1 See Shestov, Lev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (Adiens, Ohio, 1969);Google Scholar this translation conveniently brings together Shestov’s two books Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogq iF. Nitshe and Dostoevskii i Nitsshe: Filosofiia tragedii. See also Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Tolstoy as Man and Artist: With an Essay on Dostoevsky (1902; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970); Steiner, George, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

2 Fanger, Donald, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar and Morson, Gary Saul, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Stanford, 1987).Google Scholar

3 I have confirmed that this (usually unarticulated) sense of the difference between Tolstoi and Dostoevskii extends even to individual sentences. At die final meeting of an undergraduate class on Tolstoi and Dostoevskii that I teach, I distribute to the students a sheet of paper containing two sentences, one from War and Peace and one from The Brothers Karamazov. These sentences contain no place names, names of characters, or any other identifying features and are chosen by someone who has never read either novel. I then ask the students to guess which sentence was written by Tolstoi and which one was written by Dostoevskii. Most students are able to identify correcdy the author of each sentence.

4 For an early, and historically important, statement of diese principles, see Chomsky, Noam, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (London, 1964).Google Scholar

5 See Gustafson, Richard, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

6 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, Tvorchestvo L. Tolstogo i Dostoevskogo, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Dmitriia Sergeevicha Merezhkovskogo (Moscow, 1914), vol. 4, pt. 2:93.Google Scholar

7 On the monological word, see Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problemy poetikiDostoevskogo, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1972), 132–41.Google Scholar

8 Steiner, Tolstoy orDostoevsky, 9.

9 Or, more generally, does the oeuvre of a great artist exhibit endlessly random variations? Is each work totally discrete from every other work? If so, then no valid generalizations may be permitted. I believe, however, that the oeuvre of Tolstoi and the oeuvre of Dostoevskii have an internal consistency that may be described by means of generalizations that are neither universal (they allow for exceptions and differences between phases of the artist’s development) nor limited to only one work.

10 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,“ in Roman Jakobson and Halle, Morris, Fundamentals of Language (S-Gravenhage, 1956), 55–82.Google Scholar

11 See Bohn, Willard, “Roman Jakobson’s Theory of Metaphor and Metonymy: An Annotated Bibliography,” Style 18, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 534–50.Google Scholar

12 Surette, Leon, “Metaphor and Metonymy: Jakobson Reconsidered,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 551 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithiaca, 1977).Google Scholar See, in particular, “Part Two: Metaphor and Metonymy,” 73–124.

14 Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” 60.

15 Ibid., 60, 77.

16 Northrop Frye makes a comment that has great relevance here: “There are no rights and wrongs in such matters, but it seems useful to me to separate both the language of immanence, which is founded on metaphor, and the language of transcendence, which is founded on metonymy in my sense, from descriptive language.” Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York, 1982), 15.Google Scholar It makes a great deal of sense to say diat Dostoevskii, a metaphorical writer, uses the “language of immanence,” whereas Tolstoi, a metonymical writer, uses the “language of transcendence. “

17 Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” 78.

18 The most explicit statement that a homogeneous relationship obtains between two entities is an equals sign, and War and Peace is probably the only nineteenth–century novel that contains an equation. In one of the historical essays, Tolstoi describes an imaginary batde: “Consequendy, four were equal to fifteen, and, consequendy, 4x = 15y. Consequendy, x:y = 15:4. The equation does not give die value of die unknown, but it gives die relationship between die two unknowns.” Tolstoi, L. N., Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. Akopova, N. P. et al. (Moscow, 1960–65), 7:142.Google Scholar

19 It will be apparent to the dioughtful reader diat I am extending Bakhtin’s association of die polyphonic word widi Dostoevskii and the monological word witii Tolstoi. Using metaphor and metonymy to make die comparison frees it from Bakhtin’s verbally elite analysis. Since Bakhtin diinks only in terms of discourse, he has nodiing to say about issues such as Dostoevskii’s use of painting.

20 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth–Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), ix.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 177.

22 Ibid., 190.

23 Ibid., 187.

24 Dostoevskii, F. M., Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, Grossman, L. P. et al., eds. (Moscow, 1956–58), 6:438–71, 9:309–32.Google Scholar The Brothers Karamazov makes explicit its combinations of heterogeneous elements in its complex systems of interrelated chapter titles. Tolstoi’s metonymical relationships pervade his entire work, so he never uses such a system of chapter tides. Anna Karenina has one chapter called “Death“; tins chapter tide is one of die novel’s several metaphorical elements that appear in Tolstoi’s work for die first time. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 9:79–86.

25 See Tynianov, Iu., “Dostoevskii i Gogol’ (K teorii parodii),” in Kaverin, V A. and Miasnikov, A. S., eds., Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), 198–226.Google Scholar

26 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:47, 5:492.

27 Ibid., 6:680, 6:215.

28 Such research reached a certain culmination in Perlina, Nina, Varieties of Poetic Utterances: The Poetics of Quotation in “The Brothers Karamazov” (Lanham, Md., 1985).Google Scholar

29 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:275,6:88.

30 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:356 – 68. This is not to say that no one has ever tried to identify the opera. On this interesting issue, see Lehrman, Edgar, A Guide to the Russian Texts of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).Google Scholar

31 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:79,9:247.

32 Ibid., 5:177.

33 Curtis, James M., “Spatial Form as the Intrinsic Genre of Dostoevsky’s Novels,” Modern Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 135–54.Google Scholar

34 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9:26.

35 Ibid., 10:180–81.

36 Ibid., 1:168, 5:38, 10:227–33.

37 See Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 437.

38 Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” 62–63.

39 See, for example, Dostoevskii, Sobraniesochinenii, 9:176–82.

40 Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 109.

41 The point here is that although War and Peace contains letters and diaries, it also contains essays, historical documents, and the like. Tolstoi never inserted a single example of a contrasting genre whose uniqueness makes it distinctive in the larger work.

42 See Struve, Gleb, “Monologue interieure: The Origins of the Formula and the First State of the Possibilities,” PMLA 69 (1954): 1101–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:230–33.

44 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:51; emphasis in the original.

45 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:221.

46 Ibid., 8:81.

47 Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:260.

48 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:72.

49 Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 15.

50 Ibid., 188; emphasis in the original.

51 Ibid., 228.

52 Shklovskii, Viktor, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” O teorii proxy, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1929), 14.Google Scholar

53 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:360. For Shklovskii’s comments on this passage, see Shklovskii, Viktor, Materɴial i stil’ v romane Lɴva Tolstogo “Voina i mir” (Moscow, 1928), 118.Google Scholar

54 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:255; emphasis in the original. What Shklovskii does not say about estrangement is that a similar process takes place in the hunt scene, which is related to all the batde scenes: “Nikolai had never seen Ilagin, but, knowing no middle ground, as always in his judgments and feelings, from the rumors of the wildness and capriciousness of this landowner, hated him with all his soul and considered him a most vicious enemy … He had hardly ridden out into an opening of the forest when he saw a fat nobleman in a beaver hat riding toward him … Instead of an enemy, Nikolai saw in Ilagin a polite, presentable nobleman who especially wanted to meet a young count.” Ibid., 5:285–86.

55 Shklovskii, Materɴial i stilɴ, 113.

56 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, vii.

57 Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 2.

58 See Shklovskii, Materɴial i stilɴ, 126.

59 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:264; emphasis added.

60 Ibid., 6:268–69.

61 Ibid., 6:261.

62 Ibid., 6:228.

63 Cf. Lodge’s comment: “We would expect the writer who is working in the metonymic mode to use metaphorical devices sparingly; to make diem subject to the control of context—either by elaborating details of the context into symbols, or by drawing analogies from a semantic field into die context.” Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 113. By making the contiguity of the dead soldier and the new–mown hay meaningful, Tolstoi is drawing analogies from a semantic field into the context.

64 Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 98.

65 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:251 and 8:124.

66 Ibid., 7:259.

67 Ibid., 7:285.

68 Ibid., 8:465–66.

69 Ibid., 5:348.

70 Ibid., 5:349.

71 Ibid., 5:360–65,8:121.

72 There are no murders in Tolstoi’s work before the 1880s. Even during his battle scenes, no soldier ever aims a rifle and kills a member of the opposing army. When soldiers such as Andrei Bolkonskii are wounded, they are always wounded by shells or shrapnel fired by distant unseen hands.

73 Although the narrator in the Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth trilogy has brothers, they are of limited importance.