Word: tolstoys
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...series of military catastrophes which led to Russia's defeat in the war, set the stage for the Bolshevik revolution and has had reverberating consequences down to the present time Solzhenitsyn portrays the event in light of these consequences, and adopts a panoramic view that may seem reminiscent of Tolstoy but which is unusual in World War I fiction...
This failure to clearly portray individuals becomes extraordinary in light of a principal philosophical stance expressed by Solzhenitsyn. He argues that individuals especially through their personal incompetence have a personal force on history that Tolstoy excludes in War and Peace He makes this assertion in a direct comment to the reader, dropping any particular distance that an author might want to keep for the action of his novel, and contradicts Tolstoy by name in a short expository essay sitting roughly in the middle of the narrative...
Leslie Fiedler spoke at Harvard last summer on the cultural revolution which supposedly occurred in the last decade, claiming that popular culture and non-verbal media explorations are where the true art is at these days and that Tolstoy himself would have been pleased by the power of contemporary communications to link huge numbers of people to a common "creative" impulse...
Though Fiedler was entertaining, he was, of course being foolish First. Tolstoy's faith in art was based in Christian humanism, in the belief that every man had basic principles which could be appealed to by the sincere and talented artist Fiedler, on the other hand hopes for some mass tribal evolution. And he misread even the processes by which an audience experiences television in order to buttress his argument. Do people care all that deeply about what they see on the tube? If they do aren't they first primed by commercial manipulators who bombard them with verbal publicity...
...might. In fact, its pages shine with the author's loving awareness of the Russian capacity to endure, and the "inexhaustible spiritual strength that lay hidden under these soldiers' tunics." Throughout the book he carries on a kind of running discourse about history, asserting-in contrast to Tolstoy -that though men do not know the purpose of life, individual acts of common sense, honesty and courage may change the course of history. Out of the dark past, in the terrain around Tannenberg, he produces examples...