Lev Tolstoi i Russkaia Istoriia. by Iakov GordinReview by: Patricia CardenSlavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 638-639Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499763 .

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638 Slavic Review

to return to the articles and monographs that genuinely illuminate the affinity of an individual writer and period with Dante.

ANDREW KAHN Oxford University

Lev Tolstoi i russkaia istoriia. By Iakov Gordin. Tenafly: Hermitage Publishers, 1992. 152 pp. Index. $12.50, paper.

This reprint of Iakov Gordin's essay (first published in Leningrad in 1983 under the title "Mir pogibnet, esli ia ostanovlius"') makes available to a broader audience an inquiry into Tolstoi's preoccupation with history. Gordin, who has specialized in the genre of the historical "povest'," does not indulge in the strategies of fiction here, although he also does not present his essay as a strictly scholarly one. It has neither notes nor bibliography, nor even page references to any edition of Tolstoi's works. Gordin casts his reader as a person with the same "liubitel'skii" interest as himself, reading in an armchair with the twenty-volume edition of Tolstoi ready to hand on a nearby shelf for quick consultation if the need arises.

Nevertheless, the essay will be of interest to those who want to know more about Tolstoi's theory of history, his intellectual biography and his development as an actor on the political and social scene in Russia. Although there is little that is new in the materials Gordin brings forward (they will be familiar to serious scholars since the same episodes and citations have been referred to again and again in the Russian critical literature on Tolstoi), he does produce his own story of Tolstoi's development.

Gordin's plot is this: In the early 1850s in the Caucasus Tolstoi begins to read history seriously for the first time and to understand its value as a means of developing a large view of reality. Reading history fuels his personal ambition to reform the world. Throughout his career up to 1880 he returns again and again to the theme of history, trying to realize in numerous projects, some practical, some literary, his desire to make the world around him over according to his principle of good. "Year after year Tolstoi tried to saddle, to tame, historical reality. He had a powerful and sure hand and the Cossack imperturbability of the [born] rider. But time after time history threw him off." Finally giving up on history, Tolstoi turns to religion as the medium of his efforts. Gordin focuses his attention on the period 1852-1879 when Tolstoi still had confidence that history could be the means to his ends.

In the foreground of Gordin's essay are projects Tolstoi initiated in the belief that he could have an impact on Russian history. While serving in the army, Tolstoi wanted to found a journal for the common soldier which would serve as a vehicle for enlightenment and lifting the ethical level of soldiers' lives. When Nicholas I denied permission to publish the journal, Tolstoi still dreamed of establishing a "pension" which would serve the same aims. At this early date, he thought of establishing a universal religion to promote the ethical side of Christianity and suppress its mystical impulses. Later he founded a school for peasant children and even later published his Azbuka with the ambition of establishing spiritual authority over a generation of children. His efforts were all thwarted by the government and by the indifference of society.

Tolstoi dreams of an arena of action for himself, independent of the government. He envisions a country of small landholders who live independently but also act together for the common good. He dreams of making every Russian a "Cossack." He seeks various avenues to his dream, from a project to release his own peasants and rent them land, encouraging the prosperity of those who prove themselves more adept at husbandry, to a visionary plan to encourage people to resettle in Siberia, far from civil authority. None of his utopian dreams can be realized in Russian reality.

Gordin's form is often that of a chronicle. Many of his sentences begin with dates. Nevertheless, he is selective in his choice of episodes and materials. The major literary works are often disposed of in a sentence or two. War and Peace is treated only in

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Book Reviews 639

reference to the theory of history and Pierre's participation in decembrist circles in the epilogue. Gordin spends much time on unrealized literary projects that are central to his theme, like Tolstoi's drafts for a novel on the decembrists and his plans for a novel on Peter the Great. On the other hand, he quotes in full Tolstoi's plan of 1868 for a "Society of the Independent," where any Russian person who had no tie what- soever to the government and who wanted to pursue a morally pure life could band together with other like-minded persons for mutual aid.

The theme of the decembrists looms large in Gordin's account of Tolstoi's intel- lectual development. "Decembrism is the most persistent of Tolstoi's many historical themes. It first appears in his work in 1856 and figures for the last time not long before his death." Tolstoi was attracted by a central tenet of the decembrist movement, the overcoming of the schism between the people and the intelligentsia with the concom- itant duty of the intelligentsia to serve the people. In its dealings with the decembrists, the government proved its bad faith towards the people and disqualified itself to lead the nation. It behooved people of Tolstoi's generation to take up where the decem- brists left off and band together to heal the wound caused by serfdom and save the nation. This is the significance of decembrism for Tolstoi, ably traced out by Gordin through diaries, letters and drafts for works of fiction.

In spite of its absorbing and well founded story, Gordin's book loses something by disdaining the methods of the scholar. For one thing, he almost ignores the influ- ence on Tolstoi of his wide reading. How very similar is Tolstoi's utopia of small farmers to that of Rousseau, a thinker whose influence Tolstoi himself acknowledged, but Gordin does not draw the parallel. On one occasion, he appears to challenge an (unidentified) source: "There exists the opinion, that 'except for his exterior, Labazov [the protagonist of the novel Decembrists] has nothing in common with Prince S.G. Volkonskii'." Yet most of the critical literature accepts the parallel between Labazov and Volkonskii, first put forward by Tsiavlovskii and developed at length by Eikhen- baum. A few writers on Tolstoi, like Shklovskii and Fortunatov, have argued against the usefulness of seeking prototypes for his characters, but this is a theoretical position and not a rejection of Volkonskii specifically as the prototype for Labazov. Without some further identification, it is difficult to know what the anonymous critic had in mind, but Gordin leaves the reader with the false impression that he is refuting a common opinion.

Gordin is identified on the book's jacket as a long-time dissident who acted on behalf of Brodskii, Siniavskii and Daniel' at the times of their trials, and who was a disseminator of samizdat literature. His own work began to be published only in the 1980s. If his book is read through the prism of this information (which reading is not at all obligatory), we can see that many of the aspirations Gordin identifies in Tolstoi are probably his own. Gordin deftly shows how cunningly Tolstoi wove the autobio- graphical motif into his works. We may be pardoned for thinking that Gordin himself has taken a leaf from the master.

PATRICIA CARDEN

Cornell University

Tvoi 18-i vek. Prekrasen nash soiuz. ... By N. Ia. Eidel'man. Moscow: Mysl', 1991. 394 pp. Paper.

It is a sad honor to review a posthumously published book of Natan Eidel'man (1930- 1989). A historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a prolific scholar and an avid and meticulous archival researcher, Eidel'man was the creator of a genre of historical documentary that crossed the boundaries of academic scholarship and spoke directly to broad circles of lay readers. Ever since his biography of the decembrist Mikhail Lunin became an instant bestseller in 1970, his books have sold out almost as fast as they have arrived in the bookstores. In the intellectually suffocating years of the Brezhnev era he made history a medium for discussing the most pressing topical

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