The horizon of a Russian story
would naturally be vague and vast, it might seem.
It might seem so, at least, if the fiction of Dostoevsky were not
there with an example exactly opposed to the manner of Tolstoy. The
serene and impartial day that arches from verge to verge in War and
Peace, the blackness that hems in the ominous circle of the Brothers
Karamazov--it is a perfect contrast. Dostoevsky needed no lucid
prospect round his strange crew; all he sought was a blaze of light on
the extraordinary theatre of their consciousness. He intensified it
by shutting off the least glimmer of natural day. The illumination
that falls upon his page is like the glare of a furnace-mouth; it
searches the depths of the inner struggles and turmoils in which his
drama is enacted, relieving it with sharp and fantastic shadows. That
is all it requires, and therefore the curtain of darkness is drawn
thickly over the rest of the world. Who can tell, in Dostoevsky's grim
town-scenery, what there is at the end of the street, what lies round
the next corner? Night stops the view--or rather no ordinary, earthly
night, but a sudden opacity, a fog that cannot be pierced or breathed.
With Tolstoy nobody doubts that an ample vision opens in every
direction. It may be left untold, but his men and women have only to
lift their eyes to see it.
How is it contrived? The mere multiplication of names and households
in the book does not account for it; the effect I speak of spreads far
beyond them.
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