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Elective English–I

Notes the popular audience. They planned to employ the distribution methods of the commercial
producers of literature for the people (a combination of regional distribution centres and
networks of itinerant peddlers) in the service of the goals of the idealistic category. Their
efforts succeeded to an extent previously unheard of in the realm of educative literature for
the common people. Biriukov estimated that in the 1890s The Intermediary distributed some
3,500,000 copies of various works per year. This must be accounted one of Tolstoy’s most
significant contributions to popular literature.
Tolstoy’s interest in literature for the people is well-attested. In February, 1884, he wrote to V.
G. Chertkov that the literature for the people then being produced was neither good, nor even
useful, and some of it was actually harmful. In an address to an audience at his Moscow home
on 14 February 1884 he elaborated his views. He asserted that writers engaged in such work
for profit rather than to satisfy the “true needs” of their readers. They did not provide their
prospective readers with works of the same quality they would demand for themselves. Even
if they wanted to do this, they could not, because their own literary tradition (that of Pushkin
and Gogol’) was defective. Tolstoy expressed these ideas with the rhetorical heat characteristic
of him at that period:
“I see only three reasons [for the failure of contemporary writing for the popular audience]:
one, that the satiated wish not to feed the hungry, but to deal with them in a way profitable
to themselves; second, that the satiated do not want to give that which is their own food, but
give only the leftovers, which even the dogs won’t eat; third, that the satiated are not in fact
as full as they imagine, but only inflated, and their own food is not that good.”
Tolstoy stressed the need for artistry of an especially high order in works intended for the
popular audience. He criticized contemporary authors for writing “for the most part in an
untalented and stupid manner” and for their “naive persuasion” that important matters of
spirit and life “could be communicated by the first words and images which come to hand”
(25:524). He was especially hard on what he saw as the unwarranted condescension of writers
and publishers for their audience. He had long believed and frequently said that the standard
Russian literary language was distinctly inferior to that of the common people themselves.
(His best known assertion of this belief had been in an article which he had published in his
own pedagogical journal, Yasnaya Polyana, in 1863. To the question posed by the title of the
article, “Who Should Learn to Write from Whom: The Peasant Children from Us or We from
the Peasant Children?,” Tolstoy had answered: the children. In his speech to his Moscow
audience, he exempted none of the contemporary writers of literature for the people from the
criticism that their works were artistic failures, but he reserved his strongest words for writers
with a commercial motive. Speaking on behalf of and from the viewpoint of the popular
reader, Tolstoy said:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, writers of our native land, cast into our mouths mental sustenance
which is worthy both of yourselves and of us; write for us, who thirst for the living literary
word; save us from all of these Eruslan Lazareviches, Milord Georges [characters from popular
chapbooks], and other such food from the bazaar.”

As I have suggested, Tolstoy made notable contributions to each of the three major categories
of popular literature. Many works throughout his long career contain minor and major characters
drawn from among the people. In this he was hardly remarkable; writing “about the people”
was one of the hallmarks of developing Russian realism from its inception in the 1840s. For
this reason, Tolstoy’s contribution to literature about the people will not be considered further
in this discussion. Much more striking was his contribution, mostly but not entirely after 1880,
to the literature of folklore stylization and to writing specifically for the popular audience.
Here he found a way of combining the forms associated with the literature of the people
themselves with the intentions characteristic of those writing for the popular audience. To

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