The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy/Tolstoy's Diaries
Green, Martin
negativity. She makes us aware again of flight, even if it amounts to little in the quire a way of seeing . . . in which life how dangerous the world is and of the end. In...
...MARC brother Sergei, for instance, was quite ironic about the tender letters that passed between Tolstoy and the older woman...
...but such separate and equal as- Tolstoy, not with any hope of making it one spent one's time in education, pects of his mind cannot obliterate that disappear, but simply of explaining it...
...swers the question: How did you get to and their values were usually dominant...
...he became a poem - with its "cock's shrill clarion," books: the history of how Eliot found moralist instead of a novelist...
...Books: THOSE FEET OF CLAY I T would be hopeless to attempt an ac- THE DIARIES OF SOPHIA TOLSTOY spoke the language of feeling...
...He swung from one position to another, and the violence of his opinions derived from their character as reactions...
...She grieved over the passing of her own youth while she was still adolescent...
...Somehow the idea of Origins of Non-Violence: Tolstoy and Gandhi kind of absolution - a license to not take publishing a magazine got planted (by in Their Historical Settings (Pennsylvania his male chauvinism seriously...
...And this was the life Tolstoy this one...
...arar I b* W rn e,n,mnrl a it, [hristiaas er>ertus5ere.' Written by African nationals, expatriates and World Vision International executives who have dealt first-hand with the suffering in Africa, A Season for Hope provides up-to-datec broad-based summaries and close-up vignettes of the situation on that continent...
...part of War and Peace...
...He needed, sooner or later, to choose "curfew tolls the knell of parting day," .teachers," and its day-by-day spelling one of these points of view and commit no "lowing herd wind slowly o'er the out of his lesson plans - it fits on the his energies to it...
...the other half they sometimes called barbarian, sometimes Asiatic...
...Since I have given Tolstoy a major role the most important act in the world, for in my life as moral teacher and religious both men and women...
...He buildings, including a grist mill, in a Foxplayed the role of rash enthusiast vis a vis Raymond A. Schroth fire educational park...
...In this way, too, therefore, Tolstoy stood astride a crack in the earth, separating Russia from Europe, and past from future...
...The women...
...the right spouse Martin Green philosopher, it is painful to have to ac- was another moral world, facing and in knowledge - as these days one is often some sense mirroring your own, and the forced to acknowledge - that he was tritus or spent ammunition of the sex war images that mirrored to and fro between also a male chauvinist pig...
...This sense of self, too, he learned from novels, notably from Rous- SOMETIMES A SHINING MOMENT: the Humanities, various foundations, and seau...
...Tolstoy believed in those ideas, but he also believed in other and opposite ones...
...In which so much of Tolstoy's thinking read and wrote began with Richardson in these capacities he and his brothers met does...
...No prizes were being handed Rousseau style...
...Contrariwise, the cultured part of the aristocracy, like the Tolstoys, absorbed that liberal ideology though they remained aware of the counter truths embodied in their class and family traditions and the peasants they employed...
...He was a creature of enthusiasms, and found his stable identity only in a constant change A teacher's teacher of identity...
...And this is what comes out in The question obviously arises, why led between 1864 and 1881, the years of his diaries and his wife's diaries...
...A the world, and especially women some quite remarkable love letters in the woman can be free only if she is a Chris- readers...
...Nevertheless, - the doxa generated in a smoking room the two were life itself...
...They could perhaps be said to be 75 percent Europeanized...
...And I ects...
...Those Eliot) and it caught on...
...Fuller Theologkat Seminary School ofwoeld US1 10nr 'Manyr fasbauepnanda at!vf1Af+* X13' since lbe dee ruu ttng dmebtbl began...
...an ideology centered lem they raise: Tolstoy's attitude toward Edited and translated by R.F...
...And] .. . like those quoted above...
...culturally they were much closer to people in Western Europe than to the Russian peasants...
...His books inThis is as far - I think - as a defense tenth grade classes, he asked the students clude The Challenge of the Mahatmas, Dreams of Tolstoy can be pushed...
...He saw the cultural aspirations of women like his wife from inside, or alongside, but he also saw them from a distance, in irony and opposition...
...After marriage that is what he was...
...Perhaps the poem and I had come from become the person you are today...
...is the moralist - those who like Nabokov, - with the help of Eliot's friends in Will & Ariel Durant Professor of Humanities "long to kick the glorified soap-box from publishing, the National Endowment for at St...
...But Tolstoy's The most intelligent woman is less intel- Part of the answer lies in the novel own experience of "love" and of life in ligent than the most stupid man...
...In spite of himself, Corrigan leads would keep its heavy moments of rise impossible value we place on experi- Devina to the simple wisdom to say, "I and fall, but would at the same time be ence...
...In early and even middle manhood THE FOXFIRE EXPERIENCE the Whole Earth Catalogue fad of the he subjected himself to older friends, TWENTY YEARS TEACHING IN A 1960's - Foxfire, a magazine of Georgia quite unlike each other and unlike him- HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM folk culture, with a budget of $450,000 self...
...CA 91016...
...Trade paper 128 pages $5.95 Available Now Available for $4.00 with prepaid orders (f5.9'l list...
...The reader will be encouraged to understand the natural and man-made factors which have contributed to the African crisis, the efforts of dedicated people around the world to provide relief and the spiritual opportunities resulting from the famine...
...overcome the lethargy of his ninth and partment at Tufts University...
...She makes us aware again of flight, even if it amounts to little in the quire a way of seeing . . . in which life how dangerous the world is and of the end...
...two volumes) choice of the right spouse came to seem Scribners, $60, 755 pp...
...and it forms a a Christian is a wild beast...
...An emancipated woman who is not out, in the world of readers, for opinions was to write her life-story...
...For those who to brainstorm, to come up with ideas to of Adventure, Dreams of Empire, and The intensely admire his late work, it brings a snap them out of it...
...His reactions against call him Eliot because he presents him- Eliot's rereading of John Dewey's Exhis own enthusiasms expressed them- self informally, and, unlike his "kids," I perience and Education...
...And, of course, he reacted I BEGAN reading Eliot Wigginton's (Eliot's students had to approve the proagainst each of them in time...
...A new book from WORLD VISION INTERNATIONAL anticipates for AFRICA A SEASON FOR HOPE WA Ucc, I1 Says Maurke Strvug,UN Dlrcctor fur Emergency Operarions In Afrka: 7 am gr'uUy -4--d by AM- A kramn frxt:npe' ub&h, f7enasenshtdryforAscansandtheircomplex pnrbienrs that ran Only carne ft-nn deep tomb enene and eammitnle,ir to the [antlnenr...
...Of course, he was or locker-room society when "men" one entered - in novels - a paradisal also wonderfully sensitive to women, share their thoughts about "women...
...The underlying theme is the Christian hope which motivates those ho struggle to save the starving victims and to rehabilitate the survivors...
...Rather, this is a world of police inspirational/self-improvement shelf, Berlin means by saying that Tolstoy was sirens, honking horns, littered The Search for Excellence for idealistic a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog...
...Write to MARC, 919 W. Hunt ingtorl [rise, Monrovia...
...diaries is - understandably - bursting and vulgar role...
...This is doubly puzzling Tolstoy was introduced to this world with indignation about that, and the because he could so well play, in his of feeling by books and by his Aunt translator of Tolstoy's is clearly embar- fiction, that very different role which Toinette, who brought him up, and who rassed...
...one of the world's greatest...
...He knew, in some sense, how the trick was turned - how those intimate feelings were aroused - and he never wholly believed in them...
...This has something to do with the special position of Russia within Europe...
...Books...
...state...
...Thus his relation to "novels," including his own, was always ambivalent...
...dissertation...
...The mobility that Blackwood tion...
...The liberal ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, France, and Germany, and the literary forms that carried those ideas, came in from the West, while the life of the Russian peasants went on much as before, in another rhythm...
...These are in fact the ordinary de- England and Rousseau in France, and it many other varieties of "love...
...Christian around marriage and around women...
...He was able an academic mini-revolution and a As a book, Eliot's story belongs partly to be each character in turn, to see the million-dollar institution - the same day in the genre of the American autobiogworld wholly from each point of view, I had tried unsuccessfully to teach raphy as success story, like Jane Adand to interconnect them in a plot...
...AddsC Peteewagoe[, Profrxwrafchurch Growth...
...Foxfire courses in high schools throughout the country, twenty-four log political conservative and lyric poet...
...a Foxfire play stareach of them, as Pierre and Levin do in ring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy his novels...
...His Commonweal: 282 Against a backdrop of massive drought and apocalyptic starvation...
...They don't bear the authority fiction, but the kind that Tolstoy first the seigneur of a hereditary estate...
...Sometimes a Shining Moment - the posal to produce it...
...He had to wrench himself free from art I asked the class to enter the world of the Thus we have what could be three in order to pursue truth...
...sentiments and consciousness more ment on them...
...Russians felt that their culture was half European...
...guide on how-we the readers can teach we see in his remarks about women...
...An urban cemetery same time - with its chapter-length lists resolve his ambivalences by the means of sits at the bottom of the block, but here no of "overarching truths" about the "best art...
...tion of art...
...AFRICA: A Season for Hope is, indeed, recommended reading...
...State University...
...Nary...
...As he looked to the past before his imagines is just such a truce with existThrough Devina's knowing nod to death, Kafka wrote in his journal: ence: to find the elusive balance between Corrigan's paralysis, Blackwood implies "When considering the hopes I had the dazzle of nothing and the misbelief that all transcendence is false transcend- formed for life, the one which appeared that our lives measurably touch the ence...
...And unfor- and "paths of glory" that "lead but to himself as a teacher by engaging the tunately the temperament which served the grave...
...Sergei's was a worldly and aristocratic mind - closer to Lovelace than to Clarissa - and Tolstoy greatly admired it...
...Tolstoy looked like his grandfather Volkonsky, who in his turn reminded people of Voltaire...
...I private life, on a country estate, with and to feminine points of view, in his am going to face this ugly aspect of many children and dependents, where novels...
...sidewalks, and "ghetto blasters...
...He was known as a cry-baby in childhood, be9 May 1986: 283 cause of his proneness to tears...
...because does Tolstoy allow himself (over many his happiness in marriage and his writing it came out in their long and bitter con- years, and in the semi-public situation of of War and Peace and Anna Karenina flicts...
...His first fictional project tian...
...The translator of Sophia Tolstoy's his diaries) to play such an unflattering - and he knew its relation to novels...
...energies of his students in various projhim so well in the former role served him Maybe if I were more like Eliot...
...But we sustain the illusion of the most important was the desire to ac- world...
...for instance, his brother Sergei, a melancholy cynic, Boris Chicherin, a Eliot Wigginton a year, a series of nine best-selling Foxfire liberal ideologue, and Afanasy Fet, a Doubleday, $19.95, 438 pp...
...philanthropy, and - this was often only first profile- we cannot turn to those that is, of linking it with other sides of his implicit - the production and consumpother sides of Tolstoy till we have faced personality and situation...
...Who would guess, reading Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, that the author owned a serf who attended him personally, from boyhood on, and whom he sent to the army barracks to be flogged, on occasion...
...Twenty years ago, fresh struggle between him and his wife, which out of Cornell, a green, idealistic teacher REVIEWERS in some sense demanded strong feelings at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, to MARTIN GREEN teaches in the English Defrom him, in the name of sincerity...
...There are many varieties of prose a dandy, a gambler, a whoremonger, and fulness...
...But different parts of the educated classes reacted differently to those ideas...
...won him the reverence of readers all over wrote him, while he was a young man, What kind of things did he say...
...Commonweal: 284...
...They did it...
...Its einkpjcallysorurd mmnx7rreryarfe uedpmperrie+enJJers+rr~nnremuh-k term rnluu'ons to a/rlrball rrfus, Afroatnand non• Africans, can nwkeacr+nln utirm...
...Tolstoy's temperament, moreover, was reactive and divided by nature...
...headaches, flushes, pulse-beats...
...He was also ments, quite apart from their distaste- acter...
...who admire the novelist and deplore the What began as a class project became FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J...
...He could read, or write, a tender love scene, and the next day cynically mock it...
...The novel genre belonged primarily to the rising middle class of Europe, and was allied to all sorts of liberal ideas...
...As you genre, which had, as Tolstoy knew it, a general was by no means confined to his see, these are not very interesting judg- strong though implicit ideological char- relations with Aunt Toinette...
...And Eliot Wigginton is an educational to this we must add the life-and-death phenomenon...
...While the professional middle classes, to which Sophia Tolstoy's parents belonged, were almost 100 percent Europeanized...
...He had written it out of his liberal imagination, while much of his behavior was that of traditional Russian barin, His wife, Sophia, fell in love with him through reading Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and learned the joys of feeling from it...
...His experience was in some ways opposite...
...Earn glum gc+rennestyroaednvtiefeffr sot seen the utbolepecluee_ countrybl' caunoy...
...The state in its official identity, the Tsardom and its bureaucracy, tried to import the technology of the West - and its techniques of organization and discipline - without its liberal ideology...
...This is what Isaiah lea...
...And those for whom feminism in plain wrappers...
...in his novels, Tolstoy portrayed himself as a sort of Rousseau, but other people saw him as Voltaire...
...That is, it count of all that is discussed in these Translated by Cathy Porter created in its readers' minds a structure of thousands of pages, much more a judg- Random House, $35, 1043 pp...
...The Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a dams's classic Twenty Years at Hull hegemony of these values shifted, but - Country Churchyard" to fourteen col- House, where a venerable person anbecause he was writing novels - women lege men and women in Jersey City...
...Thus her husband's experience of women, and of her in particular, was tainted by his own insincerity...
...While high school teachers...
...Politically they could be, as Sophia was, quite conservative...
...that is, more so than his brothers...
...In this light, our efforts to translate have been fooled by none of this," and to recognized, and with no less admirable the ambiguity we know into the certainty go forward anyway until she decides clarity, as a nothing, a dream, a drifting we desire seem desperate in their inten- she's had enough...
...Dayu:n Roberrshas ru•giem at the ubokpwtrnrln hIs nnar*abtebork, 7be autha enCessm a us m rejruv in u iu+,brzss been done and rn n,ledlceae ou sts ra what ran be done It is a book nfbvpe and chaitenge...
...At the But Tolstoy was never really content to worlds too far away...
...a treatise on teaching, inspired by badly in the latter...
...California rcwidcnts add 6'h% sales tax...
...Peter's College in Jersey City...
...but he under his sandaled feet" - have to make is the major moral issue must surely conwas prone to all the emotions, and felt a more complicated adjustment of their demn him and read the great books only them in bodily terms - sweats, feelings...
...a practical selves as crude and vulgar prejudice - as do not want to call him "Wig...
...a Foxfire String This temperament was ideally suited story of how he turned a backwoods Bank, and, the ultimate honor - Foxfire to a novelist's work, and it made Tolstoy Georgia high school English course into as the subject of a Ph.D...
...What I will offer instead elaborate and extensive than they had are some thoughts on the thorniest prob- TOLSTOY'S DIARIES known before...
...That is why Tolstoy, later in life, repudiated Childhood, Boyhood, Youth as insincere...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 9
