The area covered by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is vast; Mr. Steiner's arguments are numerous, close in themselves and yet rather loosely connected. The book, therefore, defies summary; it has to be read. In what follows I shall do no more than take up those of his themes that have particularly interested me, and have consequently aroused at least some degree of disagreement.

The fifty years or so before the Revolution of 1905 were, as Mr. Steiner points out, "the anni mirabiles of Russian fiction." As he also points out, "the Russian novel"—he might have widened the judgment to include the Russian theatre—"was conceived under a single sign of the historical Zodiac—the sign of approaching upheaval." Underlying most of what Mr. Steiner has to say about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is the question of their relationship to that "approaching upheaval." On the whole he agrees with Communist criticism...