War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written more than 130 years ago and, to quote Lionel Trilling, since the end of the nineteenth century “literary production has been enormously brilliant and enormously relevant.” Relevant, that is, to the era of Einstein, Freud, the Russian Revolution, two world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, Vietnam, the Cold War, movies, television, and our current electronic sea change. This era has produced the often overwhelming fiction of such writers as Proust, Joyce, Mann, Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bowen, Welty, and Porter: writers who, between 1900 and 1950, achieved the “psychologizing” of the novel, its powerful adoption of interior monologue and other stream-of-consciousness techniques. Where, then, does Tolstoy fit into this Modernist web?

He is right at the center of it. For instance, what has been called the “deathbed monologue” – in such twentieth-century fiction as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1927), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1931), Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Katherine Ann Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945), Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951), Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) – such monologues can be traced as far back as the death of Praskukhin in Sevastapol in May as well as to the severely wounded Prince Andrei’s stream-of-consciousness in War and Peace (816–17; PSS 11: 385–88), Anna’s last ride in Anna Karenina (684–689; PSS 19: 336–43), and of course The Death of Ivan Ilich. If we consider near-sleep to be the “living” counterpart of near-death, we could add to this list Nikolai Rostov’s guard duty the night before Austerlitz (230–33; PSS 9: 322–23), when, time and again, he nearly drops off to sleep on horseback as his interior monologue segues into stream-of-consciousness.