The Novelist as Biographer
SEGEL, HAROLD B.
The Novelist as Biographer TOLSTOY by Henri Troyat Doubleday. 768 pp. $7.95. Revieived by HAROLD B. SEGEL Associate Professor of Slavic Literatures, Columbia University Henri Troyat is no...
...While the success Tolstoy is enjoying (a respectable place on the New York Times bestseller list, a book club endorsement, enthusiastic reviews) might suggest the book is the first major account of the Russian writer's life, this is hardly the case...
...Indeed, he is outdone in this respect only by the vast, and now outdated, "official" biography by the writer's devoted disciple, Pavel Biryukov...
...Impossible to determine...
...Yet Troyat, more than the others, is wryly sensitive to his subject's human failings, and the profound paradox separating Tolstoy the man from Tolstoy the writer-as-preacher gives a delicious current of irony to Troyat's narrative: "Three days before, on August 10, 1865, to be exact, this enemy of land ownership had purchased seventy-five acres from his neighbor Bibikov...
...Revieived by HAROLD B. SEGEL Associate Professor of Slavic Literatures, Columbia University Henri Troyat is no stranger to us...
...Simmons' brief discussion of Hadji Murad is drily precise: "His [Murad's] story is simply told, revealing the tragic irony of misunderstanding between men of different orders of civilization...
...Simmons understandably offers more extensive information on Tolstoy's contacts with America and Americans, but Troyat is more generous with detail...
...Simmons' book is written in a plain, unadorned lucid style...
...Tolstoy's trip home was uneventful, save for an unusually fierce blizzard that inspired his short story, 'The Snowstorm.' He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana on February 2, 1854...
...Here is how Simmons recounts Tolstoy's return to Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, after his military adventures in the Caucasus: "On January 12, 1854, Tolstoy received the welcome news that he had been transferred to the 5th Battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade in active service on the Danube, and his request for a furlough was also granted...
...For a writer, even fear can be grist to the mill...
...Troyat succumbs, and his book gains: "Russia lay buried deep in snow...
...The field of vision spreads beyond the Caucasus to envelop all Russia...
...But when the novelist-biographer encounters that "unusually fierce blizzard," the temptation to bring the genesis of Tolstoy's short story to life as a fit opening for a new chapter is irresistible...
...But perhaps because he is a novelist he is able to communicate the significance and spirit of Tolstoy's works, as well as something of the way his artistic laboratory functioned...
...Dawn paled in the sky at last, the wind dropped and the smoke of the village appeared in the distance...
...His interest in Russia and its literature is well-grounded, for he was born there and is thoroughly at home with the language...
...Conceived along the heroic lines of War and Peace, Troyat's epic biography is finally available in English, three years after its publication in French...
...Troyat's treatment is considerably more satisfying: "But there is more to this book than just the story of Hadji Murad himself...
...Can one discuss the distinction between good and evil in relation to a beheaded thistle...
...The tormented horse stumbled on through the squalls until dawn...
...He has written several novels on Russian themes (some of them translated into English), and has attracted considerable interest with his previous biographies of two other gods in the Russian literary Pantheon—Pushkin and Dostoevsky...
...A great writer, to be sure, but a difficult and at times decidedly unattractive personality...
...Who is the hero...
...After twenty-five years of preaching to all Russia that woman's noble calling was marriage and childbirth, how could this man publicly deny his ideal...
...Yet only occasionally does the literary biographer happen to have the critical acumen necessary to weave into his account incisive, perceptive evaluations that go far beyond the basic historical information...
...Or to determine what the author was trying to prove...
...How dared he tell others to be chaste when, at sixty, he had gother with child for the thirteenth time...
...After heading his team blindly in every direction, the driver admitted that he was lost...
...The main thing was to feel guilty now and then...
...Stop or wait...
...On the sixth day of the trip, one hundred versts from Novocherkassk, Tolstoy's sledge was caught in a blizzard...
...What to do...
...Hadji Murad, Nicholas I or Avdeyev the soldier...
...He is not a Slav-icist, though, but a professional writer—and a member of that august body, the Academic Francaise...
...A week later, he joyfully set out on the long trip to Yasnaya Polyana...
...To add to one's goods while sighing after holy equality?wasn't that the essence of modern man...
...True, an author's life and works are often so inextricably bound together that the serious literary biography can no more avoid critical comment than the critical study can do without salient facts of biography...
...Tolstoy vowed to base a story on this adventure if he came out of it alive...
...A biography and a critical study, of course, are not the same thing (the goals are different, the techniques are different, and the talents demanded are different...
...Back among men once again, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, 'To succeed in life one must be brave, resolute and keep a cool head.' " Throughout his life Tolstoy was complex, troubled, inconsistent and cantankerous...
...If Troyat's generosity occasionally approaches excess, in one important section—the discussion of Tolstoy's works from genesis to public and critical reception—the reader will be particularly grateful for the erudite inclusivity...
...No more road, no more horizon...
...The relays followed each other, identical, with myopic windows peering out beneath big white roofs, stacks of frozen straw in the courtyards, shivering grooms scurrying around the horses, hulking, silent coachmen...
...Night was coming on...
...In material and presentation, too, Troyat surpasses the master's other Western biographers...
...Just as the candles in a chandelier light up one after the other at the touch of a flame running along a hidden wick, so in this book characters apparently very remote from each other receive and emit light because of a mysterious bond that unites them...
...Artistry, finally, is what widens the gulf between the two biographies...
...He is a novelist before he is a critic, and his critical insights are not original...
...Starting with a trivial incident of guerrilla warfare, Tolstoy demonstrates its repercussions at every level of the social hierarchy...
...Troyat, alas, does not meet this heady standard...
...Whether it be War and Peace, Anna Karenina, the Kreutzer Sonata, or Hadji Murad, Troyat is not simply more expansive in his treatment, he is also far more appreciative of the special genius of each work and its place in the writer's canon...
...With great skill, free of the ten-dentiousness which the art of Tol-stoy itself had to fight through, Henri Troyat does the same for one of the Heroes of Literature...
...By drawing the Hero of History to more human scale in War and Peace, Tolstoy sheared him of much glory and showed him to be no more nor less than a mortal among mor-tals...
...Setting all moral considerations aside, his creation remains a hymn to life, nature, the sap that rises in men and plants...
...These qualities are duly chronicled by all his biographers...
...Troyat provides the same basic information, plus additional details ?Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev approved his application for a furlough and advanced him 125 rubles for the trip...
...This can be appreciated above all by comparing Troyat's book with Simmons...
...Tolstoy biographies generally begin with the family genealogy—incidentally, a good place to examine the advantages of Troyat's technique —and end with the writer's last breath in the stationmaster's small house at the Astapovo railway station...
...If Troyat's book is not the first substantial life of Tolstoy, however, it is far and away the best yet and thoroughly merits the accolades it has received...
...In a few pages a whole vast panorama is presented to us...
...After his profession of faith on the abolition of property, Tolstoy set down the following sentence, undated: 'Every man lies twenty times daily.' " And again: "She [Tolstoy's wife, Sonya] read, cursed, wept...
...Written in a language as spare and precise as that of Pushkin, without digression, without a trace of self-indulgence, compact, nervous, virile, this novel gives proof that Tolstoy's artistry has reached perfection...
...Troyat leaves the imprint of the professional novelist on virtually every page...
...Whirling funnels of snow sped across the fields, sky and earth became indistinguishable and the eardrums ached from the screaming wind...
...Freeze to death, in other words...
...There are sizeable biographies dating from 1910 and 1911 by two of his earliest admirers and translators in the Anglo-Saxon world, Ayl-mer Maude and Nathan Haskell Dole...
...The most solid one in recent memory is the lengthy work by the distinguished American Slavicist, Ernest Simmons, published in 1946 and reissued as a two-volume paperback in 1960...
...Troyat's main structural innovation is taking this one step further to include the aftermath of Tolstoy's death—the later activities of his wife, and in a footnote, a final, brief survey of the whereabouts and doings of the rest of the clan...
...in a cloud of vapor, the horse's head swayed back and forth under the wooden arch, the runners sank deep into the cottony nothingness and the cold became so intense that not even the vodka he downed could keep the passenger warm...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 10
