Originally Posted by
jblacktree
I've always found Tolstoy to be a scold, a nag, a "teacher" and, in translation, (the only way I can read him) a not very memorable writer. The horse race with Vronsky, for example, which should have some excitement, is as dull and distant as a church sermon. I can't recall a single metaphor or description in Tolstoy, nor accurately picture a character,while I can recite whole paragraphs of Nabokov and would know many of Chekhov's characters if I bumped into them on the street. Maybe the Count's translators are to blame. But Chekhov seems Tolstoy's master in every way. Tolstoy pushed his characters around to instruct us. He threw them under trains. He sent them out to thrash wheat in the fields. I loathe didactic art, prescriptive art, writing meant to set characters against the history of their times. The sad and wonderful truth is, any and all writers are victims of their times and created by local history; they needn't strain to dramatize either. Inescapable. The science fiction writer from 1930 reads like a writer from 1930even if he sets his story in 2130. Tolstoy's understanding of art, I think, had to do with his own belief that he understood something or felt something more profoundly than civilians. He didn't. His self-imposed obligation to explain to his readers amounts finally to hectoring.The death of Ivan whatever-ovitch is as dismal and unneccessary a fiction, or artwork, as I can imagine anyone writing: like being buttonholed by a drunk who insists on telling you, "We are all going to die someday! Don't you realize?" But as Ray Carver realized, the world will always prefer the artist who is obvious and easily understood to the artist who pays his readers the compliment of NOT explaining things, but assuming his/her readers already know and have lived through a lot. Teasing out deeper and original mysteries is the real chore of writers--and it's the toughest work there is.I've yet to find a new idea or phrase in Tolstoy, but one poem by, say, Wallace Stevens or one short story by, say, Don Barthelme, is bristling with both.