Tolstoy

The crisis, however, did not mature till 15 years later : it was postponed by his marriage. He had been contemplating marrying for some time. His romance with Valeria Arseniev had ended in nothing. He was obsessed by grave misgivings and doubts before he proposed to Sophie Behrs, a young girl 16 years his junior, with whom he fell in love in 1861. He overcame them, however, and they were married in the following year.

Literary Works (1852-76).

Tolstoy's literary work grew out of his diary. It was primarily an attempt to lay bare the mechan ism of the inner life, and to give clear and verbal definition to the semi-articulate processes of the consciousness. His first literary attempt, The Story of Yesterday (1851, first published 1926) sets out to give an exhaustive account of his feelings and reactions dur ing a given space of twenty-four hours. His first completed and published work, Childhood (1852), less exuberantly analytical and more conventional in form, reveals a greater command over the more intimate and elusive movements of the consciousness than had ever before been displayed in literature. In the stories that followed he further perfected his instruments of analysis, often to the detriment of the imaginative unity of the work. At the same time a conflict which was to remain dominant throughout his life comes to the forefront—the conflict between spontaneous, unre flecting, natural Life and the claims of reason and moral law. In The Cossacks (written 1854, published in what the author re garded as an unsatisfactory form in 1862) the victory rests with life : natural man, unconscious of good and evil, and consequently beyond the reach of ethical reason is glorified in the Cossacks who put to shame the reflecting and impotent hero, Olenin. The futil ity, meanness and vulgarity of civilized man is exposed again and again in Two Hussars (1856), Lucerne (1857), Three Deaths (1859) and iri Kholstonier (1861), a very characteristic satire on the life of the upper classes, in which the role of the intelligent savage of 18th-century literature is played by a racehorse. All his early work is subjective, and the reflecting and introspective char acter, whether his name is Olenin or Nekhlyudov (as in Boyhood, 1854, and Youth, 1857) is always Tolstoy himself. The other men whose feelings are analyzed, are merely types of "man in general" —psychological mechanisms of cause and effect, devoid of person ality. Such for instance are the officers of the Sevastopol stories (1855) in whom Tolstoy dissects the components of fear and courage.

After his marriage Tolstoy lived at Yasnaya Polyana, passing some part of the year at Moscow and on his estate beyond the Volga. His married life was happy and prosperous. His income was increased by successful farming and the sale of his books. His wife was entirely devoted to him and to her children of which she bore him nine. His inner conflict was lulled for many years

by the triumph of spontaneous life over questioning reason. His philosophy in those years was "that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's family,' and not try to be wiser than Life and Nature.

This philosophy found its full expression in the first of his few great novels, War and Peace. It was commenced in 1864 and completed in 1866. After that he turned again for a time to pedagogical writings, and made several attempts at other histori cal novels, including one on Peter the Great, that remained un finished, because of the invincible repulsion aroused in him by the proposed hero. In 1873 he began Anna Karenina, which appeared in instalments from 1875 to 1877. Towards the end of his work on this second of his great novels he entered on the prolonged and fateful crisis that resulted in his conversion. Indications of its approach are clearly visible in the latter part of the novel.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are Tolstoy's masterpieces. They mark, in a certain sense, the highest point reached in its development by the modern realistic novel. Literary realism at tains in them its goal: an adequacy of the verbal pattern to the living reality which ultimately produces the feeling, familiar to readers of Tolstoy, that his characters are to be classified with people in flesh and blood, not with other characters in fiction. This supreme achievement was largely prepared for by his previous apprenticeship, but War and Peace marks an enormous advance over all that had preceded it. The countless characters that fill the stage are seen not from outside only, but from the inside. The women in this respect are particularly remarkable, and among them most of all Natasha who is the centre of the novel, the em bodiment of its philosophy, the quintessence of spontaneous, nature-wise mankind. Nor does the author introduce himself so crudely as he does in his earlier work, but is transformed into the two distinct and objective characters of Prince Andre and of Pierre. With its world of characters, and against its vast back ground of Russian and European history the novel is a real piece of life, transformed by art. The novel is markedly optimistic, and has not without propriety been described as an idyll of the Rus sian landed gentry. Not that the horrors of life are entirely absent but they are overcome by the beneficent influence of a benevolent Life-god presiding over the action. The idyllic atmos phere is preserved in the greater part of Anna Karenina, which as a whole marks no advance on War and Peace, though each of the individual characters (and again especially the women) come up to the same level, and even, perhaps, present a greater variety of persons entirely different from the author and seen from inside.