Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  As I read this biography again after so many years, and thought of its relaunch into the world, I found myself compelled to rethink this simple dichotomy – between the ‘literary’ Tolstoy, and Tolstoy the dissident/rebel/holy-fool. There were not two Tolstoys, the novelist and the sectarian anarchist; there was one. War and Peace is not just a great national and family saga; it is a novel about personal and national regeneration. It asks profound questions, as does its successor Anna Karenina. They are questions which Tolstoy was going to answer in the second half of his writing life, sometimes in fictional form, but more often in those works of unforgettable and imperishable moral clarion calls. He asked such deceptively simple questions as: ‘How should we live?’ The answers he gave caused Tsars, and secret police, and Church Inquisitors to shake in their souls. By the end, literally millions of people throughout the world hung on his words.

  We too, like the crowds, sing ‘Eternal Memory’. Eternal his memory is. Of the thousands who followed his coffin to its unconsecrated woodland grave, few had read War and Peace. They saw him as a great prophet of peace, and as a great exposer of the hypocrisy not only of the Russian government but of all governments; not just of the Russian army, but of the whole militaristic outlook.

  Four years after the death of the Apostle of Peace, the war broke out which led to the whole cycle of mass slaughter and power-brokerage with which we are still living. Tolstoy’s simplicities could be denounced as simplifications. After the calamity of the First World War and the subsequent economic crises of the western world, came the inevitable growth of mass tyrannies – of Stalin’s Soviet Union, of Hitler’s Germany. Against such forces as these, could it not be said that Tolstoy’s pacifism is simply silly – that it has nothing to say?

  I would understand why anyone could believe that. But what have we to say in reply to Tolstoy as we sit in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, or the ruins of Baghdad in 2010 – that war is a dirty business? That you can’t make an omelette without torturing and maiming millions of your fellow human beings? That such and such a tyrant was so evil that it was worth killing millions of people in order to replace him with tyrannies just as horrible?

  In the autumn of 1880, a young Moscow University graduate named Ivan Ivakin arrived at Tolstoy’s country house, Yasnaya Polyana, to help him with his latest craze – learning Greek. Tolstoy rivalled Toad of Toad Hall in the enthusiasm with which he took up his crazes – whether it was hunting, agriculture, dairy farming, or, in old age, riding a bicycle. He was fluent in Russian, Turkish, French and could speak good German and passable English. Languages were a passion with him, and when he began to learn Greek, he romped through Homer, Herodotus and Xenophon. But the Greek text on which he had really fixed his penetrating eyes was that of the New Testament.

  Ivakin’s account of Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for Greek shows the great man to have been boundlessly energetic but not too punctilious when it came to the finer points of vocabulary or grammatical accuracy. ‘Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?’ he would say. ‘Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what I should do and how I should live!’

  Ivakin was startled when they sat down to attempt a rendition of the celebrated proem to the Fourth Gospel – En te arche . . . – ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’ The subsequent phrase, ‘and the Word was with God’, has baffled many translators and commentators. The word – Logos – Tolstoy rendered as ‘reasoning’. ‘And the Word was with God . . .’ His translation became, ‘And reasoning replaced God’.

  Tolstoy was both a child of the Enlightenment and deeply religious in a distinctly Russian way. His message to the planet was that, far from being against reason, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – that manifesto of pacifist anarchism – was the most reasonable utterance ever made. Do not resist evil with violence. Do not think that happiness, either personal or collective, is enhanced by the pursuit of wealth, and power. Do not hide from yourself the fact that all so-called civilizations and all so-called good governments are underpinned by violence.

  It is easy to point to the flaws in the Tolstoyan anarchist creed. The man who came closest to making Tolstoy his guide for life, Mahatma Gandhi, died by an assassin’s hand, having seen Hindus and Muslims massacre one another in their hundreds of thousands. Yet do we see Gandhi as a failure? Did not his imperfectly realised passive resistance to the British Empire eventually succeed? The Empire ended and the British had to learn that their dream of one small island dominating the planet had been a crazy one.

  In South Africa, where Gandhi had first put Tolstoy’s ideas into practice, the memory lingered. Everyone said that you could not bring Apartheid to an end without a bloodbath. Archbishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela showed that this was not true. Their Truth and Reconciliation Committee was an example of Tolstoyanism in effective action.

  Tolstoy was buried, but his memory is eternal. The green stick, which was buried in the same place, contains a message which we all know in our innermost consciences to be true. Of course we shrink from the light and prefer to blind ourselves, by consumerism, by alcohol, by carnal indulgence and by the pathetic indulgences of nationalism and party politics. But when we read Tolstoy we are refreshed by the simplicity and sanity of truth itself. As an Enlightenment man, he knew that the power to change – to change ourselves and to change the world – lies within us. Conscience is a reliable guide, not the enemy of reason. Enlightenment came to Tolstoy’s heroes, such as Pierre in War and Peace and Levin at the end of Anna Karenina. Levin acknowledged his imperfections and his inability to focus fully on the truth. ‘But’ – thought he – ‘my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is, every moment of it, no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.’

  Foreword

  The first thing to strike any foreigner about Russia is its immensity. We all know from our schoolbooks that the modern Soviet Union, like the Empire of Catherine the Great, occupies roughly one sixth of the world’s surface. Comparatively few, however, make this knowledge real by attempting to travel across its surface. Even to retrace, in a train or a car, the journey of Napoleon from Warsaw to Moscow is to cover a huge distance – a seemingly interminable journey across flat, unvarying countryside. To have reached Moscow, as a glance at the map shows us, is to have covered only the tiniest part of this extraordinary land mass which, for various historical reasons, speaks of itself as a single political entity.

  Peter the Great is rightly deemed the father of modern Russia. But it was really the German Princess Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, who was responsible for what Russia became in the following century. Catherine had the foreigner’s view that Russia was too big, paradoxically combined with the monomaniac’s desire to make it even bigger. She annexed Poland, she extended its territories southward to the Black Sea. She created the map of Russia more or less as we know it today. At the same time, she had a fear of it being unmanageably large, a fear based on ignorance. ‘What interest . . . could the young German princess take in that magnum ignotum, that people, inarticulate, poor, semi-barbarous, which concealed itself in villages, behind the snow, behind bad roads, and only appeared in the streets of St. Petersburg like a foreign outcast, with its persecuted beard, and prohibited dress – tolerated only through contempt?’ The question was Alexander Herzen’s, the first truly great Russian radical, perhaps the greatest, to fall foul of the bureaucracy which Peter had created, which Catherine had sustained, and extended, and which was to grow like a self-perpetuating monster throughout the nineteenth century.

  Towards the close of the eighteenth century, liberty and self-government became the political ideals of the West. The United States came into being, having thrown off the monarchical and colonial principles of the British Crown. The French bourgeoisie established, by violent revolution, its right to overt
hrow the outmoded hierarchy of monarch and aristocrat. Catherine, who had flirted with the ideas and the authors of the Enlightenment, left a legacy in Russia which was violently opposed to it. With systematic thoroughness, she managed to build up a system – precisely because of the enormous size of her Empire – which was almost incapable of reform.

  Apart from her expansion of the borders of Russia, two hugely important measures, both of which had a tremendous bearing on the future, should be mentioned.

  The first was her extension of serfdom throughout the Empire. In the Ukraine, for example, where the peasantry had hitherto been free, Catherine enacted a system of laws which forbade peasants to leave an estate without their landlord’s permission. The landlord became their owner. Estimates vary, but it is thought that by the end of her reign well over half the population of the Russian Empire had become a slave class, every bit as subjugated as the Negro slaves of America.

  The other reform, which went hand in hand with this extension of slavery, was a strengthening and ossifying of the gentry. In other European countries, aristocratic status, initially reflecting a position of political power, was to evolve into an inchoate position, difficult to define in terms of strength or importance. In England, for example, a duke at the beginning of the nineteenth century would certainly be rich, but he would not necessarily exercise any political power. And, by the middle of the Victorian age, his power would be yet more questionable. As for the members of the lesser gentry in England, their titles were no more than mementoes of favour granted to an ancestor by the Sovereign.

  Such an evolution was impossible in Russia, since Catherine established a strict hierarchical system of government in which only members of the aristocracy could exercise power. Membership of the aristocracy was a discernible political status. Not only was the highly organized system of local government entirely in the hands of the local gentry. They were given certain privileges which made them different in kind from their non-gentry neighbours. Not merely were they exempt from tax, and certain legal penalties, such as corporal punishment, but also, they alone could receive a full University education. They alone could aspire to occupy senior bureaucratic positions in central Government. To be deprived of ‘gentry’ status was, therefore, the equivalent of being disenfranchised.

  Between the gentry and the serfs, Catherine also established the town merchants as a separate estate with fixed, recognised privileges and social duties.

  When she died in 1796, she left an Empire which was completely top-heavy in terms of its powerbase. The Crown, and the bureaucracy with which it was surrounded, had the means to exercise an absolute control over every citizen and every institution within its dominion. Once the system got going, with bureaucrats multiplying bureaucrats, as in the comedies of Gogol, it was hard to see how it could be reformed without being destroyed altogether. And this explains why the monarchy, again and again, throughout the nineteenth century, resisted reform for fear that even quite minor changes would bring down the whole system.

  Curiously enough, considering the fact that Catherine and perhaps most of the leading aristocrats of her day were privately ‘modern’ in their religious views, her reforms had the effect of making Russia into a theocracy, whose levels of tolerance would make the Spanish Inquisition look like a Democratic Party convention. This was because, in her Germanic thoroughness, she had totally secularised the power of the Church, bringing even that within the power of the state. She had not only taken possession of Church lands. She had confirmed that the Church, as a religious body, should actually be run by the state. Not only the appointment of bishops but even the propagation of doctrine were brought into the jurisdiction of the secular civil service. The Procurator of the Holy Synod was a layman, entitled to lay down the law about liturgy, worship and theology to the Patriarch of Moscow himself.

  It was a strange paradox that Catherine, with no ounce of Russian blood, should have enacted policies which led to an increase in Russian isolationism from the rest of the world. With such an inheritance, many Russians had no chance of travelling about within the boundaries of the Empire, let alone travelling outside it, or reading foreign books.

  Nevertheless, there were changes in the wind. Some of them came about, fortuitously, by virtue of the Napoleonic Wars. With Russian troops moving about in Poland, Germany, France and Austria, there was no possibility of the state exercising the power of their minds which it was able to do in the stable conditions of peacetime. The Emperor at the time of Napoleon, Alexander I, was in any case a liberal. But, even if he had not been on the side of moderate reform, he would have been unable to stop the Russian soldiers meeting foreigners and seeing the way that things were done abroad. Their French prisoners of war, after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, would have been able to tell them of a republic, where each citizen was regarded as the equal of the next. Englishmen could tell them of their own political compromises, and the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, with an elected legislative chamber. In all the farms and fields through which the armies of Alexander I marched, they were able to meet farmers and their wives and children who may not have been rich, but who were not owned by anyone, and who would have regarded serfdom as the most appalling throwback to the Middle Ages.

  Self-conscious Russians, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, would have felt, in addition to shame at their political backwardness, an acute awareness of cultural inadequacy. Throughout the Continent of Europe, in the first two decades of the last century, there was an extraordinary abundance of genius. These were the years that produced the finest plays and lyrics of Schiller, some of Goethe’s best poetry, the Méditations poétiques of Lamartine, the best operas of Rossini, the novels of Scott, the poems of Byron and Shelley: but nothing comparable in Russia. It looked as though Russia was doomed to be a backwater, as far as the history of literature was concerned.

  The appearance of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century is something only paralleled in the history of literature by the emergence of English poets during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Nothing prepares us for it. Suddenly, there they are – Lermontov, Gogol, Belinsky, Griboyedov. Above all, there, for the tragically brief period of 1799–1837, is Alexander Pushkin, perhaps the most varied and intelligent poet in the world, a genius of world class, after whom Russia – not just Russian literature – would never be the same again. Pushkin showed that it was not necessary, as almost all the educated class in Russia did, to speak in French in order to be clever, moving, witty, inventive. Pushkin also showed that it was possible to be authentically Russian, while being totally opposed to all the cruelties and absurdities of the Russian system of government.

  Pushkin, even more than Goethe or Scott, was remarkable for the ease with which he moved from one literary form to the next and effortlessly transformed them all. He is the closest thing that literature has to Mozart. A tender lyricist, a flippant satirist, a great dramatist, a master of the short-story form, he also, in his long poem Yevgeny Onegin, effectively invented the Russian novel. Thereafter, whatever magnificent things the Russians did with that most fluid of literary forms, they trod, willy-nilly, in Pushkin’s footsteps. He was killed in a duel in 1837. Perhaps it is the greatest single tragedy in the history of literature. There is no knowing what masterpieces we have lost by that death.

  After Pushkin, there were to be many magnificent Russian poets, and a long line of great Russian novelists. Among these novelists, there is one who stands out, for most Russians, as the greatest of them all. In terms of sheer volume and monumental size he is, if anything, a larger figure even than Pushkin himself. Ninety volumes of his work fill the shelves of the Russian library. His name was Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

  Tolstoy was peculiarly the product of the Russia which we have been describing. He could not have written or lived as he did had he not been born in a particular time and place and situation. He was born on August 28, 1828, and he died on November 7, 1910. Though most Russian writers of
the nineteenth century were technically of the gentry class – how else could they have had the education or the leisure to practise their craft? – Tolstoy was alone, among great writers, in being born into the very highest social rank. On both his parents’ sides he was not merely an aristocrat, he was a member of the old seigneurial class, the sort who did not just rule over local government, but who had a place at Court, and the ear of princes.

  By the accident of his parents’ poverty and early death, however, Tolstoy never exercised his rights as a grand courtier or a diplomat or a senior army officer. The only thing which his high aristocratic status conferred upon him was the sort of freedom which might have been enjoyed by any writer born at the same time in, let us say, France or the United States.

  To be a free man in a country where everyone else is in bondage conveys a strange unreality of status. Tolstoy never fully appreciated his luck. Nor, perhaps, did he ever realise how much he was cut off from the experience of other writers, let alone of the merchant class or of the enslaved peasantry. Yet it was in the company of peasants that he spent the greater part of his life. His sorties into the outside world were brief. He served as a soldier in the Crimean War. He made two short visits to Europe, seeing Italy, France, Germany and England. But, even within Russia, his experience of travel was limited. He came to hate the intellectuals of St. Petersburg as much as he despised the rich houses of Moscow. Until his late middle age, he had very few friends outside his own family circle, and most of his time was spent on his country estate, some one hundred and thirty miles from Moscow.

  His isolation, and the privilege of his birth, partly explain why, in the second half of his career, Tolstoy managed to get away with being such a trenchant and violent opponent of the Government. At various points in the last two decades of his life, it seriously began to look as though Tolstoy’s was the only voice which the Russian Government did not dare to muzzle. The socialist revolutionaries had very largely been locked up, or killed, or sent into exile. Many of the religious dissidents were breaking salt in the mines of Siberia, or silently cowering before the censor. Tolstoy, with a simplicity which seems almost childish, mysteriously got away with denouncing the cruelty of the army – indeed, the unlawfulness of war itself – the inequality of the social hierarchy, the squalor and oppression of the urban poor, the destitution of the starving, the criminality of the censor. He got censored. But, as will inevitably happen unless a government actually takes the step of killing a writer, his hand went on steadily moving across the page. Even though the solutions which he preached to the problems of the nineteenth century were ones which only a small proportion espoused – pacifism, vegetarianism, reading the Gospels and knitting your own clothes – he stood for something much bigger and more important than just himself or his ideas. So long as he was there, huge numbers of Russians felt that it was not quite impossible to believe in the prospect of individual liberty, the survival of individual dignity in the face of a cruel, faceless, bureaucratic tyranny. It was for this reason that, when he died, there were demonstrations all over Russia. Students rioted. Anarchists were rounded up by the police. Thousands of people followed his coffin to its place of burial. And, after the death of Tolstoy, Russia looked for more desperate solutions to its difficulties.