Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

Начало книги

Tolstoy was not a particularly precocious young man, although from an early age he had vague ideas about becoming a writer. But he detested the artificiality and the hypocrisy which, as he felt, were an integral part of the way writers went about making things up. His ideal was an absolute simplicity and a straightforwardness which would describe people just as they were, and events exactly as they happened. Soon after he had written Childhood, Boyhood and Youth he came to dislike everything in it except the original childhood section. The later parts, he said, were ‘an awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, and it was the fictional element that repelled him.

Some time even before Childhood he had begun an experimental piece which he called ‘A History of Yesterday’. It is indeed just that; and as nothing much happened to Tolstoy on that particular yesterday it cannot be said to hold the reader’s attention very closely: indeed it is almost a refutation in itself of its author’s view that if the writing is simple enough it is bound to be of interest to all. The story is of interest none the less, because of its startling affinity with fictional experiments, like those of Virginia Woolf, in our own century, although Tolstoy’s manner is too precise and too beady-eyed to give the impressionist effect so important to a sketch of hers like ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

Читать дальше →