The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Sin
SIN
The Road to Calvary. By Alexey Tolstoy. 12mo. 451 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.50.
THE obsession of certain types of intellect by sin deserves a study it has never received. One might expect to find it confined largely to men whose thinking was formulated before the development of the jungle of theories and observed facts which we call psychology, but Alexey Tolstoy offers a modern instance. He is overwhelmingly conscious of the sinful impulses in men's hearts, and the clear case he presents for the suggested study is not complicated by any discernible traces of the mystic or puritan. Rather he seems a weary, cynical man-about-town who, knowing all the vices well enough to label them, returns in the old age of his spirit to a delighted, open-mouthed contemplation of virtue. In assaying sin and virtue, it must be added, he is strictly orthodox, seeing morals rather as code of thou shalt nots let down on a scroll from heaven, than as an evolution of taboos and rules of conduct, changing not a little from one century to another.
Yet as a perfect specimen of an intellect concerned with sin one flaw may be found—his desire to prove the main thesis of his book. To him the Revolution is not the product of long accruing, intolerable social injustice, but a retribution for the sinful personal lives of Russian people in general and in particular of the Russian intellectuals, who in their degenerate and pitiable condition even flirted fatuously with the ideas of the pimply, womanish, thievish, and otherwise execrable revolutionaries.
For in addition to being the work of a man of letters with some claims on our attention, this is a refugee's lament, thrown together in almost frantic haste to tell the world what it should believe. Evidently the haste increased as the book proceeded. Some of the first scenes, and particularly those in which his straw-stuffed intellectuals huff and puff and blow the house down, are reasonably vivid, reminding the reader of the typical popular story satirizing the Greenwich Village of a few years ago. Later the scenes are indicated rather than realized and the reader is able to differentiate various characters chiefly because they wear names.
Except that they both cover a large canvas, this book bears no vaguest resemblance to War and Peace. Nor is Alexey to be compared with Lyof Tolstoy. If one must seek analogies he is a very sick Dostoevsky suffering for the moment under the hallucination that he 1s Rasputin. It is to be expected that the imitator of a great master should lack his art. In addition Alexey Tolstoy seems to have missed the essential fact that no matter how fantastic Dostoevsky's episodes may be they are "directly referable to the fundamental operations of the spirit." Thus the nightmare delusion which causes Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment to see a shrivelled prostitute in the face of a fresh young girl, is a stroke of genius, while the midnight attempt of Bezsonov, the decadent poet, to break into the room of Dasha, the chaste heroine of The Road to Calvary, is pure melodrama.
L'homme moyen sensuel, like the Teliegin of the book, sees little but the surfaces of life. The great thinker clarifies. Numerous hybrids occupy the middle ground between these two extremes and among them there emerge occasionally, emotional, obscure, groping intellects which peer into many dark corners and stir up seemingly clear waters. For some reason their heaving, laborious efforts at the interpretation of life are clogged and sterile. They seem almost to be swamped by their own profundity. The work of such an intellect, complex and intriguing, this is nevertheless a muddy book, although the reader abandons reluctantly his hope, cherished for the first hundred pages or so, that it is going to take up the story of the Russian people where it was dropped by Chekhov and Gorki.