Leo Tolstoy by G.H. Perris

Half the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist--an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly re-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances--it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. "My friend, " he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, "return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayers could influence you.My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!" For once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe--that is one of his supreme values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable in his works. "We are not to take 'Anna Karenina' as a work of art," said Matthew Arnold; "we are to take it as a piece of life." The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the "Sebastopol Sketches": "I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy's have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters' names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy's is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself. I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of Karenina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind." So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.

Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana ("Clear Field"), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy's youth synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. "Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth"--which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857--tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded. The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier's death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother's death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy's artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.