Bringing it Home

One Can Confidently Assume that Bristol University’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Henry Gifford (1913–2003), knew several, perhaps even many, people born in the nineteenth century. Growing up in London, attending Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, serving in the Royal Armoured Corps during the war, and lecturing at Bristol University from 1946, Gifford presumably dealt with various individuals for whom at least some part of the 1800s was first-hand experience.¹ The impact of that century, furthermore, would have been strongly evident in his lifetime at the level of certain institutions, cultural customs, language, and so forth, making itself felt even to those most fervently seeking modernity. It was perhaps such direct knowledge which lay behind a particularly striking remark in Gifford’s finely detailed essay on translating Tolstoy, first published in 1978.² In its opening paragraph, Gifford argues that Tolstoy presents relatively few obstacles to his twentieth-century readers, whether in the original Russian or in translation, bolstering his aesthetic impact.

Tolstoy’s milieu still…remains largely accessible to us…Despite the immense upheavals of political and industrial revolution in Russia, the last five or six decades of the Empire, during which Tolstoy wrote, are… present to our imaginations…the historical imagination is hardly needed to call up the world in which Tolstoy lived.³

This statement contains enough assumptions to unpack into decent-sized studies of literary reception. It also seems old-fashioned in its untroubled self-confidence; there is no sense here of intellectual relativity, of the need to constantly reassess one’s relationship with an Other. However, instead of thinking about a possible loss of literary effect due to one’s temporal distance from an author’s cultural context, it might in fact be more rewarding to consider what it is about a text that can really bring it home. Engaging with Tolstoy’s fictional worlds can seem empathetically and intellectually direct to an uncommon degree, an experience which continues to be attested by readers across the world, for many of whom the nineteenth century is altogether remote.

Investigating Tolstoy’s widespread appeal continues to be of keen scholarly interest, a fact not likely to have been lost on John Burt Foster Jr. in writing Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World. The book has three parts – Tolstoy and the West, Tolstoy outside the Soviet canon, and Tolstoy in the wider world – which subdivide into twelve evenly sized chapters, each of which then has shorter, relatively evenly-sized sub-sections. Looking at this cynically, one might say the study is a prime example of criticism in an age of reduced attention spans: everything is rounded off to be read in short bursts. This might be unfair on Foster, however, who clearly has a gift for condensing his arguments into self-contained, well-expressed units. He also writes with a stylistic finesse and an apparent aversion to generating critical antipathy; his focus is always on saying things as well and persuasively as possible. Judging by his wide cultural knowledge, refined style, and pleasing attitude, he could have been a diplomat.

Foster defines literary transnationalism as ‘writings that transcend boundaries of nation and language while reaching out towards a wider world’ (p. 58). Tolstoy is investigated in relation to his non-Russian literary influences, his affinity with other canonical European writers, his influence on later writers, his cultural reception by diverse literary elites, and his effort to create a realistic, heroic Muslim in the posthumously published Hadji Murad. As this overview indicates, Foster positions transnationality in terms of cross-cultural points of comparison. His emphasis throughout the study is on what can be shown to be comparable across borders, between cultures separated in time and space. The analytical points he makes always connect two or more literary works; he does not attempt to pinpoint the crosscultural appeal of a work by, for example, analysing how it seeks to speak of universal experiences.

One of the most...