Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> ***** Walter Moss [Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern
> Michigan University], _Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative
> History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and
> Dostoevsky_, Part Two, Chapter 19, "A Marriage and a Masterpiece"
>
> [clip]
> Tolstoy's women in War and Peace led Turgenev, who was still
> estranged from Tolstoy, to ask a friend: "Why is it that all his good
> women are unfailingly not only females--but fools? And why does he
> try to convince the reader that if a woman is wise and cultured she
> is without exception a phrasemonger and a liar?"7...
There is an analogous aspect in Dickens. All his characters who have a general social interest are hypocrites, indifferent to those about them, etc. Cf. Mrs Jellyby in _Bleak House_.
Joanna notes that "Tolstoy could "see" ...but not all the way through." I think that that comment applies to all writers whose 'vision' reaches the horizon of their historical context. I think particularly of the Iliad-poet, Milton, & Austen. Milton's closing lines --
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way
-- are as offensive as the First Epilogue to W&P if you refuse him his historical horizon. The world had perhaps closed in on Tolstoi in comparison to Milton, so his couple are hunkering down rather than reaching out, but the core is the same. As a Christian critic of Milton put it, Adam and Eve are ourselves, at any point in history, venturing on an unknown life. Milton's world is radically individualistic with a future, Tolstoi's radically individualistic with a perceived boundary. Of course Milton _had_ experienced, been part of, a revolution, though a limited one.
Carrol
(It's been almost 50 years since I read W&P -- but I read it every June for about 6 years and remember it fairly well.)
Carrol