Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  The day after making this resolution, he lost another two hundred roubles at shtoss. Then he caught a heavy cold, and descended into a month of heavy self-pity, scribbling at his novella, Youth. After Easter he was lusting seriously after a nurse he had seen at the dressing station.19

  *

  The officers of the 3rd found quarters in an apartment in Katherine Street, on the main Katherine Wharf of Sebastopol. By now the Siege was in full swing, but there were not bombardments every day, nor was there useful military occupation for all the troops stationed there. The twelve guns of Tolstoy’s battery were divided up. Four were placed on the Yazonov Redoubt, and eight were kept in reserve against further action or a sortie. Tolstoy, together with the ‘nasty mean little’ Pole, Odakhovsky, and several other officers, found themselves on reserve, that is with nothing to do. By day, Tolstoy was seen to tinker with his writings. In the evening, he would have a bite to eat and drink vodka with his fellow officers. He liked to drink, but they never saw him any the worse for it. He would sit at the piano – things were more comfortable in the Katherine Street apartment than in the muddy huts of Balbek – and play for his fellow officers. Sometimes he sang jokey songs, making up the words as he went along. Risqué verses would alternate with sentiments of high patriotism. One of the songs which became popular among the Russian troops at this period was composed by Tolstoy at this piano.20

  Life was, in some ways, almost eerily normal for long spells in Sebastopol. The other officers got bored with Tolstoy’s card obsession. ‘Comrades! He plays all the time. It’s a shame! Let’s give our word not to play with Count Tolstoy.’ His losses, and the insane passion with which he played, had come to be a source of embarrassment in the mess. It was no skin off Tolstoy’s nose. As soon as the artillery officers stopped playing with him he began to go out into the town, where he would find infantry or cavalry officers prepared to give him a game. He would almost invariably come back having lost yet further.

  Jaunts in the town provided other temptations too. ‘As for women, there seems to be no hope. . . . Sensuality is tormenting me. . . . Lots of pretty girls. . . .’ But there are other examples in literature – Pepys and Boswell are two, Dickens was almost certainly another – of men whose powers of literary observation were actually quickened by the need for a sexual quest. It gives point to a walk about town. The man on the look-out for sexual quarry has his eyes, as the saying is, skinned. While he looks for the girls, he sees a great deal else. The Crimea was the first major war to be recorded by the camera.21 (How very differently we would view the Napoleonic wars if there had been cameras in the Peninsula or at Waterloo.) At Sebastopol, more remarkably, there was a camera with intelligence called Tolstoy. His incomparable Sebastopol Sketches are cinéma vérité of the very highest quality.

  Soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children and tradespeople are moving about, carts loaded with hay, sacks and casks, are passing, and now and then a Cossack, a mounted officer, or a general in a vehicle. . . . Everywhere you will see the unpleasant indications of a war camp. . . . But look more closely at the faces of these people moving about around you and you will get a very different impression. Take for instance this convoy soldier muttering something to himself as he goes to water those three bay horses, and doing it all so quietly that he evidently will not get lost in this motley crowd which does not even exist as far as he is concerned, but will do his job be it what it may – watering horses or hauling guns – as calmly, self-confidently, and unconcernedly as if it were all happening at Tula or Saransk. You will read the same thing on the face of this officer passing by in immaculate white gloves, on the face of the sailor who sits smoking on the barricade, on the faces of the soldiers waiting in the portico of what used to be the Assembly Hall, and on the face of that girl who, afraid of getting her pink dress muddy, is jumping from stone to stone as she crosses the street. . . .22

  She is not going to look at him. He must go to cheaper women for his pleasure. But her pink skirt and her little ankles, and, for the moment, her face, have alerted the all-seeing eyes of Tolstoy.

  Yes, disenchantment certainly awaits you on entering Sebastopol for the first time. You will look in vain in any of these faces for signs of disquiet, perplexity or even of enthusiasm, determination, or readiness for death – there is nothing of the kind. What you see are ordinary people quietly occupied with ordinary activities. . . .23

  But this impression is rudely checked by a visit to the hospital, and by hearing and experiencing the noise of cannon fire and bombardment. The first of the sketches is moving in the way that accounts of London during the Blitz are moving: ‘Men could not accept such conditions of life for the sake of a cross, or promotion, or because of a threat: there must be some other and higher motive power.’ The patriotic fervour of ‘Sebastopol in December 1854’ greatly appealed to the wartime readers of The Contemporary back in St. Petersburg. The new Emperor, Alexander II, actually commissioned a translation into French – what a significant gesture that! For all its Russian piety, the tale would only speak to half the courtiers in the language they themselves used.

  The patriotism of the first sketch is tempered in the second – ‘Sebastopol in May’ – by a strongly satirical sense of how absurd army life and military vanity can be; also by scenes in which the sufferings of wounded men are observed with an intolerable vividness.

  The picture of Kalugia’s courage and patriotism (in ‘Sebastopol in May’) is funnier, and more touching, than anything in the anti-war propaganda of Tolstoy’s late period. ‘He was ambitious and blessed with nerves of oak – in a word he was what is called brave. He recalled how an adjutant, Napoleon’s he thought, having delivered an order, galloped with bleeding head full speed to Napoleon. “Vous êtes blessé?” said Napoleon. “Je vous demande pardon, sire, je suis mort,” and the adjutant fell from his horse, dead. . . .’24

  The reader has only recovered from laughing at this sentence when his eye meets the next sentence. ‘That seemed to him very fine. . . .’ There is the whole absurdity of the patriotic position. The May sketch – with its vision of the mortuary piled high with corpses which ‘a couple of hours before had been men full of various lofty or trivial hopes and wishes’; with its Stendhalian sense that nobody, in the heroic moment, even knows what is happening; with its picture of the little ten-year-old boy, having first the revolting stench, and then the sight of a decomposing, headless French corpse – is a very different thing from its predecessor. The sketch ends with a denunciation of the vanity and ‘courage’ of popinjays like Kalugia, and a tub-thumping expression of amazement that Christian people, seeing the carnage they have done, are pleased, and not, as they should be, penitent. This is the strain in Tolstoy which was to dominate the second half of his life – the preacher, the prophet, the denouncer of obvious evils in an obvious way. He is not, like the artist of the first sketch (or parts of the second), a fascinated observer, prepared to stare at everyone’s face, and describe things exactly as they are. He is not, except in the crudest sense, a rhetorician. But he is arrestingly certain of his own moral rightness. He did not emerge as a result of some sort of mid-life crisis after the artist had finished Anna Karenina. He is there from the beginning. His is an unsubtle voice, almost devoid of charm, but, unlike the scribes, he speaks with authority, and however repelled we may be by him, we stop and listen: ‘The hero of my tale – whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is and will be beautiful – is Truth.’25

  The May sketch drew on Tolstoy’s experience doing occasional duty on the guns. It was inevitable that it should be censored. The last hero you should choose in Russia, if you want to get on in the literary world, is truth. Nor would any government in modern times (eastern or western) welcome or allow, while hostilities were still in progress, revelations or reflections such as Tolstoy’s May sketch contained. Almost as much as its obvious wrongness – killing and maiming people – Tolstoy was immediately c
onfronted with the fact that warfare is a natural enemy of his hero truth. Few would fight in wars if at the time they knew the full truth about them, or could foresee the consequences of them. Conversely, those who in peacetime would believe themselves to be passionate champions of truth believe that, in their nation’s security, almost any degree of suppressio veri or downright lying is justified.

  The Siege of Sebastopol dragged on all through the summer of 1855 while the Powers conferred in Vienna, trying to bring the war to an end. The British and the French continued to insist on the destruction of the Russian navy as a part of the peace agreement. This was something which General Gorchakov refused to accept. Too much had already been lost at Sebastopol, too much life and too much pride, for such humiliation to be acceptable. On August 16, Gorchakov, who had walked out of the negotiations at Vienna, persuaded the new Tsar to make one last effort to relieve Sebastopol.

  He attacked the French and the British in the Battle of Chornaya Rechka. The Allies lost some two thousand men in this battle and the Russians some ten thousand. It was a major Russian setback. But it was also a remarkable event in the history of literature, for it was the only large-scale military engagement which was witnessed at first-hand by Lev Tolstoy.

  It was at Chornaya Rechka (‘Black Stream’) that Tolstoy discovered the truth of what he had already read in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma – that one cannot tell the ‘truth’ about battles since all the witnesses are people who are too busy staggering about in smoke, squelching through wounded bodies, drunk with vodka, fear or courage, to have any clear sense of what is going on. Just as we lose sight of Stendhal’s Fabrice on the field of Waterloo, so, for a moment we lose sight of the young Tolstoy at Chornaya. But the curious thing about the young Russian officer who sees his comrades in arms at once so detached and so engaged, so vague and yet so intermittently brave, is that he is in control. In all important senses, at least. He is not just a young man on the field of battle. He is an artist, confronting his true métier. A professional artillery colonel called Glebov encountered him at that period and did not know what to make of him.

  On August 4 [i.e. at the Battle of Chornaya] he attached himself to me, but I could not make use of his funny little guns in the battle, since I was defending a position with battery guns; on August 27, he applied to me again, but this time without his guns, so I was able to entrust him (because of the shortage of officers) with the command of five battery guns. At any rate, it is clear from that that Tolstoy is eager to smell powder – but only fitfully, like a partisan, avoiding the difficulties and privations of war. He travels about to different spots as if he were a tourist; but he no sooner hears the noise of firing than he appears on the field of battle. . . .26

  Already, Tolstoy had recognised, and obeyed, his vocation to become a writer. But he still could not possibly have known what sort of a writer he was going to be. War and Peace lies in the future. But it is here that the seeds of it are sown. He was not so much collecting material (a phrase which implies conscious ‘research’) as mopping up an experience which was to be intensely fruitful. Moreover, the experience is to determine the form. Now here, now there, wishing to experience everything, the young Tolstoy is a man whom Colonel Glebov cannot keep track of. He is in himself as open – and from the artistic sense, as vulnerable and generous – as the book which he is one day going to write. For it is, as C. S. Lewis suggested, in its apparent lack of form that much of the book’s vast moral strength lies.

  I thought that the strong narrative lust, the passionate itch to see ‘what happened in the end’ which novels aroused necessarily inured the taste for other, better, but less irresistible forms of literary pleasure. . . . Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that. I have felt everywhere . . . that sublime indifference to the life or death, success or failure, of the chief characters, which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God. . . .27

  It is this ‘sublime indifference’, a Homeric quality, which was given to Tolstoy, both on the field of battle and – much more interestingly – when he held a pen in his hand. It marks the last of the Sebastopol Sketches, as it had been the characteristic of the first two.

  It was renewed French artillery bombardment which led to the final fall of Sebastopol. When it became clear that the besieged could hold out no longer, Gorchakov ordered his troops to cross to the northern side of the harbour, destroying all depots, ammunition and stores as they went. Sebastopol burnt for two days before the French and British entered it on September 10. If Gorchakov had not organised the Russian withdrawal at that point, the casualties would undoubtedly have been much worse. As it was, the final assault cost the Russians some thirteen thousand lives and the Allies nearly eleven thousand.

  The ending of the war was not wholly disastrous for the Russians, for on the Caucasus front General N. N. Muravyov scored a notable victory over the British at Kars. This doubtless strengthened the Russian hand at the peace negotiations in Paris in the following spring. Nevertheless, the result of that treaty neutered Russian naval power in the Black Sea, since Alexander II was obliged to promise to keep his navy in the Baltic ports and to leave the Black Sea as a neutral zone. This unsatisfactory arrangement was to flare up several times before the century was out and to play its part in shaping not only the development of the First World War, but also, indirectly, that of the Revolution of October 1917.

  By September 2, 1855, Tolstoy was apologising to his diary for a week without writing, but two sentences tell the tale. ‘Lost 1500 roubles. Sebastopol has surrendered.’28 In September, he turned for home. It was a month in which the womanising was more than usually uncontrolled, perhaps a consequence of being out of the firing line. At the beginning of October, he remarked that he had not changed his clothes for three days. He felt lazy, apathetic. For the first time in ages, he made a small win at cards – a hundred and thirty roubles, and immediately spent the money on a horse. ‘What nonsense!’ he told himself. ‘My career is literature – to write and write!’29

  Chapter Six

  Bronchitis is a Metal

  1855 – 1857

  ‘Bronchitis is a metal.’

  Tolstoy to Turgenev

  There is a famous photograph,1 taken on February 15, 1856, of a group of Nekrasov’s more distinguished contributors to The Contemporary. On the extreme left, almost too languid to hold up his head without balancing it against his wrist, is Goncharov, whose languid hero Oblomov is a proverbial figure in Russian literature. Behind his comic inability to stir himself and do anything is a great range of half-articulated, but fundamentally serious concerns. There is a pining for simplicity, and a reverence for nature which find their echo in Tolstoy. There is the alarming thought that perhaps there is no answer to the question, ‘What are days for?’* and that, in happiness or sadness, fill them how we may, we face extinction before we are given to learn the purpose of our journey. Even now, Goncharov is a neglected writer among English readers, though for Russians he is one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century literature. Beside Goncharov in the photograph, there sits Turgenev, displaying a similar air of moral exhaustion. Doubtless his expression, like Goncharov’s, could be explained by the tedious atmosphere of the photographer’s studio, and by the fact that the pose is taking a much longer time than had been promised. But in Turgenev’s writing of the time, to an even stronger degree than in Goncharov’s, there is an anguish and a moral ambivalence, about his own life, torn as he was between a domineering mother and an impossible mistress, about art, and about the future of Russia.

  Censorship was squeezing the life out of Russian writers at this date. Writing of the period 1849–56, Count Uspensky said that ‘one could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous to give any sign of thought – of the fact that you were not afraid’.2

  Writers bore the brunt of the Government’s determination that there should be no revolutionary movement in Russia comparable to those which had swe
pt Europe eight years before, in 1848. By then, Herzen was in exile, and almost every Russian writer of note had either felt the constraints, or actually (like Turgenev, or Dostoyevsky or Saltykov-Shchedrin) suffered arrest as a result of the zeal of the so-called Committee of April 2. This was a branch of the Third Department (an organisation founded by Nicholas I as a counter-revolutionary secret police). The Committee was presided over by the prodigiously reactionary D. P. Buturlin, who was in charge of all press censorship in the capital and who was credited with the immortal opinion that had it been in his power, he would have censored the Gospel because of its democratic tendencies.3 He wasn’t joking, and the seriousness of his words receive their just balance or punishment in the later years of Tolstoy.

  With Goncharov and Turgenev in the photograph are a number of other Contemporary contributors – Druzhinin, Ostrovsky, Grigorovich, all of whom, by their mere association with the paper, ensured that their lives would be kept under constant surveillance by the police, and all of whose writings, however inoffensive, could be used against them as indictable, criminal evidence.

  In those days, everyone assumed that Russia had a future, and the debate centred upon what that future should be. Between the wilder extremes of naked political solutions, there lay two broad general intellectual camps – on the one hand, the Moscow-based Slavophils, who believed that Russia should resist European influences, above all the influence of rationalism, and find its soul once more in a rediscovery of the meaning of Orthodoxy. In St. Petersburg, on the other hand, the intelligentsia for the most part dissented from the Slavophil solution and favoured an opening up of Russia, an acceptance of technological and ideological advance. These westernisers, of whom Turgenev is perhaps the most agonised and attractive example, tended to be liberal or radical in politics, and unbelieving, or at best wistful, in their religious allegiance. Neither the religious Slavophils, nor the rationalist westernisers, enjoyed happy relations with the Government. The Slavophils, for example, resented the degree to which the autocracy dominated the Church and claimed for itself ‘Russian’ values which, by Slavophil doctrines, should have sprung naturally, as a free flowering, from the people. Had they had their way, Russia would not have accommodated itself to the attitudes and mores of the West, and with the progress of the nineteenth century, it would have become more and more foreign in relation to the nations of Europe. In some ways, they did have their reward. Had the westernisers achieved their ambition, Russia would have emancipated its serfs, modernised the conditions of the poor, and evolved, at local and national level, a system of representative government. They too had their ambitions in part fulfilled.4