« back to search

Tolstoy has a "mind intoxicated with reason and fact."

— Steiner, George (b. 1929)

Author

Steiner, George (b. 1929)

Work Title

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism

Place of Publication

New York

Publisher

Knopf

Date

1959

Metaphor

Tolstoy has a "mind intoxicated with reason and fact."

Metaphor in Context

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 the 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 in the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul; Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky always on the edge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always keeping 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 [End Page 347] 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.
(pp. 347-8)