Tolstoy, Leo - Philip Rahv (essay date 1949)

Philip Rahv (essay date 1949)

SOURCE: "Tolstoy: The Green Twig and the Black Trunk," in Image and Idea: Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes, New Directions, 1949, pp. 71-85.

[In the following essay, Rahv assesses existentialism in Tolstoy's works, noting that Tolstoy was "the last of the unalienated artists. "]

The art of Tolstoy is of such irresistible simplicity and truth, is at once so intense and so transparent in all of its effects, that the need is seldom felt to analyze the means by which it becomes what it is, that is to say, its method or sum of techniques. In the bracing Tolstoyan air, the critic, however addicted to analysis, cannot help doubting his own task, sensing that there is something presumptuous and even unnatural, which requires an almost artificial deliberateness of intention, in the attempt to dissect an art so wonderfully integrated that, coming under its sway, we grasp it as a whole long before we are able to...

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