Word: tolstoys
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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...
When Mann writes in this way of Goethe and Tolstoy, he is not arguing that they simply and naturally kept to the middle of the road. On the contrary, he sees them as men who spent most of their lives and will power struggling to discipline passionate "animal" qualities. Out of this unresolved but "lofty encounter of nature and spirit" came the synthesis most admired by Mann-a harmonious and exalted mixture of primitive ardor and civilized judgment...
...most great men, this struggle raged all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous. Tolstoy, for example (a child of nature whose animal passions filled his novels with "rich streams of ... creative primeval lustiness and health"), fought his passions until he believed he had converted himself from a lecherous, iconoclastic youth into an apostolic, vegetarian writer of Christian tracts ("I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body," he said). But a rabbit had only to jump up under his feet to make him let out a hunter's bloodthirsty yell. One evening, out of sheer exuberance...