been in the ascendant; in the sixties he had been obliged to share that distinction with Ostrovsky and Pisemsky; in the seventies the satirist, Saltuikov, and the most Russian of all the Russian novelists, Dostoevsky, held the public; but five years after the publication of “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoi had distanced every competitor, and was undeniably supreme. And, characteristically enough, just as he had reached the height of his glory, doubts began to arise in his mind whether, to use a common phrase, the game was really worth the candle. Except for a very brief period in his youth Tolstoi had always despised mere style,[1] and had resolutely refused to cultivate the mere prettinesses of literature; but now he began to doubt whether literature itself, like art, as to which he had already made up his mind, was not a vain, worthless, and even pernicious pursuit. “On reflecting upon the fame I should gain from my writings,” he tells us, “I said to myself: Good! supposing you become more famous even than Gogol, than Pushkin, than Shakespeare, than Molière, than all the great writers of the world, what then? And I could find nothing to say, absolutely nothing. . . . Some indefinable power drove me towards the idea of ridding myself of life somehow or other. Indeed, the thought of suicide became so attractive that I had to use artifice against it so as not immediately to put it into execution. And this happened to me when I was completely happy,
- ↑ In his youth Tolstoi took some pains to cultivate an elegant and beautiful style, which is seen at its best in ‘‘Kazaki” (‘‘The Cossacks”), published in 1861. Yet there can be little doubt that his later style, so noble, simple, clear, poignant, and precise, with a constantly underlying suggestion of vast elemental power, is far more impressive.
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