Word: tolstoys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Thomas Mann's first great novel, Buddenbrooks, was published in 1901, there still lived in Germany a nonagenarian schoolteacher who had talked not only with young Leo Tolstoy, but with old Goethe himself. Mann, who has published 36 books in his 72 years of life, cites this old schoolteacher as the 20th Century's last physical link with the great world of Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart. But he does not suggest that that world's principal literary descendant today is Thomas Mann himself...
Austere Symbol. Half the subjects of Mann's essays are figures who are known to most Americans (Goethe, Tolstoy, Wagner, Cervantes, Schopenhauer, Freud); the others are likely to interest only a specializing minority. But there is no basic difference in Essayist Mann's approach to any one of them-and it is this constancy that unites them in one volume like assorted vegetables in one string...
...prominent but typical bourgeois. But to Mann, this insult is a compliment, because he believes that it was precisely the bourgeois soil of the 18th and 19th Centuries that nourished the traditions he most admires. Goethe, a dutiful privy councillor of Saxe-Weimar as well as a world poet; Tolstoy, a schoolteaching aristocrat who tried to look like a simple peasant-these men were cradled by the "bourgeois ideal of individual human universality...
...close scrutiny of Russian literature reveals an innate comprehension of the Christian faith, a strong religious tendency and an earnest seeking after the solution of the human riddle. Such a spirit if it lived, and it did, in Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol ... as recently as the last century cannot have been obliterated by the domination of a material-thinking group within a few short years. As well to imagine that a tin roof can obliterate the sunrise...
...playing Hamlet without a Prince of Denmark." Lomakin smiled. Chafee conceded that some U.S. newspapers might slant the news or be guilty of inaccuracies and omissions, but Government selection of what is news "could be equally wrong." He smiled wryly at Lomakin as he quoted Russia's Leo Tolstoy: "The thought of censorship hangs over me like a cloud, and the years slip by with nothing done...