I’m sure George Steiner would be mad at me for this, but I’m ruthlessly ripping the last page of his wonderful book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and placing it here for you to see. Steiner lays out the irreconcilable differences between these two greatest of novelists (he does it side-by-side, I’ve broken it out for easy reference). Check out the comparison below. Where do you find yourself leaning, both in preference and in your own personal approach to life/art?
Tolstoy
- the foremost heir to the traditions of the epic
- the mind intoxicated with reason and fact
- the poet of the land, of the rural setting and the pastoral mood
- thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it
- “keeping at all times,” in Coleridge’s phrase, “in the high road of life”
- like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience
- the embodiment of health and Olympian vitality
- who saw the destinies of men historically and in the stream of time
- borne to his grave in the first civil burial ever held in Russia
- one of God’s secret challengers
Dostoevsky
- one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare
- the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox
- the arch-citizen, the master-builder of the modern metropolis in the province of language
- rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery
- advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul
- always on the edge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams
- the sum of energies charged with illness and possession
- who saw the destinies of men contemporaneously and in the vibrant stasis of the dramatic moment [here I would add: “and in relation to eternity”]
- laid to rest in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky monastery in St. Petersburg amid the solemn rites of the Orthodox Church
- pre-eminently the man of God
I am solidly a Dostoevsky man, myself. I would name a kid after him if his name weren’t so impossibly awful for a kid to have to carry.
2 responses to “Cheat sheet”
I tend toward Dostoevsky myself, but I need to read more of both. Paradox and morass of the soul stuck out to me…
The bewildering thing about Dostoevsky, to me, was his “against the truth, but for Christ”-ness. It’s confusing because Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.” But I think Dostoevsky saw Christ as The Truth, before which all other truths and knowledge fell away… which I love about him.