Faber Finds

There’s a daunting aspect to Tolstoy’s stature in the literary pantheon, and rightly so. His books are big in all the right places, in all the right senses. George Steiner found fitting words in his Tolstoy or Dostoevsky when he described the former of the two Russian eminences as being ‘like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience.’ As if it could not be phrased more decisively than that, Steiner also quoted Romain Rolland c. 1887 to memorable effect: ‘in the art of Tolstoy a given scene is not perceived from two points of view, but from only one: things are as they are, not otherwise.’ Argue with that if you like, the fact is that one can think of very few other novelists for whom godlike powers of omniscience have been claimed, and more than once at that.
In Friday’s FT A.N. Wilson offered a present-day evaluation of Tolstoy’s immanence in the world which indicated that not much has changed: “It is hard to think of any of the great public questions facing the world today that Tolstoy did not anticipate and address in some way, whether we speak of the environmental crisis, religious debate (creationist versus atheist) or the anti-war movement…” Wilson was reviewing a number of titles that have been published or reissued for the occasion of the centenary of Count Tolstoy’s death. He is impressed by Rosamund Bartlett’s new biography for Profile, and cites a couple of translations of War and Peace, highlighting (as did Steiner) the points of comparison between Tolstoy and Homer. Most pleasingly for our purpose there is mention of Faber Finds’ reissue of the first volume of Tolstoy’s Letters, selected, edited and translated by R.F. Christian. Volumes One and Two of Tolstoy’s Diaries as edited by Christian are also available in Finds, as is the second volume of Letters, and brand new to Finds is Christian’s justly acclaimed critical study of War and Peace.