Tolstoy and Dramatism

Tolstoy wrote plays as well as novels, short stories, and essays, but his experiments with play-writing are neglected by critics and rarely staged. His famous dislike of Shakespeare may have predisposed many in the Anglophone world to assume that he simply had no gift for the genre. Whether or not this is a fair inference is debatable; what is not debatable is that he understood and communicated a sense of the dramatic in all of his works. Indeed, in this regard, he has had few peers in world literature.

When he turned to the philosophy of history, his sense of the dramatic did not abandon him. One might even conclude, with Kenneth Burke, that it was Tolstoy's inherent "dramatism" that shaped his approach to historical narrative. In a perceptive footnote on page 259 of A Grammar of Motives [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], Burke wrote:

"Consider those speculations on chance, genius, and historical law which Tolstoy has written at the end of War and Peace. Naturally, an author who had written a work in which he commanded so many destinies would feel strongly the sense of a divine principle guiding the totality of historical development. Such a feeling would be but the equivalent, in cosmological terms, of his artistic method."

Burke's own inimitable genius was often displayed in such pregnant asides. Here, with just a few deft strokes, he lays open to view the strong link between Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the philosopher of history. One might add to this list, Tolstoy the religious critic. For it is Tolstoy's implicit dramatism that makes his religious criticism so compelling. He apprehended human religiosity as "spilled poetry" (in Harold Bloom's fine phrase) and, as such, set the stage for Burke's "modest proposal" for a critical mode I have termed, inelegantly, "socio-poetics"--a mode in which "ritual drama [is taken to be] the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub" [Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), 103].

I would suggest that Tolstoy's "dramatism" was instinctive and implicit; Burke's equally instinctive, but made explicit throughout his career. Tolstoy's genius, towering and with universal aspirations (he was, after all, as Isaiah Berlin famously observed, a "hedgehog"), made it impossible for him to accept Shakespeare's "foxy" poetics. Burke, the critic's critic, sat on the sidelines and observed the one-sided squabble--undoubtedly bemused.