... Finally, there is Snow’s propensity for linking Trollope and
Tolstoy. He does so largely by virtue of a quotation her offers that
has Tolstoy saying in 1877 in connection with The Prime Minister:
“Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence” (the
reference given is characteristically incomplete: “N.N. Gusev,
Recollections. . . . not available in English”). Snow
also raises the “psossibly insoluble problem” of whether
Tolstoy, when he devised Anna Karenina’s suicide, had previously
read and been influenced by Trollope’s account in The Prime
Minister of Ferdinand Lopez’s suicide beneath a train. Both
the quotation and the possible influence are provocative. Much of the
relevant material is available only in Russian, and I am indebted to R.
F. Christian and Patrick Waddington for assistance. It turns out that
the reference to Trollope’s killing excellence is from 1865 and
that it pertains to The Bertrams. As for Anna’s suicide,
no connection with The Prime Minister is possible. When Tolstoy
began writing Anna Karenina in 1873, he drew upon an incident of
the previous year when the mistress of one of his neighbours committed
suicide by throwing herself under a train (Tolstoy was present at the
postmortem). And although the writing of Anna Karenina continued
to 1877 and involved many changes, the idea of Anna’s suicide is
in early draft versions. Fairly late in life, Tolstoy compiled a list
of what he considered to have been important books and authors he had
read. He said that some authors had made a “great”
impression, and a few an “enormous” impression (the
definitive “Jubilee” edition of Tolstoy, LXVI 68, 71).
Then there are some relevant jottings in Tolstoy’s diary for
1865: 29 September, “reading Trollope, good if there
weren’t so much diffuseness”; 30 September,
“Trollope good”; 1 October, “Bertrams,
capital”; 3 October, “finished Trollope, too
conventional” (XLVIII, 63-64). Tolstoy was, of course, writing
War and Peace at the time. In January 1877 Tolstoy wrote his
brother that The Prime Minister was “splendid”
(LXII, 302). Later, in keeping with his general change of attitude
towards art and literature, Tolstoy’s judgements were more
negative. In an article of 1891, ”The First Step,” he
speaks of the “decline” in English literature “from
Dickens to George Eliot to Thackeray to Trollope to the Kiplings of this
world” (XXXIV, 275). It should be added that when the
appropriate volume of the catalogue raisonné of
Tolstoy’s library appears, one will learn which works by Trollope
Tolstoy possessed....
From
Review of C.P. Snow, Trollope: His Life and Art by N. John Hall,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Sep. 1976),
pp. 212-216