by A. N. Wilson
You will find him throughout the day, with his neck bare, his beard lengthened, his body wrapped in sheep’s hide, eating raw turnips, and drinking kvass, sleeping one half of the day, and growling at his wife and family the other. The same feelings, the same wants, wishes, and gratifications . . . characterise the nobleman and the peasant.1
This disgusted reaction is quoted by a modern historian to illustrate the truth that mere membership of the dvoryanstvo did not, in Russian terms, guarantee gentility.
Russia had its own brand of Squire Westerns and Sir Pitt Crawleys, neither metropolitan in habit nor polite in manners. The great families in War and Peace, we are told, ‘are in no sense typical. They were the members of an exclusive club of some one thousand four hundred grands seigneurs in an empire in which a million persons claimed “noble” status of some kind.’2
While this is undoubtedly true, to which category did Tolstoy himself belong – was he a grand seigneur or an eater of raw turnips? Until he had invented, in late middle age, a special religion which made a virtue out of raw turnips and growling at the wife, Tolstoy could not be sure himself.
Certainly, he was well connected. His cousins in St. Petersburg and Moscow were somebodies. But in life style and attitudes, he was much more like any small country squire. Only in a vicarious way could he or did he want to be grand seigneurial. Sofya Andreyevna Bers had been accustomed to her parents’ well-maintained and spacious apartment in the Kremlin, to good clothes and fine company, to constant society, and to the assistance of a staff of ten servants. Things were very different indeed at Yasnaya Polyana. The vast house where his Volkonsky grandfather had lived in such splendour had been demolished. ‘Yasnaya Polyana’ now meant the two remaining wings. In one of them, Tolstoy had his school, full of children from the estate. In the other, he lived with ‘Auntie’, Tatyana Yergolskaya. There were only three servants worthy of the name, a maid called Dunya, a manservant called Alexis, and an old man who very occasionally surfaced from bouts of extreme drunkenness to do some cooking. As soon as he was back home, Tolstoy changed his city clothes for the rough peasant shirt and belt, familiar to us from the many icons of the Master. The house, as he showed the new bride around, cannot have failed to impress her with its extreme austerity. There was almost no upholstered furniture, only hard chairs and tables. Most of the lighting was from stinking tallow candles. The bedrooms in particular were icy and bleak. There were no carpets – it was assumed that you would have felt slippers or bast shoes to wear in bed – and little in the way of bed linen. The young Countess was astounded to discover that her husband did not believe in pillow cases. He always slept with a hard old red leather pillow, which looked as though it had been wrenched from a railway carriage.3
It was all quite frightening for an eighteen-year-old Europeanised city girl. There was nobody there who could possibly become her friend, no substitute for her sisters, for instance, nor for the innumerable, polite, harmless, jolly people who streamed in and out of her mother’s Moscow drawing room.
Fascinated by her husband, and deeply attracted to him sexually, she threw herself into the task of being a country wife. Her first visit to the cowsheds made her retch, and among the filthy, badly-tended farm buildings, the new bride was constantly in danger of meeting not just nasty smells, but also echoes of her husband’s guilty past. Only a few weeks before, she had been forced to read his guilty secrets, and the phrase ‘in love as never before’ stuck into her mind with particular cruelty now that she was face to face with Tolstoy’s peasant mistress. Only months before, he had been telling his journal that he regarded Aksinya Alexandrovna Bazykina more or less as a wife. Now his actual wife met the earthy, common-law Aksinya and her little baby, Tolstoy’s bastard. ‘I think I shall kill myself with jealousy,’ she told her diary. ‘ “In love as never before” he writes. With that fat, pale peasant woman – how frightful! I looked at the dagger and the guns with joy. One blow, I thought, how easy it would be – if only it weren’t for the baby. Yet to think that she is there, just a few steps away. I feel demented.’4
But the smell, the loneliness, and the rough ways, and the sinful past, though disgusting to her at some moments, were at others profoundly exciting on a sexual level. His very puritanism and the abruptness of his sexual approaches fascinated and attracted her, while hurting and irritating her. ‘He will not let me into his room which makes me very sad,’ she wrote, a fortnight after the wedding. ‘All physical things disgust him.’5 But a month later, November 13, she writes in a sated, purring mood, aware that for the previous few weeks she had been unable to concentrate on anything much except bed; and already she is pregnant. ‘Over the next few years, I shall make myself a serious female world, and I shall love it even more than the old one because it will contain my husband and my children. . . . But I haven’t settled down yet.’6
Visitors during the first few months were not aware of the momentary horrors which Sofya Andreyevna confided to her diary. Rather they were arrested by the palpable happiness of the pair. Her brother came to stay and, looking back on those early months, said that he ‘was perhaps the closest observer of their family life. Their understanding, their friendship and their mutual love always served for me as an example and as an ideal of marital happiness. All I need say is that my parents, who, like all parents, were never satisfied with the fates of their children, frequently said, “We could not wish for anything better for Sofya.”’7
The same quality of glowing happiness struck Fet on his visits, and that it was something which Tolstoy himself felt we know from his snatches of diary keeping during the honeymoon period. ‘My happiness seems to absorb me completely,’ he wrote on January 5, 1863.8 Shortly afterwards his wife was to write in her diary that she felt nothing but self-reproach and remorse for her previous harsh thoughts, and for her husband, nothing but love. ‘There is absolutely no evil in him, nothing I could ever dream of reproaching him for.’9 When her brother, her sister Tanya and a friend came to stay on January 9, Sofya Andreyevna could hardly bear to see them. ‘I simply cannot stop crying, I would not let them see me for anything, for they are children and have never been in love. I so long to see him,’ she scratched in her bedroom secrecy on to the tear-stained diary pages. ‘Lord, what if he loses interest in me altogether? Now absolutely everything depends on him. What a worthless person I am; how depressing this mental pettiness is. . . .’10
Some readers of the letters and diaries of Countess Tolstoy have discovered in each outburst of unhappiness an offence with which to indict her husband. Others, more charitably or more gynaecologically minded, would have us note that Sergey, her eldest son, was born on June 28, 1863 – just nine months after the wedding – and that in the first eight years of marriage, Sofya Andreyevna bore her husband seven more children – a crushing emotional and hormonal upset which would have tested temperaments sturdier than her own. (In all, she was to bear thirteen children in the first twenty-six years of her marriage.)
There are two or three good books about Tolstoy’s wife, but mine cannot be one of them. If this story is to remain within manageable bounds, it must concentrate largely on Tolstoy himself, and that will involve risking the appearance of indifference towards those whom he hurt, consciously or unconsciously. Even if this were not the case, it is notoriously difficult to know the truth about a marriage. Marriage as a spectator sport is a gruesome business, besides which the gladiatorial excesses of ancient Rome seem innocent. Novelists earn their living, many of them, by creating the illusion that we can see inside that most inner and private of things, the relationship between a man and a woman. Biographers and newspaper editors increase the thrill by suggesting that what we read in their pages is real, true, authentic.
The Tolstoys, as befitted such vulgar and proto-modern figures, have invited the sort of scrutiny which is given to film stars and uncrowned heads in the American and European press. The voluminous records, in journals and letters, of their ups and downs (but chiefly of their do
wns) were compiled almost from the beginning, with us, the reading public, in mind. For the first fifteen years of their married life, there were not many journals. The Tolstoys were too preoccupied and, in their fashion, too happy, to bother with them. The diary-rivalry, developing into a diary-war, with prolix accounts of each other’s misdemeanours, really belongs to the ‘post-literary’ period of Tolstoy’s life, the time following Anna Karenina and his famous emotional crisis. Then, every tearful complaint, every barbed insult, and every incident of wounded vanity was scribbled down for the prurient gaze of posterity. Such records do not necessarily tell us the truth. People who are as closely entwined with one another as the Tolstoys, and involved in such a very long-term sexual relationship (remarkable in the extent of its passion and longevity) cannot often see the wood for the trees when they are describing their day-to-day, hour-by-hour existence. At one minute he might hate her, or she him. Another moment, while still hating, they might love each other distractedly. Like married couples who enjoy having rows at other people’s dinner tables, or on street corners, they would be almost certain if they read some of the later accounts of their marriage to yell at their well-wishers and supporters, ‘You keep out of this!’ before returning to the enjoyable task of destroying one another.
Supporters is the word, if we are to keep the image of marriage as a spectator sport. And there have been many who have brought to the biographer’s task the literary equivalent of coloured scarves, the silly, loud rattles, the flick knives and the broken bottles without which no self-respecting ‘supporter’ would grace the terraces. Most of these Tolstoy ‘hooligans’ – that is to say, biographers who seem to approach their subjects and their readers spoiling for a fight – have been on the side of ‘Sonya’, as they always call her. The old man, however, has a distinguished supporters’ club, particularly, for some reason, among the English.11
In Sofya Andreyevna Bers, Tolstoy found a mate of extraordinary qualities – tenacity, energy, intelligence and a capacity for family affection. Both of them – as has often been observed by other pens – had ‘difficult’ temperaments, and their marriage called forth in them qualities of endurance which neither, in the end, quite possessed. Assessing the pain and personal cost on both sides would be as difficult as Pierre’s task when he blundered about the battlefield of Borodino trying to see what was going on.
This book is the story of Tolstoy, as a writer and a thinker. The relevance of his marriage to that story is sometimes difficult to measure, as, to her distress, his wife was to find. But there can be no doubt of its importance in the initial stages. It does not matter whether we attribute it to the prospect of paternity, to a more balanced and regular sexual regime, to less alcohol, or to the prosaic fact that his wife was a punctilious and devoted secretary. At last, Tolstoy was able to devote himself to his proper work: The Decembrists.
What distinguishes the literary masters of pre-Romantic times is, in almost every case, a unique blending of a personal with a collective or national vision: the journey of their own mind, together with a discovery of their place in the saeculum. Dante’s love of Beatrice and his love of Florence become in the end interchangeable. In the early Shakespeare, these two elements are diffuse: the narrator of the Sonnets is a man consumed by a purely personal vision, personal love and personal suffering. No wonder Proust found Shakespeare’s Sonnets such an imaginative quarry, for they seem to assert the Proustian view that only art can redeem the ravages of time; tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are viewed with disdain, rather than with the Christian humanism of the later tragedies and romances. The personal vision is all: ‘poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’, just as it had been for Tolstoy when he wrote the early diaries and The History of Yesterday. In the early history plays, Shakespeare’s patriotism is formal; there is a set-piece quality about it. Only when the personal tragedy chronicled in the Sonnets has been absorbed, and real patriotism been discovered or felt, is he capable of the Henry IV plays in which the devotion of an unsuitable older man to a younger wag is made the occasion not merely of Shakespeare’s most enduring comedy, but also of his most profoundly felt political and national emotions. In a highly analogous way, we may feel that the Vita Nuova and the early political writings of Dante are inchoate when compared with the completed vision of the Divina Commedia, where the inner vision and the grand, Homeric, national one are fused.
When Tolstoy said that War and Peace was not a novel, he was warning readers not merely to lap it up in the same spirit in which they might read instalments of David Copperfield or Crime and Punishment. This is not a matter of authorial self-conceit; the degree to which that was or was not felt is an irrelevance here. Tolstoy knew, just as Dante and Shakespeare must have known in their day, that he had produced a masterpiece which it would be completely unhelpful to compare with an ordinary serial novel.
In our reading of Shakespeare, almost everything is a matter of conjecture. We can only guess that the relationship between Hal and Falstaff reflects, in a jokey manner which Shakespeare’s friends would have recognised at once, the friendship between the sonneteer and the ‘man right fair’; and we can only see dimly how the ability to distance himself from the experience – and like Hal to ‘despise his dream’ – led to a deepening consciousness of England and the social order. But whereas we can only conjecture about the growth of Shakespeare’s mind, in Tolstoy, the process of alchemy is transparent. Almost every particle of War and Peace bears a relation to something in Tolstoy’s personal experience. There is in the whole book hardly an incident, conversation or character which the commentators are not able to tell us is ‘autobiographical’ – and in those passages which are not autobiographical in this sense, there is a conspicuous flatness (I think of Pierre’s initiation into the Freemasons which Tolstoy, not a Mason himself, worked up out of books: it shows). Yet although the gossipy editors might wish to nudge our ribs at every turn and tell us that Sonya’s love for Nikolay Rostov, for instance, ‘is’ Auntie Tatyana’s love for Tolstoy’s father, or that the scenes of Borodino and Austerlitz owe much to Tolstoy’s own experiences on the Polish front and at Sebastopol, we don’t (anyway on a first reading of the novel) pay much attention to these wiseacres. If we could tear our eyes from the page to talk to the commentators, we would rather say, what do you mean by saying that Prince Andrey’s chilling thoughts about his wife, or his ruminations on the field of Austerlitz, or his love for Natasha or his cynicism or his heroism are based on such and such an instance in real life? For everyone who has enjoyed the experience of being completely lost in the world of War and Peace, such scenes are real life. Putting down the novel and returning to the everyday concerns of ‘real life’ is, in the experience of almost all readers of the book, a turning to something paler, less true than Tolstoy’s art itself. And this testimony comes not just from readers being unwillingly drawn to a fireside or dinner table, but also from men and women of action. In the Second World War it was a common experience that those who read War and Peace were, for that week or fortnight, more interested in the campaigns of Napoleon and Kutuzov than in those of Hitler versus the Allies. I have even heard men say that they have read it on the field of battle and that the descriptions of Schön Graben or Borodino were more ‘real’ for them than the actual explosions and maimings and death going on around them.
It is a simple, even a ‘middlebrow’ point to make about War and Peace but it is one which is important, as it lies at the heart of its paradox. No book seems more real, more universal in its concerns, less self-preoccupied, and yet when the literary historian comes to unweave the strands which make up the tapestry, we find a process which is every bit as self-obsessed as Proust. The difference between the two writers is at heart a political one and a religious one. After the Dreyfus trial and the First World War, Proust could not really see any future for the society he depicts; his relationship with it, like his relationship with his own parents, is highly ambivalent, and it is with mixed feelings that we view at
the end the destruction of architecture, the bombardment of Paris, and the dismantlement of the society which the narrator has analysed with such a cold eye. Tolstoy was enough of a St. Petersburg liberal – or, perhaps, enough of an old-fashioned Slavophil patriot – to be able to believe that Russia had a future. What changed in 1862 was his own life. He was now able to grasp, with his imagination, that he had a future also. Shakespeare (in Sonnet 114) remarks on the extraordinary fact that his love has taught him an alchemy
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubims as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble. . . .
It is the perfect, and most knowing assertion of the positive artistic principle – that life can be remade – almost, he hints, redeemed through the vision of an artist. For Proust, the dissolution of society, while art survives – his own art, that is – is something in which he glories; there is no alchemy, in this sense, in his obsession with Albertine. It leads on to no positive vision for humanity. The vision is wholly misanthropic. Tolstoy’s marriage was what produced the Shakespearian alchemy in his imagination. Wilson Knight, commenting on Sonnet 114, wrote, ‘Intellectually Shakespeare is himself baffled. But it has happened. The universe has in fact been stamped with God’s signature: and that is how the works of Shakespeare were born.’ That is also how War and Peace was born. Reading it, we feel the universe stamped with God’s signature. But it is doubtful if it would have got written at all had not the manuscripts been copied and stamped with the signature, not of God, nor of Tolstoy, but of his wife.
An essential ingredient in the alchemy was the cordiality which existed between Tolstoy and his in-laws. He was in love not just with Sofya but with all the Bers family, and was very happy to spend the first Christmas holiday of his marriage in Moscow with them.
