题目内容双击单词支持查询和收藏哦～

Masterpieces are dumb." wroteFlaubert. They have a tranquil aspect like the very products of nature, like large animals and mountains. He might have been thinking of War and Peace, that vast, silent work, unfathomable and simple, provoking endless questions through the majesty of its being. Tolstoi's simplicity is "overpowering, says the critic Bayley." disconcerting" because it comes from "his casual assumption that the world is as he sees it" Like other nineteenth-century Russian writers he is "impressive" because the "means what he says." but he stands apart from all others and from most Western writers in his identity with life, which is so complete as to make us forget he is an artist. He is the center of his work, but his egocentricity is of a special kind, Goethe, for example, says Bayley, "cared for nothing but himself. Tolstoi was nothing but himself."

For all his varied modes of writing and the multiplicity of characters in his fiction, Tolstoi and his work are of a piece. The famous "conversion" of his middle years, movingly recounted in his Confession, was a culmination of his early spiritual life, not a departure from it. The apparently fundamental changes that led from epic narrative to dogmatic parable, from a joyous, buoyant attitude toward life to pessimism and cynicism, from War and Peace to The Kreuler Sonata, came from the same restless, impressionable depths of an independent spirit yearning to get at the truth of its experience. "Truth is my hero," wrote Tolstoi in his youth, reporting the fighting in Sebastopol. Truth remained his hero—his own, not others' truth.Others were awed by Napoleon, believed that a single man could change the destinies of nations, adhered to meaningless rituals, formed their tastes on established cannons of art. Tolstoi reversed all preconceptions; and in every reversal he overthrew the "system," the "machine," the externally ordained belief, the conventional behavior in favor of unsystematic, impulsive life, of inward motivation and the solutions of independent thought.

In his work the artificial and the genuine are always exhibited in dramatic opposition the supposedly great Napoleon and the truly great, unregarded little Captain Tushin, or Nicholas Rostov's actual experience in battle and his later account of it. The simple is always pitted against the elaborate, knowledge gained from observation against assertions of borrowed faiths. Tolstoi's magical simplicity is a product of these tensions' his work is a record of the questions he put to himself and of the answers he found in his search.The greatest characters of his fiction exemplify this search, and their happiness depends on the measure of their answers. Tolstoi wanted happiness, but only hard-won happiness, that emotional fulfillment and intellectual clarity which could come only as the prize of all-consuming effort. He scorned lesser satisfactions.