SOURCE: "Experience versus the Intellect: Tolstoy," in Man and Society in Nineteenth-Century Realism: Determinism and Literature, Rowman and Littlefield, 1977, pp. 111-20.

In the following essay, Larkin examines how Tolstoy's beliefs influenced his use of literary realism.

Tolstoy and the Human Condition

Tolstoy sits uneasily in any assemblage of Realists. He despised much of the mainstream of western intellectual thought, and his recipe for living was directly at odds with it. But for all that, he lived in a milieu that was influenced by western determinism; and the problems it raised are a recurring feature of his books.

His interior life was one of conflict: a continuous struggle between what his reason told him was the truth about life, and what his experience and emotions told him life could be like if properly lived. This struggle partly corresponded to the two main streams in his cultural formation: the traditional...