by A. N. Wilson
The passage occurs in Anna Karenina where Tolstoy has added one syllable to his name and where Lev occurs as Levin. Otherwise the details are remarkably similar to Dmitry’s own deathbed at Oryol. In old age, Lev would remember how Dmitry had prayed after the priest held an icon in front of his face. But this too, like the practical kindness and common sense of the women, had been a reproach to Lev at the time. The death of Dmitry had been an isolating experience, one of those chilling reminders that he was not as others are. The certainty that, in having no parents, he had missed out on most of the emotional history which the world calls childhood had compelled him to construct his childhood artificially, a pastiche fashioned from Dickens out of the actual experience of the Islavins. Thereby, he could bring what he could not remember, and could not feel – the death of his mother – into a narrative framework. He could give it a life which it was denied by conscious memory. In the Caucasus, what was lacking was less memory than what sprang from the original loss of memory, and that original maternal deprivation: an inability to react to the world spontaneously, as old Yepishka did. This was to flower into his finest early work, The Cossacks. The death of Dmitry had meant almost nothing at the time. As a physical spectacle, he was repelled and disgusted by it. And with youthful insensitivity, and the typically crass values of a young socialite enjoying himself in the capital, he could hardly bear the thought of missing a party that week in St. Petersburg. Someone had offered to take him to a grand Court spectacle, and it seemed a pity to be missing that just because his brother was rotting away with consumption. So, after only two days in Oryol, Tolstoy abandoned Dmitry to his fate, and went back to the capital. Dmitry lingered on a little while, and finally died on January 21, 1856.
The whole experience of Dmitry dying, and of his own shabbily thoughtless part in the matter, was buried in Tolstoy’s mind. We are often told by the commentators that he gives an exact account of the case in the scenes from which I have already quoted in Anna Karenina where Levin visits his dying brother. But the details which have been changed in that part of the book are as revealing as those which have not. In the novel, significantly, it is Kitty, Levin’s wife, who tends the dying man, rather than his aunt. She had first met him at the German spa town of Soden, and it is there (Soden being a place where Russian consumptives often went to die) that she had learnt her easy sickbed manner. Soden is the town where Tolstoy’s brother Nikolay was to die in 1860. There, as we shall see, there were elements of neglect and guilt. But nothing so glaring as in the case of Dmitry. He was actually able to spare the time to be with Nikolay while he was dying. So, though the squalor of Dmitry’s hotel death, and the kindly, pock-marked prostitute, and the large, bony hands which had struck Tolstoy at the time, are all recorded in Anna Karenina, he does not record the fact that Lev, unlike Levin, was not even patient enough to wait for the death.
The death of Dmitry is conflated with that of his elder brother, and in the book, the dying brother is called Nikolay. The girlfriend, Masha (the usual Russian diminutive for Mary – it was the familiar one used by Tolstoy for his sister), becomes dignified not merely into Marya, but Marya Nikolayevna, the full name of Tolstoy’s sister. ‘Nikolay’ in the novel is further attended by the actual maid from Yasnaya Polyana, Agafya Mikhaylovna. Tolstoy does not even bother to change her name. What was in fact a bleak and rather guilty death becomes in the novel a strongly family affair. By the time Tolstoy was able to write it all up, he was himself a married man, so that an idealised picture of his wife could also be brought in, rather as the medieval masters, when depicting the Crucifixion, thought nothing of adding the figure of their patron (some Italian prince or Flemish burgher) to the conventional group of figures – St. John and the Virgin – at the foot of the Cross.
What scandalised Tolstoy most of all, when he looked back on the death of his brother Dmitry, was how little he had cared. It was the most appalling case of having the experience and missing the meaning. The advantage of the novelist’s imagination – an imagination, anyway, cast in Tolstoy’s particular mould – is that it can seize upon unacceptable scenes from the past, and replay them as the protagonist would have wished. In Anna Karenina he flagellates himself for his inability to rise to the occasion of the deathbed, as the women could do; and he recaptures, with lurid vividness, the stench and squalor and fear of his brother’s room. Particularly unforgettable is the moment when Marya Nikolayevna needs help in turning the patient over in bed, and how, as he thrusts his hands under his brother’s damp, emaciated limbs, Levin feels dreadful revulsion, made worse by the fact that his brother then wants to kiss him. It is one of the very greatest scenes in Tolstoy. But one suspects that it was only able to be brought into being precisely because it was not like that at the time. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is another phrase for making things up after the event. The crucial theme of those particular chapters in Anna Karenina is not feeling, but lack of feeling. And by conflating the death of his two brothers, Lev Nikolayevich is able to be present, body and soul, at a deathbed which in 1856 was a matter of huge indifference to him. In the novel, it even becomes rather the edifying stuff of which a man could read aloud to some Dickensian family circle, with a gulp in his throat.
The sight of his brother and the closeness of death renewed in Levin’s soul that feeling of horror in the face of the inscrutability and at the same time the nearness and unavoidability of death, which had taken possession of him on that autumn evening when his brother had paid him a visit. That feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel able to understand the significance of death, and its unavoidability now seemed even more terrible to him; but now, thanks to the proximity of his wife, this feeling did not drive him to despair; in spite of death, he felt the necessity of living and loving. . . .16
All very affecting, in its place in the novel. And, as the commentators remind us, such thoughts reflect Tolstoy’s own growing preoccupation with death during the 1870s when the passage was written. But it took nearly twenty years for him to get these emotions right. No wonder they seem so perfect in the case of Levin. Like a criminal who had been twenty years on the run, Tolstoy could be expected to get his lines right when the time of trial came, and he had to relive the offensive scene.
Three aspects of metropolitan life were of particular attraction as he made his retreat from his brother’s deathbed and hurried back to St. Petersburg: the Court, the bath-houses, and the literary salons. That is to say, snobbery, sex and fame.
In the first, his painful shyness and clumsiness were at war with a pride in his birth, and a delight, which is reflected so exuberantly in War and Peace, in all the resplendent detail of high life. How very high that was, by the contemporary standards of other European countries, is revealed to any modern visitor to the armoury of the Kremlin in Moscow, or to the Winter Palace in Leningrad where, in addition to the stupendous opulence of the coaches and costumes and uniforms and furniture, the sheer size and scale of it all are overwhelming. The Russian Court, in all its Imperial glory, was much the grandest thing in Europe, and far outshone the muted luxuries of Windsor or even – a phrase one does not write lightly – the Habsburg splendour of Schönbrunn.
Even those who today have seen the Winter Palace at Leningrad, and been overwhelmed by its scale and richness, have only seen the half of what Tolstoy saw when he attended Court functions there. For in those days, the newly built palace was not a museum, but a living setting for Imperial magnificence, room after room dripping with crystal and marble and full of people who astounded foreign visitors by the wealth of their costumes, their jewels, and their elaborate uniforms. Nor was the Winter Palace an individual showcase. There, indeed, the bureaucrats, the senior military officials and their diplomats mingled in their finery with Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses. But the company was probably more select, and the furnishings and costumes were hardly less plutocratic in the great aristocratic houses of St. Petersburg, stunning in their wealth, size and ele
gance.
Into this world, in which his ancestors had moved as habitués, Tolstoy blundered with a mixture of awe and embarrassment. Everyone at such a levée would know ‘who he was’, but he belonged to no inner circle, and even his kinsfolk who were courtiers were strangers to him. The courtier with whom he was to form the closest attachment was the Countess Alexandra Alexandrovna Tolstaya, a lady-in-waiting to the Grand Duchess Marya of Leuchtenberg. But this friendship – one of the most important of Tolstoy’s life – was only to blossom on foreign soil. In the Court, as in the literary salons, he was always something of a stranger.
The fact that he got invitations to Court functions did not go unnoticed among his literary friends, and helped to mark him out from the rest. There is jealous derision in Turgenev’s exclamation, yelled at some literary dinner, ‘Why bother to come here? Go off and see your princesses!’17
Turgenev was a difficult man to get along with. At various stages of his life he had acrimonious quarrels with Dostoyevsky, Fet, Katkov and Nekrasov. Tolstoy was not alone in exciting his wrath. But Turgenev seems to have had the capacity to arouse Tolstoy’s anger in return, and in their most memorable exchange one catches the flavour of their antipathy. Serious contemporaries perhaps tried to extract from these rows and quarrels some profound ideological or intellectual difference. If Tolstoy had sat at a dinner table which contained Turgenev (who, as a true European and cosmopolitan, was a friend of George Sand), Tolstoy would see that as a good opportunity to be as rude as possible about this fashionable French writer. ‘I can’t repeat the nonsense he talked about George Sand, it was so crudely obscene,’ Turgenev wrote furiously one morning to his friend Botkin, promising never to see or speak to Tolstoy again. But then they would meet, and be friends once more, until Tolstoy thought of some new way of provoking him. One good way of getting any group of literary men on the raw is to say that you do not see any merit in Shakespeare. Tolstoy tried this one at several stages of his life, always with pleasingly apoplectic results. He perfected the technique in that season at St. Petersburg. Fet got to a dinner party where the performance had ended and Tolstoy was on his way out. ‘What a pity you were late,’ another friend wrote to him. ‘You would have learnt that Shakespeare is an ordinary writer and that our delight and astonishment over Shakespeare are nothing more than our desire to be fashionable, and our habit of repeating foreign opinions. . . .’
Lest the reader should be tempted to believe that Tolstoy was thinking when he indulged in these bear-baiting exercises, one should repeat and cherish his best exchange with Turgenev. On one of these occasions, Turgenev became so angry with Tolstoy that he thought he would choke. He clutched his throat and said, ‘I can’t stand any more of this! I’ve got bronchitis!’ ‘Bronchitis!’ said Tolstoy scornfully. And then, perhaps feeling that his words made sense, ‘Bronchitis is a metal!’ The remark is very mildly less absurd in Russian than in English, in so far as bronchit could conceivably be some word like grafit (graphite) which refers to a physical substance rather than a disease. Tolstoy could have misheard. But there is a surreal appropriateness in the exchange. Tolstoy would spend many years of his life trying to persuade people that Shakespeare was no good; that Jesus wasn’t a Christian; that folk songs were better than Beethoven and that property is theft – in other words, preaching the important gospel that bronchitis is a metal.
Nowhere does an intelligent and independent-minded person feel more strongly the need to preach this gospel than in some little intellectual circle such as the group surrounding The Contemporary. The writers for this periodical all furiously debated the question: whither Russia? and all thought that they had got the answer to the question. In the latter half of the fifties they were beginning to form into opposing camps. Turgenev and the more civilised writers were liberals, who hoped for a gradual reform of the system, and dreamed as liberals always do of the coming-together of men of good will everywhere. . . .
But there were others who looked to Herzen in exile, or who read the writings of the French socialist Proudhon, and who felt that the injustices in society were so glaring, the inequalities so gross, that only a radical, and possibly a violent, solution could be found. This point of view was represented by figures like Nikolay Chernyshevsky and his friend Dobrolyubov. By supporting these radicals, Nekrasov lost nearly all his great contributors. Turgenev led the way, but Botkin, Fet, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Goncharov and Tolstoy himself all left for other periodicals. The paper was closed down by the censor in 1866.
Tolstoy’s aloofness to the squabbles among lesser Contemporary writers is highly characteristic of his attitude to intellectual controversies at other periods of his life. He was open in his rudeness about both sides. He could mock the liberalism of Turgenev as mere posing, and attack the profanity and violence of the extreme left. If such double-handed scepticism produced some explosions at a soirée, or even a threatened fisticuffs, so much the better. But at the same time, Tolstoy was quietly absorbing much from both points of view: and it is extremely unlikely that his life at Yasnaya Polyana would have developed as it did without this period of exposure to what the intelligentsia was thinking in St. Petersburg. But like many countrymen, he was temperamentally inclined to entrench himself, and to resist contemporary fashions. It was while he was in St. Petersburg, and not while he was at home, that he resolved to liberate his serfs. And though, when he returned for a spell of five months on his estate in the latter half of 1856, he failed to put the plan into operation, he did try to do so. He had absorbed Turgenev’s guilt and Angst about the position of the country nobility. But equally, he had absorbed much of the extreme radicalism of Chernyshevsky, Herzen and Proudhon. It had entered his system – true son of Rousseau as he was – without effort, or without his really noticing the difference. Though he found it emotionally impossible to belong to groups or to admit that he agreed with anyone, Tolstoy was from now on a fellow traveller with those who wanted to bring the system down.
The third great distraction of St. Petersburg life – we have mentioned the Court and the salons – was the easily available sex. The diaries show that this period was one of unrestrained activity, both in brothels and in the bath-houses. All classes of society and both sexes frequented these bath-houses, since pre-Revolutionary plumbing in Russia was even more rudimentary than post-Revolutionary. Each enormous house in St. Petersburg, whose each block of stone would dwarf a peasant’s izba, contained many dwellings. But they were too large for carrying water about. One English visitor remarked that the size of everything in St. Petersburg seemed ‘to have been designed for the countless generations to come, rather than for the practical wants of the present inhabitants’.18
The most respectable citizens of St. Petersburg, therefore, as well as the least respectable, would be found of an afternoon or an evening, making their way to the bath-house. ‘Terrible’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘never again’ are the frequent refrains in the diary as Tolstoy made his way around the very circuit of brothels and bath-houses which, forty years on, would see the revels of Rasputin. ‘I make it a rule for all time,’ he wrote in May, ‘never to enter a pub or a brothel.’19 But lust kept returning, so terrible that at the sight of the other naked bodies in the bath-house, it amounted to a physical pain.
Not long after this, he took his way home to the country. At first he stayed with Turgenev at Spasskoye, and on his way there he had a religious experience (unspecified) which moved him to tears.
By the beginning of July, he was back at Yasnaya Polyana. Much had happened since he was last there, both to himself, inwardly, as a man, and to the fabric of his estate. His grandfather’s great house had now been demolished and Tolstoy took up residence in the surviving wing. He had also become exercised once again (a perennial preoccupation) with the status and fate of his peasants. There was so much talk now in St. Petersburg that the Government might be on the point of liberating the serfs that Tolstoy wanted to jump the gun and set his villagers free, regardless of what the Government
decided.
Old Aunt Toinette, however, who remained at Yasnaya Polyana as a link with the past and the old ways, could not be persuaded that it was a good thing to let the peasants go.
‘In comparison with my former Yasnaya recollections of myself,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘I feel how much I’ve changed in the liberal sense. Even T. A. [i.e. his aunt] displeases me. In 100 years you couldn’t knock into her head the injustice of serfdom.’
Tolstoy was to spend the next five months at home, happy to be there. Clearly, in spite of the cataclysmic debts which he had allowed himself to amass during the war, they had not been brought quite to the verge of ruin. It was a sad but ghoulish fact that one factor contributing to this had been the death of Dmitry, whose inheritance was divided among his surviving brothers and sister.
Tolstoy needed this period of respite, when he sat at home, waiting to discover what direction life would lead him into. It was in some ways a happy time, when he saw a lot of his friend Dyakov, who was, as he had confided in his diary some time before, the individual with whom he had been most deeply in love. They knew each other well, and they spoke on a level of intimacy. Dyakov advised Tolstoy that he should marry his ward, Valerya Vladimirovna Arsenyeva. She was the daughter of a Yasnaya Polyana neighbour, whose father had died in 1854 leaving Tolstoy, amazingly, as the legal guardian of his three children. By the summer of 1856, Valerya, the eldest, was twenty years old and Dyakov’s idea that her twenty-six-year old guardian should marry her did not look altogether preposterous. She was pretty. She wore alluringly skimpy evening gowns. She was ‘sweet’. She was ‘limited and impossibly trivial’. As far as Tolstoy was concerned she was everything a woman could be. But the more he contemplated it, the less he could imagine himself having family life; or, more crucially important, sexual relations with a girl who was so ‘sweet’. In September, he started to have nightmares that he had become impotent: not a fear which he had ever had before. Throughout the fall, while he awaited his discharge from the army (it came through on November 28), he bombarded Valerya with letters. They were of inordinate length and incomparable condescension but, taken together, read like an elaborate backing away from a situation which pleased neither party. In November he informed her that although it is all right for her, as a woman, to ‘think and feel as the foolish man does, it would be disgraceful and sinful for me. . . . Please go for a walk every day. . . . And wear a corset. . . . and Christ be with you and may he help us to understand and love one another well. . . .’20 he wrote to her from Moscow in November. The advice is unstoppable. Not only does he dismiss all her friends and relations (‘it is incomprehensible to me how you can live with these people without being disgusted’), but he also feels moved to correct any vestiges of self-regard which, after a summer with him, Valerya might have had left. ‘Alas,’ he wrote to her from St. Petersburg, ‘you are deluding yourself if you think that you have taste. . . . The elegance of bright colours etc. is excusable, although ridiculous, in an ugly young lady, but for you with your pretty little face it’s inexcusable to make such a mistake. . . . Christ be with you. . . .’21 ‘Religion is a great thing, especially for women. . . .’22 ‘How is it that you say nothing of Dickens or Thackeray. . . .?’ ‘And what is this nonsense you have been reading. . . .?’23
