Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Tolstoy, Leo - Hugh I'Anson Fausset (essay date 1947)

Hugh I'Anson Fausset (essay date 1947)

SOURCE: "The Testimony of Tolstoy," in Poets and Pundits: Essays and Addresses, Jonathan Cape, 1947, pp. 13-30.

[In the following essay, Fausset examines evidence of Tolstoy's philosophical convictions in his fiction.]

During the War a writer in a Sunday paper declared that 'we're all Tolstoyans now'. He was referring, of course, to the carefully expurgated Tolstoy whose novel War and Peace had been broadcast, and not to the Tolstoy who denounced the barbarity of war and preached the way of peace. But the real Tolstoy can no more be contained in the pocket of the doctrinaire pacifist than in the clever hands of the propagandist exploiting the historical parallels between Napoleon's and Hitler's invasion of Russia.

The title which he gave to his great novel, he might have given to his own life. It was a life in which peace had to be incessantly won from war, which is to say that he was...

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