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Updated: May 1, 2025
Tolstoi's reputation as an artist quite rightly began with the publication of the three Sevastopol stories, "Sevastopol in December" , "Sevastopol in May, Sevastopol in August." This is the work, not of a promising youth, but of a master. There is not a weak or a superfluous paragraph.
Besides, it was through Turgenev that the French, and later the whole Western world, became acquainted with Russian literature; for a long time he was the only Russian novelist well known outside of his country. It was also owing largely to his personal efforts that Tolstoi's work first became known in France.
His Diary of a Sportsman contains some of the best of his short stories, and his Country Inn, written a few years later, in the maturity of his talent, is as good as Tolstoi's little masterpiece, Polikushka. He was certainly able to paint all classes and conditions of Russian people. But in his greater works Turgenev lays the action exclusively with one class of Russian people.
This review had been founded by Pushkin in 1836, was now edited by Nekrassov, who had accepted Tolstoi's first article, "Childhood," and had enlisted the foremost writers of Russia, prominent among whom was, of course, Turgenev. The books which Tolstoi read with the most profit during this period were Goethe, Hugo's "Notre-Dame," Plato in French, and Homer in Russian.
At the same time Turgenev also wrote to Fet, expressing his great pleasure in the renewal of the old friendship, and saying that Tolstoi's "name is beginning to have a European reputation, and we others, we Russians, have known for a long time that he has no rival among us."
No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.
Tolstoi's is a harsher note. He vilifies the flesh to exalt the spirit, as though the two never mingled. He would abolish the springs of life to purify its stream! He bids us see in our passions "foes to be conquered rather than friends to be encouraged." Why not try to establish a just harmony between them? Is there no medium? Must the passions be kings or slaves, in prison or on the throne?
Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better Tolstoi's POWERS OF DARKNESS. Here is a piece full of force and truth, yet quite untrue.
It is this tendency either automatically or intentionally actually to injure unskilled labor, that has led men like Mann and Debs and Haywood to their severe criticism of the present policies of the unions, and even affords some ground for Tolstoi's classification of well-paid artisans, electricians, and mechanics among the exploiters of unskilled labor.
But with all that, there are in this novel passages that no man in Europe except Tolstoi could have written, things which put me into a frenzy of enthusiasm." Tolstoi's genius reached its climax in "Anna Karenina."
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