Chapter 17 one five

It was ten years after Kreutzer, during which time he devoted himself more and more to moral propaganda. "Master and Servant" (1895) is a transitional work between the previous gloomy works and the kindly divine light.But we feel that it is closer to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Folk Tales".Most of this book narrates the story between a master who has no kindness and a servant who is patient. The technique is very realistic: the two of them got lost in the Siberian steppe on a snowy night; He ran away, came back again, and found him frozen, covering him all over him, warming him; this was an instinctive movement, and he himself didn't know why, but his eyes were full of tears: it seemed that he had become the body he had saved. Nikita, whose life is not in himself but in Nikita—"Nikita lives; therefore I live, I"—he, Vasily, almost forgets that he is Who.He thought: "Vassily doesn't know what he's supposed to do...and I, I know now!

The artistic character which we have noticed in the works of the last period, is here repeatedly encountered, especially the concentration of narrative, which is more pronounced in a novel than in a short story.The works are consistent, at this point and completely different from each other.There are almost no interspersed stories.The only movement develops very tightly in the whole work, and all kinds of details are collected. Just like in the "Sonata", the characters are also portrayed vividly.The increasingly clear, solid and unscrupulous realism enables him to see the animal nature in human nature——"the terrible and stubborn animal nature of human beings, and when this animal nature is not discovered, it is even more so when it is hidden under the so-called poetic appearance." Terrible." The legal translation, page 379.The conversations in these salons are only for the purpose of satisfying the needs of the flesh: "When the muscles of the mouth and tongue are stretched, it can help digestion." The first twenty-nine pages of this book.Sharp eyesight is not a pretense to anyone, even the beautiful Korsha golden girl, "protruding humerus, broad thumbnail", her naked posture makes Nehrius more Her husband felt "shame and disgust, disgust and shame", and the heroine of the book, Maslova, could not be regarded as an exception. Her seductive smile, her boozy smell, her flaming red face.The details are described like wild nature writers: a woman sits on a trash can and speaks.The poetic imagination and the charm of youth have completely disappeared, only the memory of first love can still cause strong tremors in our hearts, and it is like the Saturday night before Easter, when the white fog was so thick that "five steps outside the house, only one can be seen." A black block with a star of light looming in it”, a rooster crows in the middle of the night, the frozen river cracks and cracks, as if a glass is breaking, a young man peeps through the glass window, a girl who cannot see him, sits at the table , under the dim light, this is Katyusha thinking, smiling, dreaming.

The author's lyrical elements occupy very little place.His artistic face became more independent, more detached from his own personal life.Tolstoy tried to revolutionize his field of observation.The realm of crime and revolution that he studies here has never been known to him; Salon, army, street life.All he has to do is recall.He penetrates these worlds only by voluntary sympathy; he even admits that revolutionaries are terribly disgusting to him before he has observed them carefully.Page 20 of Volume II of this book.What is particularly admirable is his true observation, which is nothing more than a bright and flawless mirror.How rich are the typical characters, how exactly are the details described!Despicableness and virtue, everything is observed with an attitude of neither leniency nor fierceness, calm wisdom and fraternal compassion. ... Women in prison, a sad sight!They have no intention of mutual pity; but the artist is a gentle God: he sees in every woman's heart the pain hidden in the baseness, and the tearful face under the shameless mask.The pure, pale gleam gradually revealed itself in Maslova's vulgar heart and soul, and finally became a sacrificial flame, shining brightly on it. A few rays of sunshine on Lang's humble picture.No harshness, not even to the executioners. "Forgive them, my lord, they do not know what they have done",...the worst thing is that they know what they have done and regret it, but they cannot stop themselves from doing it.In particular, the book expresses a mood of unsupportable fatalism, which oppresses both the sufferer and the sufferer—such as the jailer, full of natural benevolence, for the prisoner's life, and for his The weak and absent-minded daughter of the same loathing who learns Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody on the piano all day long;--the wise and kind ruler of the Siberian city has endless conflicts between the good he wants to do and the evil he has to do So, for thirty-five years, he drank desperately, but even when he was drunk, he still did not lose his independence and dignity. Tenderness, but their occupations force them to be heartless towards others. Among the characters of various characters, the one that lacks objective truth is only that of the protagonist Nekhludoff, because Tolstoy completely entrusted his thoughts in his body.This is already a shortcoming—or, rather, a danger—of the most famous characters in the world, such as Prince Andrei, Pierre Bezukhov, Levin, and others.But their shortcomings are less serious: because those characters, in status and age, are closer to Tolstoy's mental state.Unlike here, the author incorporates the soul of an out-of-fit seventy-year-old man into the protagonist's thirty-five-year-old body.I am not saying that Nekhludoff's insanity lacked reality, nor that it could not have occurred so abruptly.Tolstoy probably thought of his younger brother Dmitri, who also married a Maslova-like woman.But Dmitri's violent and unbalanced character is different from Nekhludoff's temperament.But nothing in the nature of the character represented by Tolstoy, nor in his past life, foreshadows or explains the cause of this psychosis: and when it is triggered, nothing can stop it. There is no doubt that Tolstoy has deeply marked Nekhludov's immoral mixture and intertwining of sacrifice ideas, self-pity and self-pity and the horror and hatred he felt in front of reality later.But his determination never yielded.It's just that the previous insanity, although violent, was temporary, and it has nothing to do with this time.See page 138 of Volume 1 of this book.Nothing can stop the indecisive man.The prince's family is quite rich, he is also respected by others, and he is quite concerned about public opinion in society. He is marrying a woman who loves him and he does not dislike him, and suddenly decides to give up everything, wealth, friends, status, and marry A harlot, to atone for his old sins: his madness sustained for months, and no trial, not even the hearing of the woman he would marry continued her profligate life, could not He is discouraged.When Nekhludov learned that Maslova was still committing adultery with a male nurse, he was even more determined to "sacrifice his freedom to atone for the woman's sins." —There is a sanctity here, for Dostoevsky's psychoanalysis can reveal its source in the dark recesses of consciousness, in the institutions of his protagonists.But Nekhludoff has absolutely no Dostoevsky-like temperament.He is a typical example of ordinary people, mediocre and healthy, which is the kind of character Tolstoy is used to choosing.In fact, we clearly feel that Tolstoy, a man of great realism, never described his characters with such power and stability; see the scenes of Nekhludoff before his first court appearance and the The insanity of man stands side by side;—and this other man is old Tolstoy.At the end of the book, in a strictly factual third part, there is an unnecessary Gospel-like conclusion: here again the impression of a dual element is at odds—for the man's acts of faith are clearly not the protagonist's life. the result of the theory.And it is not the first time that Tolstoy mixed his religion into his realism; but in his previous works, the two elements were mixed more perfectly.Here, they exist at the same time and are not mixed; and because Tolstoy's confidence is more divorced from positivity, and his realism is gradually sharper and sharper, their contrast becomes more intense.It is a relation of age—not debility—and so lacks tact in successive joints.Religious conclusions are by no means the natural result of the work's structure.I am convinced that in the depths of Tolstoy's mind, despite his own certainties, the truth of his artist was by no means perfectly reconciled with the truth of his believer.

Yet even without the harmonious fullness of his earlier work, even if I personally prefer it, it is the most beautiful poem of human sympathy,—the truest poem, perhaps, which I have read more in this book than in any of his other works. See Tolstoy's clear eyes more clearly, light gray, deep, "the eyes that penetrate into the soul of people", as the Countess Tolstoy wrote in a letter in 1884.It sees the presence of God in every soul.