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Tolstoj I Homer. Genotipski Uticaj
Tolstoj I Homer. Genotipski Uticaj
PAULFRIEDRICH
1. Biography
Tolstoy read Homer as a boy on his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and, while
in the Caucasus in his middle twenties, returned to the Greek poet with mounting
enthusiasm. Somewhat later, while coming out of a deep depression in August,
1857, he wrote, "I was/have been reading (chital) the Illiad. That's it! What a
wonder! It is compelling me to rethink The Caucasus Tale [i.e.. The CossacksY'
(Opul'skaya 364). (The Russian translation that so inspired him, incidentally,
was Nikolay Gnedich's, which Pushkin so admired and which stands, paradig-
matic and unsurpassed, to this day.) On December 9, 1870, Tolstoy announced
to his wife that he was going to learn Greek and began immersing himself in the
language fervidly on an almost daily basis: Xenophon, some Plato, above all.
Homer. These originals were like "spring water that sets the teeth on edge, full of
sunlight and impurities and dust motes that make it seem even more pure and
fresh" (Troyat 327). He taught himself with a rapidity that astonished scholars,
ignoring grammar as a matter of principle,' and seems to have believed that he
' The way that Tolstoy studied Greek (and later Hebrew) by comparing several translations—but
"without grammar"—has to be understood in relation to his intense earlier studies of Latin, Russian,
and French grammar before he went to Kazan University.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/284
had found in the Greek poet an art similar to his own: "Without false modesty,"
Tolstoy would later declare of War and Peace., "it is like the Iliad" (Steiner 71).
Hugo von Hoffmannsthal apparently agreed, and wrote that he could not read a
page of The Cossacks without being reminded of Homer. Much more recently,
Harold Bloom has written eloquently on the Homeric qualities of Tolstoy's last
novel, Hadji Murad. One reason critics have been responding in this way is the
chiasmic symmetry that both authors share, a structure that, as will be shown,
can be internalized and creatively adapted without the benefit of hearing "the
spring water" of the original.
2. Values
Homer's gift to Tolstoy also consisted of fundamental, axiomatic values: not
just a warrior ethic but a patriarchal culture, "interacting local and urban scenarios
. . . a dry fidelity to the facts . . . an affirmation of life . . . an anthropomorphic
image of reality... an immanent realism rooted in the senses (Steiner 78). Tolstoy
drew from Homer an empathy for the natural world that reinforced his own
experiences, as well as his reading of all of Rousseau by age eighteen: in Homer
the horses of Achilles weep, while Tolstoy allows us to see the world through the
eyes of a gelding; the dog who dies upon seeing his master in Homer is paral-
leled by the setter in Tolstoy who thinks about the folly of his bird-hunting mas-
ters. In both authors the realm of nature is often quintessentialized through
depicting the time of day or the season: the epiphany of Homer's rosy-fingered
dawn is equaled aesthetically by the autumnal dawns and times of twilight in
Tolstoy. This attentiveness to the natural cycles is paralleled by an acute sensitivity
to occasional and annual rituals coded in formulae and traditional phrasing that
reinforce the idea of the repeated emergence of culturally defined activities:
rituals for receiving a guest or sacrificing to a god in Homer find their match in
Tolstoy's word pictures of a (wolf) hunt or a baptism. Both authors also display a
comparable interest in ethical values, not only in their realization but also in how
they are threatened or degraded by human weakness: the absolute dignity of
manual work—plowing and haying—versus the sloth and luxury of Helen's bed-
room or of Helene in her boudoir; the absolute value of man and wife living
together in harmony as distilled in Odysseus's words and Tolstoy's happy mar-
riages versus the conflicted marriages and the varieties of adultery that inspire
both authors; the physical courage of Sarpedon and Prince Andrew versus abject
cowardice in combat situations. In both, the warrior ethic is in fact balanced by
the capacity to see the enemy and his point of view, be this the mortal fear of
Hektor in flight or the young French officer with blue eyes whom Nicholas rec-
ognizes as so much like himself that they could have grown up together in the
same family. These values are, in turn, set in contexts, not just of war and peace,
but of the more general conflict between private standards and loyalty to the
polity: should I run the king through because of a slave-girl, or must the great
king compromise his majesty by leaving that slave-girl untouched? must I show
hospitality to this ritual brother although it puts my family at risk (as in the case
of Hadji Murad), or should I slaughter the suitors for my wife because they have
TOLSTOY & HOMER/285
violated the rules of hospitality (as in The Odyssey). At the level of gender these
and other values are concretized hetween, on the one hand, a patriarchal, male-
dominant culture and, on the other, the complex relations between a man and
woman who are conceptualized as equal: Levin and Kitty during courtship and
many other scenes, or Odysseus and Penelope during the negotiation of his recog-
nition. A similar tension surrounds issues of deeper philosophical import: although
both writers seem to acknowledge a controlling necessity or fate—be it the causes
of war, or of Anna's suicide, or the foreordained doom of Achilles—both also
leave the door ajar to freedom of will and choice, whether the question involves
marrying a Russian princess or going home to one's wife. This unresolved ten-
sion between absolute freedom and absolute fatalism is conveyed in the language
of both authors, in the counterpoint between formulaic language and language
that is inebriatingly free and original, between the rigorous architecture of
Ciceronian sentences in Tolstoy or Homer's lines balanced in dactylic hexam-
eter and a choice of words in a narrative sequence that, in its synthesis of seem-
ing freedom and seeming inevitability, has struck all readers as "natural." On a
dozen axes of values, then, there is a deep congruity, much of it reflecting the
influence of the archaic epic bard on the nineteenth-century novelist.
3. OvertPoeties
At a relatively superficial and obvious level, Tolstoy's art language shares much
with his beloved Homer, including the figure of inventory, the heroic epithet,
formulaic scenes, certain kinds of repetition (notably anadiplosis), lyric epiphany,
and an inspiring tension between the literal and figurative, between literary real-
ism and associative lyricism—and something else nobody has been able to de-
fine: clarity and simplicity.
One hallmark of Homer's poetics is the list, be it of warriors or of ships. In
Tolstoy the list serves diverse purposes—as in the mysterious list of ten field fiow-
ers at the start of Hadji Murad. A second, more widely recognized trope is the
heroic epithet, from "much-enduring, crafty Odysseus" to the down on Lisa's lip
or the bared bosom of Helene, even if the novelist's irregular usage of this trope
is far from the rules of economy and thrift that control the Homeric epithet. A
third striking feature is formulaic and hence repeated scenes or "situation rhymes":
the rituals of sacrifice, hospitality, and the battlefield in Homer were a template
for Tolstoy's analogous scenes of battle, hunting, and the ballroom. A fourth
resemblance involves a striking but not systematic repetition of words between,
as the case may be, lines, clauses, and sentences; what in Homer is an irregular
repetition between lines becomes in Tolstoy the repetition of a word at intervals
within the sentence or between sentences (see Sankovitch). The last of the obvi-
ous connections between the two writers is the presence of "lyric epiphany"
(Friedrich, "Lyric Epiphany"): in the course of the narrative one encounters,
often suddenly, an increased density of phonic texture and an increased inten-
sity of images and their sequencing. For example, the corporality of Homer's
description of the pole entering the Cyclops' eye is not only paralleled but matched
by Tolstoy's account of Levin mowing with the peasants. Similarly, for lyric inten-
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/286
sity, Anna's suicide matches the death of Patroclus. Indeed, Homer's intricate
relation to subsequent lyric poetry, notably Sappho, is a critical commonplace,
as are Tolstoy's intricate debts to lyric poetry.^
^ Many times throughout his long life Tolstoy composed poems, "about 40" according to one
scholar (Sloane 70-71), but many more if we include the lines and stanzas that he composed in his
head while en route to some meeting or occasion. He often corresponded in verse (Sloane 70-71).
Tolstoy also wrote two long poems, and The Cossacks actually began as a ballad in Cossack Russian
(Opul'skaya; see also Maude 53). It was rewritten as numbered paragraphs that hark back to the
stanzas of the original long poem tbat he was carrying in the depths of his mind. Moreover, in
letters and diary entries Tolstoy sometimes refers to The Cossacks as "my Caucasus Poem." Tolstoy
was a close friend with two of the greats of Russian lyric poetry: Nikolay Nekrasov (who published
Childhood and other early works of Tolstoy), and Afanasy Fet, with whom he talked about poetry and
(mainly German) philosophy. Tolstoy revered Pushkin, whose Gypsies and Caucasus Prisoner rival
Homer as a deep source of inspiration for The Cossacks. He also, if less reverently, reread Lermontov,
particularly A Hero of Our Time, which had demolished one kind of falseness in the poetry of the
Caucasus. The Cossacks contains many passages tbat either avoid or parody conventional Caucasus-
style poeisis at the same time that it synthesizes not only prose realism and lyric subjectivity but epic
and lyric as well. To do so Tolstoy drew from Homer both lyric epiphany (some of whicb, such as
Hektor's farewell, he identifies), and, as I will demonstrate below, the overall strategy of Homeric
chiasmus, or perhaps more accurately, chiasmic symmetry.
' Homer's influence was reinforced by Tolstoy's deep roots in the eighteenth century (see Berlin,
"Tolstoy and the Enlightenment"; and Eikhenbaum). Indeed, an important aspect of Enlighten-
ment culture was the use of chiasmus in all the arts, especially music. For example, the music of
Bach and Mozart, with which Tolstoy was familiar, is often strikingly chiasmic in its organization.
Thus, by a sort of serendipity, the two ages in Western civilization when chiasmus flourished most
vigorously as an aesthetic principle—^Archaic Greece and eighteenth-century Western Europe—
were also two of the main sources of Tolstoy's art.
TOLSTOY & HOMER/287
'' Opul'skaya's superb and minutely detailed analysis of the composition of The Cossacks draws on
a huge archive of personal letters, historical documents, textural variants, and dozens of successive
drafts and outlines, many of the latter containing the author's marginalia.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/288
Chapters 1 and 42
The underlying and ubiquitous chiasmus of The Cossacks is illustrated near the
very end, as if the author were teasing us: "Then as now a three-horse convey-
ance (troyka) was standing at the porch." However, now (in Chapter 42), in con-
trast to then (in Chapter 1), Olenin is not promising himself a new life. A deeper
strand shared by the two chapters is the breakup of a courtship: in Chapter 1,
^ For the benefit of readers who are tmfamihar with this work, here is a one-paragraph summary
of The Cossacks (modeled on Aristotle's summary of the Odyssey). An aristocratic rake, Olenin, turns
his back on Moscow dissipations and a courtship gone awry and heads for the Caucasus as a volun-
teer officer brimming over with Romantic illusions about heroic combat, egalitarianism, and the
beauty of nature and native women. On reaching a village there he makes friends with an old Cos-
sack wbo teaches him about bunting, local customs, and human nature; a young Cossack who incar-
nates Cossack horsemanship, martial arts, and womanizing; and a beautiful, strong virgin with whose
family be lives and with whom he becomes infatuated. Memorable episodes include the young Cos-
sack shooting a Chechen guerilla from ambush as be tries to swim a river, a hunting seqtience that
focuses on the meaning of Olenin's encounter with a great stag and its lair, a party given by Russian
officers for young Cossack women, and a skirmish in which the young Cossack is gravely wounded
while his detachment is killing nine Chechen infiltrators. Olenin exits Cbechnia as a wiser man, but
alienated from both nature and the Cossacks, wbo are already forgetting him as he leaves. (All
translations of The Cossacks here are my own.)
TOLSTOY & HOMER/289
Chapters 2 and 41
Chapters 2 and 41 appear to be quite disparate at first glance: six pages of
Olenin's expectant illusioning in the first instance versus three pages of bloody
fighting in the second. Yet it is precisely the hiddenness of the chiasmus that
renders it profoundly signifying. Chapter 2 depicts Olenin's fancied and actual
alienation from Moscow, high society, the never named friends to whom he has
just tearfully bidden farewell, and even the socially lofty Sashka (with whom he
uses the second person pronoun ty, implying intimacy). He is also alienated from
a series of women, be it the young aristocrats with whom he has had flirtations,
the gypsies with whom he has done "some foolish things," or a recent affair that
went too far and from which he is now escaping—avoiding, as he always does,
any serious commitment. All in all, nine persons are named or partly titled "who
represent the social world he leaves behind him, each indicating either debts he
has failed to repay or a love relation that he is fleeing along with those debts"
(Bagby and Sigalov 480). Swathed in illusions of his youthful strength, Olenin
feels that he has never actually loved, that "there is no love." He dreams of a
Circassian slave woman who will pine for him and afford him pleasure when he
returns heroically from war covered with gore, who will learn French and read
Hugo, and whose key trait will be submissiveness {pokornost').
In Chapter 41, on the other hand, Olenin, now violently in love or at least
infatuated with a flesh-and-blood beauty—albeit not Circassian but Cossack—
and seeking her hand in marriage, is violently rejected, with her "beautiful sad-
ness" {krasivaya pechaV) expressed in five successive negations, including a triple
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/290
negative, during five conversational turns that are climaxed by a look of "abhor-
rence, contempt, and anger" from which our hero, totally excluded, departs for-
ever. The chiasmus between Chapters 2 and 41, then, involves a set of illusory
pluses counterposed to a set of actual minuses. The dyad also provides support
for the argument that the hub of The Cossacks is a theory of love that draws, in
particular, on the Bible and Plato, both of which Tolstoy read repeatedly during
his three years in the Caucasus.
In both chapters amorous dreams are spiced with martial scenes. Fn route to
the Caucasus, Olenin dreams of "killing or subduing innumerable highlanders"
or even of becoming one of their leaders and fighting against his own Russians.
In Chapter 41, however, Olenin is totally rejected by the Cossacks as a coward (he
ducks sniper bullets) and, as an outsider, is deemed fit only to watch the battle as
a bystander. He is categorically set off from the ideal Cossack Luka, who is gravely
wounded when the Cossacks, using a hay wagon as cover, kill all the Chechens.
He is even more categorically set off from the red-bearded, aquiline Chechen,
who, after wounding Luka, is gunned down unarmed by the real coward in the
crowd, the young cornet.
Chapters 3 and 40
Chapters 3 and 40 are chiasmically parallel in at least eight ways. Both are set
at sunrise, with sightings across great expanses (in Chapter 3 of steppe leading to
the mountains, and in Chapter 40 of steppe that is vacant and austere like the
social and psychic vacuum with which the book ends). In both chapters mounted
Cossacks are in action—in the first case near at hand, their guns swinging rhyth-
mically, in the second assembling in the village and then riding to combat, "car-
rying their weapons (rifles) so that they neither jingle nor rattle." In both chapters
there is an omen, be it, in 3, of a "terrible murder," with the implied danger to
travelers, or, in 40, "of bad luck among the Cossacks," when the fine horse of the
leader stumbles and becomes restive. In both chapters Olenin is approaching
the dangers of guerilla warfare with the Chechens, sighting (in Chapter 3)
Chechen abreks "cantering about the plain" and ( in Chapter 40) the nine
Chechens who, entrenched behind a low mound of sand, have tied themselves
together and are readying to fight to the death.
Perhaps the most tightly focused chiasmus here is the crucial role that is played
in both chapters by the Nogay (pastoralists north of the Terek Cossacks): in 3 it is
the Nogay carriage driver who points out the distant mountains to Olenin, who
can't see them, and then when he does, responds "indifferently." In 40, on the
other hand, the Cossacks first pass a Nogay cart carrying a family and then "two
tattered Nogay women," who confirm the presence of "many Chechens." In both
cases, then, it is Nogay Others who interpret a distant reality—mountains and
Chechens—that symbolizes the wildness and exoticism of the Caucasus. At the
deepest level, though, the chiasmus between Chapters 3 and 40 is antithetical or
dialectical. In the earlier chapter Olenin is immersed in an illusion of human
equality that seems to be in the process of realization: fantasies of Cossack and
Caucasian indigenes and their women and a view of the mountains which he
TOLSTOY & HOMER/291
questions and doubts (like the music of Bach or woman's love) are replaced by
what seem to be real Cossacks, real mountains, and real native beauty. Thus, in
40, he is not only stripped by Luka, the cornet, and others of any illusion of
equality; he is actually demoted to an inferior, noncombatant status which he
accepts, his "meaningless questions" ignored by the Cossacks. In short, whereas
Chapter 3 depicts a joyous entry into a seemingly realized realm of "grand" and
"majestic" illusion, Chapter 40 depicts an unhappy descent from lost illusion
into a stark reality of debasement and humiliation. In 3 Olenin looks back at the
false illusions and shame of his Moscow existence and ahead to an illusory
Caucasus, whereas in 40 he looks directly at a reality characterized by his own
exclusion and shame.
Chapters 20 and 23
The first part of both Chapter 20 and 23 depicts Olenin's all-day hunts with his
dog. He mingles and identifies with nature, although his Romanticism is tem-
pered by Tolstoy's classic realism. Thus, in 20, Olenin finds himself covered with
mosquitoes which "sting him and mingle with his sweat," each one of them a
distinct individual "separate from all else like me." Olenin is no longer a Russian
aristocrat, but a mosquito.
Olenin also deeply identifies with the stag he had heard the day before while
hunting with Eroshka. Now he lies in its lair, smells its sweat, sees its droppings
and the earth it has turned. Olenin's moments of identification with the stag and
with the mosquito are themselves blended or bonded through the shared idiom
of "separate from all": "I, Dmitri Olenin, am separate from all, alone, like this
stag." There is even a phonic identification between the stag (olen'), the name
Olenin, and the Russian word for "one" or "alone," odin (a tradition of its own in
Russian romantic poetry, as initiated in a poem by Lermontov with whose oeuvre
Tolstoy was so decisively engaged). These phonic connections remind one of
Homer's play with Odysseus as "No man" in the Cyclops episode, just as the stag
and its lair probably hark back to Odysseus's olive bush lair, the boar's lair, and
his encounter with a stag (10:157-63). Olenin's identification with the stag not
only harmonizes with his name but also with his epiphanic discovery of himself
and his own true nature: he reunites with the primal, etymological meaning of
his name (Pomorska).
Let us go deeper. These chapters are also bonded to each other by an eruption
of simple, elemental joy: in 20, Olenin senses the stag from being in its lair whereas
in 23 he senses Maryana from watching her moving about her house and yard—
locations that are synecdoches, respectively, of nature and culture. Moreover,
both moments of elemental happiness are undercut by sharp turns toward alien-
ation and fear. In 20, Olenin, emerging from the stag's lair, finds the forest spooky,
uncanny (zhutko), and fearful (strashno). In 23, as if to complement this, Olenin's
imagined communality with Maryana, which he would be "afraid" to spoil with
"a word of jestful love," is violently interrupted by the visit of a friend with his
banal, French-laden lingo, Moscow gossip, and shallow social ambitions. The vil-
lage Cossacks soon accept Olenin's visitor, however, and approve of his addiction
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/292
to wine and women, whereas Olenin again is left alone to talk and drink with the
likewise marginal Eroshka.*
These two chapters are also locked together structurally: the order of elements
within each is roughly parallel, as is true of many chiasmically linked books in
Homer (1 and 24 in the Iliad, for example) and other dyads in The Cossacks. What
locks the two chapters together most tightly, however, is the rejection of self-
ishness and egoism (originally a French word that is used in both chapters and
nowhere else in The Cossacks). The egoism in 20 is Olenin's own; in 23 it is that of
Russian society as represented by his friend Beletsky. In both, the rejection is
also coupled with an enthusiastic embrace of values beyond the self: in 20, a
selfiess love for others, in 23, feminine beauty as exemplified by Maryana. In
each case Olenin's soul soars toward higher and transcendental ideals which are
strengthened by the semi-parodic and certainly ironic image of Olenin stagger-
ing out of the stag's lair to look for someone on whom to practice his version of
selfiess love.
Chapters 21 and 22
The parallelism in these central chapters is dense, but is also disguised more
craftily than in any other dyad in The Cossacks; perhaps, after leading us through
the first half of the book, the author did not want to make his trope too obvious.
On the one hand, 21 focuses on the brother of Luka's victim, a tall, well-built
man with a beard dyed red, who notwithstanding his tattered coat and hat, is
"serene and majestic as a tsar." He has come down out of the hills to ransom the
body. His past and motives (three brothers killed by Russians), and his hatred
and infinite contempt for Russians, particularly Luka, dominate here. Chapter
22, on the other hand, focuses on Olenin's gift to Luka of a fairly ordinary
horse and the enormous disparity of wealth between the two men: one owns
hundreds of horses worth 300 rubles each, whereas the other needs a horse in
order to get married.
Yet there are important connections beneath the overt disparity. In Chapter
21 Olenin is emerging from the forest, and in Chapter 22 he is returning home
through that same forest. Both chapters throw Olenin and Luka against each
other as reciprocal touchstones of their respective characters. Near the start of
21, for example, Olenin encounters the hostility of the Cossaciks in the barracks,
whereas near the end of 22 the Cossacks, including the elders and Maryana's
mother, have become suspicious of him because of his (to them incomprehen-
sible) gift of a horse to Luka. One third of the way through 21, Luka boasts of his
Chechen kunak friend, Cirei Kan, and two thirds of the way through 22 he again
tells Olenin of this same kunak, who has invited him to participate in an ambush.
Deeper parallelisms involve the relation between false appearances and un-
derlying sincerity or genuineness. In 21 the Cossack captain shifts from stilted
^ Olenin's alienation from the village Cossacks is also indicated by the fact that Maryana never
names him directly or indirectly. Moreover, Luka never even refers to him (Bagby and Sigalov 482,
485). Olenin always stands onomastically outside the Cossack world he dreams of entering.
TOLSTOY& HOMER/293
6. Homeric Chiasmus
Let us return now to the particular "Homeric question" with which we began.
In Homer chiasmus works synergisdcally with narrative line and character devel-
opment as one of the basic principles of construction. This is a case where what
can be simply defmed can also be projected as the orchestration of a vast work:
on the one hand, "I love you and you love me"; on the other hand, the orchestra-
tion of the Iliad—or of Mozart's Requiem Mass. In Homer, as in Tolstoy's The Cos-
sacks, chiasmus involves a parallelism between the first and last chapters or books,
the second and next-to-last book, and so forth. It is also present within a given
book or chapter.
It should suffice for now to summarize the working of chiasmus in the first and
last books of the Iliad. Book 1 begins with the plague sent by Apollo (whose priest
had been rejected) and the funeral pyres of the Greeks; 24 ends with the funeral
of Hektor. Next in the first book comes the quarrel between the king and Achilles
and the abduction by the former of the "spear woman" or captive slave of the lat-
ter; in Book 24, on the other hand, the next-to-last event involves the reconciliation
between Achilles and the king of Troy and the return of Hektor's body. A third
parallel can be drawn between Achilles' encounter with his sea goddess mother
and her appeal to Zeus in Book 1 and the message from Zeus to Achilles and his
mother, Thetis, in Book 24. Odysseus's journey by boat to return the girl captive
in Book 1 likewise corresponds to King Priam's journey in the dead of night to re-
trieve his son's mutilated body in Book 24. In Book 1 Thetis entreats Zeus to ac-
cept her son's cause, which he does, whereas in 24 her encounter with Zeus re-
sults in a modification of that cause. Finally, the end of Book 1 portrays a quarrel
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/294
— Quarrel on Olympus
'—Thetis and Zeus—modification of hero's cause
-Thetis and Achilles—message from Zeus Book
• • Priam's journey XXIV
'—Reconciliation and restitution of Hector's body
-Funeral of Hector
Indeed, as Whitman and his predecessors (Sheppard, for example) have shown,
the entire Iliad is chiasmically orchestrated around the pivotal ninth book, "The
Embassy," just as Tolstoy's The Cossacks is chiasmically ordered, from the bracket-
ing 1 and 42 to the central 20-21.
All of the above should remind us that Tolstoy participated in a Russian liter-
ary tradition that was far more oral than its Western counterparts in terms of
reading one's work aloud, writing by dictation, and the manifold uses of the memo-
rization and the recitation of poetry (granted that for Tolstoy and his totally
literate readership, chiasmus did not have the mnemonic function that it does
for a bard in the purely oral cultures of Ancient Creece or the South Slavs). For
Tolstoy chiasmus became a tactical principle by which elements in the first third
or half of a work function to generate analogies in the second half, analogies
which the rfeader, ignorant of their source, might find novel and unpredictable;
in other words, a simple rule of transformation generates hundreds of fairly regu-
lar correspondences that seem totally spontaneous. As such, chiasmus became
for Tolstoy an organizational principle employed toward the end of the creative
process rather than an integral part of that process ab ovo. Furthermore, if Tolstoy
and Homer agree in using isolating, individuating epithets and "dramatically
pertinent details" (Steiner 66), Tolstoy goes farther than his Greek predecessor
in projecting scores or hundreds of details that are both "dramatically pertinent"
and chiasmic; this double function gives The Cossacks some of its mysterious charm.
Thus, while in both Homer and Tolstoy chiasmus and narrative (line) are com-
plexly synergistic, in the latter artist it can and does have the additional function
of obscuring (or, insidiously, highlighting) a political message. In Tolstoy, in sum,
chiasmus is a technique or device that can be artfully, even craftily exploited, a
compositional principle, in other words, by which he slyly attempted to perfect
the several big ideas that the hedgehog in him had built into "one thing" (Berlin) .^
' See Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," the title of which stems from
two lines by the sixth-century Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things/But the hedge-
TOLSTOY & HOMER/295
University of Chicago
" Tolstoy also artfully concealed other orchestrating structures in his works. "The Kreutzer Sonata,"
as one might expect and as analyzed by two critics, is an analogue, not only of the Beethoven origi-
nal (Green), but, beyond that, of the sonata form more generally (Rosen 12). His later masterpiece.
Master and Man, is to a significant degree modeled on Flaubert's "The Legend of St. Julien," and
includes Christian and numerical symbolism (the circle, the numbers two and three) that was woven
in late in the writing process and has been barely noticed by readers (Trahan; Swanson).
' Thanks to the following for their critical comments: Tom Bartscherer, Sascha Goluboff, Alaina
Lemon, Paul Liffman, Katia Mitova, Dale Pesmen, Kevin Tuite, and the two anonymous readers for
Comparative Literature. I am grateful to Ann Ch'ien of the University of Chicago's Anthropology
Department and to Katie Gruber of the Linguistics Department for their meticulous, informed
typing of various stages of the manuscript, to Maureen Mahowald for her library searches, and—
last but not least—to my daughter Joan Friedrich for her help with making the English in my trans-
lations more natural. A complete analysis of chiasmus between all 42 chapters is available in xerox
form on request.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/298
Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. W. Hamilton. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1927.
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