Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  From all that he had heard in St. Petersburg, Tolstoy knew that the emancipation of the serfs was imminent in Russia. Already, things were changing. Under the tutelage of P. D. Kiselyov, there had been considerable extensions of peasant privileges. Kiselyov made provision for peasants who were not ‘gentry serfs’ (i.e. privately owned) to form themselves into communes, to colonise sparsely populated regions, to make use of state forests, even to borrow capital from the state. There was to be a measure of self-administration. In the villages, a volost’ or canton elder was to be elected to represent the interests of the community with the larger nobles and, after 1864, with a local council, the zemstvo.

  All this involved the presupposition that someone, somewhere in a Russian village, was able to read – not always a safe assumption to make. It was obviously in the interests of reaction to keep the populace illiterate; nor could those whose livelihood depended upon tilling the soil always see the necessity for bookwork. A parish priest in the south of Russia at about this period decided to educate his parishioners, and chose to teach thirty boys from the parish how to read. At first the parents went along with the idea. But when they realised that schooling was not compulsory, they immediately came and remonstrated with the priest. ‘Not only did the peasants not see any material benefit from the teaching of their children,’ the priest wrote, ‘but they saw this as a loss of needed work time and turned to me with the request that I assign their children a salary for attending school. . . .’ In that particular parish, education ceased, and the population remained, as they wanted to be, illiterate. When, in 1861, the proposal for emancipation was published, two hundred and eighty thousand copies were printed, and more were immediately required. But this is not a high proportion in a population of sixty millions. A contemporary painting, by G. G. Myasoyedov, called ‘Reading the Manifesto’, depicts various peasant men, of mixed age, huddled around a little boy – presumably the only literate person in the village – who has a copy of the proclamation in his hands.25

  Figuratively speaking, it was to that little boy that Tolstoy paid much of his attention in the coming years. Ever since a brief, abortive, attempt to start a school at Yasnaya Polyana in 1848, he had nursed the ambition of educating his peasants. It had begun as an idea straight out of Rousseau. As the century advanced, his desire to be an educator was one of the things which anchored him most closely to his country’s destiny. He shared with the revolutionaries, with the Church, the Government, the emergent intelligentsiya, a desire to capture the uneducated minds of the peasantry. But he differed from nearly all in his desire, which anticipates a lot of twentieth-century educational theory, to allow each child to develop as an individual. He did not simply regard them as vessels to be filled up with information and ideas.

  The whole history of education in Russia begins with a certain sort of crude comedy and ends in blood. In the nineteenth century, however hard educators tried to ‘raise’ the peasantry to a level where they would enjoy reading for some lofty purpose, even ‘for its own sake’, the preponderance of learners wished only to read for practical purposes. The ability to read a map, for example, gave enormous scope to those whose way of life in their own region was unsatisfactory and who wished to migrate to another part of the Empire. The jealous neighbour, who could read the deeds of a cottage or a small plot of land, had enormous power over the illiterate next door. With the ability to read, it was possible that the over-numerous children of a peasant family could go into town and read the street signs, tell one shop from another, and even get jobs in restaurants where they could now read the menu. It was on this sort of level that literacy held attractions for the populace at large.

  Tolstoy had a more high-minded view of it all, but he also entered into the practical uses of literacy, and enjoyed setting up a school. It began in 1859 with about twenty children, but he soon expanded and began to take on assistant teachers. One of these, Pyotr Vasilyevich Morozov, described arriving by foot at the farm, and seeing a little swarm of peasant kids making their way towards the low-lying farm buildings which served as schoolrooms at that date. On the verandah outside the building there stood a genial man with a thick, dark beard, soft boots – evidently a prosperous peasant type. ‘How can I see the Count?’ asked Morozov. ‘I am the Count,’ was the reply.26 Tolstoy intensely enjoyed being among peasants and liked wearing peasant costume. He found the women sexually attractive and available. He loved kissing the men, too. ‘Their beards smell wonderfully of spring,’ he told Alexandra.27 Among such people, he was the monarch of all he surveyed. He had no need to be as shy or belligerent as the drawing rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg made him feel.

  The foundation of a school at Yasnaya Polyana was just one gesture towards the recovery of that green stick on which was written the secret of happiness, the means to destroy evil and to build a Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In the classroom as he laughingly taught the children the alphabet, he might have felt the Ant Brotherhood was re-forming.

  But there were obstacles in his way. He did not know much about education: and, Europeaniser and westerniser that he was, he believed that he should travel abroad to see how they did things in Germany, France, England. Abroad, too, was where the original, embryonic Ant Brotherhood was heading in the summer of 1860. His elder brother Nikolay was suffering from tuberculosis, and his condition was becoming serious. He had already settled in Soden, the Prussian health resort. As harvest approached, and the children disappeared into the fields, Tolstoy decided to leave Yasnaya Polyana in the charge of his assistant teachers, and to go abroad himself. He went with his sister Marya, and a few weeks later they would be followed by brother Sergey. It all looks as if he could foresee what was going to happen. But he did not. Instinct may have been guiding him, but with his conscious self, he was in for a shock.

  It was a summer of vivid dreams. Perhaps his brother Nikolay’s illness affected him more profoundly at a subconscious level than he at first recognised. Or perhaps, merely, the German food disagreed with his repose. In one dream, he saw that the religion of this time – and his own religion – is just a belief in progress. ‘Whoever said to anybody that progress is good?’ In another, perhaps more prophetic, dream, he was dressed as a peasant, and his mother did not recognise him. . . .28

  For most of the month of July and for the whole of August, he devoted himself to inspecting German schools, and to absorbing the Geist of the place. ‘Luther is great,’ he wrote, having seen one Church primary school. ‘Just the Bible without explanations or abbreviations.’29 The remark shows how little of Luther he had ever read. In fact, the whole of Luther’s philosophy of life derived from a sense of human imperfectibility, and the need for grace. The ‘pure religion and undefiled’ after which Tolstoy aspired was of the sort which Luther would have regarded as purely carnal. Luther was a disagreeable man, but a brilliant and original interpreter of the Augustinian world myth. His vision of a humanity which is obliged to accept its own guilt, and even to love it, is utterly at variance with the simple moralism of Tolstoy’s creed.

  Lutheranism at its purest level had little effect on the way the Germans ran their primary schools, and in many of the places Tolstoy visited, he found conditions ‘terrible. . . . a prayer for the King, beatings, everything by heart, frightened, morally deformed children’.30 At the beginning of August he met Julius Froebel, nephew of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the Kindergarten system. Froebel’s account of being lectured on education by his Russian visitor sounds like any exchange between any western liberal and any Russian between that date and this. Particularly admirable is Tolstoy’s ability to criticise this German system of education, and to make a virtue out of the fact that the Russians did not even have any system. The Germans, who had at least been trying to evolve a satisfactory way of preparing children for life, are thus given a left and a right. On the one hand, Tolstoy’s fortnight’s survey has convinced him that they are doing it all wrong. On the other, how much better these things are done, or not
done, at home. ‘Progress in Russia, he told me, must come out of public education, which among us will give better results than in Germany, because the Russian masses are not yet spoiled by false education. . . .’31 Tolstoy went on to speak of the Russian masses as a ‘mysterious and irrational’ force from which, one day, would spring ‘an entirely new organisation of the world.’32 No one can deny that this prophecy was fulfilled, and when it was, how grateful we all were.

  The meeting between Tolstoy and Froebel took place in Kissingen. A few days later, Nikolay arrived from Soden. ‘He’s terribly clever and clear-headed. And he wants to live,’ Tolstoy told his diary, ‘but he has no energy for living.’33 Yet, although he could see the truth with one part of himself, Tolstoy was being unrealistic about how ill Nikolay was. Both brothers, moreover, had to contemplate the life style of Sergey, who had also turned up in Kissingen, having lost his entire fortune at the gambling tables. The Ant Brotherhood was no longer, in real life, very congenial. Sergey had about him ‘the glitter of aristocracy’ and Lev found himself going off for walks on his own, and seeking out the company of German peasants, or of the novelist Auerbach, rather than his own family. After a few days Nikolay went back to the company of Mashenka in Soden. ‘I’m no use,’ said Lev in his diary.34

  Biographers of Tolstoy with a stricter moral sense than mine have expressed the feeling that Tolstoy should have been some use.35 But what could he have done? The knowledge that those whom we love are about to die is very often cruelly withheld from us. Tolstoy had already lost one brother. Though he was only thirty he knew that we are not immortal. But he behaved as if Nikolay was immortal. Nikolay wrote to him, asking him to come down to Soden. He did so slowly, spending a couple of days at Frankfurt, and toying with his story The Idyll. When he reached Soden, he thought his brother was well, and in good spirits. But he was wrong. Nikolay died on September 20. ‘What’s the point of struggling and trying, if nothing remains of what used to be N. N. Tolstoy?’ Lev wrote to his friend Fet:

  He didn’t say that he felt death approaching, but I know he followed its every step, and surely knew what still remained to him of life. A few minutes before he died, he dozed off, then suddenly came to and whispered with horror: ‘What does it all mean?’ He had seen it – this absorption of self in nothingness. And if he found nothing to cling to, what shall I find? Even less. And then it’s most unlikely that I or anyone else would struggle with it up to the last minute quite as he did. A couple of days before I said to him, ‘We’ll have to put a chamber pot in our room.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m weak but not as weak as that, we’ll struggle on a bit longer.’ Up to the last minute he didn’t give in to it; he did everything himself, continually tried to occupy himself, wrote, asked me about my writing, gave me advice. But I felt he was no longer doing all this from any inner desire, but on principle. One thing remained for him to the end – nature. The night before he died he went into his bedroom . . . and fell exhausted on the bed by the open window. I came in, with tears in his eyes he said: ‘How I’ve enjoyed this whole last hour.’ From the earth you came, to the earth you will return. The one thing that remains is the vague hope that there, in nature, of which you will become a part in the earth, something will remain and be discovered. All who knew and saw his last minutes say, ‘How wonderfully peacefully and calmly he died,’ but I know how frightfully agonising it was, for not a single feeling escaped me.36

  It is one of the best descriptions of a deathbed that Tolstoy ever gave us. And without suggesting for a moment that Tolstoy did not feel intense grief for Nikolay, one can see that the deathbed has already become a scene in a novel. The feelings of the dying must, by any logical understanding, be theirs alone. We can’t know them. But for the novelist, who knows everything, not a single feeling escapes him. One sees here, in a moment of intense personal horror, how Tolstoy’s extreme egotism feeds his power of artistic sympathy. He is Nikolay on the deathbed, and the death which most upsets him to contemplate is not his brother’s but his own. That is why he can have all Nikolay’s feelings for him as well as all his own.

  The elder brother whom he had so much revered and respected died in Tolstoy’s arms. He was thirty-seven. Lev Nikolayevich, five years younger, could now feel his childhood sealed off. True, Sergey and Mashenka were still alive, but upon neither of his surviving siblings was it possible to foist his fantasies of family purity or childhood innocence, as had been the case with Nikolenka and the Ant Brotherhood. Indeed, the two survivors might have made him fear that he had been born into a difficult genetic inheritance.

  Writing to his aunt Toinette from the Caucasus in 1852 he had confided in her a dream which he had had. ‘It’s a beautiful dream but it’s still not all that I allow myself to dream of. I am married – my wife is a sweet, good, affectionate person; she loves you in the same way as I do. We have children who call you “Granny”; you live in the big house, upstairs – the same room that Granny used to live in; the whole house is as it was in Papa’s time, and we begin the same life again. . . . If they made me Emperor of Russia, if they gave me Peru, in a word if a fairy came with her wand to ask me what I desired, my hand on my heart, I would reply that my only desire is for this to become a reality.’

  With his brother Sergey, such dreams, however intensely felt, must have seemed a little far removed from reality. It was Sergey, after all, who had introduced Lev to the brothel. When they grew up, Lev used to complain that they had little in common. This could very well have meant that he feared they had too much in common.

  He had similarly watched Marya’s marriage to Valeryan collapse and the flirtation with Turgenev begin. The images of innocence with which Lev Tolstoy liked to associate his family had died with Nikolenka. From now onwards, Lev Tolstoy’s imagination was free to seek its consolations in a pure mythologising of his past. He sought back, and back, beyond the time of the Ant Brotherhood, to the era of the parents’ marriage, and further back still to a time when there were no Tolstoys at Yasnaya Polyana – only old Prince Volkonsky and his long-suffering daughter; a time before the Decembrist Rising, when the officers who marched on Paris returned, and brought to Russia a sense of new beginning, a time when the ‘mysterious irrational force’ of the Russian people seemed benign, even glorious. It is no surprise that the next lot of relations he should have visited should be Volkonskys: and Volkonskys who harked back to precisely this period of existence.

  In November he made a visit to Italy. In Florence, he presented himself to the most romantic and distinguished of all the Russian emigrés there, his mother’s second cousin Count Sergey Grigoryevich Volkonsky, now seventy years old. ‘His outward appearance – with long grey hair – was exactly like that of an Old Testament prophet,’ Tolstoy recalled. ‘This was an astonishing old man, the flower of the Petersburg aristocracy, nobly born and charming. And yet, in Siberia, even after he had done his penal servitude, and when his wife had no kind of drawing room, he used to work with the men, and all kinds of peasant labourers would be lolling about in his room. . . .’37

  It is just the sort of scene which we associate with Tolstoy himself in old age – the wife having to rub shoulders with extraordinary peasant visitors, the husband a prophetic Old Testament character with flowing grey locks. Tolstoy was not many days with his distinguished old kinsman, but it is unimaginable that they did not speak of the Decembrist Rising, and of Count Volkonsky’s sufferings at the hands of the autocracy. Of his various encounters abroad, it is possible that the meeting with Volkonsky made the most impression. Tolstoy’s own efforts in the prophetic vein were to occupy much of his future years, and it was the budding prophet and educator who buzzed about the capitals of Europe for the next five months. But Volkonsky had touched a deeper vein, and shaken Tolstoy’s imagination.

  After Italy, England.

  Tolstoy was in London for only sixteen days at the beginning of March 1861. In later years, he retained a keen memory of its criminal and sordid underworld. ‘I was struck when I sa
w in the streets of London a criminal escorted by the police, and the police had to protect him energetically from the crowd, which threatened to tear him in pieces. With us it is just the opposite, police have to drive away in force the people who try to give the criminal money and bread. With us, criminals and prisoners are “little unhappy ones”.’38

  He was fascinated by the double standards of the English, and in particular their hypocrisy about sexual matters. He very nearly admired it. He wrote knowingly to Strakhov, nine years after his visit to the English capital, ‘Imagine London without its eighty thousand Magdalens! What would become of families? How many wives and daughters would remain chaste? What would become of the laws of morality which people so love to observe? It seems to me that this class of woman is essential to the family under the present complex forms of life.’39