Essays on Russian Novelists/Tolstoi

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Essays on Russian Novelists
by William Lyon Phelps

Tolstoi

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1625236Essays on Russian Novelists — TolstoiWilliam Lyon Phelps

V

TOLSTOI

On the 6 September 1852, signed only with initials, appeared in a Russian periodical the first work of Count Leo Tolstoi—Childhood. By 1867, his name was just barely known outside of Russia, for in that year the American diplomat, Eugene Schuyler, in the preface to his translation of Fathers and Sons, said, "The success of Gogol brought out a large number of romance-writers, who abandoned all imitation of German, French, and English novelists, and have founded a truly national school of romance." Besides Turgenev, "easily their chief," he mentioned five Russian writers, all but one of whom are now unknown or forgotten in America. The second in his list was "the Count Tolstoi, a writer chiefly of military novels." During the seventies, the English scholar Ralston published in a review some paraphrases of Tolstoi, because, as he said, "Tolstoi will probably never be translated into English." To-day the works of Tolstoi are translated into forty-five languages, and in the original Russian the sales have gone into many millions. During the last ten years of his life he held an absolutely unchallenged position as the greatest living writer in the world, there being not a single contemporary worthy to be named in the same breath.

Tolstoi himself, at the end of the century, divided his life into four periods:^[1] the innocent, joyous, and poetic time of childhood, from earliest recollection up to the age of fourteen; the "terrible twenties," full of ambition, vanity, and licentiousness, lasting till his marriage at the age of thirty-four; the third period of eighteen years, when he was honest and pure in family life, but a thorough egoist; the fourth period, which he hoped would be the last, dating from his Christian conversion, and during which he tried to shape his life in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.

In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind, beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."

↑ His own Memoirs, edited by Birukov, are now the authority for biographical detail. They are still in process of publication.

[1] His own Memoirs, edited by Birukov, are now the authority for biographical detail. They are still in process of publication.

[1]

Essays on Russian Novelists/Tolstoi

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