Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  It was in this extraordinary climate that Tolstoy began his literary apprenticeship, finding it, we need hardly emphasise, immensely congenial. In November 1851, after a longish gap, he wrote from Tiflis to his Aunt Toinette that although he had to hang about waiting for his military papers to come through, he is not in the least bored. ‘Do you remember, dear Aunt, a piece of advice you once gave me – to write novels? Well, I’m following your advice and the occupations I speak of consist of composing literature. I do not know if what I am writing will ever be published, but it is a work which amuses me, and which I have persevered too long at to abandon.’22

  He was rewriting and wholly revising the work which is known as Childhood. Lest the foregoing paragraphs about Dickens and Thackeray seem tangential to our biographical purpose, it is perhaps necessary to emphasise what was happening to Tolstoy at this point. We are touching on the very core of what makes it such a challenge to write the biography of a great novelist; on something, in fact, which induces a suspicion of the whole art of biography itself. Tolstoy was profoundly self-obsessed, and it is this self-obsession which made him a writer. But the truth could equally be told the other way around. It could be said that it was only through the artifice of literature that he was able to comprehend or impose a shape on the inchoate business of existence. The vast majority of the human race drifts without record from conception to extinction. Their lives go unrecorded, and it is only theology which might make us suppose that these individual lives have any previous or future existence, or indeed, during their palpable existence on earth, that they have any identifiable significance. For most, it is a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing; but, most significant of all, it is a tale which is not told. It is only by telling the tale that we create the illusion that there is a tale to tell. The rise of the novel in literature, which came with a great resurrection in the art of biography, a passion for journals, letter writing, personal confessions and memoirs, all of which happened shortly before or during the lifetime of Rousseau, gave to articulate beings the means of creating a shape, of holding on to words and moments which would otherwise be forgotten, of creating a barricade against death. By recording Johnson’s conversations, or those of Louis XIV, a Boswell or a Saint-Simon have done something which is essentially artificial. They have made marmoreal things which are essentially ephemeral. The act of record is in itself an act of artifice. The novel and the biography are not really all that different, as Tolstoy’s young intelligence was very quick to recognise. He loved Rousseau’s Emile and The Confessions equally; and not because they were so wonderfully distant from himself, but because to all serious purposes, he thought they were about himself. Dickens made a similar impression, influencing not merely the novels which he was to write, but the way in which he was to record his own life in the diaries.

  The greatest of Tolstoy critics, Eykhenbaum, long ago asserted that it is not safe to take Tolstoy’s diaries as a literal record of events, however passionately sincere he might have felt while he was writing them.23 They are best understood when compared with the eighteenth-century models (Rousseau, Franklin) on whom he (sometimes consciously) modelled himself. Likewise, it is when his Copperfield-mania is at its height that he starts to see all his male friendships in terms of the Steerforth-young-David mould, to describe himself as having been ‘almost in love’ with Dyakov in Kazan, or to consider that his love for Islavin ‘spoilt the whole eight months of my life in Petersburg’.24 As, perhaps, with most such feelings, there is a very fine borderline between the homoerotic and the narcissistic. The little boy loves Steerforth because he would like to be Steerforth. By externalising shameless masculine energy he is able to love it without the sensations of mawkish guilt which overcome him when contemplating his own sexuality. Similarly, by making Steerforth do all the running with the Little Em’lys of this world, it leaves the self-image, the ‘innocent’, prepubescent Copperfield-figure, free to pursue an emotional attachment to Em’ly which is untainted by sexual desire.

  We see all this process at work in the revisions Tolstoy made between the first and second drafts of Childhood while he was staying in the German suburb of Tiflis. The first draft of Childhood begins as a way of writing out his obsession with the Islenev family. The nursery recollections are those of his beloved Islavin, as are the family circumstances. The story in the first version hinges on the discovery by the children that their parents are not married. (The Islenevs are indeed illegitimate.) Stage one of the creative process has been passed through: the homoerotic. In the revision,25 the love of Islavin becomes blatantly the contemplation of self. The details of Islavin’s illegitimacy are dropped. Little Nikolay begins to be given the characteristics which Tolstoy is told – by those, like his aunt and his brother, who remembered his childhood – he had himself. He is given the memories which are just beyond Tolstoy’s own reach – Yasnaya Polyana before the death of his mother. The drama of the story, the event on which it all hangs is switched: no longer the Islenev illegitimacy (that hook is abandoned) but, Copperfield-like, the death of his mother.

  Critics have pointed out that in some of the crucial scenes of the story (such as the description of the young boy’s grief for his mother’s death) there is sentence by sentence equivalence between Childhood and David Copperfield. Other passages reveal the strange slip of timescale in the book. They show that what purports to be the feelings of a little boy are actually the feelings of a grown-up. You get this, for example, in the repeated, obsessive assertions that the narrator has no memory of his mother’s face.26 As it happens, this adds a sort of pathetic poignancy and authenticity to the narrative, since it is one of the features of real grief that the features of the beloved, whom one most desperately wants to recapture, remain forever elusive. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that in such circumstances one would say – of a real loss – that the face eludes the memory because they are being seen through tears, ‘the tears of the imagination’, as the narrator of Childhood does in Chapter III. These are the words of a man who is almost knowingly creating for himself a memory which he does not have, of a mother, and perhaps of a whole childhood, which were in fact for him a blank, or a shapeless series of impressions which, until they were made into art, had no coherence and meaning for him at all.

  The text of Childhood is crammed with a like evidence that the childhood imagination is in fact that of a young man. Mention has already been made of the fact that he repeatedly speaks of his ‘little limbs’, clothes and so on as being ‘tiny’. It is only when you are outside a body, looking in, that you are aware of its tinyness. Inside, as a child, one does not think of oneself as little; though one might think of the rest of the world as big, that is not the same thing.

  Moreover – and this is a fact which biographers have been slow to pick up – the ‘memories’ of Childhood are in a large number of cases transcriptions of adult, recent experiences, things which had happened to him in the year during which the novel was composed: the experience of living with Nikolay, his slightly bossy elder brother (doubtless plenty of childhood memories passed between them as they talked); the comradeship of the soldiers; the pleasures of the hunt; the amorous dalliance with Katya; even his kindly German landlords in the suburbs of Tiflis were all ‘Copperfielded’ and made into distant memories. Tolstoy was a young man with a brother called Nikolay whom, to judge from the many jokey references in his letters, he was beginning to find oppressively protective. In Childhood, with this passion for being the person who obsesses him (an essential ingredient in the psychology of many novelists), he names himself Nikolay, with a tiresome elder brother called Volodya.

  Memories of an actual German tutor to his elder brothers, Fyodor Ivanovich, got turned into dear old Karl Ivanich as he enjoyed the German suburbs of Tiflis. His crush on the Islenevs, and on young Islavin in particular (which happened when he was twenty), is made into a thing of infancy (‘His original beauty struck me at first sight. I felt irresistibly attracted to him. To see him was suffi
cient to make me happy, and at one time the whole strength of my soul was concentrated on that desire.’) This is almost word for word what Tolstoy had written in his diary about Islenev. It is the sort of language which besotted young men (like Shakespeare and Southampton) use of one another when they are in love, but innocent of homosexual desire. It is not the sort of feeling which ever actually crops up between ten year olds. Likewise, the vividness with which he ‘remembers’ the hunt surely reflects very recent memories of hunting with the regiment in the Caucasus. (One recalls that Proust used to be driven out to look at the apple blossom before being driven back at top speed to his hideous cork-lined bedroom in Paris to record the freshness of childhood memories of the stuff.) It is only in the very old that childhood memories are vivid. It is precisely because they are so elusive that they appeal to us; the more so that they should appeal to someone like Tolstoy who probably in psychological terms – never having had parents or what we now call bonding – simply had not had a childhood at all. There was nothing, of a coherent kind, to remember; therefore, everything to create. It was because he could not properly remember it that it was so necessary to create it. It was equally necessary, since he was unable to take Yepishka’s bluff, pagan attitude towards sex, to absolve himself through art, to sanitise his experiences, and to make them innocent. The Katya whom he had loved during the previous months, and perhaps from whom he had contracted the sores and fevers which made it necessary to undergo mercury treatment, became, in the affectionate, diminutive Katenka of Childhood, the twelve-year-old child of a house serf called Mimi. Katenka is still decidedly a devochka and not a devushka, a little girl, not a demoiselle, and yet, the scene in the ninth chapter, where the narrator, his brother Volodya, their sister Lyuba and Katenka are gathering caterpillars, would have a feeling of Lolita about it unless the narrator was meant to be a ten year old, or unless the grown-up narrator were actually thinking of a twenty-year-old Katenka:

  I looked over Katenka’s shoulder. She was trying to lift the caterpillar on a leaf which she had placed in its path.

  I had noticed that many little girls had the habit of twitching with their shoulders, trying with this movement to shift their open-necked dress to its proper place when it had slipped. I remember that Mimi always got angry with this gesture and said, ‘C’est un geste de femme de chambre.’ Leaning over the caterpillar, Katenka made this very gesture and just at that moment the wind lifted the little shawl from her little white shoulders. Her shoulder-strap, at that moment, was within two inches of my lips. I was no longer looking at the caterpillar. I looked and looked, and with all my strength I kissed Katenka’s shoulder. She did not turn round, but I noticed that her neck and ears flushed red. Volodya, without raising his head, said scornfully, ‘Why this display of affection?’

  There were tears in my eyes. I did not take my eyes off Katenka. For a long time, I had already been accustomed to her fresh, fair little face and I had always loved it; but now examined it much more attentively and loved it all the more.27

  The parallels between the two young ‘mavishes’ on Yarmouth beach in Dickens’s novel are quite unmistakable. Katenka, like Little Em’ly, is related to a domestic employed by the narrator’s mother. Their love is meant to be quite unspotted and pure, in direct contrast to anything she and Steerforth might get up to later. And yet, although Tolstoy has tried to make Katenka into his Little Em’ly, it does not quite work. Nikolay is not alone when he kisses Katenka, as David is when he kisses Little Em’ly. A scornful elder brother looks on, just as, years before, an elder brother had looked on, in a whorehouse in Kazan, while Lev Nikolayevich (not that much older than the narrator of Childhood is supposed to be) had his first experience of sex and burst into tears by the bed. Even less time had elapsed since he had pressed his lips to an actual Katenka. Since we are told in the diary that the real-life Katya liked to sit on Tolstoy’s lap and assure him that he was the only man in her life, her shoulder blades will have been particularly real and vivid to him. ‘Happy, happy, irrecoverable days of childhood! How can one fail to love and cherish its memories!’

  It is small wonder that, when he came to reflect on his career as a novelist in old age, Tolstoy should have particularly abominated Childhood on the grounds that it was insincerely written, an incoherent jumble of events from his own and his friends’ childhoods, nor that he should have recalled, ‘that at the time of writing I was far from independent in my forms of expression, but was under the influence of two writers – Sterne (A Sentimental Journey) and Topffer (La Bibliothèque de mon oncle) who had a great effect on me just then’.28 It is entirely typical of Tolstoy’s periodic outbursts of irrational envy of writers who might be thought to be as great as himself that he conveniently forgets Dickens at this point and drags in the much less important (and as a writer totally negligible) figure of Topffer. By the time these words had been spoken, Prospero’s wand had been broken and cast aside. So had the cult of worshipping the immaculate mother, either in childhood memory or in church icons. Jesus was by then the model, and like all Tolstoy’s great models, one to be slapped down and remade in Tolstoy’s own image. By then, he was determined to be himself an innocent, a strong son of God. Fiction had been seen through for what it was, and his life had been seen as dividing into four great phases: the period of childhood innocence; the period devoted to ambition and above all to lust; the period of his early married life; and then the blessed period of his own rebirth, when he had cast aside the artist‘s laurel and assumed the prophet’s mantle.

  Why we should assume that the ‘memories’ of Tolstoy when old were any more authentic than the memories of Tolstoy when young, it is hard to say. The fact that memories come so vividly to old people (long after any witnesses who might gainsay them are dead) is not a guarantee of their accuracy. Who is to say that all memory is not a form of fiction and that the ‘natural’ thing to do with existence is to allow it to pass, uncluttered by history, unstamped by the ego? This was something which Tolstoy would never, could never do. The early years were too much of a fog and, one would suspect, too much of a painful fog, for that.

  It would probably be more truthful, if we had to divide his life into phases, to make Tolstoy’s life fit into three distinct parts. In the first phase, we have a heightened intelligence which has nothing to focus upon; passionate sensibility, who feels things so keenly that it is almost ready to explode; eyes which see more brightly, ears which hear more sharply, nostrils which smell more acutely, loins which lust more vigorously than those of ordinary mortals. The history of this sensibility is a mess. It is all false starts, dead aunts, unhappy houses. Overwhelmingly strong, it is a sensibility which lacks altogether any motive of direction and has been tugged now in this direction, now in that. Tolstoy does not know where he is going, emotionally, geographically, or in the most prosaic terms of his outward career. Is he to be a fop in St. Petersburg, or a card-playing roué in Moscow, or a pious country farmer? Which is to be stronger in him, his desperate need to be loved and approved of by his own sex, or his overpowering physical weakness for the opposite sex? How is it that, however he tries to impose order on this existence, it falls into chaos?

  Thus, the first stage; and it is the stage which it is almost impossible to reconstruct because we can only visualise it, as it were, from the inside. It is like envisaging a tortoise without its shell. Then, with The History of Yesterday, there is a false start which points towards the way of salvation, and in Childhood, that salvation dawns. The intolerable chaos and agony of life, as well as its unmanageable pleasures and its fascinatingly irreversible history, can be mastered. Through the medium of prose fiction, it was possible to transform experience itself.

  One of the extraordinary things about Dickens as a writer is the strength with which he kidnaps every reader’s inner life. To some extent, those who are no more than readers of David Copperfield feel that David’s childhood memories have been their own. For Tolstoy, the spell of nine or ten years’ intense readi
ng life – in which Rousseau, Sterne and Dickens were the most formative influences – finally took shape in his being able to write. Henry James, in one of his magnificent put-downs (as it happened to Mrs. Humphry Ward), apologised for having a low opinion of Robert Elsmere because he could not read novels, only write them. He spoke probably for all novelists. Tolstoy would certainly have said the same if he had had an ounce of self-awareness; but like many self-obsessed people, he was entirely lacking in self-knowledge which is why, for the next twenty years, he was able to write fiction with the self-detachment of a saint. It was only when he decided that fiction would not do, and that a saint, rather than a novelist, was what he was cut out to be, that the real trouble began.

  On July 3, 1852, Tolstoy plucked up his courage and sent Childhood to a St. Petersburg editor. ‘My request will cost you so little labour that I am sure you will not refuse to grant it. Look through this manuscript, and if it is not fit to publish, return it to me. Otherwise evaluate it, send me what you think it is worth, and publish it in your journal. . . .’29