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Updated: May 11, 2025
It would have shown itself first in the appetite, in the general condition, and above all the face would have betrayed cancer if he had had it. His illness frightened me, and kept me on tenter-hooks. I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him.
And furthermore, in either case again, the story is incomplete; neither of them is finished, neither of them is given its full development, for all the size of the book. But to this point, at least in relation to one of the two, I shall return directly. Tolstoy's novel is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole objection to its loose, unstructural form.
I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came to this greatest work of his: I read 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol, which is so much of the same quality as 'War and Peace; and I read 'Policoushka' and most of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I had never felt with the people of other fiction.
Youth and age, the flow and the ebb of the recurrent tide this is the theme of Tolstoy's book. So it seems for a while. But Tolstoy called his novel War and Peace, and presently there arises a doubt; did he believe himself to be writing that story, and not the story of Youth and Age?
When he is not pamphleteering Tolstoy's treatment of the second story, the national saga, is masterly at every point.
Obviously there is no space to lose; and it is enough to look at Tolstoy's use of it, and then to see how Balzac makes the situation that he requires the contrast shows exactly where Tolstoy's method could not help him.
In 1861 a new era began in Russia, and a new period in Tolstoy's life, which was henceforward bound up with the history of the country folk. Alexander II issued a decree of emancipation for the serf, and Tolstoy was one of the arbitrators appointed to supervise the distribution of the land, to arrange the taxes and decide conditions of purchase.
Educated men were becoming more common among the peasants, thanks to Tolstoy's guidance. He had shown the way to them and could not repent when they took it, for it is the duty of the reformer to secure a following. Anarchy he had not foreseen, and was troubled by its manifestations.
You cannot deal with Tolstoy's and Flaubert's subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that is unknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of George Eliot, of Thackeray, of Dickens, of society, you may deal with them even in the magazines. There is no other restriction upon you.
His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, "the art of a people universal art"; and his style was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his novels always speak "in character" with perfect reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr.
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