It is simply an account of uninteresting things that happen in the course of a day. Tolstoy’s first artistic work, “A History of Yesterday,” is telling in this respect. He was seeking a rational creative method- he wanted to construct narratives that were both factual, that is, true to experience, and aesthetically right.
In his diary, he began a series of literary experiments: He made lists, he drew up columns, he numbered propositions in sequence. Tolstoy believed that the literary patterns inherited from the Romantics did not get to the essence of meaning and were thus obsolete. Throughout Tolstoy’s fiction, characters are reduced to one or two physical features the palpable, the perceptible, the visible-this is the universe of Tolstoy.
To Tolstoy, every inner thought, sense, and emotion was reflected in some physical detail the resulting psychophysical method was to have a profound influence on later writers. In his conception, art is the great unmasker as he wrote in his diary on May 17, 1896, “Art is a microscope which the artist aims at the mysteries of his soul and which reveals these mysteries common to all.” The microscope focuses attention on the telling detail, the apparently meaningless gesture, the simplest expression. Tolstoy, ever the moralist, sought to attain truth through art. Precisely for that reason, Tolstoy was able to write War and Peace, a work depicting the ordinary life of an entire period of history in all of its movements, contradictions, and complexity. He sought to reveal the reality underneath by removing the veneer of custom. To depict all in motion, the inner world of people and the life surrounding them, is the basic creative method of Tolstoy. Thus, his goal was to construct a new style, prosaic, matter-of-fact, but sharp and full of contrasts, like life itself. His view, expressed numerous times throughout his diary, was that such conventions blind both writer and reader to reality. Leo Tolstoy’s literary works may be viewed as repeated assaults on Romantic conventions.
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