Tolstoy Today

...They retain their social sense, even too rigidly, while our novelists "try to create imaginatively the climate that in nineteenth-century Russia existed politically...

...Bayley probably feels the same way, but he does not have the courage of his philosophical convictions...

...he felt that the present should ideally be the past...

...His attacks on such writers as Mailer and Genet are vitiated by his unwillingness to drive home the lesson to be learned from Tolstoy's writings...

...I have always felt that this was best expressed in his imaginative work...

...It is here that Bayley has found the key to Tolstoy's creative elan, his epic sweep, his magical ability to create convincing characters...

...The master-work of this volume is his treatment of War and Peace...

...Because our novelists' characters feel they have not made the laws, they can act as irresponsibly as they wish...

...but he cannot ease his confrontation of life in the reflections of an Ivan, the fable of a Stravrogin and a Grand Inquisitor...

...it is simply an attribute of life, of the fully sentient being...

...Everywhere," he says, "we shall find references to his characters being pleased with themselves...

...it is as universal and primordial as the promptings of human self-concern...

...Dostoevsky idolized the past...

...A completely commendable and admirable aim, doubly so since there are not many other critics around these days who can lay claim to a coherent system of ideas...

...This is irritating...

...The outsider, the alienated, cut off from the social whole, has become, as Bayley says with sarcastic relish, "the undying worm of fiction...

...Ironically enough," Bayley comments, "Tolstoy may be said to have suffered the Russian extremity more keenly than Dostoevsky, because he cannot turn it into imagination and idea...

...He deplores this irresponsibility, for it means a less and less "social" fiction, though he wanly admits that fiction most likely thrives best "where communal responsibility and mutuality are not directly required of us...

...With Norman Mailer and William Burroughs in mind, not to speak of the subway ads urging the depressed to join the elite in the underground, Bayley's description of Dostoevsky's aim in writing Notes from the Underground takes on a de-liciously satiric aspect...

...Perhaps it's about time that English critics reread "Men Without Art" and "Time and Western Man...

...but just as certainly he finds in himself??in what the French philosopher Alain so beautifully calls "his stone-age thoughts"??a faith that has no justification in the brute facts of politics, committees, the external order...

...After this is said, Bayley's book, especially in its un-polemical aspects, is a brilliant achievement...

...It may be unfair to beat present-day literature over the head with Tolstoy's enormous vitality, but that is precisely what Bayley does, and with such skill that the unfairness only occurs to one much later...

...He wrote his short masterpiece, Notes from the Underground, with the aim of blasting the then fashionable scientific determination and exposing a social evil: "a man 'born in a chemical retort, not in the womb of nature,' a man who cannot even honestly dislike his fellows but 'derives his dislikes from books...

...After reading it, I found that the critics were much more belligerent than Bayley himself, who makes some shrewd but rather mild and oblique criticisms of the mythology of modernism...

...I do agree with his estimates of Master and Man, Family Happiness, Hadji Murad, and many of the nouvelles that Tolstoy wrote after his conversion...

...The isolation that is characteristic of Dostoevsky's heroes appears only tangentially in Tolstoy's work...

...Here we reach the crux of Bayley's position...

...He is not representative of the development of a type...

...Unusual, startling comparisons, such as the comparison of Tolstoy with Chaucer, brilliant dissections of Tolstoy's approach to war and his use of the pastoral, his views about family and social system, make this long chapter by far the most exciting piece of writing on War and Peace that I have come across in any language...

...He wants literature to return to the social awareness and responsibility that is found in the best realistic fiction and, supremely, in Tolstoy's greatest novels and stories...

...But what about Levin and his natural mysticism...

...Tolstoy would not have been surprised, because he refused to deal with such questions in his fiction...

...he distrusted the onward march of history...

...The negative qualities of this hero were to be swallowed up in union with the people...

...WRITERS & WRITING Tolstoy Today By Raymond Rosenthal It comes as a surprise to realize that John Bayley's new critical study, Tolstoy and the Novel (Viking, 316 pp., $6.95) is the first full-length treatment in English of the great Russian writer...

...He makes many sharp and revealing observations about the Russian literary scene, too, but his main intent is to clarify the differences between the two great Russian writers??the diverse attitudes that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky took toward the past and history, the future and its Messianic implications...

...With a flair for paradox, Bayley says that Tolstoy became much more deliberately esthetic after he turned against his art than he had ever been in his great novels...

...Whatever else can be said about Bayley's book, it has the immense virtue of getting there first...

...It would also seem that nothing more could be wrung from the tried-and-true comparison of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...

...So I am enthusiastic about the book as a whole and rather sad that its implicit philosophical attitudes were not more openly expounded...

...It occurs to me that what Bayley needs??what indeed many critics of his abilities and particular approach need??is some of the chutzpah of a Wyndham Lewis: the ability to drive to the ideological core of a writer's position and reveal it for what it actually is...

...All the more reason, then, that a book by him on Tolstoy should constitute an event of some importance...

...he can guard himself with a system and a way of life...

...He adds: "Dostoevsky would be outraged to hear it...

...It is the condition of their vitality??deprived of it, they cease to exist...

...He carries a sharply honed axe which he not only grinds but also employs in deadly aggressive fashion...

...Yet Bayley has a great deal to say on the subject that is both new and devastatingly applicable to contemporary literary trends...

...There are of course the books of George Steiner, Theodore Redpath and Isaiah Berlin, but none of these sets out to deal with Tolstoy solely as an imaginative writer...

...Tolstoy is not merely what American critics like to call a mythopeic genius, he also had very definite ideas, a philosophy...

...Bayley uses the Russian word samodovolstvo??self-satisfaction??and he uses it as a key to unlock many of the Tolstoyan mysteries...

...He can write a Confession...

...Isaiah Berlin's book has seemed to me a trifle too relentless in its effort to prove that the rationalistic Tolstoy left no room for the mystical Tolstoy...

...His persona is, in fact, a little blurred...

...As a result, he has been able to refer to the exacting and laborious work of Russian textual critics and, more important, to the philosophical speculations of at least two generations of Russian thinkers stimulated by Tolstoy...

...His Prince Andrew is like a superfluous man, but is not one...

...Certainly he continues to use his reason to explain the people around him, the press of necessity...

...For example, in closing his disquisition on the Underground Man and his curious origin, Bayley rather sadly comments that we Westerners have changed places with the Russians...

...One has the feeling that he has lived so long and so intimately with this epic novel that he knows its characters as vividly as one knows close friends...

...and he talks about them with the freedom, gaiety, and charm that only true friendship, true love, can evoke...

...Conceal it" may be a trifle unfair, for he attempts to show his philosophical ideas in the quick of various works of the imagination...

...It might help...

...he cannot help endorsing it...

...I am strongly in sympathy with his aim, but I find that his criticisms of modern fiction, though often acute, have a strange habit of trailing off to nowhere...

...Or, rather, almost admits it, since he ends by putting his statement in the form of a question...

...Dostoevsky failed to bring about that union in his work, and contemporary literature has inherited only the negative qualities of his hero...

...In fact, taking Bayley's position in the round, it has a great many resemblances to the positive, classical approach that Lewis represented so brilliantly in his criticism...

...and it was rather amusing to see many critics who would ordinarily insist that a writer's real biography is contained in his books jump so eagerly to accept Berlin's essentially denigrating thesis...

...Bayley, with commendable industry, has learned Russian...

...Yet to say it is not approved is to stretch the facts: of course Tolstoy is wholly on its side...

...Bayley has a reputation for being tough...

...It is a trait especially evident in the buoyant self-confidence of War and Peace...

...Tolstoy is indeed a unique case, as is any great writer...

...I do not agree with his estimate of The Death of Ivan llyich, which he deems a failure, but his remarks about this crucially important story are unfailingly keen and provocative...

...one feels that he has very definite likes and dislikes, a quite well worked out philosophical system, but that he prefers to conceal it behind a determinedly esthetic approach...

...It is this sort of indecisiveness which may have annoyed certain English critics...

...it is an aspect of his own huge confidence in himself and his own being...

...still, I feel that his imaginative practice can, after due allowances are made for changed conditions, be used as a touchstone for the failures of present-day fiction...

...It seems at times an elegiac, forlorn hope...

...It is neither formulated nor approved...

...Tolstoy, as Bayley explains, did not look toward the future...

...The isolated essays by Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and R. P. Blackmur, together with Prince Mirsky's and Maurice Baring's sections on Tolstoy in their books of Russian literary history, complete the meager conspectus...

...he becomes real to us only through his own unique social and family situation...

...As Alain points out, there is nothing Slavic in Tolstoy's mysticism...

...Perhaps the chief reason for the hesitancy of other critics can be traced to the fact that the main work on Tolstoy has been done by Russian critics and scholars...

...His first important critical work, The Characters of Love, became a kind of rallying ground for critics in England who were fed up with the vague guff about modernism...