Neo-Euro Tolstoy

[Zenon M. Feszczak]

A quote to be questioned:

"Leo Tolstoy is justifiably famous as perhaps the greatest novelist in the
history of Western literature."

("Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology".  George Dickie, Richard Sclafani,
Ronald Roblin.  2nd Edition.  1989 St. Martin's Press, New York. Intro,
Part I, p. 7.  Really, it's an excellent anthology, by the way).

Tolstoy seems, to my undoubtedly biased perspective, about as Western as an
onion (tsybulia) dome.

Then again, perhaps the guilty/responsible editor (who chose to remain
nameless as the author of this introduction) is simply subsuming Leo under
the Western conceptual tradition of the "novel".   Or perhaps the editors
were thinking of spaghetti Westerns?  A vision of Tolstoy in a cowboy hat
and guns a-blazing suddenly shocked me out of my post-modern complacency.
Perhaps it's just that Tolstoy had that rather addictive aristocratic habit
of slipping into the French language.  By the way, did Rilke ever forgive
the diplomatic gent for harping on the worthlessness of lyric poetry?  As
they say in certain circles: "That must have hurt".

Nothing nearly as intriguing as the fact that the "greatest novelist in the
history of Western literature" judged pre-humously, even pre-hummusly,
that, according to his own passionately moral philosophy (cf. "What is
Art?"), all of his novels (the greatest in the history of Western
literature, mind you) were best relegated to six-shooter target practice.
That's what I call integrity.
An attempt to out-Gogol Gogol?

Writing with a momentarily dead soul, and apologies to all involved,
implicating no one but myself, self-stukach,

Zenon M. Feszczak
Philosopher ex nihilo
University of Pennsylvania