Tolstoi and Britain by Gareth JonesReview by: Donald RayfieldThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), p. 155Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212807 .

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REVIEWS 155

Jones, Gareth (ed.). Tolstoi and Britain. Berg, Oxford and Washington, D.C., 1995. xii + 303 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?39.95.

LIKE its companion volume, Bill Leatherbarrow's Dostoevsky and Britain (Oxford and Providence, RI, I995), this is a collection of essays, none of which were written for this book and some of which are distinctly out of date. Here too, the editor's contribution is the most erudite, compelling and up-to-date, so that one would have preferred to have seen W. Gareth Jones (who writes here on Adam Bede and Anna Karenina, as well as contributing an introduction) dismiss his contributors and become sole author of a monograph.

This collection is less successful than Dostoevsky and Britain, partly because Tolstoi as both man and writer arouses more banal responses from his non- Russian critics, and partly because Tolstoi did not affect the English novel anything like as dramatically as did Dostoevskii. Nevertheless, pace the contributors, there are Tolstoian novels in twentieth-century England: 7he Forsyte Saga (even if it is classified as popular reading) borrows a lot from Anna Karenina.

Contributions in this collection overlap considerably. One account (Chris- tian's collection of memoirs) of an Englishman in Iasnaia Poliana, shocked by Tolstoi's failure to get behind the plough, the lackey's tawdry white gloves and the mildewed wreck of his apple orchard, is enough. The petty quarrels of the Purleigh Community (M. J. de K. Holman's article, and also part of W. H. G. Armytage's) need to be told only once, if that, since there have been enough such experiments in Britain since the days of the Rantlers and Levellers for Tolstoi and Chertkov to be no more than peripheral stimuli.

The most important pieces in this anthology deal with Tolstoi's debt to the English novel. Gareth Jones on the importance of passages and conceptions from Adam Bede has text on his side but, as is shown by the piece by Edwina Jannie Blumberg he so generously includes, Middlemarch is the only work by George Eliot crucially relevant to Anna Karenina. I am dismayed to see no essay on Vanity Fair, whose characters, structure, morality and plot so clearly anticipate War and Peace that the analogies with George Eliot fade into insignificance by comparison. And on the political front, the last stand of Old Labour against Blairism deserves to have a Tolstoian interpretation.

This book contains a useful essay by Tom Cain on Tolstoi's use of David Copperfield. Henry Gifford's short and derivative article 'Dickens in Russia: The Initial Phase', however, would have been more appropriate to a study of Dostoevskii. The most unexpected (and least British) article is E. B. Greenwood's 'Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer', and the most original George J. Zytaruk's 'D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: An Instance of Literary "Clinamen"'. Whether a fine introduction and four or five truly interesting and profound pieces make the whole book worth buying is a decision that only the richer libraries can afford to ponder.

Queen Mary and Wes!Ield College DONALD RAYFIELD

University of London

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