by A. N. Wilson
The summer months were spent as only the pure in heart could spend them. . . . gambling, fighting, womanising. If he had thought that by getting away from Moscow drawing rooms, he could cure his addiction to cards, he was not reckoning on the Russian soldier’s passion for gambling. In the second half of June, he lost two hundred roubles of his own, a hundred and fifty of Nikolay’s. He borrowed a further five hundred and promptly lost that, bringing his losses by the beginning of July to eight hundred and fifty roubles.
At about this period, Tolstoy had his first direct experience of military conflict, when Nikolay’s unit took part in a raid on the Chechen mountain tribesmen. It was an incident which inspired one of his earliest published stories, The Raid, a fascinating piece of writing which foreshadows the later Tolstoy in a number of revealing ways. When it was at length published in a magazine in March 1852, Tolstoy complained to his brother Sergey that the tale had been ‘simply ruined by the censor. All that was good in it had been struck out or mutilated.’ It is understandable why the censor objected to these ‘good’ passages, because they represent (even at this early stage of his career) Tolstoy’s profound worry about the very allowability of war, a worry which is made all the more powerful by his devastating artistic ability to particularise. For this story is an enormous artistic advance on The History of Yesterday. In his first (censored) paragraph, he wrote that he was ‘more interested to know in what way and under the influence of what feeling one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino’.9 Thus, beside his (slightly boring) philosophe’s desire to define the nature of courage there is the wonderfully realised detail of particular lives: the captain whose old mother back in Russia believes that he has been spared by the wonder-working icon of Our Mother Mediatrix of the Burning Bush (in fact he has been wounded several times); the cruel-seeming young lieutenant who models his behaviour on the heroes of Lermontov and Marlinsky – ‘but his mistress (a Circassian of course), whom I happened to meet subsequently, used to say that he was the kindest and mildest of men, and that every evening he wrote down his dismal thoughts in his diary as well as his accounts on ruled paper and prayed to God on his knees. And how much he suffered merely to appear in his own eyes what he wished to be.’10 The comic absurdity of this should put us constantly on our guard, incidentally, when approaching Tolstoy’s own multifarious accounts of himself. The literary historian Prince Mirsky was right to regard the diary, in its own way, as much as a work of art (though with different sorts of purpose) as the fiction.11 Much of Tolstoy’s stupendous success as a psychological realist depends on the confidence trick – he fooled himself as much as his readers – of appearing himself in so many guises; the roué and the cynic, the penitent and the mystic, the chaste lover of one woman, the passionate devotee of his family, the voluptuary in the brothel, the callous society man who finds his brothers unendurably boring. Tolstoy makes the lieutenant in The Raid so real to us because to all important purposes, he is that lieutenant. And it is this power of sympathy, wherever it comes from, combined with his photographic eye for detail, which makes his moral judgements so devastating as the justly famous, censored passage from Chapter VI.
Who will doubt that in the war of the Russians against the mountain tribes, justice, resulting from a feeling of self-preservation, is on our side? If it were not for this war, what would secure the neighbouring rich and cultured Russian territories from robbery, murder, and raids by wild and warlike tribes? But consider two private persons. On whose side is the feeling of self-preservation and consequently of justice? Is it on the side of this ragamuffin – some Djemi or other – who, hearing of the approach of the Russians, snatches down his old gun from the wall, puts three or four charges (which he will only reluctantly discharge) in his pouch and runs to meet the Giaours, and on seeing that the Russians still advance, approaching the fields he has sown which they will tread down and his hut which they will burn, and the ravine where his mother, his wife, and his children have hidden themselves, shaking with fear – seeing that he will be deprived of all that constitutes his happiness – in impotent anger and with a cry of despair tears off his tattered jacket, flings down his gun, and drawing his sheepskin cap over his eyes sings his deathsong and flings himself headlong on to the Russian bayonets with only a dagger in his hand? Is justice on his side or on that of this officer on the General’s staff who is singing French chansonettes so well just as he rides past us? He has a family in Russia, relations, friends, serfs, and obligations towards them, but no reason or desire to be at enmity with the hillsmen, and has come to the Caucasus just by chance and to show his courage. . . .12
*
Since The Raid is more or less the earliest finished Tolstoyan fiction that there is, it is interesting to find from the beginning an instance of the apparent separation of what has been called Tolstoy’s right and left hands. At first sight, it is easy to think that the Slavophil patriot, the man who loves the excitement of the military life, the amoral Tolstoy who simply loves life in all its manifestations and details, is at war with Tolstoy the ‘moralist’. We are often invited to think of Tolstoy as someone who spoilt his ‘art’ by trying to develop as a moraliser or a thinker. But in The Raid, there is no such division. It is because he can so cram his short story with detail of every human and natural kind – the captain lighting up a pipeful of cheap tobacco at the mention of his mother, the flocks of wild pigeons whirling above the broad ravine, the crickets and grasshoppers and thousands of other insects filling the roadside grasses with sound – it is all this massing of detail which leads naturally to the ‘moralising’. War is not an abstract thing. In The Raid we see a battalion of well-trained Russian soldiers, actual people with lives and personalities who are completely real to us, harrying some pathetic tribesmen. ‘Can it be that there is not room for all men on this beautiful earth under these immeasurable starry heavens? Can it be possible that in the midst of this entrancing Nature feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to exterminate their fellows can endure in the souls of men?’13 To know, to know deeply and closely, is to sympathise. And at the same time, there is a callous Homeric eye in Tolstoy which can see the behaviour of the soldiers who are looting the little village and recognise this too as an emanation of nature, of life. The conclusion of the tale depends for its beautiful effect precisely on such a suspension of moral feeling so that, while sympathising, we do not judge.
The green of the grass and trees was turning black and becoming covered with dew. The dark masses of troops moved with measured sounds over the luxuriant meadows. Tambourines, drums and merry songs were heard from various sides. The voice of the second tenor of the Sixth Company rang out with full force and the sounds of his clear chest notes, full of feeling and power, floated through the clear evening air. . . .14
The Raid reflects a strong dawning in Tolstoy, which war was always to effect in him, of the sense of common humanity, shared not only with Russians of the officer class, but with peasants, gipsies, Cossacks, everyone. The story must reflect some feeling which he actually had himself in the summer of 1851 when we witness him making friends with the Cossack villagers.
The Tolstoy brothers were billeted with a vast, octogenarian Cossack, called Yepishka Sekhin. As is often going to happen in the course of my book, we are confronted with the problem of how to disentangle a character in real life from what he became in fiction. Evidently Yepishka was very much like Dyadya Yeroshka in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. Yepishka is at first described in Tolstoy’s diaries merely as a ‘veteran of Yermolov’s days, a Cossack, a rogue and a joker’. In the finished novella Yeroshka is a figure of Shakespearian vigour, of Falstaffian strength of personality, once met, never forgotten, with his vastly broad shoulders, his broad beard as grey as the moon; even the smell of him remains with us – ‘the strong but not unpleasant blended odour of chikhir [Caucasian wine], vodka, gunpowder and hard-baked blood’. The Cossacks, when finally revised, was the result of nine years�
�� reflecting on Tolstoy’s experience in the Caucasus, and Yeroshka’s almost pagan life-acceptance is placed very deliberately at variance with young Olenin’s tormented, educated, urban moralism. Such a ‘considered’ view of Yeroshka informs and shapes what might well be half memories of real conversations with the giant Yepishka.
‘God has done everything for the joy of man. There is no sin in any of it. Take an example shall we say from the wild animal. He lives both in Tartar reeds and in ours. Wherever he lands up, there is his home. What God has given, that he eats. But our people say that we shall have to lick frying pans in hell for that. I think that it is all a fraud,’ he added, after a pause.
‘What’s a fraud?’ asked Olenin.
‘What the preachers say. Once, old man, we had a Cossack captain who was my kunak, my close friend. He was a fine lad, just like I was. He was killed in Chechnya. So, he used to say that the preachers make all that stuff up out of their own heads. When you croak, he said, the grass grows on your grave, and that’s all.’ The old man laughed. ‘He was a desperate man.’
‘And how old are you?’ asked Olenin.
‘God knows. I must be about seventy. When you had a tsaritsa, I was no longer little. You work it out, see if it’s as much as seventy years.’
‘It would be. And you’re still a fine fellow.’
‘Well, anyway, thank God, I’m healthy, completely healthy, only a woman has marred me, the witch.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, well, she just has.’
‘So, when you die, the grass will grow,’ repeated Olenin.
Yeroshka evidently did not want to express his thought clearly. He was silent for a while.
‘And is that what you thought? Drink!’ he shouted, with a smile, pushing over the wine to him.15
*
By the time The Cossacks reached its final form, Tolstoy did not wish it to appear that Olenin had enjoyed the witchlike women, who could ‘mar’ men in unmentionable ways. The Cossack beauties ultimately elude Olenin. In actual life, Yepishka Sekhin acted quite cheerfully as a procurer for Tolstoy. In July and August, his favourite was a gipsy girl called Katya. Her ‘songs, eyes, smiles, breasts and tender words’ all enchanted him. He got into the way of humming the song, ‘Tell me why’ – ‘not one of my favourite songs, but one which Katya had taught me sitting on my knee on the very evening when she told me she loved me, and that she only showed favours to others because the gipsy choir required it of her, but that she allowed nobody but me those liberties which have to be hidden by a curtain of modesty. That evening I genuinely believed her artful gipsy chatter,’ he noted on August 10, ‘and I was in a good mood, as no guest disturbed me.’
If he wasted some tears on Katya, that certainly did not stop him from taking an interest in the other women in the village. On August 25 he ‘had a Cossack girl at my place. I hardly slept all night. My spirit failed.’ On the 26th ‘Did nothing all day. . . . Roamed around the village in the evening, staring at the girls.’ ‘On the 28th I was twenty-three. I set much store by this age, but unfortunately I’m just the same.’16 In the autumn, however, under Nikolay’s tutelage, he moved to Tiflis with the intention of joining up in the regular army. And in October he entered the 4th Battery (that is, Nikolay’s) of the 20th Artillery Brigade, as a non-commissioned officer of the 4th class.
It was a modest beginning to a military career. Doubtless, he went to Tiflis chiefly for the purpose of taking his army exams. But he was also in need of medical treatment. For three weeks he was laid up with sores all over his tongue and the inside of his mouth, pains in his back, sleeplessness and fever. At first syphilis was suspected, but it would seem as though he had an unpleasant recurrence of the clap which had afflicted him since his teens in Kazan. In December he was able to write to Nikolay that ‘the venereal infection has been cured, but the after-effects of the mercury treatment are incredibly painful (me font souffrir l’impossible).’17
This letter to Nikolay was very far from being the only production of Tolstoy’s pen as he recovered in the lodgings which he had found for himself in a pleasant middle-class suburb of Tiflis, ‘very pretty, surrounded by vineyards. . . . and on top of everything else, I get free practice in German’.18
This reference to German is explained by the fact that there was a considerable German colony in Tiflis. It appealed to Tolstoy, who wrote to his aunt that it was ‘a civilised town which apes Petersburg a lot and almost succeeds in imitating it’.
To his diary, neglected since September, he confided the notorious thoughts which his wife found so offensive when she was to read them fourteen years later: ‘I have never been in love with women. . . . I have very often been in love with men.’ The pain of the mercury treatment has to be borne in mind when we read of his protestations that he has never loved a woman. (Entries for the diary all summer have professed his chaste love for Zinaida, in Kazan, and his adoration of Katya in the village.) He reflects in particular on his love of the Islenev* family, and his obsession, during his spell in St. Petersburg, with the youngest boy, ‘externally very attractive, but’ as he said later, ‘profoundly immoral’.
As personal as our choice of clothes, psychosexual mores are greatly determined by fashion. We could not prove it, but we could say quite confidently that the sexual histories of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Mick Jagger (say) would have been quite different if they had all swapped centuries and been born at different periods. Where sexual fashions come from it is not easy to say, any more than we can say that allegedly seminal works (Childe Harold, Freud’s Lectures on Psychoanalysis, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) reflect or determine the prevailing mood of a decade. One thing is certain: that Dickens is such a seminal writer, nowhere more than in Russia. All his works were translated into Russian more or less simultaneously with their English appearance, but it was Dombey and Son in 1847 which had the biggest success.19 Dombey-mania overtook the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and we can be sure that it came Tolstoy’s way. David Copperfield was published in monthly parts in England from May 1849 to November 1850, and it was translated almost immediately into Russian. Its success outshone even the extraordinary reception of Dombey and Son, and it is obvious that Tolstoy read it. In a letter of December 1851, he alludes casually to Mr. Micawber in a way which suggests that his brother Sergey will know what he was talking about. It would have been surprising if the Tolstoy brothers had not, like most other reading Russians that summer, been gripped with Copperfield-mania. In later years, he would come to say that Dickens was his favourite author and David Copperfield his favourite book.
It is easy to see why the novel had such a particular appeal for Tolstoy at this particular date; easy to see why, once Tolstoy had read it, David Copperfield became a model for his own autobiographical reflections, a helpful complement to Rousseau’s Emile.
Dickens inherited from Rousseau (not, one would imagine, from reading him; he merely absorbed what the Romantic generation had absorbed of Rousseau as later generations of Freudians did not need, or bother, to read Freud) the concept of original innocence. The children in Dickens are all angels. It is the cruelty or hamfistedness of the grown-ups which corrupts them: the grime of cities, the squalor of workhouses, the absurdity of classrooms.
On another level, Copperfield’s feeling of hero-worship for Steerforth corresponds exactly to Tolstoy’s feelings for the young men he has admired. Indeed, it might very well be the case that the Copperfield–Steerforth relationship suggested to Tolstoy the way he should understand these young men, whom, since Kazan days, he had ‘loved’ more than women. (‘I fell in love with men before I had any idea of the possibility of pederasty; but even when I knew about it, the idea of the possibility of coitus never occurred to me.’) What happens in Dickens (and Tolstoy was to make varied use of the fact over the next twenty years) is that rampant sexuality when seen from the male point of view is passionately attractive; but seen from the female point of view it is destructive. Copperfield adores St
eerforth, and all in Steerforth which will cause the ‘ruin’ of Little Em’ly. But when Little Em’ly loses her purity, all readers are meant to agree that it would be better if the waters could close above her head.
Pushkin had already (both in Yevgeny Onegin and, tragically, in his own person) turned the Byronic persona on its head by confronting the sexual champion with the two things he could not defeat: the chastity of a good woman, and death. In the next generation, male sexuality and female purity had grown polarised. The link had been forged – not a surprising one in a generation so riddled with V.D. – between sex and death. Men in love with their own lost innocence invented perfect childhoods for themselves and mothers every bit as immaculate as the Virgin Apparition of Lourdes, who appeared eight years after the publication of David Copperfield.
In the most fascinating book dealing with the subject, Hugh Kingsmill20 points out that the extraordinary cult of childhood innocence was a feature of the very period when Tolstoy was coming to manhood, the early 1850s. Thackeray, for example, in the thirties and forties had referred to his schooldays at Charterhouse as the violent, horrible place it actually was. His sketches of school life were entitled Dr. Birch’s Academy. But by the early 1850s, when he was writing The Newcomes (and, incidentally, when he had become syphilitic, a detail Kingsmill chastely spares us) Thackeray had submitted to the changed spirit of the age. Slaughterhouse is transmuted into Grey Friars, and for the bullies, bloods and sneaks of Dr. Birch’s academy we are given ‘a little red-cheeked, white-headed gown boy’ to whom Colonel Newcome, a dying pensioner of the Grey Friars Hospital, takes a great fancy. The child prattles by the Colonel’s bedside of a cricket match with the boys of St. Peter’s, exciting the old man with reminiscences of his own cricketing feats in old days; until at last Clive Newcome thinks it advisable to dismiss the child with a sovereign to buy tarts. ‘I curre, little white-haired gown boy!’ Thackeray concludes, ‘Heaven speed you, little friend!’21
