Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, TolstoyPanin, Ivan
History
Lectures on Russian Literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy
Panin, Ivan
Russian literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
"'Not another word,' she repeated; and with an expression strange
to him, with an expression of cold despair on her face, she parted
from him. She felt that at this moment she could not express in
words her feeling of shame, joy, and terror before this entrance
into a new life, and she did not wish to speak of it, to lower that
feeling with inexact words. But even later, on the morrow, and on
the third day, she not only could find no words for expressing the
whole complexity of these feelings, but she could not find even
thoughts, in revolving which she might clearly define to herself
whatever was going on in her soul.
"She said to herself, 'No, I cannot think this out now; later, when
I shall be more calm.' But this calmness for her thoughts never
came; whenever the thought came to her of what she had done, and of
what was to become of her, and of what she must do, terror came upon
her, and she drove away these thoughts.
"'Later, later,' she repeated, 'when I am more calm.'
"But in sleep, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
situation appeared to her in all its ugly nakedness. One dream came
to her almost nightly. She dreamed that both were her husbands, that
both were spending upon her their caresses. Alexei Alexandrovitsh
cried as he kissed her hands, and said, 'Ah, how good this is!' And
Alexei Vronsky was there, and he also was her husband. And she
wondered why all this had hitherto seemed to her impossible, and
explained to them laughingly how simple all this was, and that now
they were both content and happy. But the dream oppressed her like
an Alp, and she awoke every time in terror."
15. And of such unapproachable art the examples in Tolstoy are well-nigh
innumerable. There is hardly a single work of Tolstoy in which he does
not display that marvellous fidelity which has made Mr. Howells exclaim:
"This is not a picture of life, but life itself!" And this fidelity
Tolstoy attains not so much by depicting the event itself as by
depicting its effect on the soul; just as the silent sight of the
wounded on the field tells of the battle more loudly than the thunder of
the cannon. I say this is the highest art, because its method is
universal, where all others are only particular; for men may indeed
differ in the language of the tongue, but they do not differ in the
language of the spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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