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deal intimately with death. Consider the difference in this respect be–
tween him and Franz Kafka, another novelist of the existential mode.
In Kafka the theme of death is absent, not because of strength but
rather because of neurotic weakness. He was ridden by a conviction,
as he himself defined it, of "complete helplessness," and baffled by the
seeming impossibility of solving even the most elementary problems
of living, he could not look beyond life into the face of death. He
wrote: "Without ancestors, without marriage, without progeny, with
an unbridled desire for ancestors, marriage, and progeny. All stretch
out their hands toward me: ancestors, marriage, and progeny, but
from a point far too remote from me." That is the complaint of an
utterly alienated man, without a past and without a future. Tolstoy,
on the other hand, was attached with the strongest bonds to the
patrician-peasant life of Yasnaya Polyana, he was in possession of
the world and of his own humanity. His secret is that he is the last of
the unalienated artists. Hence it is necessary to insist on the differences
not so much between him and other artists generally as between him
and the modem breed of alienated artists. It is thanks to this un–
alienated condition that he is capable of moving us powerfully when
describing the simplest, the most ordinary and therefore
in
their own
way also the gravest occasions of life-occasions that the alienated
artist can approach only from a distance, through flat naturalistic
techniques, or though immense subtleties of analysis, or through the
transposition of his subject onto the plane of myth and fantasy.
But, of course, even Tolstoy, being a man of the nineteenth cen–
tury, could not finally escape the blight of alienation. In his lifetime
Russian society disintegrated; he witnessed the passing of the old so–
ciety of status and its replacement by a cruelly impersonal system of
bourgeois relations. Tolstoy resisted the catastrophic ruin of the tradi–
tional order by straining
all
the powers of his reason to discover a
way out. His so-called conversion is the most dramatic and desperate
episode in his stubborn and protracted struggle against alienation.
His attack on civilization is essentially an attack on the conditions that
make for alienation. The doctrine of Christian anarchism, developed
after his conversion, reflects, as Lenin put it, "the accumulated hate,
the ripened aspiration for a better life, the desire to throw off the
past--and also the immaturity, the dreamy contemplativeness, the
political . inexperience, and the revolutionary flabbiness of the vil–
lages." Still, tP,e point of that doctrine lies not in its religious content,
which is very small indeed, but rather in its formulation of a social
ideal and of a utopian social program.
