Carving Tolstoy

The short stories of two great writers, Leo Tolstoy and Raymond Carver, could not be further apart on the theological spectrum. Tolstoy (1828-1910) in the 1860s and 1870s wrote his most famous novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Then a sense of life’s meaninglessness left him in despair until a decisive conversion experience gave him new hope in Christ. Carver (1938-1988) fought alcoholism as he wrote stories about the gritty lives of lower-middle-class Americans who fell into despair and rarely came out of it: His typical characters illustrated the life under the sun (but not under the Son) that Ecclesiastes depicted.

Two books published this year allow for easy comparison of the two writers’ theology. The Gospel in Tolstoy (Plough) includes selections from Tolstoy’s short stories, spiritual writings, and novels. It includes my all-time favorite, “What Men Live By,” along with selections from Tolstoy’s novels and his musings on nonviolence and simple living. Beginners (Vintage) is the original, unedited manuscript of Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981): A good editor tightened those stories by an average of 55 percent, doing Carver a favor; but the author squawked about the outcome, and literature graduate students ever since have wondered about the original.

Tolstoy’s stories or book sections typically conclude with characters realizing their dependence on God. “Where Love Is, God Is” ends, “Martin understood that his dream had come true; and that the Savior had really come to him that day, and he had welcomed him.” In “What Men Live By,” after God teaches an angel three lessons about God’s sovereignty and love, “the angel sang praise to God, so that the hut trembled at his voice.” In “A Spark Neglected Burns the House,” Ivan puts aside anger “and now lives better even than he did before.”

On the other hand, Carver’s story “The Fling” has an estranged father and daughter meeting briefly: It ends with the daughter’s statement, “He hasn’t written, I haven’t heard from him since then. I’d write to him and see how he’s getting along, but I’m afraid I’ve lost his address. But, tell me, after all, what could he expect from someone like me?” In “Mine,” a battling man and woman are each holding onto their baby: “Let go of him, he said. Don’t, she said, you’re hurting him! … He felt the baby going out of his hands and he pulled back hard. He pulled back very hard. In this manner they decided the issue.”

In “So Much Water So Close to Home,” Carver states, “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people, and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer.” But Tolstoy’s character Konstantin Dmitrich Levin in Anna Karenina comes “to the recognition of that Power that not only in the past gave me life but now too gives me life. I have been set free from fallacy. I have found the Master.” Similarly, Pyotr Kirillovich Bezukhov in War and Peace feels “stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on new and unshakable foundations.”

Short stops

Harlow Hyde’s Climate Change: A Brief History of the Last 50 Million Years (Legacy, 2015) shows that climates always change, and that “if the period 1990 through 2014 is representative of what climate change will do to world food production, we should hope and pray for a lot more of the same kind of change.” Mel Mulder’s Back to the Designer (Word Association, 2015) includes 180 pithy two-page commentaries from a six-day creationist perspective.

Bernie Schock’s Raising Champions: Helping Your Child Grow Through Sports (Dunham, 2014) has good advice for sports-minded parents. Schock quotes high-school coach Biff Poggi’s response to a question about whether his athletes would succeed during the coming season: “Won’t really know for 20 years.” Poggi’s thinking: It would take all that time to see what kind of husbands, fathers, and citizens his team members become. —M.O.