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George Steiner’s comparative study of the two giants of Russian literature, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is subtitled “An Essay in the Old Criticism.” When it appeared in 1959, the “New Criticism” movement held the field in literary studies, so Steiner’s subtitle is programmatic. It should not be understood, however, as rejecting the insights of the New, which devoted attention to the text itself. Indeed, Steiner studied with some of the best practitioners of it. Instead, Steiner’s concern is that the approach was too narrow, especially when applied to forms such as the novel or drama. He turned out to be a harbinger.
Not only do novels generally profit from the broader context Steiner espouses, but the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which present a particular problem, especially so. If the novels of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—-from Samuel Richardson to Henry James—are taken as defining the form, then the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are outliers. They sprawl and present semi-digested blocks of philosophy (some New World writers—Poe, Hawthorne, and especially Melville—present a similar problem).
Part of the problem is formal. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky incorporated earlier literary forms in their work—forms said to be played out in their day and superseded by the novel. Tolstoy’s model was the epic poem; his point of reference—one could even say his peer—was Homer. Dostoevsky’s was tragic drama. His pole star was Shakespeare. It is remarkable, given their length, how much his books focus on dialogue and action.
But the oddity of these books is not only a matter of form. As Steiner sees it, the heart of the “problem” with these novels is that the Western novel is secular, concerned with this world alone, while Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spent their lives grappling with God. This concern unites and divides the two authors, for as Steiner demonstrates if the God of Tolstoy and the God of Dostoevsky were to meet, they probably wouldn’t get along.
Steiner’s book is divided into four long chapters. This may seem daunting, but the chapters are subdivided into sections. I read one section at a time and could follow the argument. The first chapter, the briefest, situates Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the European literary tradition. The second offers a close reading of Tolstoy, arguing for the greatness of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and his other works. The third does the same for Dostoevsky. Chapter Four is the payoff, devoted to the interplay of art and mythology in both authors. In an imaginative foray, Steiner recasts the poem of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov as a dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He admits that Dostoevsky could not have known the points of contact between the philosophies of the Grand Inquisitor and Tolstoy since many of them were expressed in private notes and remained unpublished until after Tolstoy’s death, yet Steiner’s treatment illuminates. The final section builds on this and touches on the paradoxical posthumous fate of the two authors. Tolstoy, the landed patrician, was lauded in post-revolutionary Russia as a precursor of the new order. Dostoevsky, by contrast, though initially acclaimed for his grim portrayal of life in Tsarist Russia, quickly fell out of favor. Meanwhile, he was more influential than Tolstoy in the West as one of the giants of existential thought. Gide, Camus, and others acknowledged their debt to him.
George Steiner was the product of a world that no longer exists. It could be summed up by his self-identification as Middle European, although academically, his training was in Paris, Oxbridge, and the United States. He was thus uniquely fitted to appreciate the best of what the New Criticism had to offer, yet knew the value of the historical-philological work that it sought to displace. The result here is a valuable book that is both erudite and humane. Highly recommended, although no substitute for deep reading of Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and the other masterpieces he analyzes. ( )

Crítica das obras de Fiódor Dostoiévski e do Conde Lev Tolstói. O autor não só analisa suas diferentes concepções sobre vários temas cruciais em seus livros, mas os coloca em uma tradição dramática por um lado, e trágica por outro. Fantástica leitura. ( )

This critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel provides detailed plot summaries of the authors' works and draws on references to Homer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Zola and Henty in order to illustrate the themes. George Steiner has also written "Language and Silence", "The Death of Tragedy", "After Babel", "In Bluebeard's Castle" and "Real Presences - Is There Anything in What We Say?".