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  3. "Masterpieces are dumb," wrote Flaubert, "They have a tranquil aspect like the very products of nature, like large animals and m

"Masterpieces are dumb," wrote Flaubert, "They have a tranquil aspect like the very products of nature, like large animals and m

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问题     "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, ignored 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.
It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following is true of War and Peace?
选项 A、It belongs to an early period of Tolstoi’s work.
B、It incorporates a polemic against the disorderliness of Russian life.
C、It has a simple structural outline.
D、It is a work that reflects an ironic view of life.
答案A
解析 推理判断题。第二段第三句中的The apparently fundamental changes指代第二句中提到的“托尔斯泰的信仰发生了改变”，即他中年时期的信仰与早期时的信仰不一致。通过第三句可知，这种改变所引起的变化有：写作手法从史诗叙述发展到教条式的比喻，对生活的态度由乐观向上的转变为悲观厌世，作品从《战争与和平》发展到《克勒采奏鸣曲》。由此句中所提及的变化的可推断，《战争与和平》对应的是托尔斯泰早期的信仰，即该部作品是他早期的作品，故答案为[A]项。
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