ABSTRACT
Tolstoy was a poet who disbelieved in nearly all poetry—the iconoclast of his own work. He combined a spontaneity that seemed nature’s own with a passion for rectitude and the readiness to pluck out his eye if it offended. Tolstoy’s earliest work—the more or less autobiographical sketches in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth , at once revealed his gift of innocence. Sometimes termed naïveté, sometimes the capacity to re-enter childhood, it is a grace to be found also in Oblomov. War and Peace is a grand valediction to the heyday of the Russian nobility, and especially of that Muscovite rural section glorified in the Rostov family. It is also a pause for Tolstoy to assess not only the past of his kindred but his own experience hitherto. Anna Karenina continues the debate of War and Peace, setting spontaneity against the intellect and unyielding will; rural sense, neighbourhood with the peasants and domestic stability against the false civilization of St Petersburg.
