However, although 'Turgenev knelt before 'Tolstoy's art, he could not swallow his philosophy. "It is a great misfortune," he wrote, once again to Annenkov,4 "when a sclf-cducated man of Tolstoy's type sets out to philosophize. He invariably climbs onto any old broomstick, invents some universal system that seems to provide a solution to every problem in three easy steps—historical determinism, for instance—and forward march! When, like Antaeus, he comes down to earth again, his strength is renewed: the death of the old prince, Alpatich, the peasant uprising, all that is remarkable."
Old Pogodin was no less effusive: "I melt, I weep, I rejoice," he wrote to Tolstoy on April 3, 1868. And he went on, the next day: "Now look here, what is this? You've done for me. . . . You have turned me, in my dotage, into—Natasha! . . . And Pushkin not here to sec it! I low he would have applauded, how happy he would have been, how he would have rubbed his hands with glee!"
It is true that a few months later, on second thought, the same Pogodin expressed a far more critical view of the same novel in an article in The Russian: "What the novelist absolutely cannot be forgiven is his offhand treatment of figures such as Bagration, Speransky, Rostopchin and Ermolov, who belong to history. To study their lives and then judge them on the basis of evidence is all well and good; but to present them, without any reason, as ignoble or even repellent, mere outlines and silhouettes of men, is in my opinion an act of unpardonable irresponsibility and provocation, even in an author of great talent."
This criticism was typical of the views of the conservative writers' clique, headed by Vyazemsky and Norov. Prince Vyazcmsky, an old friend of Pushkin and Gogol, was incensed by Tolstoy's rabid determination to knock the national heroes off their pedestals. "In atheism, heaven and life after death become meaningless," he wrote. "In historical free-thinking, earth and life itself become meaningless, through belittlement of the events of the past and contempt for the idols of popular imagination. . . . This is no longer skepticism; it has become literary materialism."5 And Norov, who had fought in the battle of Borodino in his youth, admitted that the author had portrayed the battle scenes with praiseworthy respect for detail, but bemoaned the fact that "our generals, whose names are inseparable from our military history, and are still heard in every mouth in the new generation of officers, were presented as a set of blind and incompetent tools of fate."8 The reactionary critic of Action, curiously enough, attributed this deflation of the official embellishments of war to a perverted sense of patriotism in the author—even though, said the critic, judging by his family name, he was a true Russian. "Some ascribe this phenomenon," he went on, "to the influence of the environment in which the author grew up; during his childhood or youth, he was undoubtedly surrounded by Jesuit-trained French governesses, whose views of the year 1812 penetrated so deeply into the impressionable mind of the baby or boy that even in his adulthood Count Tolstoy has been unable to divest himself of this muddled, unintelligent and Roman Catholic interpretation of events."®
The monarchists heaped abuse on Tolstoy's head because he had flaunted national values, and the liberals wanted to send him to the stake because he had flaunted the people. In the progressive paper The Affair, Bervi stated that for Tolstoy, "honor and elegance exist only among the rich and famous," that all the characters in the novel were "base"; that Prince Audrey, for one, was nothing but a "dirty, vulgar, unfeeling automaton," that the author "let no opportunity pass to glorify passion, vulgarity and inanity," and that in reading the military passages "one continually got the impression that a narrow- minded but garrulous corporal was boasting of his exploits in some remote hamlet to a group of gawping hicks."
This virulent attack set the tone for other radical writers. In the Illustrated Gazette, an anonymous critic reviled the characters of War and Peace, who were "all infamous products of the age of serfdom" and held the entire book to be "an apologia for gluttonous aristocrats, sanctimony, hypocrisy and vice." Tongue-in-chcck, The Spark congratulated Tolstoy 011 his appetizing rendition of the battle scenes,
• A singular commcnt on a novel in which patriotism in epic proportions looms out of every page, and the French can scarcely be said to be flattered!
proving that "it was a pleasant and easy thing to die for the Fatherland." And Shelgunov, taking over from Bcrvi in The Affair, raised the tone of the debate by solemnly declaring that "Tolstoy's philosophy could have no European significance," that the author was preaching "Eastern fatalism against Western reason," that lie and his ideas were "throttling all energy, initiative and desire in the individual to improve his social condition and achievc happiness," and, in short, that the teachings he was propagating were "utterly opposed to those of modern thinkers, and chiefly Auguste Comte." "Fortunately," concluded Shelgunov, "Count Tolstoy is not a great writer. ... If, with his lack of emotional maturity, he had the genius of a Shakespeare or a Byron, the direst curse on earth would not be too strong for him."
The liberals' mistrust of Tolstoy could be explained by the fact that in those days, with his title of nobility, his estate at Yasnaya Polyana and his military background, he still appeared to a portion of the young intellectuals as an aristocrat playing at being a friend of the people. None of his novels dealt with the issues that inflamed public opinion: emancipation of the serfs, freedom of the press, reorganization of the courts, women's rights, government reform. It seemed as though, by- living in retirement on his estate, he were trying to ignore the present. True, there had been the Sevastopol Sketches. But since then . . . ? The novels of Goncharov, Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin aroused impassioned debate because they were blows struck in a battle; for many people, those of Leo Tolstoy were mere works of art "Although everyone read War and Peace with great enjoyment," wrote Lystscv in his reminiscences, "I must confess that wc were not very stirred by it because the period the great author was writing about was too remote from the problems which were tormenting Russian society at that time."
Ilooted at by left and right, Tolstoy received his just measure of praise from the moderate critics and what is commonly called the general public. In Fatherland Notes Pisarev spoke of "truth, unadorned and unadulterated"; Mrs. Tsebrikova, writing in the same periodical, praised the ruthless and unerring simplicity with which he transposed life in his novel; in the European Ilerald Annenkov devoted a substantial article to the book, "which can be compared with nothing on earth"; Suvorin, in the Army and Navy Gazette, confessed that he was left at a loss by qualities he could not define: "Nothing spectacular, nothing strained; this gifted writer has not resorted to a single trick. This is a smooth-flowing epic, by a painter-poet"; and in The Dawn, Strakhov wrote the following lines, which filled Tolstoy to bursting with pride: "What mass and balance! No other literature offers us anything comparable. Thousands of characters, thousands of scenes, the worlds of government and family, history, war, every moment of human life from the first mew of the newborn babe to the last gush of sentiment of the dying patriarch. . . . And yet no person is hidden by any other, no scene or impression is spoiled by any other, everything is clear, everything is harmonious, in the individual parts as in the whole. . .