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8 George Steiner on Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky 8 GEORGE STEINER ON TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY Th e essay below is tribute to a classic in Russian literary criticism written in the “Old Style,” a little battered but still robust: “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Seductions of the Old Criticism” [a retrospective essay on George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959)], in Reading George Steiner, ed. by Ronald A. Sharp and Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 74–98. In this essay too, one feels the Gasparov-Bakhtin divide between “philosophers and philologists.” As in the fracas over “Tatiana,” there are traces of Russian versus Western ways of reading the classics. In editing this essay for republication, I expanded somewhat on Steiner’s contribution to the Tolstoy-versus-Shakespeare wars. Th ose wars (with a focus on the part played by George Bernard Shaw during the last six years of Tolstoy’s life) were a major scholarly preoccupation of mine during the Tolstoy Centenary year, 2010. TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY: SEDUCTIONS OF THE OLD CRITICISM 1994 A Tribute to George Steiner George Steiner wrote his major contribution to Russian literary studies, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, in the late 1950s.1 At the time, academic critics in the West felt much closer to nineteenth-century Russian culture than to any literary product of that forbidding and well- sealed monolith, the Soviet state — even though, paradoxically, our regnant 1 Th e book was fi rst published in 1959. All citations for this essay are taken from George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971). Page numbers are included in parentheses in the text. — 192 — ----------------------------------- 8. GEORGE STEINER ON TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY ---------------------------------- New Criticism recalled in many particulars the spirit of Russian Formalism from the Soviet 1920s. Now over thirty years old, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky still renders useful service to those two great Russian novelists. But the book casts unexpected light on our own current critical debates as well. Steiner opens his essay with a defense of his “old” critical approach. Its primary purpose, he tells us, is to serve the text “subjectively.” Th us its starting point must be a positive, almost an electrical, contact between an artwork of genius and its admiring and energized reader. In Steiner’s words, “when the work of art invades our consciousness, something within us catches fl ame. What we do thereafter is to refi ne and make articulate the original leap of recognition” (45). Th is quasi-mystical mission — which only Steiner’s great erudition and good taste could bring down to earth in our suspicious, secular age — is then pointedly contrasted with the spirit of the New Criticism; “Quizzical, captious, immensely aware of its philosophic ancestry and complex instruments, it often comes to bury rather than to praise” (4). In retrospect Steiner is perhaps too harsh on the New Critics, whose captiousness is but a minnow to the leviathan of later postmodernist burials of the world’s great literature. Still, he sees ample evidence of a falling away from earlier, more radiant modes of reading. Th e unhappy vogue of “objective criticism,” he claims, has made us uncertain of our great books and suspicious of tradition. “We grow wary of our inheritance,” he writes. “We have become relativists” (4). Why relativism in one’s literary relations should be a sin or a shame is not spelled out, but Steiner’s basic position is clear: he defends the literary canon and the reader’s unmediated primary contact with it. As Real Presences indicates, this commitment has not changed. But what, precisely, is primary contact? It does not have to mean immersion in the native language of the literary text (in his dealings with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Steiner apologizes for his ignorance of Russian, although it hampers him little in the texts he discusses); nor does it mandate a meticulous, insider’s knowledge of the political or cultural background of every world-class text. Primary contact, for Steiner, is both more modest and more risk-laden. It requires from the reader less an intellectual than an aesthetic commitment, a willingness to “tune oneself” to the artwork and thus to become part of the text’s glorious problem rather than its solution. In short, we come into primary contact when, one way or another, we fall in love with a piece of art and are moved to expand on its value in ways that expose our own vulnerabilities before it. “Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love,” Steiner writes (3). From this primary love relation, apparently, there are no merely scientifi c or “secondary” ways out. — 193 — ------------------------------------------------ PART II. ON THE MASTER WORKERS ------------------------------------------------ In our current climate of interrogating texts and their authors, all this sounds very, very old. But what takes us by surprise, in rereading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, is its high degree of theoretical sophistication. Th e number of potent critical ideas that Steiner eases directly out of primary texts (and it goes without saying that Russian scholarship has a vast “secondary” industry on each of these novelists, but Steiner is not, and cannot be, indebted to it) is exhilarating. His resulting thesis is so intelligently cobbled together from the bottom up, out of the wide-ranging and integral worldviews of the novels themselves, that it easily survives the language barrier and the passage of time. To reconstruct and extend that thirty-year-old thesis, with an eye to some intervening critical developments, will be the major task of this essay. § Steiner’s thesis, anchored fi rmly in the ancient world, can be summed up in a topic sentence. Tolstoy’s art revives the traditions of Homeric epic, whereas Dostoevsky’s art reenacts, in novelistic garb, Greek tragic drama. One is immediately struck, of course, by the derivative nature of the whole dichotomy — by its apparent indiff erence to the manifest “novelness” of the novel, which has been justly celebrated as the most non-Aristotelian of genres. Many have argued that the novel’s messiness and potential indeterminacy were precisely what appealed to these two Russian innovators in the genre. Th is intractable failure of the great Russian novel to fi t into a classical poetics led the twentieth century’s greatest student of Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, to posit the novel as a genre that is in principle opposed to both epic and drama. Th is dialogue between Bakhtin and Steiner, so suggestive and full of intricate complementarity, shall be pursued at the end of the essay. Let us fi rst turn fi rst to the general lineaments of Steiner’s juxtaposition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Chapter One sets the scene by marking similarities. Both novelists wrote immensely long books. But, Steiner notes, the length of these books was of a diff erent order than the length, say, of Clarissa or Ulysses; for those latter authors, length was an invitation to elegant and precise mapping, to tying down, whereas for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, “plenitude was an essential freedom” (14). Freedom and plenitude: out of these two ideas Steiner constructs his larger contribution to the history of the novel. Much ink has been spilt on comparisons between the “European” and “Russian” novel, Steiner remarks. But the more interesting and valid comparison is between — 194 — ----------------------------------- 8. GEORGE STEINER ON TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY ---------------------------------- the European novel, on the one hand, and on the other the Russian and the American novel — two generic strands fused, as it were, at the still half-savage periphery of Europe’s sphere of infl uence. Steiner explains his typology. Th e European novel, he argues, arose as a private genre that was secular, rational, social. Its task was the successful portrayal of everyday life. But the genre was plagued from the start with a question of legitimacy: could the prosaic and quotidian ever attain to the “high seriousness” expected of great art? Th e grand novels of the Romantic period were spared the full implications of that question, because Dickens, Hugo, Stendhal could abandon the familiar plots of classical antiquity and draw, for inspiration and grandeur, on the heroic (but still contemporary and local) events of the 1810s-40s, on the Napoleonic theme and its aftermath. Th e problem became more serious in the second half of the century, Steiner notes, when the mainstream European novel — tacking to and fro in search of a new word — confronted the pervasive, leveling “bourgeoisifi cation” of everyday life. As a genre devoted to secular readings of ordinary experience, its predictable endpoint was Zola’s desiccating naturalism and Flaubert’s catalogue manqué. According to Steiner, this “dilemma of realism” was felt less acutely at the periphery of the novel’s reach. “Th e masters of the American and the Russian manner appear to gather something of their fi erce intensity from the outer darkness,” he writes, “from the decayed matter of folklore, melodrama, and religious life” (30). Melville and Hawthorne are the American States’ Dostoevsky: writers on an untamed frontier, creating their narratives in isolation, plagued by crises of faith in their pre-Enlightenment societies, and radically insecure in the face of Europe’s complacent cultural superiority. Russian and American novelists had no trouble fi lling their novels with “high seriousness” and at the same time claiming “exceptionalist” status. Having established the special compatibility of these two quasi-civilized European outposts, Steiner then returns to the classics — and shows how the Russian novel became the salvation of that profoundly civilized legacy. Steiner’s book falls into two parts, each with its own thesis and demonstration: Tolstoy as Homeric bard, Dostoevsky as tragic dramatist.
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