Leo Tolstoy and American "moral realism" in the late 20th century (epiphany in Saul Bellow and John Gardner)

"Moral realism" has long been an important phenomenon in American literature. It is often associated with the Howellsian tradition, which found its followers into the late 20th century. One of them was Lionell Trilling, who advocated moral principles both in his critical works and in fiction. Between the 1950s and 1980s, "moral realism" became an integral part of the neorealist movement in the US fiction. The paper discusses the dialogue with Leo Tolstoy in Saul Bellow and John Gardner, two notable "moral realists" in the American neorealist tradition. For both authors Tolstoy remained one of the key figures to refer to while contemplating on moral values in contemporary life, which becomes particularly important in the moments of epiphany of their characters. In the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953) references to the Russian classic are often playful and comically polemic, as in an episode of a Cossack emigre against a wilderness landscape, for which Bellow, as a city writer, did not share Tolstoy's affection. In his later intellectual novels of ideas such as Herzog (1964) and Humboldt's Gift (1975), Bellow incorporated Tolstoy's maxims to agree or argue with the great Russian moralist on issues of humanism and personal responsibility of every person in history. Despite the polemics on philosophy, the life-affirming spirit of Bellow's novel is Tolstoyan, as clear, for example, in the powerful epiphanic finale of Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), which is consistent with Tolstoy's idea of life purpose as striving to goodness, which is God, as stated in the essay "What is Art". Saul Bellow was one of the few American authors not criticized in the literary manifesto of the 20th-century "moral realism", John Gardner's book On Moral Fiction (1978). Quoting Tolstoy, Gardner insisted that "art is game played against chaos and death, against entropy". After an attempt of polemics with Tolstoy's didacticism in Resurrection, named to signal a conversation with the Russian classic's eponymous last novel, Gardner came to inspiring from the philosophy and poetics of Tolstoy's earlier masterpieces. The emphasis on family values and birth imagery in Nickel Mountain (1973) evokes Anna Karenina, while an elemental epiphany ending October Light (1976) reminds of pantheistic revelations in War and Peace. Besides Tolstoy's novels, the epiphanic narrative pattern of his long short story "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is quite important for moral contemporary fiction. For example, Gunter Leypoldt argues that the protagonist in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) is a "tragicomic yappy version of Ivan Ilych". Though this particular statement seems doubtful, it is characteristic of recent transnational comparative studies which seek the origins of current literary phenomena in distant cultures. This creative surge across borders is both stimulating and enriching.

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