Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  As for the Decembrists,6 as the conspirators of December 1825 came to be called, they were rounded up. About six hundred were questioned, a hundred and twenty-one were put on trial: five were condemned to death, thirty-one were exiled to Siberia for life, and eighty-five for a shorter term. Of the Siberian exiles, few were more romantically attractive than Tolstoy’s second cousin, Major-General Prince Sergey Grigoryevich Volkonsky,7 who was stripped of lands, titles and estates before being dragged in chains in front of the Tsar, who shouted at him, ‘You are a fool, Major-General Prince Volkonsky! You should be ashamed of yourself!’ But his young wife did not think so. Abandoning their little son, she followed her husband into exile, and stayed with him for the next thirty years before spoiling things and running off with another man. She had been originally wooed by Pushkin, who wrote a poem about her heroic exile:

  Bo rлyбинe cибиpcкиx pyд

  Xpaнитe ropдoe тepпeньe,

  He пpoпaдeт вaш cкopбный тpyд

  И дyм выcoкoe cтpeмлeньe . . .

  [In the depths of the Siberian mines

  Maintain your proud patience,

  Your sorrowful labour will not be wasted,

  Nor your high aspiration of mind. . . .]8

  When Nicholas I died in 1855, there was every reason for Russian dissidents and malcontents to rejoice. But Volkonsky, hearing the news in Siberia, wept. He wept because his Emperor was dead, and he wept for Russia, because thirty years of exile (a shorter spell was to teach similar lessons to Dostoyevsky) had made him wonder what alternatives there were to the repressive and reactionary form of government which, as a young man, he had so vigorously opposed. He wrote:

  And when will our national consciousness be rid of this fatal confusion between power and national welfare, that has brought so much falsehood into every sphere of national life, falsehood which has coloured our politics, our religious and social thought, our education? Falsehood has been the principal ailment of Russian politics, along with its usual companions, hypocrisy and cynicism. They run through our whole history. Yet surely life’s goal must not be just to exist, but to exist with dignity. And if we want to be frank with ourselves, then we must admit that if Russia cannot exist otherwise than she did in the past, then she does not deserve to survive. And as of now, we have had no proof that the country can be run along different lines.9

  This Prince Volkonsky was a kinsman of Tolstoy’s mother, Princess Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya. After the amnesty granted by Alexander II, Tolstoy was able to meet him – though in Italy, not Russia. Throughout the first half of his life Tolstoy had a preoccupation with the Decembrist Rising which bordered on obsession. He was acutely aware that he had been born too late for it; acutely aware, also, that had it succeeded the whole of Russian history would have been different. For Tolstoy, always, the destiny of Russia and the destiny of his own family were inseparable, and both are not merely ‘ingredients’ of his art. They are its primary force, motivation, inspiration. Gorky was right to stress that Tolstoy is a ‘whole world’, his bigness stemming partly from the fact that his family had been helping to shape the national destiny since the time of Prince Ryurik, and partly stemming from his own enforced remoteness from his immediate ancestors. For him, the process of discovering who he was, and who they were, and what Russia was, were all intimately linked. The ‘world’ which is Tolstoy is, as Gorky said, intensely national, intensely Russian, and yet – to Lenin’s infuriation – supremely individualistic. Too late for one revolution and too soon for the next, his existence is both one of detachment from the fabric of his national history, and a challenge to the society which, all around him, pursued a course so much at variance with the direction which he wanted to take. ‘I could hardly imagine Russia, or my relationship with her, without my Yasnaya Polyana.’ Viewed in some lights, Tolstoy seems like the archetypal Romantic egotist, the ardent reader of Rousseau, whose mind was sufficiently big to enable him to sit out the nineteenth century, unaffected by its changes and chances. In another aspect, however, Tolstoy seems more caught up in the movements of history than any other imaginative artist. The involvement and the detachment were, like everything about him, in a perpetual state of contradiction and struggle.

  Tolstoy was to grow up and become a great novelist, that is to say a great liar. Novels are works of art which arrive at truth by telling untruths. Novelists are frequently men and women who have been compelled, by some inner disaster, to rewrite the past, to refashion their memories to make their existence more interesting or more explicable to themselves. This self-mythologising process had begun in Tolstoy before conscious memory, which is why we can only guess at the truth of what he tells us about his childhood. The novella which he entitled Childhood, and which some biographers have taken to be an almost photographic record of how the infant Tolstoy passed his days, was, by his own confession, a complete fabrication.

  Nevertheless, there is an obvious interest in Tolstoy’s own recollections, spoken or written. One of the things which makes him such a memorable writer is his extra-consciousness, or super-consciousness, of existence itself. Although there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in his first twenty years of life to suggest that he would become a great genius in any sphere, the clue to what makes him special resides in this preternatural ability to be aware. We all know that there is such a thing as life, that we are alive, that the world is there, full of sights and sounds. But, when we read Tolstoy for the first time, it is as if, until that moment, we had been looking at the world through a dusty window. He flings open the shutters, and we see everything sharp and clear for the first time. This super-awareness came to him, he informs us, when he was still a baby.

  I lie bound and wish to stretch out my arms, but cannot. I scream and cry and my screams are disagreeable to myself, but I cannot stop. . . .10

  These recollections purport to relate to a time when Tolstoy was a baby in swaddling clothes, still being fed at the breast. The wonder is that he did not remember the exact texture of his wet-nurse’s nipples, and the mixture of sensual greed and spiritual revulsion which, as a six-month-old boy, they awoke in him. St. Augustine, whose egotistic journey offers so many parallels to Tolstoy’s own, comes close to having such a ‘memory’, or at least to wishing that he had had it.

  The next impression, remembers Tolstoy, is a pleasant one.

  I am sitting in a tub and am surrounded by a new and not unpleasant smell of something with which they are rubbing my tiny body. . . .11

  The ‘tiny’ is the giveaway. His novel Childhood is full of such details, as when, in the opening scene, the narrator draws stockings on to his ‘tiny feet’. As children, we are not aware of having tiny bodies. Only a child who had become an artifact, a memory in an older mind, could be aware of having a tiny body as he sat in his tub.

  Probably it was the bran put into my bathwater; the novelty of the sensation caused by the bran aroused me, and for the first time I became aware of, and liked, my own little body with the visible ribs on my breast, and the smooth, dark, wooden tub, the bared arms of the nurse, the warm, steaming, swirling water, the noise it made, and especially the smooth feel of the wet rim of the tub as I passed my hands along it.12

  Some people have such perfect pitch that almost all music is intolerable to them; others have a heightened colour sense, or a peculiarly sensitive sense of smell. This or that person, notoriously, has a different level of erotic awareness. In Tolstoy, consciousness itself was overdeveloped. In a non-Wordsworthian sense, the world was ‘too much with him’.

  The other great quality which all readers notice in Tolstoy is his moral directness and simplicity. This, too, he believed, stretched back to the time of his childhood. When he was five years old, he was called by his elder brother Nikolay to join the other children. Nikolay, who was aged ten at this stage, was always the leader in their games, their entertainer and their mentor. He would tell them ghost stories and fairy tales. But, on this particular occasion, he
had something rather more important to divulge to the five-year-old Lev, and to Sergey, Dmitry and Marya. Nikolay had discovered the secret by which all men would become happy. There would be no more disease, no trouble, no anger. Everyone would love one another, and they would be called the Ant Brothers. In Russian the word for ‘ant’ is muravey; almost certainly, Nikolay had heard of the Christian denomination (who, incidentally, had such an effect on John Wesley) known as the Moravian Brotherhood. He had also, no doubt, vaguely heard of Freemasons, and their aspirations to unite mankind with some form of universal wisdom. Hence the Ant Brotherhood.

  As Lev Tolstoy grew older, the game of the Ant Brotherhood exercised a powerful hold over his imagination. Not until much later in life, when he had become a figurehead of dissent and a religious guru, were Tolstoy’s friendships ever ideological. The family, not the like-minded kruzhok (little circle), supported him. Intellectually and emotionally, there was always the mythology of the Ant Brotherhood behind him.

  The Ant Brotherhood was revealed to us, but not the chief secret – the way for all men to cease suffering from any misfortune, to leave off quarrelling and being angry, and become continuously happy – this secret he said he had written on a green stick buried by the road at the edge of a certain ravine, at which spot (since my body must be buried somewhere) I have asked to be buried in memory of Nikolenka.13

  Yasnaya Polyana, where this stick is buried, was potent with legends in Tolstoy’s own personal mythology, and with unremembered national and family ‘memories’ on which he was brought up. If the great political legend in nineteenth-century Russian history was the Decembrist Rising of 1825, then the great national event was the invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812: an event exactly parallel in nineteenth-century Russian imaginations to the invasion by Hitler in 1941 in the imaginations of twentieth-century Russians. In both cases, there are the same ingredient elements of shock, fury, awe, and national pride. But, in the Napoleonic case, there was no memory to compare with it. To the outsider, looking at a map of the Russian Empire in the time of Alexander I, or the Soviet Union in the era of Stalin (diminished as that had been by the humiliating terms agreed by Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk), the perennial Russian fear of invasion strikes a note which is difficult to comprehend. The country is so vast, the distances covered by any invader would have to be so enormous, that only a madman or a genius would contemplate a military operation of such audacity. Yet twice such madmen have arisen, bringing with them at each date scenes of carnage unparalleled in Russian history. Borodino, the battle which immediately preceded the French occupation of Moscow in September 1812, inaugurated new horrors in the history of warfare. Napoleon called it the most terrible of all his battles. The casualties were greater than at any battle before in the history of the world: thirty thousand French and forty thousand Russians in a single day. Tens of thousands more French were to die in the winter retreat which followed, the whole campaign emphasising with hideous and inescapable force the sheer futility of the pursuit of power, and the hollowness of military glory.

  Of the war, Princess Marya thought as women do think about war. She was afraid for her brother, who was there, and without understanding it, she was amazed in the face of human cruelty, impelling people to kill one another. But she did not understand the significance of this war, which seemed to her like all previous wars. . . .14

  These are the reflections of Princess Marya Bolkonsky in War and Peace as she hears the rumours of the Napoleonic invasion in her father’s estate.

  Prince Andrey, a few chapters later, on the road from Smolensk, turns off to inspect the place, and finds it already in a state of dilapidation. His mother and sisters have fled to Moscow, the peasants are in a state of despondency and financial ruin, three regiments of Russian dragoons have already billeted themselves there. On route marches, the ornamental gardens have been spoilt, some of the windowpanes have been smashed, already there is grass growing on the paths. There are few more vivid moments, before Borodino, of the emotional impact of Napoleon’s war.

  Yasnaya Polyana, and the whole of Russia, after Napoleon’s invasion, were to live again, a deliverance on which Tolstoy was to meditate. So much is going on inside a novelist’s subconscious when he creates his characters that no simple identification of people in the books and people in ‘real life’ will ever make complete sense. Nevertheless, it seems to be beyond question that in the figure of old Prince Bolkonsky, Tolstoy was thinking of his Volkonsky grandfather; that the young Prince Andrey Volkonsky contains a good bit of Tolstoy’s father, and Prince Andrey’s virtuous sister Marya Bolkonsky is Tolstoy’s mother Marya Volkonsky. In so far as there is truth in these simple identifications, they are full of psychological importance. By making his parents into a brother and sister, Tolstoy, with classic Oedipal jealousy, has removed his mother from his father’s bed. But one could not take any of this very far without realising the central fallacy of the approach. It would be impossible, with any hope of historical plausibility, to use War and Peace as an accurate picture of what Tolstoy’s parents or grandfather were like. We have only the ‘fictional’ descriptions of life at Bald Hills to study: almost no authentic documentation for life at Yasnaya Polyana at the time of 1812. We will never know how much is embellishment, and how much the truth. War and Peace is not only a great historical novel. It is also a monument to his obsession with his own personal history. Readers of the novel who turn back to Tolstoy’s early life feel in a thousand ways that they have been there before.

  Left a widower at the age of thirty-five, Tolstoy’s father had tried to manage efficiently the estates which he had inherited from his wife. There was little enough Tolstoy money. Since the old governor of Kazan had died in 1820, Nikolay Ilyich had struggled with inherited debts and a host of extravagant female dependants.

  His occupations were farming and lawsuits, chiefly the latter. These lawsuits frequently obliged him to leave home, and besides that, he used often to go hunting and shooting. Beyond this, Count Nikolay Ilyich was a literate man, with a well-stocked library, but the times when he was at home with his children were few.

  ‘I remember him in his study, when we went to say “good night”, or sometimes simply to play, where he sat on the leather divan, smoking a pipe, and caressed us, and sometimes to our great joy let us climb on to the back of the divan while he either continued to read, or talked to the clerks standing at the door, or to my godfather who often stayed with us.’15 Tolstoy’s recollections of his father are full of admiration and affection. He recalls his handsomeness, his frock coat and narrow trousers or, in the country, his exuberance on the hunting field. But like all aristocratic children of the period, they saw very little of their father. It would seem that they felt a certain closeness towards their Tolstoy grandmother, a silly, affectionate spendthrift, very decidedly of the ancien régime. One of Tolstoy’s earliest memories was of her sitting in a yellow cabriolet underneath a clump of hazel bushes. The footmen were lowering branches to her so that she could pluck nuts without getting out of her seat.

  In 1837, the children lost their father. He had gone into Tula to see about one of his lawsuits, and dropped dead in the street. He was forty-two years old. Some of the family immediately suspected his servants of having murdered him. Others thought that he had had an epileptic fit. Both of these speculations, however interesting, are groundless. Dostoyevsky’s father actually was murdered and the event was a turning point in his life. But the nine-year-old Tolstoy did not have fits when he heard of his father’s death. The event passed in a dazed blur of grief, followed the next year by the death of his old Tolstoy grandmother.

  The children were now put under the guardianship of an aunt, the late count’s sister, the Countess Alexandra Ilyinichna Osten-Saken, a woman who could easily have stepped out of Dostoyevsky’s pages. Her husband had been a mad Baltic count who had tried to cut out her tongue, and on another occasion had shot her. She found consolation in a pious exercise of the Orthodox religion. She was
never happier than when reading the lives of the saints or, when she could not read about them, going to meet them. When in the country on her late sister-in-law’s estates at Yasnaya Polyana, she frequently entertained the strange, half-crazed, wandering pilgrims who traipsed the mud roads that connected town with town in those pre-railway days. ‘From time immemorial, such wanderers have existed in Russia, nomads, homeless and hearthless, possessing no earthly ties, following no trade, driven onwards by some nameless thought. Leading the life of gypsies, and yet not of the gypsy class, they roamed over the vast territories of Russia, from village to village, from country to country. . . . Nobody knew the meaning of their pilgrimages. I am convinced that had any of them been asked whither he was going and why, not one could have answered. . . . Perhaps they were escaping nothing more tangible than toska, that nostalgia only Russians experience, utterly indescribable, utterly incomprehensible, and often without motive.’16