An idea is something you can argue for or against, but a work of art, if it is great, transcends polemics altogether, offering a portrait of life in all its irreducible contradiction. No one understood this better than Tolstoy. How, after all, can you “agree” or “disagree” with War and Peace? You can’t, for what Tolstoy gives us in that novel is not so much a set of answers to life’s every challenge as an attitude toward living.
