THE DOUBLE CRISIS
women created by the writers of western Europe. However, as soon
as it
is
a question no longer of fiction but of judgment, we find that
Goethe, and Tolstoy himself, have put down a long list of state–
ments which no woman could read without laughing. That Nietzsche
could have written, "The more a woman is beautiful, the more she
is modest," makes us wonder. . . .
Then it remains to be seen whether or not Russia is culturally
a part of Europe. What confuses the question
is
that travelers who,
from the moment that they enter Russian territory, no longer feel
themselves to be in Europe, assert that Russia is a part of Asia. For
myself, I believe that Russia is actually neither in Europe nor in
Asia,
in
the same way that Japan
is
neither in Asia nor in America.
If,
rather than having been obsessed by Japanese painting, which
they have known for a long time, Westerners had paid some attention
to Japanese music, which they have known only recently, they would
have found themselves much more at home in Japan. The Japanese
scale
is
approximately our own. The heroic quality of Shinto song
is reasonably Occidental, and the Japanese and Chinese have noth–
ing in common in their ideas of love or loyalty or death. In these,
the Japanese are far closer to the Vikings.
To get back to Russia. Ilya Ehrenburg said in a lecture, think–
ing I imagine of an interview which your humble servant gave on
the Atlantic Civilization: "Which is really European-Tolstoy or
the atom bomb?"
If
Russia has to be defined as the country that
lacks the atom bomb, then the definition will not hold much longer–
at least if it turns on that point alone.
But, seriously, as to Tolstoy.
If
it is a question of knowing
whether the author of
War and Peace
is a European, he is incon–
testibly one of the major geniuses of the West. Furthermore, he was
one whose mind was turned toward the Occident, proud of being
compared to Balzac, and not interested in by-lines. But if you take
him, not as the writer of this novel, but as Count Tolstoy, a prophet
of his own particular kind of Christianity, whose death was like that
of the hero of a Russian folk song, as the man who attempted to
establish a new evangelism, and who proclaimed the artistic meaning–
lessness of Shakespeare, then the problem has a different color.
Let us sum up: the idea of Europe is far from clear on the
plane of culture. In part, the notion of Europe is an inheritance. On
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