Genius is vision, often involving the gift of finding patterns where others see nothing but a chance collection of objects. Genius is a memory for essential details. Genius is ‘the transcendent capacity for taking trouble,” as Carlyle said; it is the capacity for brooding over the subject until it reveals its full potentialities; but that again is a form of energy. Genius is also a belief in oneself and the importance of one’s mission, without which the energy is dissipated in hesitations and inner conflicts.
– Malcolm Cowley, Introduction to Anna Karenina (1960)
Having spent the better part of my career reading and writing, leading up to the publication of Inside the Liberal Arts, the question of how to spend this summer wasn’t a tough call: more reading and writing. Not because it’s the best thing to do, or for any elevated reasons. It’s just what I do best and enjoy most. Call it lifelong learning; one of the fatal byproducts of a liberal education is that you can never get enough of it.
The focus of my attention this summer has been Tolstoy. I’ve been reading Anna Karenina, and in the Fall, I’ll be digging into War and Peace – both for the second time.
In a perfect world, I’d also be finishing Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, along with a small stack of other philosophy tomes and assorted books and essays on the liberal arts, because – well, why stop now? Meanwhile, I’m enjoying Randy Rainbow’s vivid memoir, Playing with Myself – and Tolstoy.
Why Tolstoy? First, because I co-host a literary seminar that meets in September, and Anna Karenina was this year’s choice. Just as important, the professor who leads the seminar, and many of the participants, are old friends. Our annual get-together is like a stimulating mini-college-reunion.
Another reason is that I love Tolstoy. He isn’t an especially “beautiful” writer, although there are arresting passages, especially about nature and human nature; and I’m not enamored of the translation I’m reading, by a Russian-American couple, which is very highly regarded, yet full of infelicities. Nor is Tolstoy funny (like Mr. Rainbow) – except for an extended wedding scene that takes up several chapters mid-book and reads like a dark Russian version of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
What is it then?
For one thing, Tolstoy is full of philosophical and other ideas, which he exposes through his characters’ lives and inner struggles rather than by preaching about them. He has exceptional insight into the human psyche in both its male and female varieties. And he is a dreamer who makes his dreams of love, compassion and decency the moral center of his prose.
Tolstoy’s characters grow on you; but more than that, they grow into their fates, as wobbling agents who enjoy partial, often calamitous moments of freedom in a highly structured and stricture-ridden society. As such, Tolstoy meets George Orwell’s litmus test for great literature: that the characters evolve and grow across the pages. In his essay on “Charles Dickens,” Orwell writes:
Why is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens's – why is it that he seems to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people that are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens's are already finished and perfect.
For Orwell, a son of the British upper class and a hard-bitten socialist, to rank Tolstoy – a Russian count and a romantic – above Dickens, his own great precursor who documented the brutalities of Industrial Age Britain, might be considered high praise. (For that matter, Orwell himself, who documented the brutalities of the 20th century better than almost anyone, doesn’t quite pass the Orwell test, which maybe suggests it isn’t the final word on literary greatness). But his appraisal of Tolstoy is both a judgment and a statement of truth.
Tolstoy, like Dickens, writes from and to the heart – unlike Dostoevsky, or Orwell himself. Yet while Dickens documents the cruelty and comedy of his society, and the resilience of its less-fortunate members, more than Tolstoy does, I believe Tolstoy is the greater writer for exactly the reason Orwell cites. And I’ve never found a better definition of what separates great literature from nearly great.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is pitiable: more a victim, and less a criminal or adulteress, than either she or her society can fathom. Meanwhile (as Gary Saul Morson writes in an insightful review essay [Death and the Hedgehog, The New York Review of Books, June 22 2023]) “Tolstoy traces dozens of tiny changes in [Alexéi Alexándrovich] Karenin’s consciousness and feeling that lead him to forgive and love the unfaithful wife he has hated.” Put another way: Tolstoy’s characters, like real people, are complex.
Karenin’s softening comes too late for Anna – but not for the reader. Similarly, in War and Peace, there’s the gradual, but ultimately spectacular, evolution of Pierre.
What shines through all of Tolstoy’s work is his love: of life, of Russia, its land, its animals, and its people. His sympathy for his characters is palpable. In the sprawling narrative bubbles of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, he creates a self-contained world. It’s a raw, unjust 19th century world, to be sure, as was Dickens’s London; but in its drama, its realism, and its moral and psychological sophistication, it seems to us vast and full of possibility. As Malcolm Cowley wrote in his introduction to the 1960 edition, “the great quality of the novel is [its] sense of vivid and abounding life.”
That’s why Tolstoy’s world, for all its violence and cruelty, is a world that you want to crawl into and inhabit, if only on the page, knowing that your imagination is in the hands of a master. Great writers do that, though more often on a lesser scale. In contemporary Anglophone fiction there are too many to name. (Ian McEwan, John Banville, Maggie O’Farrell).
In tracing the psychological, moral, and intellectual development of their characters, they challenge us to enter their lives and grow along with them: to open our eyes, minds, and hearts. That is the feat Tolstoy triumphantly achieved – and maybe the ultimate power of literature.