PAUL FRIEDRICH

  TOLSTOY, HOMER, AND GENOTYPICAL INFLUENCE 

ALTHOUGH IT IS COMMON knowledge among lovers of Russian literature that Leo Tolstoy was profoundly and throughout his life influenced by Homer, key questions remain regarding the nature, scope, and depth of his indebtedness. In the pages that follow I will attempt to answer some of these questions from four different perspectives: biography, fundamental values and themes, phenotypical traits such as the heroic epithet, and, most important of all, genotypical poetics—in this case chiasmus, or the repetition of elements in reverse order. I will do so by looking mainly at Tolstoy’s earliest masterpiece, The Cossacks, with a concluding supplementary glance at his last, Hadji Murad.

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 Cossacks].". (The Russian translation that so inspired him, incidentally, was Nikolay Gnedich’s, which Pushkin so admired and which stands, paradigmatic 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."  He taught himself with a rapidity that astonished scholars, ignoring grammar as a matter of principle, and seems to have believed that he 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."  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. 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 paralleled by the setter in Tolstoy who thinks about the folly of his bird-hunting masters. 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 bedroom or of Hélène in her boudoir; the absolute value of man and wife living together in harmony as distilled in Odysseus’s words and Tolstoy’s happy marriages 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 recognizes 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 violated the rules of hospitality (as in The Odyssey). At the level of gender these and other values are concretized between, 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 recognition. 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 tension 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 hexameter and a choice of words in a narrative sequence that, in its synthesis of seeming 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. Overt Poetics

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 realism and associative lyricism—and something else nobody has been able to define: 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 flowers 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 Hélène, 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. The last of the obvious connections between the two writers is the presence of "lyric epiphany": in the course of the narrative one encounters, often suddenly, an increased density of phonic texture and an increased intensity 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 intensity, 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.