When John Bayley's Tolstoy and the Novel was published in 1966, it was marketed as the first full-length study of Tolstoy as a writer. An earlier study, which Bayley acknowledges, contained only 128 pages, so it was not "full-length." In addition, I think truth in advertising would have added the qualifier "in English."
In the opening chapter, Bayley situates Tolstoy's work in the context of Tsarist Russia, which Bayley likens to a severe boarding school (15). Literature, he suggests, was a substitute for free institutions (16), at least for young men from aristocratic families who chose to do something more with their time than drinking, gambling, and affairs of the heart and who knew there was no use in devoting their talents to political reform.
Their situation (unsurprisingly) was akin to that of the protagonists of their writings, "superfluous men," a type created by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, a "hero whose intelligence and aspiration can find nothing to work on and through in the objective social world (18)."
The second chapter contrasts Tolstoy with Dostoevsky (Bayley calls it "the inevitable comparison"). Although both, coming on the heels of Pushkin, who opened the era of modern Russian literature and created the language in which to fashion it, are influenced by him, they differ in their reception. Tolstoy has absorbed Pushkin yet distrusts him, while Dostoevsky looks to him not only as a literary master but as a prophet, while he, Dostoevsky, is "the epiphanist," the one who "will show forth Pushkin's secret" (31).
More than a third of Bayley's book is devoted to War and Peace, which Bayley praises for its "extraordinary breadth of reality . . . as a microcosm of human consciousness" (65). Yet he notes the curious phenomenon that readers who can recall plot points and characters in David Copperfield or other novels have trouble remembering what happens in War and Peace. Bayley's explanation: Tolstoy is like the current of life itself (98). While not as extensive, Bayley’s treatment of Anna Karenina is also insightful. Bayley touches on the rest of Tolstoy's novels and novellas as well. His reaction to the late work Hadji Murad, singled out by Harold Bloom as Tolstoy's greatest achievement, is temperate by comparison. In particular, he calls the metaphor of the Tartar thistle, which appears at the beginning and the end of the tale, an "artificial clamp," yet acknowledges that apart from this, "the story expands and diversifies with superb power" (273).
Bayley devotes attention to Tolstoy's gift for characterization, relating it to Tolstoy's nature as a great solipsist. This seems counter-intuitive, but Bayley convincingly argues that Tolstoy's self-absorption enabled him to recognize in himself a wide range of human experience, which he then apportions to his characters. Notably, he adopts a woman's point of view as powerfully as he does a man's.
Bayley also finds a key to Tolstoy's strength of characterization in the Russian concept of "samodovolnost" (self-sufficiency, self-esteem). This seems closely related to the life force itself. When this departs from a character, death is near.
Death, by the way, is Tolstoy's great enemy, as Bayley points out. Tolstoy's reticence in depicting male sexuality is noted as well. In addition, Bayley covers other aspects of Tolstoy's style, such as the technique of "making strange" that he appropriated from two of his favorite authors, Voltaire and Swift. Unlike them, however, he doesn't employ it solely for satire but also for dramatization.
Bayley devotes a section to Tolstoy's theory of war in War and Peace. Famously, Tolstoy rejected the "great man" theory, according to which such men influence events "when in reality they are in the grip of forces they cannot understand or control" (164). Napoleon is "the arch-villain of war because he thinks he is its master" (169). Yet Tolstoy's view of war is "inconsistent, slanted and downright perverse" (171), achieved only by filtering out contrary evidence. But not totally. Tolstoy acknowledged Stendhal as his master in describing war. Still, unlike Stendhal, Tolstoy knows that "the actualities of war . . . can appear in every possible form," even in the way it is depicted on heroic battle canvases (167).
Bayley concludes the book with a brief chapter on Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago, which had appeared in English eight years earlier. For Bayley, this novel is part of Tolstoy's legacy. However, he concedes that it is not very obviously in the Tolstoy tradition, owing more to the Russian symbolist poets, with whom Tolstoy had little in common. Bayley sees the most significant similarity in the depiction of Yuri Pasternak as a good man, much like Pierre in War and Peace or Levin in Anna Kerenina. To me, this chapter felt tacked on.
The book assumes familiarity with the major writings and some awareness of Tolstoy's life and philosophy. As such, it's not an introductory text. Yet, for the breadth of insight and assured, well-founded judgments, it remains well worth reading a half-century after appearing. ( )

Extensively researched, interesting, and written refreshingly by Bayley. I was interested in his position that Tolstoy's composition of Anna Karenina was inspired by Pushkin's work and that Tolstoy, after so many years writing it, had no idea how to end how to fittingly end War and Peace. As with Tolstoy's own essays on the subject of the novel, I still have no idea what the Count's idea was.