Who Is Tolstoy?

"Tolstoy is plurality, change and movement. This is arguably his most powerful legacy. For Tolstoy represents a life seeking its limits, ceaselessly inventive, restless and unsure: here is an artist who combines tremendous moral earnestness with cunning and delight in the power fiction grants its creator; here is a questing, religious personality who combines authentic humility with an arrogance that mocks any notion of piety; here is a supreme rationalist whom reason disappoints; here, finally, is a man who sought to become at home in the world and ran away from home to die. The wonder of Tolstoy is that he encompassed all these divergent energies and converted them into an immensely rich body of work that magnificently expresses the sheer precariousness of human life, that homelessness with which we try to become at home despite death's insistent presence."

--Jeff Love, Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum (2008), 151-152.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy had what I like to call the Heraklitean "genius of belonging." It is the genius of a life, restless and insistent, that can sing with Dylan Thomas:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

It is the poetic genius that William Blake insisted was the mark of the Word made Flesh. A sturdy genius, hard as rock, consuming as flame, in tune with the rhythms of the cosmos. Difficult to live with, impossible to live without. It is the genius of life itself.