Goodbye, George Steiner

It is the age-old Russian literary chestnut: Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? For a long time I always chose Dostoevsky, a literary genius and religious zealot who provided the greatest argument for atheism ever committed to paper. He burrowed into the 'cellerage and morass of the human soul', found it brimming with horror, and yet still somehow managed to let God off the hook. Tolstoy was undoubtedly amazing, but I enjoyed gazing inwards rather than out and around. The horizon was overrated.        

By posing the same question, George Steiner, who died yesterday, changed my mind. His 1957 book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, charged and coloured my reading of the two Russian giants. 'Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love' begins Steiner, and then goes on to analyse the differences, affinities, and rarely paralleled genius of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's writings. It is an astonishing and incredibly readable piece of writing, more so because it is his academic debut. Instructive, provocative, and brimming with obiter dicta – the asides on Madame Bovary alone say more than most books dealing solely with Flaubert. 

There is no question mark

Learning of Steiner's death this morning, I reached towards the bookshelves for my copy of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, disturbing and shattering a ceramic candle holder in the process, and breezed through highlighted passages on the bus into work. Here he is on Dostoevsky (I shan't gloss; Steiner's words alone are what count):   

'Dostoevsky perceived time from the point of view of a dramatist. He asked in the notebooks for Crime and Punishment: 'What is time?' And answered: 'Time does not exist; time is a series of numbers, time is the relation of the existing to the non-existent.' Instinctive to him was the concentration of tangled and multitudinous actions into the briefest time span that could be reconciled with plausibility. This concentration contributes signally to a sense of nightmare, of gesture and language stripped of all that softens and delays. Whereas Tolstoy moves tide-like and gradual, Dostoevsky twists time into narrowness and contortion. He empties it of those spells of leisure which can qualify or reconcile. Deliberately, he crowds the night as thickly as the day lest sleep muffle the exasperations or dissipate the hatreds bred by the clash of characters. Dostoevsky's are the contracted, hallucinatory days and the 'white nights' of St. Petersburg; not the ample noon under which Prince Andrew lies at Austerlitz or the deep star spaces in which Levin finds peace.'

And then on Tolstoy:

'Tolstoy's conception of the Kingdom of God arose directly out of his stubborn attempt to entrap the death-drawn soul and to retain it everlastingly within the confines of the tangible world. He emphatically rejected the notion that the Kingdom lay "elsewhere," that we accede to it through a transcendence of life itself. Much of western thought is founded on a Platonic division between the shadow-world of the mortal senses and the "true," unchanging realm of ideas and absolute light. Entrenched in our poetics is the belief that art reveals to us, through allegory and metaphor, the "real" world of which our own is but a corrupt or fragmentary image. Dante's ascent to the rose of light is an imitation - probably the subtlest and most coherent that we possess - of the principal action of the western mind as a whole: the ascent from the transitory to the real through philosophy or science of the sudden illuminations of poetry and grace.'

Suffice to say, why on earth would you need to choose between the two? My preference for Dostoevsky disappeared. The lesson learned from Steiner was that you can glory in reading them both. His remarks that Dostoevsky rarely writes outside of the city, and only occasionally travels into the vast, rural landscapes of Greater Russia (perhaps his time imprisoned in Siberia gave him his fill), made me recall Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Buddy Willard's absurd diagnosis of Esther: 'a true neurotic' because of her wish to live in both the city and the country. These binary choices are ridiculous. And more so when we are concerned with two of the greatest novelists that have ever lived.     

Professor George Steiner

And if the culmination of his landmark piece of literary criticism does not cause you to return to those novels, or, indeed, approach them for the first time, daunted but eager, then you are denying yourself art of the highest order. The final words go to Professor Steiner. 

'Thus, even beyond their deaths, the two novelists stand in contrariety. Tolstoy, the foremost heir to the traditions of the epic, Dostoevsky, one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare; Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact; Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; Tolstoy, the poet of the land, of the rural setting and the pastoral mood; Dostoevsky, the arch-citizen, the master-builder of the modern metropolis in the province of language; Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; Tolstoy, 'keeping at all times,' in Coleridge's phrase, 'in the high road of life'; Dostoevsky, advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellerage and morass of the soul; Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, 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; Tolstoy, the embodiment of health and Olympian vitality; Dostoevsky, the sum of energies charged with illness and possession; Tolstoy, who saw the destinies of men historically and in the stream of time; Dostoevsky, who saw them contemporaneously and in the vibrant stasis of the dramatic moment; Tolstoy, borne to his grave in the first civil burial ever held in Russia; Dostoevsky, laid to rest in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky monastery in St. Petersburg amid the solemn rites of the Orthodox Church; Dostoevsky, pre-eminently the man of God; Tolstoy; one of His secret challengers.'