Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  But the next thing which Auntie heard was that Tolstoy was going to devote the summer to music. It was always a passion with him and, to help his studies along, he brought home to Yasnaya Polyana a noisy, drunken German musician, lately met in a cabaret in St. Petersburg, whose name was Rudolph.

  Aunt Tatyana, who had not played the piano for years, started to practise again, and she surprised her nephew by the accuracy and beauty with which she played his favourites: Weber’s Sonata in A flat major, as well as the usual repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, Bach and early Beethoven.

  But his aunt was worried about him. She wished that he would settle to something, even if it were merely to have an affair with a rich, married woman. She fantasised about his becoming an aide-de-camp to the Tsar, but as autumn began once more to set in at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy had a new craze up his sleeve. He started a school for the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana. Like most of his ventures at this date, it did not come to anything. In fact, after a couple of years, it folded for want of funds. But it was the beginning of something which was to be a major preoccupation in the years to come.

  Another public-spirited thing which he did in the autumn of 1849 was to become a local magistrate. On November 23, he was nominated for a post in the Chancellory of the Tula Assembly of Nobles. Tolstoy moved into Tula, the merry little provincial town some miles from Yasnaya. It was the very place where, twelve years before, his father had dropped dead in the street. Tolstoy’s duties on the Assembly of Nobles can hardly have been arduous.

  A photograph taken not long before he went to Tula shows a lean, extremely youthful twenty-one year old. The next twelve months were to add whiskers, flab and belligerence to the face. But in 1849, the face is sharp, wary. It looks as though it could have developed into a bony face like Alexander Pope’s, or Voltaire’s. The very short hair emphasises large, protuberant ears. The full lips are not merely sensuous but satirical. But the most arresting feature is the preternaturally straight brown hair which overhangs very dark, deep-set eyes. It is a face of extreme aliveness and alertness. But it stares at us, as though a complete stranger to its cravat, frock coat and sofa. It seems to be asking, ‘What in the world am I doing here?’

  A sense of being a displaced person was a recurrent one in all Tolstoy’s great literary precursors in Russia, in none more so than Lermontov, whose A Hero of Our Time, one of the most extraordinary novels in the history of the world, Tolstoy read at about this time. Pechorin, the ‘hero’, believes that ‘in our time’, happiness or moral certainty are impossible. When he has killed Grushnitsky in the duel, he proclaims, ‘Finita la commedia’. Mortals, he says in another place, can do no more than go on from doubt to doubt. Just as Onegin, in an earlier generation, was a conscious projection of Pushkin himself, so in A Hero of Our Time, the identification between artist and subject was absolute. Belinsky, when he first met Lermontov in 1840, declared that Pechorin was Lermontov.

  Yet in Pushkin and Lermontov, no more than in Griboyedov, Romantic egotism differed from the solipsistic frenzy of Byron or Schiller by always, in fact, sharing something with its readership. Whereas Byron struck his poses in an essentially solitary way for the benefit of his English admirers (and, indeed, rather like Wilde, could be said to have been a martyr to them) Pushkin found, almost malgré lui, that to his poses every Russian bosom was returning an echo. The Romantic hero in Russian literature found, willy-nilly, that the more he wrote about himself, the more his readers felt him to understand Russia itself, and their collective moral predicaments.

  A perceptive English critic has written, ‘Pechorin knows that on December 14, 1825, an iron door closed upon Russia. For his generation there seems to be no way out. He is the bound athlete, the genius who could only become a bureaucrat.’ All this suggests Pushkin’s, and Lermontov’s, strong political commitment and awareness. They were both old enough to have been actively sympathetic to the Decembrists; hardly an option for Tolstoy, who was born into the age of the ‘bureaucrats’. At no stage, really, can one ‘place’ Tolstoy on any political spectrum, any more than you could fit him into any of the circles of literary movements of his day, or pigeonhole him as a westerniser or a Slavophil. He is truly a creation of the generation into which he was born, moving ‘from doubt to doubt’; and, because he was quite cut off by upbringing and education from the intellectual circles of the capital, his journey, which began alone, was to continue for much of life as a pretty solitary trek.

  The year in Tula was not really a year in Tula. In the warmer months he went back to Yasnaya Polyana. Whenever he could, he went to stay with his sister, or with friends. In the winter of 1850, he moved back to his flat in Moscow.

  Что нового покaжeт мне Mосквa?

  Bчepa был бaл, a зaвтpa бyдeт двa.

  [What new thing will Moscow show me?

  Yesterday there was a ball, tomorrow there will be two.]

  The familiar lines from Griboyedov’s Misfortunes of Being Clever (Gorye ot uma) had already become proverbial by 1850. The play is set in 1820. ‘Cleverness’ (‘um’) for those twenties intellectuals was synonymous with radicalism. It was cleverness which involved Griboyedov in the Decembrist conspiracies, and cleverness which got his play censored. His early death aged thirty-four is as much of a piece with his Romanticism as were those of Pushkin and Lermontov. For some Russians, Griboyedov, not Pushkin, was seen as the master. Alexander Blok considered Gorye ot uma ‘perhaps the greatest work in our literature. . . . unsur-passed in the literature of the world’.13

  Western readers who are amused by Griboyedov’s cynical drawing-room comedy might well find Blok’s hyperbole incomprehensible. Probably not Tolstoy, though, who, not in the least ‘clever’ in Griboyedov’s sense, would probably have found much to respond to in the comedy. Unlike Onegin or Pechorin, Griboyedov’s hero Chatsky is middle-aged, a forty-five year old who has seen it all, a somewhat Proustian figure, in fact, who, wearied and even disgusted by high society, is yet unable to keep away from it.

  Grand drawing rooms, rather than peasant cottages, were to provide Tolstoy with the inspiration for his first attempt at prose fiction. Throughout December, he was in Moscow, becoming increasingly fond of gambling, and going to as many parties as he could. Then, towards the end of the month, Nikolay Nikolayevich returned from the Caucasus, and the Ant Brotherhood began to reassemble. Tolstoy went to spend Christmas with Nikolay at his sister’s house. They also reunited with Sergey. After the holiday, Tolstoy went back to Moscow, where the social round began again.

  Increasingly, he was becoming fond of Louisa Ivanovna, the wife of his Volkonsky cousin, Alexander Alexandrovich. On March 24, he spent yet another evening at their house, playing cards, and hovering awkwardly about his hostess, and staying so late that they gave him supper before he went downstairs to greet his patient coachman and make his way home through the frosty air. That night, for some impenetrable reason, was different. Perhaps it was a trivial reason. Perhaps he was, to just the right degree, drunk; or, to just the right degree, in love with the idea of being in love with Louisa Ivanovna. The next morning, he woke up, thinking of the evening, and it seems that he spent the day alone. From 26 to 28 March, he wrote solidly, polishing it up in the next few days, before on April 1 returning to Yasnaya Polyana. It was a fragment, never to be completed, called The History of Yesterday.14

  The elements in Tolstoy’s genius were many-stranded, many-particled. As was the case with other prodigious literary geniuses, these elements only appeared to coalesce after a period of total indolence. The History of Yesterday is both a record of Tolstoy’s indolence and, as it were, a snapshot of some of the undeveloped elements of his genius before they ‘gelled’ or came together. It is a fascinating record of how he set to work, writing up and transforming experience. On the one hand, it can be seen as a simple extension of his journal. Not only does it describe an actual evening, spent at a soirée of the Volkonskys in Moscow; but it also meditates upon the diary itself. Whe
n he gets home, he indulges in a feast of self-reflection of a kind which will be only too familiar to readers of the diaries.

  I have often heard it said of me – ‘Hollow man, he lives without an aim.’ And I have even often said it of myself, not just so as to reiterate the words of someone else, but I feel in my soul that it is bad to live like this, and that one needs to have an aim in life.

  But what is one to do in order to become a man of action, and live with an aim? One can’t give oneself an aim. I’ve already tried countless times, and it did not work. One needs, not to invent an aim, but to find one which is already in existence and which I have but to recognise. I think I have found some sort of aim: universal knowledge and a development of all my faculties. And one of the best means of attaining this is to keep a Franklin journal. In the diary every day, I write down what I have done wrong. . . .15

  But The History of Yesterday is not really the work of a penitent; no more so than The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tolstoy is more than a bit in love with the flirtatious ‘older woman’ who is his hostess. In a very Rousseauesque way, he lets the reader into the secret that she is also in love with him (‘Comme il est aimable, ce jeune homme’), and when her husband’s back is turned, their flirting becomes almost outrageous.

  The hero of Tolstoy’s early diary is a graceless, rather humourless fellow, whom it is hard to like. The hero of The History of Yesterday begins to be a deliberately comic creation. He has a strict rule not to go to bed after midnight, and so he rises from the soirée to leave early. He makes his adieus to his host. But madame urges him to stay, and he finds himself, awkwardly standing, with a hat in one hand, and the other hand resting on the back of her divan. Of course he stays to supper, but he has neither the skill nor the nerve – the um in fact – to carry out the lightweight conversation which is required of him. He is not Chatsky, nor was he meant to be.

  Her husband went out for some reason, probably to order the supper. When I am left alone with her, I always feel clumsy and awkward. When I follow those who are departing with my eyes, it is as bad for me as dancing a five-figure quadrille. I see that my partner is crossing over to the other side, and I must stand alone. I am confident that Napoleon could not have suffered more when, before Waterloo, the Saxons went over to the enemy, than I did, when, in my first youth, I watched this cruel evolution. . . .16

  The joke may be clumsy, it may misfire, but it is there. The detachment from self of which the real diary was incapable becomes here something comically, self-consciously Sternean.

  Tolstoy read A Sentimental Journey initially in French, but he was so bowled over by it (‘an immense influence’) that he soon set to work to improve his English by translating it from the original into Russian. This was a purely private enterprise. Both A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy had been published in Russian before the close of the eighteenth century. At first glance, one would imagine that the gulf between Tristram Shandy and War and Peace was absolute, and that no line could be drawn which would connect their authors. At this date, there is no evidence that Tolstoy had read Tristram Shandy; so there is no need for us to build Shandy Hall at Yasnaya Polyana, nor to point out that Tolstoy’s story, like Tristram’s, was four volumes finished before he was even born; no need to draw fantastic parallels between the siege of Moscow in 1812, and Uncle Toby’s misfortunes at the siege of Namur. No need, alas, to connect Tolstoy’s maternal fixations with Tristram Shandy’s obscene fascination with his mother’s body and its various orifices.

  But we do have incontrovertible evidence that A Sentimental Journey was what started Tolstoy off as a writer. The practice of getting up steam by reading English novels was to survive into his maturity. His wife records in her journals in 1878, ‘I happen to know that when Lyovochka turns to English novels he is about to start writing himself.’17 Nothing so crude as imitation was at work in the mature Tolstoy. Rather, the absorption in a different mind engaged in an analogous creative process released something within him, providing, when it worked, the right blend of distraction and impetus.

  He is fretful because he cannot write; this evening, while he was reading Dickens’s Dombey and Son, he suddenly announced to me: ‘Aha! I’ve got it!’ When I asked what he meant he would not tell me at first, but eventually he said: ‘Well, I’ve been imagining this old woman – her appearance, her manner, her thoughts – but I haven’t been able to find the right feelings to give her.’18

  He was not borrowing the feelings out of Dickens, but somehow or another, reading the work of another great writer stimulated his own daemon.

  In the immature Tolstoy, something much closer to imitation was at work. The strong element of suppressed sexual desire and the faux-naïf flirtation between a young man and a slightly older woman owe much to Sterne. So, perhaps, do the moments of solitude, but it is in solitude that the essential differences between the two writers most sharply emerge. Tolstoy’s narrator when in repose worries about the moral pointlessness of his life, he wishes that there were some great aim to follow, and like the hero of all the great Tolstoyan fictions, he strives to master, in his own weak person, the mysteries of the universe itself. Quite simply, he yearns for God. Not so the ‘Yorick’ with whom Sterne chose to enflesh his imagination.

  Alas, poor Yorick! cried I, what art thou doing here? On the very first onset of all this glittering chatter, thou art reduced to an atom – seek – seek some winding alley with a tourniquet at the end of it, where chariot never rolled or flambeau shot its rays. There thou mayest solace thy soul in converse sweet with some kind grisset of a barber’s wife, and get into such coteries. . . .19

  Sterne’s huge appeal as a writer (again, to use a criterion of Henry James) was that he did not strictly speaking write at all. The high popularity of A Sentimental Journey in the last forty years of the eighteenth century stemmed from its usability as a blueprint for Romantic egotists. Stylistically, it could have been penned by some lecherous parish clerk. It arrives in your hands half finished. The reader does the writer’s work for him, finding in it virtues which the reader has put there himself and therefore esteems much more highly than he would the virtues of another. Sterne not surprisingly enjoys great popularity in the twentieth century, with its mania for readers doing the work of writers, and discovering their own ‘text’ as they go along. Also, A Sentimental Journey is attractively short.

  In Tolstoy’s eyes, the gap between the unfinished book Sterne did not write, and the ‘masterpiece’ which we discover in it, was filled by his own evolving self-preoccupations. To a large degree, Tolstoy only found himself at this period as a reader. He only made sense to himself when imagined as an Onegin, a Chatsky, a Pechorin. In The History of Yesterday, he transposes the imagined self into a social world. The result is not without its comedy, some of it conscious, as during his shy attempts to converse with Volkonskaya, and some of it still unconscious, in the diary mode: his knowing comments about how to conduct oneself in society, his man-of-the-world poses. But there are other strands here, too. Coming out into the late Moscow night, and being met by Dmitry the coachman, the narrator creates, for perhaps a page and a half, the illusion that we are really there, listening to the crossing keepers and Muscovite coachmen shouting to each other through the frosty air. It is a glimpse of what Tolstoy was to be at his best, a glimpse of the very essence of that genius with which he enjoyed so stormy a relationship. At present, it was safe, because he had no idea that it was there. There is not the smallest trace in The History of Yesterday that he recognised what he was really good at: that he was possessed with a Shakespearean capacity to recreate our world, all its naturalness, all its outer reality, all the inner feelings of its human inhabitants. There is no sign that he knew what he was up to while writing The History of Yesterday. In all its stammering clumsiness, its mixture of unconscious comedy and high moral seriousness, it could have been penned by Pierre Bezukhov, the clumsy hero of War and Peace; which, in a way, it was.

  Cold is
the absence of heat. Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. Why does man love heat, light and goodness? Because they are natural. The cause of heat and light are the sun; the cause of goodness is God. You could no more have had a bad God, than a sun which is cold and dark. We see light, and rays of light; we seek its cause and we say that it is the sun. Light and dark and the law of gravity lead us to the highest point, so the law of goodness leads us to its source – God.20

  In his beginning was his end. In Tolstoy’s best art – as, for instance, in the creation of Pierre himself – there is as much naturalness in talking about God as there is in describing frost or barouches. But, as in the end, at the very beginning, there is a tension between the spontaneity of his art, and the demands of soul. The fates are about to shower upon this improbable recipient imaginative gifts which are almost without parallel. He fears them, et dona ferentes.

  The true literary irony of the piece is that it is as much a self-contradiction as anything penned by the paradoxical Sterne. Its paradox is totally unconscious. The narrator expresses regret and self-hatred because he has no aim in life, and does not know what to do. But it is precisely in writing down his predicament and fashioning it into something which is half-way to being art that his ‘aim in life’ is discovered. Quite unannounced and sandwiched between social engagements of stunning triviality, Tolstoy’s vocation as a writer had arrived. Rightly was the aunt, in A Landlord’s Morning, to say that we only feel our vocation when we have once mistaken it. From now onwards, Tolstoy’s existence is to be understood in what he was or was not writing.