Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  But somehow the system was to beat both of them. However much the intelligentsia wanted a future for Russia, the power of the state, its capacity to diminish and destroy the lives of individuals, was to grow in belligerence and to some degree in strength. Ideas such as those disputed by Turgenev, Aksakov, Chernyshevsky, counted for less than the power granted to bullying secret police to wake up the thinkers in the middle of the night.

  In that famous photograph of 1856, there is one figure who looks completely out of place. Five of the men in the picture have long hair growing over their ears; this figure has a short, military haircut. Five loll languidly, leaning on chairs, crossing their legs, or leaning on chairs. One stands bolt upright. Five are wearing cravats, waistcoats, watch chains, trousers, frock coats; they could be literary gentlemen anywhere in Europe. We could superimpose upon this photograph a contemporary picture of Flaubert, Tennyson or Manzoni and they would not look out of place, as the young man standing behind Turgenev looks out of place, in his Russian military uniform.

  Tolstoy went to St. Petersburg straight from Sebastopol in the fall of 1855. The poet Fet has left an unforgettable description of his first awareness that the young genius had reached the capital. It is with good reason that all biographers repeat this old chestnut. Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, then aged thirty-five, called on Turgenev one December day in 1855, and was impressed by the magnificent short sabre which he saw hanging on the hat-stand in the hall. The servant informed Fet that it was the property of Count Tolstoy, who was staying with his master. For the next hour, Turgenev and his guest conversed in whispers, because, although it was the middle of the day, Tolstoy was asleep in the next room. ‘He’s like this all the time,’ said Turgenev. ‘He has come from his battery at Sebastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gipsies, and cards every night: then he sleeps like the dead until two o’clock in the afternoon. I try to restrain him, but I’ve given up now.’5

  The tension between Tolstoy and Turgenev probably owed its origins to quite personal concerns: Tolstoy did not much like Turgenev’s interest in his sister Marya for a start. Tolstoy’s coarseness grated upon the older man’s graceful sensibility, but at a much deeper level there was wariness, as there often is between artists who are both playing the same game. The late nights and the boorish behaviour enabled Turgenev to label Tolstoy as a ‘troglodyte’, but a more damagingly percipient comment was that Tolstoy was all the time putting on an act. ‘Not one word, not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us, and I find it difficult to explain in a clever man this impoverished Count’s arrogance.’ Turgenev was most generous in his recognition of Tolstoy’s literary genius. More, perhaps, than any of Tolstoy’s contemporaries, he was responsible for boosting the career of his younger rival. (‘I’m not exaggerating when I say that he’ll become a great writer and a splendid person,’ he wrote, with a conspicuous emphasis on the future tense, to Tolstoy’s sister.)6

  But Turgenev knew that behind the exercise of fiction, there lies the simple childhood desire to pretend. Tolstoy saw it too in Turgenev, and hated the older man’s political radicalism. In the light of poses and attitudes which Tolstoy was later to strike himself, it is interesting that during the first spell of their acquaintanceship, Tolstoy was simply unable to believe that someone of Turgenev’s wealth and privilege should wish to impoverish himself by emancipating the serfs. Fet records for us that Tolstoy thought Turgenev was ‘merely wiggling his democratic haunches’.7

  With Fet himself, however, Tolstoy was to become a close friend, and their friendship lasted until death. Perhaps one thing which bound them together initially in the world of civvy-street intellectuals was that they were both in the army, though both were to resign their commissions soon. Much more hung on Fet’s military career, from a personal point of view, than on Tolstoy’s.

  Poor Fet had a complicated history which could only have happened in nineteenth-century Russia. His parents were German (Johann and Charlotte Foeth). When he was fourteen years old, the authorities declared that they did not consider Fet to have been validly baptised. Having been called Afanasy Afanasyevich Shensin, after his stepfather, he was obliged to take the name Fet (the Russianised version of Foeth) and to forfeit all his claims to inherit Shenshin’s estate, and all his noble status. ‘If you ask me what all the sufferings and all the sorrows of my life are called,’ he once wrote, ‘I will answer: they are called Fet.’8 He joined the army after university in 1845, solely because cavalry officers, after reaching a certain rank, could achieve noble status. This desire to be a nobleman was not a matter of simple snobbery. If you were not classifiable as ‘gentry’ or ‘nobility’ in nineteenth-century Russia, your life was as circumscribed as that of non-Party members in the Soviet Union today. The place and extent of your residence, the job you did, the amount you were allowed to travel within Russia and abroad, all depended upon membership of a certain estate in society. By 1853, Fet had become a lieutenant, and looked certain of earning back his birthright, when a cruel law was enacted which said that only those who attained the rank of colonel could henceforth claim membership of the dvoryanstvo (nobility). At that point despair entered Fet’s soul. He married, for money, the unappealing sister of Botkin, his most admiring critic, and for a while continued to pen lyrics to the girl he actually loved. His writings were hugely successful, and his popularity enabled him to collect enough money to buy an estate in the Mtsensk district, near where he had been born. But his treatment at the hands of the Government had silenced him. He was reduced to Oblomovism, and spent his days sitting miserably at home, reading Schopenhauer (‘that Buddhist, that corpse’,9 as Herzen had called him). It is surely significant that throughout this period, Fet wrote no more poetry, but that when, at the age of fifty-four, his baptism and birth certificates were suddenly and capriciously legalised, and he was admitted once more to the legal membership of the Shenshin family (and hence of the nobility), his lyrics once more started to flow.

  There is much in Fet’s sad, kindly character which explains why Tolstoy responded to him so immediately, and began to call him (how is it possible to translate these diminutives and terms of affection without heightening their absurdity?) dragotsenny dyaden’ka – precious little uncle. Tolstoy exchanged more letters with Fet than with any other writer, and although the novelist and the poet were to diverge so extremely in middle age, there is much which the two have in common. Fet was a lifelong atheist, whereas for Tolstoy the concerns of religion would ultimately overwhelm his interest in literature. Tolstoy was a self-conscious realist, whereas Fet, as has been well said, ‘sang of the love he never allowed himself to have’.10 Tolstoy, from the beginning, nursed feelings that art should be committed, if not politically, at least morally, whereas Fet tells us in his memoirs, ‘I have never been able to understand art interested in anything except beauty.’11

  Yet in Fet’s poetry, as in the best of Tolstoy’s fiction, there is a highly comparable simplicity. It is not simplemindedness so much as reverence and rapture in the face of nature itself. In his ‘garden’ poems, Fet reveres the stars, the trees, the flowers, just for being themselves.

  Цapит вecны тaинcтвeннaя cилa

  [The mysterious force of spring rules]

  could be a line spoken by a character in The Cossacks. The final stanza of that poem is profoundly Tolstoyan in its sense of human littleness beneath the stars. The ‘smoke’ of the poem might superficially remind the reader of Turgenev, but Fet is not saying (as Turgenev’s title suggests) that everything in life is pointless so much as emphasising the frailty of all human aspirations.

  A cчacтьe rдe? He здecь, в cpeдe yбoroй,

  A вoноно – кaк дым.

  Зa ним! зa ним! вoздyшнoю дoporoй –

  И в вeчнocть yлeтим.

  [But – where is happiness? Not here amid misery.

  But here it is – like smoke.

  After it, after i
t! By an airy way,

  And we shall fly off into eternity.]12

  Like Tolstoy, Fet could not for long take his mind off the prospect of extinction – and in 1856, just as he was beginning to find his feet in the literary world.

  Fet was the little uncle to Tolstoy, a closer companion, on an intellectual and spiritual level, than Tolstoy’s own brothers. But it was in the early months of his friendship with Fet that Tolstoy witnessed the first of his siblings make his journey, like smoke, into nothingness.

  The power of total recall is never vouchsafed, not even to the most vivid imaginations or intellects. In our personal mythologies, we select a very few characters and incidents to masquerade, in memory or half-memory, as our past. The more we articulate these ‘memories’, the less true they are likely to be, the more tolerable and acceptable. Tolstoy’s personal myth, not unusually, was that of Paradise Lost, and his recollections of his brother Dmitry sharpen this perspective into lurid caricature. In Kazan days, Dmitry had been a holy innocent, praying, and being kind to the afflicted and the poor, while his worldling brothers played cards and chased the girls. He was some sort of image of what a part of Tolstoy wanted himself to be.

  I believe that I had already left for the Caucasus when a remarkable transformation came over Dmitry. He suddenly started to drink, smoke, squander money, and go about with women. How it happened, I don’t know, and I did not see him at this period. The only thing I know is that the man who led him astray was Islenev’s youngest son, outwardly very attractive but also deeply immoral.13

  It is interesting to notice how the last sentence is contradicted by the one before it. Tolstoy had no idea how the corruption of Dmitry came about. But he was also quite sure that it happened as a result of Islenev’s corrupting influence.

  In the last chapter there was some discussion of the ways in which literary influences, and in particular those of Dickens, provided Tolstoy with a method of sorting out his own past, and of reading back into his childhood a laundered version of events which were in fact happening in his grown-up life. The sequence which we call Childhood, Boyhood and Youth are apprentice pieces, and though they are the apprentice pieces of a great genius, they would not detain us long were it not for the biographical importance which they embody. Not that Tolstoy was not simply recording, or attempting to record childhood in the manner of, say, Aksakov and Herzen. He was making a series of highly significant projections. The original drafts of Childhood, which are not translated into English, show us a rudimentary epistolary novel. The letters – from the same Nikolay Irtenev who is our narrator in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth – were a series of reminiscences, first confessing the misdemeanours of an adolescent and a young man, and then attempting to round out the picture of this young man by a series of flashbacks or Kinderszenen. These stories were all written in the person, not of Tolstoy, but of his friend Islavin. Any possible doubt about the matter is dispelled by the fact that in these first-draft letters, the protagonist, like Islavin, is illegitimate.

  The Islavin children, of whom there were six, were the offspring of one of their less innocent neighbours at Yasnaya Polyana, A. M. Islenev. (Neighbours, that is to say, in gentry terms: his estate was twenty miles away.) These children were given the surname Islavin, and since they were much of an age with the Tolstoys, they played together quite frequently. In retrospect, he tended to make the girls symbols of purity and innocence, and the boys agents of corruption. But in spite of this mythopoeic tendency, a few realistic memories intruded. On one occasion, for example, when they were playing, he pushed one of the Islavin girls in the small of the back so hard that she fell off the balcony where they were playing. In memory, this event happened because he was trying to spare her the attentions of other little boys – but at the age of ten (and she eleven), is this probable? The incident stays in the mind, and the biographies, because this little girl, whose innocence and sexual purity he was prepared to do violence to preserve, was none other than Lyubov Islavin, later Tolstoy’s mother-in-law.

  Not long after this jape, the Tolstoys and the Islavins became separated. The Tolstoys went off to Kazan, only returning to Yasnaya Polyana for summer holidays. It was really not until he had left Kazan that Tolstoy rediscovered the Islavins and they became seriously important to him. They met up, not in the country, but in St. Petersburg, during that year after Kazan when he toyed with the idea of reading Law at St. Petersburg University. Having had a childhood which was, by most standards, ‘emotionally deprived’, Tolstoy had a great weakness for other people’s families. He loved them en groupe, and enjoyed vicariously attaching himself to them. Cut off from his brothers, parentless and auntless, he did this to the Islavins at their St. Petersburg house during eight ‘wasted’ months of 1851. When they were over, he confided in his diary:

  My love for Islavin spoilt the whole eight months of my life in Petersburg for me. Although not consciously, I never bothered about anything else except how to please him. All the people I loved felt this, and I noticed how hard it was for them to look at me. Often, I couldn’t find that moral understanding which reason required in the object of my love, or after some unpleasantness with him or her, I would feel hostility towards them; but this hostility was based on love. I never felt this sort of love for my brothers. I was very often jealous of women. I can understand ideal love – complete self-sacrifice to the object of one’s love. And that is what I experienced.14

  For the purposes of his Childhood, he chose to become Islavin, intermingling Islavin’s memories with his own. It is only at the end of Youth that the ‘I’ of the story can project his moral preoccupations on to his wholesome friend Nekhlyudov, Tolstoy’s righteous self-image. In time, first in A Russian Landlord, and much later in Resurrection, the ‘I’ figure is forgotten altogether and only the moralist, only Nekhlyudov, will remain.

  At this early stage, however, Islavin remains in Tolstoy’s mind as a mythological tempter and, when blended into fiction, as an image of his own lost innocence. By all accounts, Islavin was a boozy, dissolute young man who liked gambling and going to brothels. So did Tolstoy, which is why they got on together so well. But Tolstoy’s conscience would not let it rest there. Islavin had been more than a drinking companion. He had excited Tolstoy’s love, a love which could not be distinguished from guilt. So, when he came to revise and rewrite Childhood, and to continue the sequence with the only intermittently successful Boyhood and Youth, Tolstoy was celebrating his love for Islavin, and trying to absolve himself from it by being Islavin and writing the story in his person. Later, the absolution could be perfected and completed by marrying the daughter of the child he pushed off the balcony, by leaving behind his involvement with the guilty Islavin maleness, and by entering the sugary, innocent world of their females.

  That this sort of thing was going on in Tolstoy’s imagination it is hard to doubt, when we look at his reaction to the death of his brother Dmitry. Dmitry, like Nekhlyudov, was someone that Tolstoy hardly ever saw after he had passed his eighteenth year. This made it all the easier to make him into a figure of complete innocence and moral rectitude, such as emotionally insecure people require their families to be. In his old-age reminiscences, Tolstoy finds it hard to account for the fact that this paragon of virtue should have died in the arms of a prostitute. There is something automatic about the explanation which he provides: that Islenev’s youngest son led him astray. What? Another Tolstoy soul lost through the love of Islenev/Islavin? This seems almost too bad to be true.

  The death of Dmitry is one of the most vivid examples of guilty experience which Tolstoy could only absolve by means of art. He wrote very little about it at the time. Yet, as he remembered in 1902 or 1903, when recollection of the ‘vileness’ of his former life caused him ‘the torments of hell’, he was ‘particularly detestable’ at the time of Dmitry’s death. The scene occurred in the provincial town of Oryol. Tante Toinette had come over from Yasnaya Polyana to tend her consumptive nephew, and to help Masha, the pock-
marked girl whom he had rescued from a brothel. At this stage of his life Lev Nikolayevich was intoxicated with his own advancement in the world and, after the social restrictions of military service, he was inordinately excited by the life of the metropolis. As his brother lay dying, Tolstoy records, he was unable to excite in himself any feelings of pity for him. He was disgusted by the smell of the sickroom. He felt reproached by the kindness and sheer practical goodness of the women. They knew what to do in the sickroom, and they did it. Lev Tolstoy watched as the two women sponged Dmitry, propped him up on pillows and prepared him for the visit of the priest. ‘Both women knew without any doubt what life was and what death was, and though neither of them would have been able to answer, nor even to understand such questions which confronted Lev, neither of them doubted the significance of this phenomenon – and they both had exactly the same outlook upon them; an outlook which was not only theirs, but was shared by millions of other people. They knew quite certainly what death was, and the proof of that was, as they knew, without a second’s hesitation, what it was necessary to do with the dying, and not to fear them. Lev and others, although they could talk about death a lot, evidently did not know a thing, for they were afraid of it, and decidedly did not know what you should do when people were dying.’15