The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (27 page)

With these two poetic dramas, Ibsen won his battle with the world; he paused now to work out his future. But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice. When he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with
Et dukkehjem
(1879;
A Doll's House
), about a very ordinary family that disintegrates. Audiences were scandalized at Ibsen's refusal in
A Doll's House
to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright would have done) a “happy ending,” however shoddy or contrived. But that was not Ibsen's way; his play was about knowing oneself and being true to that self.

Ibsen's next play,
Gengangere
(1881;
Ghosts
), created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. Ostensibly the play's theme is congenital venereal disease, but on another level, it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism. The play is a grim study of contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Alving's timidly respectable views.

Among his later plays are
Fruen fra havet
(1888;
The Lady from the Sea
),
Hedda Gabler
(1890),
Bygmester Solness
(1892;
The Master Builder
),
Lille Eyolf
(1894;
Little Eyolf
), and
Naar vi døde vaagner
(1899;
When We Dead Awaken
). Two of these plays,
Hedda Gabler
and
The Master Builder
, are vitalized by the presence of a demonically idealistic and totally destructive female. Another obsessive personage in these late plays is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last dramas; perhaps these resulted from Ibsen's decision in 1891 to return to Norway, or perhaps from the series of fascinated, fearful dalliances
he had with young women in his later years. After his return to Norway, Ibsen continued to write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. He died in Kristiania in 1906.

(b. Aug. 28 [Sept. 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire—d. Nov. 7 [Nov. 20], 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan province)

L
eo Tolstoy, the Russian master of realistic fiction, is one of the world's greatest novelists. The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Educated at home by tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to the less demanding law faculty, where he began to pursue his interests in literature and ethics. He left the university in 1847 without a degree. He served in the army, which included service in the Crimean War (1853–56).

Among his early published works are three sketches about the Siege of Sevastopol: “Sevastopol v dekabre mesyatse” (“Sevastopol in December”), “Sevastopol v maye” (“Sevastopol in May”), and “Sevastopol v avguste 1855 goda” (“Sevastopol in August”; all published 1855–56). Tolstoy was at first hailed by the literary world of St. Petersburg. But his prickly vanity, his refusal to join any intellectual camp, and his insistence on his complete independence soon earned him the dislike of the radical intelligentsia. He was to remain throughout his life an “archaist,” opposed to prevailing intellectual trends.

He traveled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children. His novel
Kazaki
(1863;
The Cossacks
) was among the works from a period
during which he experimented with new forms for expressing his moral and philosophical concerns.
Voyna i mir
(1865–69;
War and Peace
) marked the beginning of the period during which Tolstoy reached the height of his creative powers. It contains three kinds of material—a historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of fictional characters, and a set of essays about the philosophy of history. It examines the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical figure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its flawless placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of the Western novel.

His other great novel,
Anna Karenina
(1875–77), takes family life as its concern. The novel's first sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy's most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Both
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
advance the idea that ethics can never be a matter of timeless rules applied to particular situations. Rather, ethics depends on a sensitivity, developed over a lifetime, to particular people and specific situations. Tolstoy's preference for particularities over abstractions is often described as the hallmark of his thought.

After the publication of
Anna Karenina
Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis (described in
Ispoved
, 1884;
My Confession
). Drawn at first to the Russian Orthodox church into which he had been born, he rapidly decided that it, and all other Christian churches, were corrupt institutions that had thoroughly falsified true Christianity. Having discovered what he believed to be Christ's message and having overcome his paralyzing fear of death, Tolstoy devoted the rest of his life to developing and propagating
his new faith, which stressed simplicity, nonviolence, and social reform. He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901.

Among his later works is
Smert Ivana Ilicha
(written 1886;
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
), a novella describing a man's gradual realization that he is dying and that his life has been wasted on trivialities; it is often considered the greatest novella in Russian literature. Tolstoy also wrote a treatise and several essays on art. In
Chto takoye iskusstvo?
(1898;
What Is Art?
), for instance, he argued that true art requires a sensitive appreciation of a particular experience, a highly specific feeling that is communicated to the reader not by propositions but by “infection.”

Tolstoy lived humbly on his great estate, practicing a radical asceticism and in constant conflict with his wife. In November 1910, unable to bear his situation any longer, he left his estate incognito, although the international press was soon able to report on his movements. During his flight he contracted pneumonia, and died of heart failure at the railroad station of Astapovo.

(b. De
c
. 10, 1830, Amherst, Mass., U.S.—d. May 15, 1886, Amherst)

T
he American lyric poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision, is widely considered to be one of the leading 19th-century American poets.

The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. For her first nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who
had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her parents were loving but austere, and she became closely attached to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door.

Dickinson attended the coeducational Amherst Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students alike for her prodigious abilities in composition. She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. When she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, she found the school's institutional tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke's strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year.

At home as well as at school and church, the religious faith that ruled the poet's early years was evangelical Calvinism, a faith centred on the belief that humans are born totally depraved and can be saved only if they undergo a life-altering conversion in which they accept the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst's First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have retained a belief in the soul's immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude specification is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal definition. In this she was influenced by both the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy.

Although Dickinson had begun composing verse by her late teens, few of her early poems are extant. Until she was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters, and a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward have been preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin, or to friends of her own sex, especially Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these generous communications overflow with humour, anecdote, invention, and sombre reflection. In general, Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. On occasion she interpreted her correspondents' laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or even betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Much of her writing, both poetic and epistolary, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching effort to deny, overcome, or reflect on a sense of solitude.

Dickinson's closest friendships usually had a literary flavour. She was introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson by one of her father's law students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons, a gifted college student. Two of Barrett Browning's works,
A Vision of Poets
, describing the pantheon of poets, and
Aurora Leigh
, on the development of a female poet, seem to have played a formative role for Dickinson, validating the idea of female greatness and stimulating her ambition.

In 1855 Dickinson traveled to Washington, D.C., with her sister and father, who was then ending his term as U.S. representative. On the return trip the sisters made an extended stay in Philadelphia, where it is thought the poet
heard the preaching of Charles Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian minister whose pulpit oratory suggested (as a colleague put it) “years of conflict and agony.” Seventy years later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, claimed that Emily had fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was married, and then grandly renounced him. The story is too highly coloured for its details to be credited; certainly, there is no evidence the minister returned the poet's love. Yet it is true that a correspondence arose between the two and that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst about 1860, and again in 1880.

Always fastidious, Dickinson began to restrict her social activity in her early 20s, staying home from communal functions and cultivating intense epistolary relationships with a reduced number of correspondents. In 1855, leaving the large and much-loved house in which she had lived for 15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her family moved back to the dwelling associated with her first decade: the Dickinson mansion on Main Street in Amherst. She found the return profoundly disturbing, and when her mother became incapacitated by a mysterious illness that lasted from 1855 to 1859, both daughters were compelled to give more of themselves to domestic pursuits.

In summer 1858, Dickinson began assembling her manuscript-books. She made clean copies of her poems on fine quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold. Over the next seven years she created 40 such booklets and several unsewn sheaves, and altogether they contained about 800 poems.

Dickinson sent more poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a cultivated reader, than to any other
known correspondent. Repeatedly professing eternal allegiance, these poems often imply that there was a certain distance between the two—that the sister-in-law was felt to be haughty, remote, or even incomprehensible. Yet Susan admired the poetry's wit and verve and offered the kind of personally attentive audience Dickinson craved. Susan was an active hostess, and her home was the venue at which Dickinson met a few friends, most importantly Samuel Bowles, publisher and editor of the influential
Springfield Republican
. Gregarious, captivating, and unusually liberal on the question of women's careers, Bowles had a high regard for Dickinson's poems, publishing (without her consent) seven of them during her lifetime—more than appeared in any other outlet.