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PARTISAN REVIEW
George Sand, then adored by virtually all the Petersburg writers, in–
cluding Dostoevsky.
The faith in family life is integral to Tolstoy. It has the deepest
psychological roots in his private history, and socially it exemplifies
his championship of patriarchal relations. It is a necessary part of his
archaistic outlook, which in later life was transformed into a special
kind of radicalism, genuinely revolutionary in some of its aspects and
thoroughly archaistic in others.
War and Peace
is as much a chronicle
of certain families as an historical novel. The historical sense is not
really native to Tolstoy. His interest in the period of 1812 is peculiarly
his own, derived from his interest in the story of his own family. He
began work on
Anna K arenina
after failing in the attempt to write
another historical novel, a sequel to
War and Peace.
And
Anna Kare–
nina
is of course the novel in which his inordinate concern with mar–
riage and family life receives its fullest expression.
The existential center of the Tolstoyan art. Tolstoy as the last of the
unalienated artists.
So much has been made here of the ration–
alism of Tolstoy that it becomes necessary to explain how his art is
saved from the ill effects of it. Art and reason are not naturally con–
gruous with one another, and many a work of the imagination has
miscarried because of an excess of logic. "There may be a system of
logic; a system of being there can never be," said Kierkegaard. And
art is above all a recreation of individual being; the system-maker
must perforce abstract from the real world while the artist, if he is
true to his medium, recoils from the process of abstraction because it
is precisely the irreducible quality of life, its multiple divulgements in
all their uniqueness and singularity, which provoke his imagination.
Now there is only one novel of Tolstoy's that might be described
as a casualty of his rationalism, and that is
Resurrection.
The greater
part of his fiction is existentially centered in a concrete inwardness
and subjectivity by which it gains its quality of genius. In this sense
it becomes possible to say that Tolstoy is much more a novelist
of life and death than he is of good and evil-good and evil are
not categories of existence but of moral analysis. And the binding
dogmas or ideas of Tolstoy's fiction are not in contradiction with its
existential sense; on the contrary, their interaction is a triumph of
creative tact and proof of the essential wholeness of Tolstoy's nature.
The Tolstoyan characters grasp their lives through their total person–
alities, not merely through their intellects. Their experience is full of
moments of shock, of radical choice and decision, when they confront
themselves in the terrible and inevitable aloneness of their being. To
