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Dostoevsky advances "in the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul."

— 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

Dostoevsky advances "in the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul."

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)