关于托尔斯泰的长阅读

专注GRE三十年UID：3277319

“Masterpieces are dumb,” wrote Flaubert, “They have a tranquil aspect like the very products of nature, like large animals and mountains.” He might have been thinking of War and Peace, that vast, silent work, unfathomable and simple, provoking endless questions through the majesty of its being. Tolstoi’s simplicity is “overpowering,” says the critic Bayley, “disconcerting,” because it comes from “his casual assumption that the world is as he sees it.” Like other nineteenth-century Russian writers he is “impressive” because he “means what he says,” but he stands apart from all others and from most Western writers in his identity with life, which is so complete as to make us forget he is an artist. He is the center of his work, but his egocentricity is of a special kind. Goethe, for example, says Bayley, “cared for nothing but himself. Tolstoi was nothing but himself.”
For all his varied modes of writing and the multiplicity of characters in his fiction, Tolstoi and his work are of a piece. The famous “conversion” of his middle years, movingly recounted in his Confession, was a culmination of his early spiritual life, not a departure from it. The apparently fundamental changes that led from epic narrative to dogmatic parable, from a joyous, buoyant attitude toward life to pessimism and cynicism, from War and Peace to The Kreutzer Sonata, came from the same restless, impressionable depths of an independent spirit yearning to get at the truth of its experience. “Truth is my hero,” wrote Tolstoi in his youth, reporting the fighting in Sebastopol. Truth remained his hero—his own, not others’, truth. Others were awed by Napoleon, believed that a single man could change the destinies of nations, adhered to meaningless rituals, formed their tastes on established canons of art. Tolstoi reversed all preconceptions; and in every reversal he overthrew the “system,” the “machine,” the externally ordained belief, the conventional behavior in favor of unsystematic, impulsive life, of inward motivation and the solutions of independent thought.
In his work the artificial and the genuine are always exhibited in dramatic opposition: the supposedly great Napoleon and the truly great, unregarded little Captain Tushin, or Nicholas Rostov’s actual experience in battle and his later account of it. The simple is always pitted against the elaborate, knowledge gained from observation against assertions of borrowed faiths. Tolstoi’s magical simplicity is a product of these tensions; his work is a record of the questions he put to himself and of the answers he found in his search. The greatest characters of his fiction exemplify this search, and their happiness depends on the measure of their answers. Tolstoi wanted happiness, but only hard-won happiness, that emotional fulfillment and intellectual clarity which could come only as the prize of all-consuming effort. He scorned lesser satisfactions.

专注GRE三十年UID：3277319

21.        Which of the following best characterizes the author’s attitude toward Tolstoi?
(A) She deprecates the cynicism of his later works.
(B) She finds his theatricality artificial.
(C) She admires his wholehearted sincerity.
(D) She thinks his inconsistency disturbing.
(E) She respects his devotion to orthodoxy.
答案为C，但是我感觉不太到。。。wholehearted sincerity。

22.        Which of the following best paraphrases Flaubert’s statement quoted in lines 1-4?
(A) Masterpiece seem ordinary and unremarkable from the perspective of a later age.
(B) Great works of art do not explain themselves to us any more than natural objects do.
(C) Important works of art take their place in the pageant of history because of their uniqueness.
(D) The most important aspects of good art are the orderliness and tranquility it reflects.
(E) Masterpieces which are of enduring value represent the forces of nature.
答案为B，不太懂。

gckgckgckUID：3471903

严重同意！！！！！！！！！！！

fm_smileUID：2528707

专注GRE三十年 发表于 2012-7-9 17:08
21.        Which of the following best characterizes the author’s attitude toward Tolstoi?
(A) She deprec ...

21， 我的理解：means what he says  这类意思可以表达sinserity

fm_smileUID：2528707

专注GRE三十年 发表于 2012-7-9 17:08
21.        Which of the following best characterizes the author’s attitude toward Tolstoi?
(A) She deprec ...

22. Great works of art do not explain themselves to us any more than natural objects do.  这个我开始也有困惑。后来发现是对no  any more than的意思理解有问题。这个选项应该是说“great works of art与natural objects一样不explain themselves to us”。这样的话，楼主会不会觉得有道理了？

你是不是开始也理解为：GREAT WORK不如NATURAL OBJECTS那么能EXPLAIN了

雅思新兵UID：3528361

21用排除法就能选出来，除了C选项其它基本都是贬义的啊，D没有提到过，文章明明是推崇托尔斯泰作品的。

22题楼上回答正解。not... more than 的意思是前者同后者一样都不......