Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Weidhorn, Manfred

Yet, when his feelings subsided, Tolstoy resumed his animosity. If Dostoyevsky's objections to Tolstoy were based partly on politics and partly on envy, Tolstoy's were mainly esthetic (with, of course, a dash of envy as well). Except for the House of the Dead, he had little good to say of Dostoyevsky's books. They contained fine passages but also dreadful stuff. The style was turgid, the characters were poorly outlined and too "original" (Troyat 400). In their tendentiousness, the novels contained a bizarre mixture of Christian ideas, submission to authority, and praise of war. The artistry was also poor: Tolstoy could foretell from the beginning of Crime and Punishment how the rest of the novel would go. The trouble with the Idiot was that Dostoyevsky lacked the courage to make the innocent Christian, Prince Myshkin, healthy because, being himself sick, he felt compelled to create everyone else in his own image. Nor was Tolstoy able to finish reading the Brothers Karamazov, which was "anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems." He disliked the exaggerations, the implausibility, the "shapeless style," the grammatical errors, the crowd of epileptic, alcoholic, paranoid characters (Diaries 673; Letters 709).

Tolstoy particularly reprehended the widely held view of Dostoyevsky as a "prophet and saint," someone immersed in the conflict between Good and Evil. However moving, clever, genuine, and interesting he manages sometimes to be, Dostoyevsky, a "man who was all struggle," should not be "set on a pedestal" (Letters 363). How, Tolstoy wondered, could critics talk of the author of the Brothers Karamazov in the same breath as of the author of War and Peace, even if only to contrast them? (Troyat 698)

Late in his life, in October 1910, Tolstoy, wanting to recollect Dostoyevsky, tried to reread the first volume of the universally praised Brothers Karamazov. he found the jokes intrusive and the conversations "impossible, completely unnatural.... all the characters speak the same language." Astonished atDostoyevsky's "slipshod manner, artificiality, and fabrication," he could only skim through it because "it's so disorganized" (Diaries 673-74).

Though Dostoyevsky had found serious defects in what he conceded to be major works by Tolstoy, the latter was unwilling, at least in his later years, to grant Dostoyevsky's novels even such a status. Modern readers find curious an outlook that praises the House of the Dead far more than the quartet of great Dostoyevsky novels, but one must recall that a common bond between the two men (and no other prominent Russian writer ofthat time) was that each was moved by what he saw as the Christian dimension in the other's work-in the House oftheDeadand Anna Karenina. It was, to be sure, a different Christianity: Dostoyevsky, says one critic, sinned his way to God, Tolstoy reasoned his way there (Simmons 360).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

Which of the two rival Russians deals with men as they should be and which with men as they are is difficult to say, as is also the case with another pair of famous novelists who, a few generations later, were in a like tortured relationship. Faulkner and Hemingway, both in their prime in the 1930-1950 period, made quite a contrast. Faulkner wrote mainly about an imaginary, exotic county in his corner of Mississippi; Hemingway, the lifelong traveler, placed his American characters in his major novels in Italy, France, Spain, Cuba. Faulkner was the eccentric stylist with sentences that covered entire pages, with syntax that dissolved into a stream of consciousness, and with daring experiments in structure, plot, and character portrayal. Hemingway, conservative in his plotting, achieved eccentricity with sentences at the opposite extreme, notorious for brevity, simplicity, almost childishness.