Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  There is something quite lordly about the tone of this letter: and this is the more surprising when we realise that he is not so much writing to an editor as to the editor, as far as literary life in the early 1850s was concerned. The editor, and the journal: Sovremennik (The Contemporary). It is worth saying a brief word about the position and history of this periodical, and about the Grub Street of St. Petersburg in the decade or so before Tolstoy began to write.

  Russian intellectuals divided themselves at this period between Moscow-based ‘Slavophils’, who were on the whole nationalistic, religious and traditional; and St. Petersburg-based ‘westernisers’, whose nickname or title more or less explains itself: they were on the whole left-wing in politics, progressive in social and moral ideas, free thinking in religion. Their main periodical in the forties had been Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes for the Fatherland). Turgenev published with them; so did Herzen, Nekrasov, Bakunin, Granovsky and the young Dostoyevsky. In the mid-forties, there was a split in the ranks of those who wrote for the paper, and Belinsky, the leading critic of the age, left the paper, followed by all the more radical and westernising writers – notably Herzen, Nekrasov, and Panayev. Nekrasov and Panayev managed to buy The Contemporary, which had the distinction of having been founded by Pushkin himself. They intended to make it a vehicle for all their (by now slightly old-fashioned) radical ideas.

  They had a struggle. Herzen, who would certainly have been one of their leading contributors, was exiled in 1847; and the following year – the so-called year of revolutions in Europe – had, as we have seen, made the Government of Nicholas I decidedly edgy. The Emperor appointed A. S. Menshikov as head of a committee whose function was to censor the radical and intelligent press, in particular the Notes for the Fatherland and The Contemporary. This action only increased the regard in which the two papers were held by the intelligentsia, and the educated aristocracy and gentry. Anyone who wished his writings to be taken seriously would want to be published by Nekrasov. In writing to him, Tolstoy had gone straight to the top.

  As a name in literary history, Nekrasov is probably best known for his tempestuous funeral. He died in December 1877, and thousands of people, mainly University students, highbrow malcontents and radical intellectuals, followed his casket to the graveside. Dostoyevsky himself delivered an oration at the cemetery, and expressed the view that Nekrasov was worthy to be placed beside Pushkin and Lermontov in the poetic pantheon. ‘Higher still than Pushkin or Lermontov!’ exclaimed a young voice in the crowd. Upon which, the funeral ceremony turned into a passionate literary debate, with some people declaring Nekrasov’s superiority to Pushkin, and others thinking that this was to place him too high.

  Tolstoy himself was to suffer the penalty of being judged not on his literary merit, but on the grounds of what he ‘stood for’. Russian writers ask for this sort of treatment; and whether they do or they don’t, Russian readers give it to them. It is hard for me, a wholly westernised latecomer to the debate which began at his grave, to see so much literary merit in Nekrasov. He wrote, in what seems a patronising and sentimental way, about the unhappy lot of the peasant; and he did so in verse which even one of his more indulgent Russian critics admits to be ‘most unequal and . . . unpoetical’. But with titles like Red-Nosed Frost and the unfinished Can Anyone be Happy in Russia? you could not really, in Nekrasov’s day, go wrong. By the time Nekrasov had died, Tolstoy had left The Contemporary. But it is important to remember that he began there. It was the journal which published the extreme radical fiction of Chernyshevsky, and Goncharov’s masterpiece Oblomov. Tolstoy aspired to stand with the great writers of the age and to align himself with the radical chic of the metropolis.

  He had not reckoned either on the meddlesome habits of editors, nor on the intolerance of the censors. When Childhood appeared in The Contemporary, the author was outraged to discover that it had been monkeyed about with. Even the title was different: A History of My Childhood.

  ‘Dear Sir,’ Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov, ‘I was extremely displeased to read in The Contemporary Number IX a story entitled A History of My Childhood and to recognise it as the novel Childhood which I sent to you. . . . The title A History of My Childhood contradicts the idea of the work. Who is interested in the history of my childhood. . . .?’30 In a furious catalogue the young author lists all the epithets and phrases which the editor has changed and says why he prefers the original version. But publication in The Contemporary made Tolstoy’s reputation immediately. Turgenev was extravagant in his praise. Though so passionately Anglophile, it is interesting that he did not recognise the extent of Tolstoy’s debt to David Copperfield and was amazed when the tales were translated into English that London reviewers thought Childhood just a pale imitation of Dickens. Turgenev read Childhood in the comparative comfort of his ‘internal exile’, at home in Spasskoye, having been arrested some months before for his injudiciously adulatory obituary of Gogol. Dostoyevsky also read the September issue of The Contemporary in his place of exile, Siberia. The thing was just signed L.N.T. Initially Dostoyevsky was overwhelmingly impressed but then the irresistible awkwardness and jealousy, which were always to characterise the two writers’ refusal to have any relations with one another, overrode his literary judgement. ‘I like Lev Tolstoy enormously,’ he wrote later, ‘but in my view he won’t write much of anything else. . . .’31

  Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Dostoyevsky’s instinct must have told him. From now onwards, Tolstoy was a writer: that is, a man whose life is defined by what he is or is not writing. Over the next two years, he was writing continuously. In circumstances which were, to say the least, distracting, he produced Boyhood, Youth, the Sebastopol Sketches, The Snowstorm, A Russian Landlord, and most of Family Happiness. Even more important, he was laying the foundations of experience which would evolve into War and Peace.

  On January 12, 1854, Tolstoy heard that he had, as requested, been transferred to the 12th Artillery Brigade, serving on the Rhine. He took a month’s leave, went back to Yasnaya Polyana, and then heard from Nekrasov that he did not like his latest story, Notes of a Billiard Marker. ‘Your previous work was too promising,’ wrote Nekrasov, ‘to follow it up with something so undistinguished.’32

  Tolstoy was raring to go, like a young horse that could hardly be restrained from exhausting itself at too early a stage of the ride. The diary is a record of repeated trying-on of roles. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that I’m bound to achieve fame: it’s actually because of this that I work so little: I’m convinced that I only need to have the wish to work upon the materials which I feel I have within me. . . . Here is a fact which needs to be remembered more often.’ (By whom? we might ask.) ‘Thackeray spent thirty years preparing to write his first novel, but Alexandre Dumas writes two a week.’33 Tolstoy is aware of this tremendous gift within himself, but he does not know yet what it is. Then, as so often in his destiny, he did not have to make a decision. Rather, he yielded to the compulsion of external events.

  * Alexander Islenev, the father of this family, had six children by Lyubov Alexandrovna Kozlovskaya before her divorce from her lawful husband, Prince Kozlovsky. Although they subsequently married, their union was not recognised in Russian law and the Islenev children were not allowed to bear their father’s name. They were each christened Islavin. Hence the Islavin/Islenev confusion of names. Tolstoy’s mother-in-law belonged to the Islenev family, but her maiden surname was Islavin.

  Chapter Five

  Crimea

  1854 – 1855

  Сpeдь rpyды тлeюшиx кocтeй

  Kтo цapь, кто paб, cyдья или вoин?

  [Amid the heap of rotting bones, who is Tsar, who is the slave, who is a judge or a warrior?]

  Alexey Tolstoy, John Damascene

  When Tolstoy, after the age of fifty, became an out-and-out pacifist, his writings on the subject of warfare were marked by a remarkable simplicity of moral outlook. Everything became black and white. As far
as he was concerned, war was evil. There were no ambivalences, no circumstances where the idea of a just war might have demanded his consideration.

  It is surely no accident that he developed these simplistic ideas as a veteran of the Crimean War, a war, that is to say, which was completely pointless and manifestly avoidable. This was no case of a West European despot penetrating deep into the heart of the Russian homeland. Here was no Napoleon marching on Moscow in 1812 or Adolf Hitler turning his back, for some inexplicably grandiose motive, on the Nazi–Soviet axis and attempting to tread in Napoleon’s snowbound footsteps. If Tolstoy had been involved in such a campaign as the wars against Napoleon and Hitler, in which so many heroic Russians lost their lives for an observable end, he might have wanted to say that there were some circumstances in which war was the only solution to a case of international conflict. It is easy, after all, to predict the reaction of Napoleon to a ‘negotiated settlement’ to the problem of 1812. Munich showed what Hitler thought of the negotiating table. If the Russians wanted to rid themselves of these despotic menaces, the only way to do so was by the means of war.

  The Crimean tragi-farce is different in scale, different in degree, different in kind. What was at stake was the quarrel of five great powers – Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and Britain – quarrelling over the demise of the ‘sick man of Europe’, the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

  The idea that the Russians had a right to move into Turkey had been growing in the Russian mind throughout the century. It was partly political – Nicholas I would have liked a warm-water port, and the strategic importance of Constantinople and the Dardanelles is obvious to anyone who has ever looked at a map of the Mediterranean. If he controlled western and southern Turkey, the Russian Emperor could move from his Black Sea ports such as Odessa and Sebastopol all the way down through the Balkans and round into the eastern Mediterranean. If he conquered the Ottoman Empire entirely, he would command the whole of the Black Sea to the north as well as all the lands which occupy modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and parts of Egypt and Libya. It is obvious why the other superpowers wanted to stop him.

  There were sentimental and religious ideas behind Nicholas’s expansionist dreams, too. The Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople had, ever since the sixteenth century, lived under the tyranny of a Muslim potentate, the Sultan. Now, with the weakening of Turkey as a political power, Russians began to hope that God would give back the Patriarchate to the Christians. While so doing, the Deity might be expected to liberate the various Slavic peoples scattered about the Baltic, such as the Serbs, who had their own autocephalous Christian churches and patriarchates, and looked to the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow as to a friendly big brother.

  The mixture of political opportunism and religious fervour suited Nicholas I’s purposes well, since a foreign war is about the best way of uniting a populace at home and persuading them to forget their political discontents. While it was possible to regard Holy Russia as threatened by an unholy alliance of western Protestants and atheists and Turkish infidels, it was easier to forget the plight of intellectuals, dissidents, serfs and other such blots on the Russian landscape.

  A good example of this process at work can be seen in Tolstoy’s mind at this time. He was a fervent patriot, and fully on the side of his own country against the threats of the other powers. During this period he read, among other things, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We should expect the disciple of Rousseau and the potential anarchist to see the obvious parallels between the Negro slaves in the United States and the slaves on his own estate. But his only comment in a diary entry was, ‘It’s true that slavery is an evil thing, but ours is a very benevolent evil.’ That was what it felt like in the wartime situation of 1853–4. Slavery, for the time being, was something that he could forget, or feel comfortable about. And that was just what Nicholas I wanted from his people.

  Nobody viewed the Russian Emperor’s activities in the Mediterranean with more dismay than the British. If anyone was to dominate the world scene, they wanted it to be them. They were already scheming to build a Suez canal in Egypt which would link up Europe with their vast Imperial territories in India and Africa. The very last thing they needed was a powerful Russia. They therefore joined vociferously with the other powers in protesting against the Russian interference in the Balkans and the Russian invasion of Ottoman territory there.

  In the early months of 1854, the Western Allies protested their concern at Russia’s warlike activities and in March, Britain and France broke off diplomatic relations with Russia.

  By then, Tolstoy had reached Bucharest, and he was with the Russian armies when they crossed the Danube and laid siege to Silistria.1 On March 22, he was assigned to the 3rd Battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade. Six weeks later, he was attached to the staff of the Commander of the Artillery on the Danube, General A. O. Serzhputovsky, and towards the end of May he saw his first engagements – sporadic outbursts of fighting between Russian and Turkish troops among the network of fortifications in Silistria. Cannon thundered night and day and, although he tried to keep up an appearance of nonchalance, he was terrified. To test his nerve, a notorious practical joker in the regiment led Tolstoy through an exposed piece of terrain. The young soldier seemed impassive, but afterwards he admitted that he had felt sick with fear. For the most part, however, the strange business of war went on beneath his gaze like a ghastly sport.

  ‘It’s true,’ he wrote home, ‘it’s a funny sort of pleasure to see people killing each other, and yet every morning and evening I would get up on to my cart and spend hours at a time watching, and I wasn’t the only one. The spectacle was truly beautiful, especially at night.’2

  Then, as arbitrarily as it had all begun, it stopped. The fighting was brought to an end by negotiation. The Prussians and the Austrians put pressure on Nicholas I, and he ordered a withdrawal of his troops from the disputed Balkan territories. Tolstoy found himself marching back across the Danube. The war, such as it was, seemed to be over.

  But this was to disregard the fact that British troops, under the command of Lord Raglan, were already on their way. In the course of a swelteringly hot summer, a total of fifty thousand soldiers, English and French, with their horses and field guns were being transported across the Mediterranean. In England, there was a tremendous enthusiasm for the idea of a war. There had not been one, properly speaking, since the Battle of Waterloo, nearly forty years before. The newspapers, for the first time in history, had exercised a real power in whipping up public opinion about a subject hitherto totally absent from the English consciousness: the custody of the Holy Places in Palestine. A few reporters had given accounts of superstitious bearded monks guarding the holiest shrines of Christendom and the idea of a Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem, held jointly with the German Lutherans, began to be of great appeal. All of a sudden, Russia became the threatening bear of Punch cartoons and the British public longed to hold back the alleged threats to British interests in such very British places as Silistria, the Black Sea and Constantinople.

  By the time the Russians had so unsportingly retreated from the disputed lands, the British were more or less committed to war. Lord Aberdeen, the Prime Minister, and Lord Palmerston, the belligerent Foreign Secretary, could hardly have brought home the troops without a shot being fired. Apart from anything else, it would have been hard to explain why more than half of them were dead before they ever saw battle – victims of dysentery, cholera, typhoid and the other inevitable diseases which assailed overcrowded troopships in a hot Mediterranean summer with no clean water supply. Reinforcements were being sent to the theatre of war before the first act. And a theatre it was, too. A flotilla of British sightseers followed the task force as it made its way through the Bosporus and up into the Black Sea. By now, all cause and justification for the war on a diplomatic level had ceased. Spurred on by the thought that, if they destroyed the Russian navy, they would remove the threat of Russian domination in the future, they made for Sebastopol and began t
o besiege it at the beginning of September.

  Tolstoy, for the whole of that summer, had been stuck on the Danube. Like many other young men before and since, who have gone to war expecting to see action, he did absolutely nothing in the military line for three months. He wrote a certain amount. He toyed with A Russian Landlord. He read voraciously: Dickens, Lermontov, Goethe. He lolled about. He observed.

  Then, in June, having for six weeks been troubled by fistulas, he submitted to an operation by the doctors. On June 30 he had the operation under chloroform, and ‘was a coward’. Three days later, he was once more gambling, a lust which at this date possessed him like the Devil. In the intervals when he was not losing money at cards and reading, he devoted extended passages of his journal to self-flagellation and fascinated self-analysis. ‘Yes, I am not modest; and that is why I am proud at heart, but bashful and shy in society.’ ‘What am I? One of four sons of a retired lieutenant-colonel, left an orphan at seven years of age in the care of women and strangers, having received neither a social nor an academic education and becoming my own master at the age of seventeen, without a large fortune, without any social position, without, above all, my principles.’ He also described himself as ‘ugly, awkward, untidy and socially uneducated’.3

  Still, there were consolations. ‘The landlady’s pretty daughter was reclining at her window, leaning like me on her elbows. A barrel organ passed along the street and when the sounds of a good old waltz receding further and further into the distance had completely died away, the girl gave a deep sigh, got up and moved quickly from the window. I felt so sad, yet happy, that I couldn’t help smiling and long continued to look at my streetlamp, whose light was sometimes obscured by the branches of a tree swaying in the wind, and the sky, and all these things seemed to me even better than before. . . .’4