Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Leo Tolstoy (2003) (173p) [Inua].pdf

Leo Tolstoy (Bloom's Major Novelists)
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 254 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (May 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791074447
ISBN-13: 978-0791074442


The book opens up the life of the great mind of Leo Tolstoy the man who sparked up the idea of communism and also wrote many great books like, "War and Peace"

Editor's Note
This volume gathers together a representative selection of the best criticism devoted to Tolstoy that is available in the English language. The essays, reprinted here in the chronological order of their publication, cover a period from 1920 through 1983, and can be called a history-in-little of the twentieth- century reception of Tolstoy's work in Anglo-American criticism, although Continental and Russian commentaries are also included here. The editor is grateful to Ms. Olga Popov, without whose erudition he would not have known of some of these essays.
The editor's "Introduction" centers entirely upon Tolstoy's magnificent late short novel Hadji Murad, so as to intimate something of Tolstoy's Homeric powers in narrative. With the great Hungarian critic, Gyorgy Lukacs, we expect a social emphasis, but that emphasis is severely tested when Lukacs admits that Tolstoy transcended both romanticism and the form of the novel, and nearly renewed the Homeric or national epic, a renewal that Lukacs rejects upon Marxist historical grounds. Thomas Mann, who had portrayed Lukacs in The Magic Mountain as Leo Naphta, the Jewish Jesuit and Nietzschean terrorist, somewhat counters Lukacs here by comparing Tolstoy to Goethe. As Mann shrewdly notes, even the most social of Tolstoy's concepts and visions invariably originated as intense personal needs.
Viktor Shklovsky's brief excursus on Tolstoyan parallels provides a fine instance of twentieth-century Russian stylistic criticism. With Philip Rahv's ruminations upon Tolstoy's short novels, the startling naturalness of that cosmos is emphasized. Something of the same tribute is paid by George Steiner in his comparison of Tolstoy and Homer, which can be contrasted usefully to the editor's comparison in his introductory remarks.
In Isaiah Berlin's essay, Tolstoy is seen as a martyr of the European Enlightenment, sacrificing everything upon the altar of truth. In some sense, this is parallel to R. P. Blackmur's reading of Anna Karenina, which concludes that human life could not stand Anna's "intensity," perhaps a trope for Tolstoy's drive towards truth. In Barbara Hardy's very different analysis, Anna is seen as suffering from the disease of nihilism. When John Bayley, assessing Tolstoy's outrageous tract What Is Art?, concludes that.