Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.

Bellow’s quip uses deliberately provocative comparisons—“Tolstoy,” “Proust,” “Zulus,” “Papuans”—to question how “great literature” gets recognized and canonized. On one level it can be read as a challenge to cultural gatekeeping: if genius is universal, why do the world’s literary pantheons so often center a narrow set of languages, institutions, and publishing networks? On another level, the line can be taken as skeptical or satirical about fashionable relativism, implying that claims of equivalent “Tolstoys” everywhere may be rhetorical unless the works are actually available to read. The closing sentence (“I’d be glad to read him.”) sharpens the point: admiration should be grounded in encounter with texts, not in abstract posturing.