622
PARTISAN REVIEW
Razumnik, by whose classical treatises the author appears little affected.
In fact Mr. Slonim has chosen that time-honored middle way with
which all readers of academic literary history are all too familiar-in
which knowing allusions are from time to time made to regions beyond
the confines of pure literature, shedding little light and serving only
to tantalize the reader and probably the author too.
But if Mr. Slonim's treatment of
Ideengeschichte
is somewhat thin,
his treatment of individual writers is often interesting and at times il–
luminating. He is a genuinely sensitive critic of literature and writes well
about the great classical masters. Thus he conveys vividly and at
moments imaginatively the horror of empty places, the paranoiac
flight from gaps in reality-the lifeless, the trivial, the hair-raising abyss
of daily life which obsessed Gogol; like Byely and Vengerov he stresses
Gogol's sense of the perpetual presence of the Devil, of hideous grimaces
and grinning fiends in every nook and cranny; and relates this to Gogol's
"realism" with skill, and at times, insight. He is no less enlightening
about the inner crack in the life of Nekrassov.
Mr. Slonim's essay on Turgenev is less interesting than that on
Dostoevsky, about whose novels, without saying anything arrestingly
new or profound, he writes with subtlety, judgment and balance. This,
in dealing with an author who too often hypnotises his critics into his
own condition of fever and violence, is a remarkable achievement in
itself, and says much for Mr. Slonim's sanity and judgment. While his
strictures upon Goncharov who is accused of an excessive tendency to
moralize are open to question, Mr. Slonim's portrait of Tolstoy is
a solid piece of literary draughtsmanship. Mr. Slonim is even here
too fond of walks through open doors, but he does so with modesty,
simplicity and lack of pretentiousness, and tacitly rejects
en passant
the
mountain of fanciful and arid interpretation with which Russian criticism
all but concealed the greatest European novelist.
Mr. Slonim wishes to give his readers a sense of the continuity of
Russian letters, and with this in mind tends at the end of every
chapter to say something about the fortunes of the works of this or that
writer in the Soviet Union. But this excellent intention needs more
for its successful execution than a catalogue of the facts; an attempt
to connect the outlook of a given author, either the actual or the
official beliefs of the Soviet hierarchy, with some indication of the
curious twists and turns of the party line might indeed have been
valuable and fascinating; but this need is not filled by statistical in–
formation on the number of copies of this or that work printed, with, at
