Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Tolstoy both did and did not belong to the societies he inhabited. Yasnaya Polyana provided him with the security and strength and independence which would eventually enable him to write War and Peace. Yet in itself it was an emblem of his status as an outsider in provincial Russia. He both was and wasn’t peasant-like; he both was and wasn’t a St. Petersburg aristocrat; he both was and wasn’t a writer, a member of the intelligentsia.

  His ambivalence was apparent throughout his first year back home, and it produced conflicts, some comic, some touching, some prophetic. Tolstoy was not sure where he was, or who he was.

  Before he got home, he found that he had been appointed, in absentia, a Justice of the Peace, with special responsibilities for supervising the new legislation which had come into force upon the emancipation of the serfs. The innocent outsider might suppose that it was a strange honour to have conferred upon a young man who was not very popular with the local gentry and whose life style had not hitherto been all that might be expected from the judicial bench. But consider the nature of his task. The marshal of the local nobility had already made representations to the governor of Tula that the traditional rights of landlords over ‘their’ peasants should be respected, whatever the newfangled laws might decree. But the law now allowed for the peasants to have redress in cases of injustice. They could exact financial compensation if they had been wrongfully made victims of physical punishment. In the many cases where emancipation was effectively withheld from the peasants, it was the arbiter’s job to intervene and make sure that justice was done. This was the sort of task which fell to Tolstoy on his return. One of his neighbours, for instance, Kostomarov, was claiming that all his ‘souls’ were really his own personal house serfs and therefore not entitled to any land.

  Is it any wonder that the governor of Tula gave the uncongenial task of arbiter to a young nobleman who was actually out of the country at the time of his appointment? Anyone doing the job was bound to make enemies, so why not entrust it to a young man whom the neighbourhood regarded in any case with abhorrence? The fact that he was offered the job is a tribute not to Tolstoy’s powers of leadership, but to his already observable social isolation.

  There were many cases like that of Mrs. Artukhov. She lodged a complaint with her local council (the zemstvo) that her manservant, Mark, wanted to leave her on the grounds that he was now a free man. Moreover the ‘Arbiter of the Peace, Count L. N. Tolstoy’ had ruled that Mark and his wife should be given, not merely their freedom, but also three and a half months’ wages to compensate for the time he was wrongly held in Mrs. Artukhov’s employment against his will. When she appealed to the zemstvo, who were all her own kind, Tolstoy’s unpopular, and fair, decision was overruled.

  Though the governor of Tula had thought Tolstoy’s appointment would have the advantage of letting other landowners off the hook, it infuriated the others. Tolstoy was this funny mixture. They knew that he had been abroad and picked up a lot of ideas. But they would not have expected a nobleman of such breeding to side with the peasants against them. The magistrates’ session at Tula reversed nearly all his decisions. ‘I have earned the terrible indignation of the nobility,’ he wrote to Botkin. ‘They even want to beat me and take legal action against me. . . . I am just waiting for them to calm down and then I shall resign.’51

  The authorities began to regard Tolstoy as a dangerous revolutionary, which he was; much more potentially dangerous than either they or he ever realised. This was abundantly clear when they came to investigate the school which he was running at Yasnaya Polyana. Having seen the schools of Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and England, he was anxious to put his own educational theories into practice. To our contemporary way of looking at things, they were remarkably advanced and enlightened. He was not a believer in treating children as the passive vehicles of information which was to be drummed into them, Gradgrind style, by repetition or by fear. Rather, he sought, as we would say, to ‘draw them out’. The essays and stories which the children wrote still survive. Many of them were published in the lifetime of the children. By then Tolstoy had enlisted and enrolled a number of assistant teachers, and devised a proper curriculum. He described it all to Alexandra, who had complained to him that corresponding with the Laird of Yasnaya Polyana was like ‘having a game of tennis all by oneself, throwing the ball into the haystack’. He told her not to be angry, and then painted for her an idyllic pastoral which explained why he had been too busy to write.

  When I escape from my office and from the peasants who persecute me from every part of the house, I go to the school; but, as it is under repair, the classes are installed in the garden, under the apple trees, to which one has access by stooping, the vegetation being so dense. The schoolmaster sits there, and all around the pupils, nibbling grasses and making lime and ash-leaves pop. The master teaches according to my advice, but not very well after all, which the children feel. They love me more. And we begin conversing for three or four hours, and nobody is bored. One cannot describe these children, I have never seen the like of them amongst the children of our dear rank. Just think that during the two years, without any discipline, no boy and no girl was punished. No laziness, no rudeness, no stupid jokes, or distasteful words. The schoolhouse is nearly finished. Three large rooms – one pink, two blue – are for the use of the school. A museum besides is in one of the rooms. Along the walls, on brackets, stones, butterflies, skeletons, grasses, flowers, apparatus for physics, etc., are placed. On Sundays the museum is open for everybody and a German from Jena (who is an excellent fellow) does experiments. Once a week botanical class, and we go into the forest to search for flowers, grasses, and mushrooms. Four times a week singing class; six times drawing (again the German) and it goes very well. . . .52

  It all sounds a little too good to be true, but the testimony of his pupils shows that there was really something very special about the Yasnaya Polyana school, and that they did genuinely love him. This thirty-two-year-old eccentric, who maddened his ‘own kind’ and could not fit into any of the social or intellectual stereotypes of the day, found true companionship with his young friends at the school. He spoke to them as equals. No wonder they sat and listened. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he would say. ‘Maybe I’ll give up my estate and my life as Master, and live like a peasant, build a hut on the edge of the village, marry a country girl, work as you do at mowing, ploughing and all kinds of work.’ While the boys and girls debated the proposition, Tolstoy made notes.

  To his many other maddening characteristics, Tolstoy could add that he was good with children, and this did not go unnoticed in the neighbourhood. By the time his Yasnaya Polyana, a periodical based on the school experiments, was being published in the following year, the Minister of the Interior, Valuyev, was drafting a memo to the effect that ‘A close perusal of the educational review Yasnaya Polyana, published by Count Tolstoy, inclines me to think that by advocating new teaching methods and principles for the organisation of schools for the common people, this periodical is spreading ideas which are not only false but dangerously biased. . . . The continued publication of the periodical would seem undesirable, especially as its author, who has remarkable and persuasive literary powers, is above all suspicion of criminal intention or dishonesty. . . .’ Worse and worse! They could not even get him on a charge of fraud or corruption, and shut him up that way. ‘What is harmful is the inaccuracy and eccentricity of his views which, set forth with exceptional eloquence, may be convincing to inexperienced teachers and may thus orient education in the wrong direction.’53

  There is a tendency to think of Tolstoy’s desire to live like a peasant as a feature of his middle and later years, a manifestation of his religious, post-literary self. But it was always there and, in the years immediately following his return from abroad, this Rousseauesque identification with the peasants was very strong. It was an important symptom of the isolation which was so necessary to him, as an artist. He could not function inside any mainstream. He had to be an
outsider. With two of his brothers now dead, he was able to taste, that happy summer, some of the reassuring delights of the Ant Brotherhood. But, whether or not he was fully conscious of the fact, part of its sweetness was that it angered, not merely his neighbours, but the Government itself. It placed him out on a limb, contra mundum, beyond the pale. Always, in Tolstoy’s life, there was this dual compulsion. On the one hand, there was the need for a little band of the faithful, who looked up to him as the Master. He found it in the Yasnaya Polyana school. When he came to marry, he tried to find it in his progeny. And he was to find it in the motley band of ‘dark ones’ who, in later years, followed his teachings and example.

  But he had no interest in joining ready-made brotherhoods, nor in attaching himself to cliques. And the year which saw him antagonising the Department of the Interior and upsetting nearly all his landed neighbours also saw him distancing himself, irrevocably, from the literary set in St. Petersburg. His attitude to the peasants placed him in peril of siding with extreme radicals like Chernyshevsky. But he need not have worried.

  Chernyshevsky lambasted Tolstoy’s pedagogical writings in a scathing Contemporary article.54 He was anxious to prove Tolstoy’s ignorance, dragging up the fact that he did not have a proper University degree, was shocked that Tolstoy did not take more seriously chic figures like Froebel, and took the view, common to urban radicals, that members of the aristocracy had no business to be on the side of the peasants unless they learnt from the intelligentsia how to cultivate the right attitudes. As a matter of fact, Chernyshevsky’s attack on Tolstoy is a good early-warning signal of how much the serious ‘political’ left in Russia hated the peasants. They did not like the idea of anybody achieving independence, and this is what intelligent and independent-minded country people have always wanted. Tolstoy, for all his posturings, was actually on the side of the peasants whom he knew, and who loved him. He wanted them to be free. Chernyshevsky’s doctrinaire radicalism is interestingly analogous to the response of English socialists to the Distributist movement in the 1920s. The suggestion that the poor should be liberated not only from the oppression of capitalists but also from the tyranny of the state filled such people as Shaw or the Webbs with horror; they lost. no time in caricaturing the position of the Distributists as ‘back to the land’ and ‘three acres and a cow’. These were creeds to which the poor kulaks clung, too. While Shaw mocked the Distributists’ ideal at home, his hero Stalin was employing weapons heavier than satire and, in his collectivisation of the land, massacring peasants in their millions who failed to conform to the requirements of the Five Year Plan.

  Tolstoy’s row with Chernyshevsky, then, anticipates the extreme suspicion with which, in later years, the Bolsheviks would regard the ‘Tolstoyans’. His quarrel with Turgenev doubtless had its roots in the same need to cut himself off from anything which might have been thought of as metropolitan fashionableness. At the same time, it went deeper than that. It was both more tragic and more farcical.

  Turgenev got back from abroad in May 1861, and almost immediately invited Tolstoy to stay at his estate of Spasskoye. The meeting was happy enough, and there was a good dinner. After the meal Turgenev proudly produced the newly completed manuscript of his novel Fathers and Children and, placing his friend on the drawing-room sofa, put the masterpiece into Tolstoy’s hands. Then he left his guest to savour the experience of reading it alone.

  When Turgenev returned to the drawing room to see what impression the novel was making upon Tolstoy, he was disconcerted to see the young man stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep. Since both the participants in this marvellous scene were novelists, that is to say falsifiers, it is hard to know how much of it actually took place, and how much was a fiction in their own brains. Tolstoy improves the story by saying that he opened his eyes and was just able to see Turgenev’s back slinking through the doorway of the room, and trying not to be noticed.

  So much for Tolstoy’s verdict on Fathers and Children. The next round of the combat occurred when Tolstoy chose to be singularly offensive about Turgenev’s natural daughter, and offensive in precisely the same way that Chernyshevsky was offensive about him. Turgenev happened to remark that the girl had an admirable English governess who had asked him to specify how much his daughter might spend on charity. He went on to describe this governess teaching his daughter to ‘mend the tattered rags of the poor’.

  ‘And you think that’s a good idea?’ asked Tolstoy abruptly.

  ‘Yes, surely. It puts her in touch with the real world.’

  ‘Well, I think that a well-dressed girl with filthy, stinking rags on her lap is acting in an insincere theatrical farce.’

  Turgenev’s face became red.

  ‘I would ask you not to say that.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I say what I believe?’

  ‘Then you are saying that I am educating my daughter badly?’

  Tolstoy said, yes, he did think this, but it was his opinion. It did not reflect on his opinion of Turgenev personally.

  ‘Then,’ shouted Turgenev, ‘if that’s what you think, I’ll punch your nose.’

  After this well-reasoned contribution to the educational debate, Turgenev ran out of the room, returning a minute later to apologise to Fet’s wife who had been the bewildered witness of it all.

  ‘For God’s sake, forgive my bad behaviour, for which I apologise most deeply,’ he said, and then, like some comic character in Dickens, he ran once more from the room.

  But Tolstoy was not prepared to leave it at the level of drawing-room farce. The animosity between the two writers was real, and deep. Those who witnessed it must have hoped that it would all blow over, because they had no reasonable grounds for hating one another. But they had something much stronger than that, grounds, enforced by that mysterious jealousy which is as strong as sex: literary rivalry.

  Tolstoy went away, but the quarrel nagged at him, and at the first stop on his journey, he posted a note to Turgenev, reminding him that he had behaved improperly. At the next post station along the road he awaited a reply from Turgenev. There was none. Tolstoy immediately ordered pistols, and sent a second letter, announcing that he challenged Turgenev to a duel. He hoped that Turgenev would meet him in the woods at the edge of Bogoslovo, a place whose name means the Word of God.

  As it happened, Turgenev had replied to the first letter, but sent it to Tolstoy’s next address rather than to a changing post along the road. It suggested that they break off relations altogether – a good idea, but Tolstoy’s challenge was by now in the post. It is a frightening thought that if Tolstoy had been having this quarrel with Dostoyevsky, they would almost certainly have met for this duel, killed one another, and deprived the world of the two greatest novelists of the nineteenth century. It is a good thing they never met. Turgenev sent grovelling apologies, fully admitted (which was hardly, by now, true) that he was completely to blame and wholly in the wrong, and said that Tolstoy, being wholly in the right, was justified in summoning Turgenev to justify himself with pistols. But the letter is of a kind which would have made it impossible for Tolstoy to insist on satisfaction. He asks Tolstoy’s pardon. Tolstoy replied that he knew Turgenev was afraid of him. ‘I scorn you and do not wish to have anything more to do with you.’

  For the next few months, there was a truce, during which, inevitably, Tolstoy’s conscience began to trouble him. He realised that he had gone too far, and he wrote a letter to Turgenev telling him that it was, for him, a torment that he should have an enemy. He sent the letter, to be forwarded, to Turgenev’s bookseller in St. Petersburg. But Turgenev was abroad, and did not read this letter for three months. Meanwhile, rumours had reached him that Tolstoy was going round Moscow accusing him of cowardice, and circulating copies of his letter to that effect. Very well. If Tolstoy had been accusing Turgenev of cowardice, he must answer for it. When Turgenev returned to the province of Tula, he would insist upon a duel to defend his honour. Since he was at that time in Paris, and would not be returni
ng to Russia for the rest of that year, he could not fight the duel for about eight months, but it was, as far as he was concerned, a firm date.

  Even Tolstoy could see the absurdity of this. It was one thing to fight a duel on the spur of the moment when passions were running high, another to keep the resentment at an artificial heat for two thirds of a year. He wrote asking Turgenev’s pardon for any offence he may have caused, and declined the challenge.

  For the next seventeen years, there was to be no contact between the two men. This made complete what had been evolving over the previous two or three years: the social, political and intellectual isolation in which Tolstoy’s daemon could flourish. The quarrel with Turgenev was about nothing: it could have been patched up in half an hour if Tolstoy had wanted it. But Turgenev was at this juncture the most obvious rival to Tolstoy’s latent genius. (When Dostoyevsky’s genius emerged, Tolstoy simply refused to meet him.) He was by now isolated from St. Petersburg but – thanks to his activities as a magistrate and an amateur schoolmaster – isolated from the local nobility around Tula. He had already written and said enough to earn him enemies in the Government, and it would not be long before they made their appearance. All that was needed, now that his artistic isolation was assured, was some emotional cocoon in which his loneliness could be sheltered. It was time for him to get married.

  Chapter Eight

  Marriage

  1862

  Suppose you are fortunate enough to have ‘fallen in love with’ and married your friend. And now suppose it possible that you were offered the choice of two futures: ‘Either you will cease to be Lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same Beauty, the same Truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros. Choose which you please.’ Which should we choose? Which choice should we not regret after we had made it?