Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Katkov was fortunate, however, to have other irons in the fire. One could say that no editor of any periodical ever had such good fortune as he. For, while Tolstoy bided his time with 1805, Dostoyevsky was sitting in Wiesbaden wondering how to extricate himself from an appalling financial crisis, the result of a gambling bout. Since marriage, Tolstoy had been largely cured of gambling; and, since the death of two of his brothers (he inherited a good share of their estates) he had a regular source of income apart from his literary work. He could afford the leisure to pause for a whole year while he considered how his novel should proceed. Dostoyevsky could not afford such luxuries. He was desperate. He had no income – no money at all to pay hotel bills. So, in September 1865, he dashed off a famous letter to Katkov suggesting to him the story of Crime and Punishment.15 Katkov bought the idea. ‘Later I found out,’ Dostoyevsky was to write, ‘that he was only too glad to accept my offer because he had nothing else for that year. Turgenev has not written anything and he has quarrelled with Lev Tolstoy.’16 He had not exactly quarrelled with Tolstoy, though he was displeased by his inability to produce at an appropriately regular rate. Though there was a St. Petersburg rumour of a quarrel between author and editor, Tolstoy denied it in his next dispatch to Alexandrine. It was, in fact, no rumour which caused the silence. It was the commercial astuteness of Tolstoy’s wife. Tolstoy was cock-a-hoop that he had got Katkov to pay twenty-five roubles for each printed page of 1805. But Sofya Andreyevna had a belief in volume publication. This was to cause many rows in future years, when Tolstoy tried to give away copyright and generally behave, from a business point of view, like a fool. His wife always clung to the view that a writer’s fortune derives from his income from books. Everything else, for her, was illusory. Katkov may pay a lot of money for the serial of 1805, but a serial, once sold, is sold; a book goes on selling for years. Moreover, if everyone has run out to buy the serial, it would diminish the volume sales of 1805. So Sofya urged Tolstoy to think again before sending any more chapters to Katkov. To supply the gap, Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. Subscribers of Russkii Vestnik in 1866 thus enjoyed a literary feast such as has been enjoyed by few literary periodicals. January contained Crime and Punishment, the first twelve chapters. February, March and April had more of 1805 – taking us to the end of Part Two, Volume One in War and Peace. Then more Crime and Punishment. At this point, Tolstoy lighted upon a title for his story. He decided to call it All’s Well that Ends Well. Prince Andrey lives, and recovers from his wounds, but when he realises how deeply his friend Pierre Bezukhov loves Natasha, he allows them to get married. Petya is not killed in battle. Sonya relinquishes Nikolay, so that he can marry Prince Andrey’s sister. There is no appearance of Platon Karatayev, the peasant wiseacre whose conversation in prison leads to Pierre’s spiritual awakening: that awakening happens spontaneously. So, a very different novel in many ways was planned. Under Sofya Andreyevna’s canny eye, the first volume, entitled 1805, was published in June.

  Biographers and literary historians have made surprisingly little of the fact that Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s masterpieces were both published at the same time, in the same periodical and by the same editor. Surprisingly little, too, has been made of the fact that there are distinct echoes each of the other in both the great books. How could they ignore each other? Each must have felt as he was writing his novel that he was bringing to birth a masterpiece such as Russian literature had never seen. In a sense, each was right. But there, in the selfsame publication, there was something of at least comparable greatness. They could not but be astonished and chagrined. The fact that they were silent about it has allowed their biographers to ignore the singular importance of this literary dog which does not bark in the night.

  The area where we see them glancing at each other is in their reflections upon Napoleon. After the first instalment of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky was mercilessly mocked and lampooned in a comic paper called Iskra (The Spark – not to be confused with the Communist paper of the same name founded in 1900 which survives to this day in Russia). The paper published a very funny parody of Dostoyevsky’s wild, religio-sensational style, and in subsequent chapters this put rather a damper on Dostoyevsky. But, we are told by one of his most intelligent biographers, ‘He felt no such constraint in dealing with the “Napoleonic” theme in the novel.’17

  In March 1865, Napoleon III had published The History of Julius Caesar and the event had provoked reflections, in various European languages, upon the general theme of great men and their effect on history. Napoleon III, writing in the shadow of his distinguished grandfather, argued that providence threw up such men as Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon to pave the path which people have to follow and thus complete in a few years the work of centuries. Such men stamp their genius on a whole era.

  In the Russian press the book was greeted as a piece of self-defence by the Imperial author. But The Contemporary, in one of the last issues before it was closed down by the censor, carried a long review of the book in which it pointed out a fascinating moral consequence of Napoleon III’s idea. If it is true that men of destiny are, as he argued, essentially different from other men, it must follow they are governed by different morals, and different logics. It would follow that there was one logic and one set of logics by which you would judge the actions of ordinary men and another set of criteria by which you would judge heroes, demigods and geniuses.

  The Contemporary went on to ask the fascinating question, how can we recognise immortals? Supposing there was a man whom all his friends and acquaintances took to be an ordinary mortal but who was in fact a Napoleonic genius. Would this not secretly entitle him to disregard the ordinary laws of morality? For such a person, might it not be acceptable, for instance, to commit a murder, just as it might be permissible for a man of destiny to start a war or a revolution in which thousands of his fellow mortals would be killed? The substance of all this Contemporary article is absorbed entirely into Crime and Punishment: we find it echoed, almost word for word, in the speech of the detective Porfiry Petrovich in Part III, chapter 5; all the ‘Napoleonic’ theories are attributed to the criminal Raskolnikov himself. There is a good example here of how one senses Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky straining to disagree with one another through the medium not of overt public controversy but through the different artistic presentation of an idea. The differences reveal so much about both men, both as individuals and as writers. Dostoyevsky, who was by now preoccupied with an apocalyptic dread of socialism, made the ‘Napoleonic’ theme an occasion for meditating first on the nature of personal evil, and secondly something of a prophecy about the shape of things to come. Raskolnikov, who (before his redemption through the prostitute Sonya) scorns personal morality, and has decided that all the great men in history could be described as ‘criminals’, is both the terrifying emanation of a Dostoyevskian idea of human nature, and a prophetic figure. Dostoyevsky was thrilled that after he had begun the story just such a murder as Raskolnikov commits was in fact perpetrated by a student called Danilov.18 He would have been even more thrilled and disgusted by the close resemblances between Raskolnikov and Lenin in his brutal notions of what is forgivable in a man of destiny. Dostoyevsky’s use of the Napoleonic idea is terrible, melodramatic, and yet plausible. Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre Bezukhov, is completely unlike the crazed murderer Raskolnikov of Dostoyevsky’s imagination. Pierre (who was to become the Decembrist in the finished novel) is an idealistic fellow, who believes in the initial stages of the book that Napoleon is a great deliverer of mankind, and gets so carried away with his imagination that he actually imagines himself to be Napoleon.19 But no one could be further from Raskolnikov. Here we have a case of Tolstoy making one of his characters adopt his own habit of so identifying with a character that he almost imagines himself to be that person. What is most striking of all is that Dostoyevsky, in spite of all his moral protestations, fundamentally accepts the Napoleonic idea – he accepts, that is to say, the cant that there
are ‘men of destiny’ who change history. Tolstoy, as he laboured at his book, was to distance himself further and further from that point of view and, indeed, to rewrite history in order to establish his point of view. His idealisation of Kutuzov, who appears to sit back and let things happen, who allows the French into Moscow, who allows it to burn, knowing that the great Russian winter and the spirit of the Russian people will eventually be too much for the Napoleonic armies, is only a small part of Tolstoy’s prolix attempt to distance himself from any point of view which might have come the reader’s way when perusing Crime and Punishment. It is obsessive; in the finished version we have two appendices and numerous asides assuring us of the falsehood of the ‘Napoleonic idea’, and grinding on and on about ‘the forces that move nations’.

  In regard to the migration of the peoples it does not enter anyone’s head today to suppose that the renovation of the European world depended on Attila’s caprice. The farther back in history our observation lies, the more doubtful does the free will of those concerned in the event become, the more manifest the law of inevitability.20

  There were plenty of interruptions to work, and the Tolstoys would not have been the Tolstoys if they had not, even in this period of comparative harmony, kept up a measure of marital tension. After the birth of their son Ilya in May 1866, Sofya Andreyevna plunged into a period of melancholy, and poured out her sorrows to her diary: she had difficulty in feeding the new baby, painful breasts, exhaustion. Worst of all, however, were the torments of jealousy. Tolstoy had engaged a new bailiff to manage the estate, and was spending far more time than Sofya liked in the company of the bailiff’s animated young wife. ‘She is an attractive young woman and a “nihilist”.’ Sofya was tortured by Tolstoy’s fondness for this crop-headed young bluestocking. While she imagined, each time he set foot outside the house, that Tolstoy and this Marya Ivanovna were committing adultery, he was totally insensitive to her fantasies. He returned saying how fascinated he was by Marya Ivanovna’s conversation, or how sorry he felt for such a clever young woman being forced to lead such a dull life in the country. This was fine talk to the wife he had exiled from Moscow and forced to lead the life of a country bumpkin. ‘She is in the drawing room with the children,’ Sofya scribbled, ‘and I have shut myself in my room. I simply cannot endure her. It enrages me to see her beauty and high spirits, especially in the company of Lyovochka.’21

  It is true that Marya Ivanovna did provide a distraction from the great work, but Sofya (who in her memoirs cannot even remember Marya’s surname) had no reason to fear. Tolstoy was always delighted by the company of clever, animated women, but he was not committing adultery with his new friend. In fact, he found her very slightly ridiculous. In August of that year, when the Dyakovs visited Yasnaya Polyana, he suggested that, instead of the usual charades after dinner, they should try to enact a play. He produced the manuscript of a magnificent little comedy which he had composed – a play in three acts entitled . . . The Nihilist! In the play, Tolstoy reverses the sexes. A happy, conventionally married couple in the country are visited by some young people, one of whom, a student, is full of the new nihilist ideas. The husband gets the absurd idea that his wife and the student are carrying on an affair, but in the end everything is resolved. Sofya Andreyevna played the role of the husband in Tolstoy’s drawing-room production, and Tanya her sister put up a spirited performance as his flirtatious wife. Dyakov, whom Tolstoy had loved so besottedly in their youth, played the beautiful student, and Tolstoy’s sister Marya played the part of a religious pilgrim. Thus were their inner emotional difficulties externalised and laughed away.

  Something more serious which distracted Tolstoy’s attention in that summer of 1866 was a macabre real-life drama which drew him back into his military past.22 Colonel Yunosha, a neighbour who often went riding and hunting with Tolstoy, was in charge of a court martial. The other two officers of the court were a twenty-one-year-old man called Kolokoltsov and a man called Stasyulevich, who had been with Tolstoy in the Caucasus thirteen years before. A private in the 2nd Company of their regiment (65th Moscow Infantry) had assaulted his captain. They could not find anyone to act in this man’s defence. Would Tolstoy oblige? The court martial was fixed for July 16, 1866.

  Private Vasily Shabunin was probably a very typical Russian soldier, and a desire to reacquaint himself with the breed, as he wrote and rewrote the military experiences of Nikolay Rostov and Prince Andrey, perhaps played some part in Tolstoy’s willingness to break off his work on War and Peace and to do his best for the defendant in this hopeless case. Shabunin was twenty-four years old, rather overweight and red, and deeply alcoholic. He seems to have spent most of his spare time lying on his bunk drinking sivukha, the poisonous local brandy, and muttering psalms or passages from the Gospels. One day his cruel captain, one Yasevich, gave Shabunin a report to copy out for the battalion commander, and when the poor private had finished his labour, the captain merely crumpled it up and threw it in his face. Shabunin, understandably, hit the man in the face, with the words, ‘Take that in your ugly Polish mug.’ When it was reported to the Adjutant-General of the Moscow Military District, it was decreed that Shabunin be court-martialled under Article 604 of the code of military regulations. This had been introduced under the draconian Nicholas I, who had gradually come to disregard the century-old tradition that there was no death penalty in Russia. ‘Raising a hand or weapon against a superior,’ stated the regulation, ‘is to be punished by death.’

  So, Tolstoy had a case of life and death on his hands. By the time he had taken on the case of defending Shabunin, the wretched man had already signed a full confession of guilt. Tolstoy had two interviews with him before the trial, and found him dull and unresponsive.

  What could Tolstoy have done to save this man? He took the line of defence – very interesting in the light of his later obsessions with suicide – that Shabunin would not have made a confession of guilt unless he had wanted to die. The fact that he had confessed, before the trial, and knowing that his offence was punishable by death, meant – Tolstoy averred – that Shabunin was suicidal. (The more obvious explanation, that Shabunin was just stupid, must have been clear to everyone taking part in the trial.) But if he was suicidal, Tolstoy argued, then the balance of his mind was disturbed; if he was mad, then he should have been pleading insanity and diminished responsibilities. Tolstoy bungled this line of defence. He failed to get an independent medical examination of his client, and he ignored the fact that an army doctor had already examined Shabunin and found him to be sane. He therefore failed to get the man off, and Shabunin was sentenced to death. Tolstoy wrote at once to Alexandrine in St. Petersburg to get a pardon directly from the Tsar, but, there being no grounds for such a pardon, Shabunin did not escape. He was executed by firing squad, quite near Tolstoy’s home, on August 9. They did it in style, with drummers and other musicians.

  Years later, in 1903, a paper called Pravo, trying to rake muck, carried an article by a witness of the trial, who claimed, unsurprisingly, that there was a great contrast between Tolstoy who, in 1866, argued the case in a formal way, and the old anarchist Tolstoy of the 1890s who would have disputed the right of the court martial to be convened at all. Yes, there is a contrast; but so what? When the Tolstoyan disciples found out about the Shabunin affair, they were shocked. His first biographer, Biryukov, questioned the Master about the Shabunin trial and in 1908 got an abject and gerontic account of the whole matter: ‘That incident had much more influence on my life than all the seemingly more important events of life; the loss or recovery of wealth, successes or failures in literature, even the loss of people close to me.’ To Pravo he wrote, ‘It was absolutely horrible to me now to reread my pitiful, disgusting speech for the defence which you have printed. . . . Speaking of the most obvious offence against the laws of God and man which some men were preparing to commit against their brother, I did nothing better than cite some stupid words written by somebody else called laws. . . .’


  We can be certain that Shabunin would have had an even smaller chance of reprieve had his defence counsel not cited these stupid things called laws in court. The pacifist saint of 1908 was disgusted by the thought of Shabunin’s fate, as is the modern reader. But for Tolstoy the novelist in his full vigour in the summer of 1866, it all looked and seemed very different. It may be right, as some have suggested, that Pierre Bezukhov’s thoughts about the wickedness and horror of firing squads in War and Peace reflect the author’s experience of July– August that year. But probably what rankled in Tolstoy’s subconscious when he recalled the summer was that the incident had made no moral impression at all. He admitted to Aylmer Maude that the court martial was one of only four occasions in his whole life that he had ever spoken in public. And ‘this was the time he did so with the most assurance and satisfaction to himself’. There is no evidence that he lay awake at nights worrying about the fate of the pathetic Shabunin. Tolstoy had War and Peace to think about. It was a wet summer, and the family were much indoors nursing colds; Tolstoy was out a lot shooting snipe. There is a death on his mind, or a potential death, as his letters reveal. His beloved Dyakov had lent him a horse, but the animal had grown weak. After a few days out on this horse Tolstoy wrote to a friend that the creature was only fit for the knacker’s yard, and that the only part of her which would go home would be her hide and her collar. But, ‘her death is not going to be on my conscience. I have been travelling very slowly.’

  Meanwhile, preparations were under way for Sofya Andreyevna’s nameday. They had a party, and asked the officers who, a month before, had presided over Shabunin’s execution. There was dancing at Yasnaya Polyana, with a little hired band. They were the very musicians who had played while Shabunin was led out before the firing squad.