoy put it very well when
he said that in the Tolstoyan novel all ideas and phenomena exist in
pairs. Comparison is inherent in
his
method.
His early
nouvelles
can certainly be read and appreciated with–
out reference to their historical context, to the ideological differences
between him .and his contemporaries which set him off to confound
them with more proofs of his disdain for their "progressive" opinions.
Still, the origin of
Family Happiness
in the quarrels of the period is
worth recalling. At that time (in the 1850's) public opinion was much
exercised over the question of free love and the emancipation of wo–
men; George Sand was a novelist widely read in intellectual circles,
and of course most advanced people agreed with George Sand's liber–
tarian solution of the question. Not so Tolstoy, who opposed all such
tendencies, for he regarded marriage and family life as the foundations
of society. Thus
Family Happiness,
with its denigration of love and
of equal rights for women, was conceived as a polemical rejoinder to
