by A. N. Wilson
The man who would no more get worked up by a massacre of the Poles than he would complain to his butcher for killing meat soon put the Shabunin affair behind him. In September, he took Sofya’s brother Stepan, who was becoming one of his best friends, to explore the battlefield of Borodino. He wrote to his wife on September 27, ‘I have just come back from Borodino. I am very, very pleased with the trip, and even with the way I stood it, given the lack of sleep and decent food. If only God will give me good health and tranquillity, I’ll write the best Battle of Borodino yet!’23 And, in the next few months, he did.
Research went on. Some of the scholars emphasise how much Tolstoy had to read in order to write War and Peace. Others point out that, although he turned over a lot of material, he did not really read very closely. The events of 1805 and 1812 became for him imagined events, and where history did not fit in with what he wanted to happen, he rode roughshod over the facts. Readers of the novel, moreover, quickly notice that although he had done his homework for such set-pieces as the Battle of Borodino, what makes the book live is a series of infinitely personal vignettes. The book is unforgettable and endlessly rereadable not because of the accuracy or thoroughness of its historical research, but because each character in turn is imagined with all the intensity of Tolstoy’s being. He is each character in turn, acting them with all the vigour of his family at charades.
By this stage, the autumn of 1866, Tolstoy had decided to take Sofya’s advice and publish the novel himself in volume form. It meant borrowing a thousand roubles (some of which he immediately spent on a fur hat and boots)24 but in the end it was a good investment. He went to Moscow to talk to an illustrator in November. The illustrator Tolstoy chose was Mikhail Sergeyevich Bashilov, who was distantly related to Sofya Andreyevna, and who was at the very top of his profession, having done famous illustrations for Griboyedov and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Tolstoy’s many letters to Bashilov make fascinating reading, emphasising not merely how much he cared about the finished book, but also how vividly he saw each scene and each character in his mind’s eye. If Bashilov sent a sketch which displeased Tolstoy, he got a quick letter back telling him what was wrong. They are not angry, offensive letters, but they have an eye for everything: Bagration should be wearing an astrakhan cap – the fur hat Bashilov had given him is out of period. Bashilov has made Prince Andrey slightly too affected – but he is urged not to spoil it: if that’s the best he can do, he should leave it as it is. Kutuzov and Dolokhov are both splendid, but can’t Bashilov make Dolokhov stick his chest out a little more? Make him more military! The advice pours out, revealing that all the characters in War and Peace are just as real to Tolstoy – more real, really – than characters in real life.
The title War and Peace was finally arrived at by March 1867. In the summer of 1867, Tolstoy revised 1805, and cut it quite heavily. It was then announced that a four-volume work entitled War and Peace would soon be published. In March 1868 another notice appeared in the Moscow and St. Petersburg papers. The projected work would be now in five volumes, but anyone who subscribed to the four already in preparation would get the fifth volume free! By then, three volumes were in the bookshops and selling very well. Lest it should be thought of simply as a novel – rather than a great piece of national myth-making – Tolstoy published his famous article ‘A Few Words about War and Peace’ in the March number of The Russian Archives. Not long after this article appeared, a fourth volume appeared, and the fifth and sixth volumes appeared in 1869.
By now, the ending was considerably different from anything envisaged when he had started work in 1865. The urge to contradict Napoleon III, and Dostoyevsky, had become stronger than the original conception, which had been to write a preface or prehistory to the Decembrist Rising. That idea had not yet been discarded, but the book which he had now completed had taken on its own shape and developed its own power over Tolstoy himself. There is a sort of exhausted anachronism about the conclusion. Pierre is not a man of 1812 preparing to grow into a man of 1825. He is much more a man of 1869, preparing to grow into he knows not what.
Chapter Eleven
The Shadow of Death
1869 – 1872
‘What am I frightened of?’
‘Of me,’ answered the voice of Death. ‘I am here!’
Memoirs of a Madman
War and Peace was published, finished.1 Most writers feel, having completed a book, a sense of imaginative depletion. How can they ever repeat the act? The greater the book, perhaps, the greater the sense of letdown. To be in full, physical vigour and to have completed, at the age of forty-one, the greatest masterpiece in prose fiction inevitably produced a generalised feeling of gloom. This feeling was reinforced by spending the summer of 1869 reading the lugubrious philosophical writings of Schopenhauer. ‘I’m certain,’ he told Fet, ‘that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men.’2
Now that he had conquered his gambling habit and written a book which, thanks to his wife’s advice to publish it himself in volume form, had made his fortune, Tolstoy had on his hands both cash and time. Happening to see an estate advertised for sale in the province of Penza, he set off on impulse towards the end of August 1869 to look at it. It was a difficult journey, involving many changes of conveyance – and finally, when the coach service gave out at Saransk, the hiring of private horses. On September 2, before he got to Saransk, he found himself overcome by exhaustion, and decided to spend the night at a place called Arzamas. He took a room at an inn, went to bed, but was too exhausted to sleep. He wrote a letter two days later describing the experience to his wife:
It was two o’clock in the morning. I was terribly tired, I wanted to go to sleep and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overcome by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before. I’ll tell you all the details of this feeling later: but I’ve never experienced such an agonising feeling before and may God preserve anyone else from experiencing it.3
The mauvais quart d’heure was to be absorbed and transformed into Tolstoy’s inner personal mythology, and when he wrote it up as an unsuccessful short story fifteen years later, it is interesting to see what details he heightened and invented. First, the narrator of the story is not an artist, still less a great genius, but a man whose experience has been like everybody else’s. As a boy he had indulged in the same filthy vices as all boys do, and as a man he had given himself up to lust. The only difference between this man (who is a civil servant) and the rest of the human race is that he has a heart more full of pity. Since childhood, he has not been able to tolerate the thought of human beings punishing each other. The sight of a serf boy being whipped threw him into tantrums, and he screamed when a pious nurse told him about the Passion of Christ. In the end, these moments of panic – taking the form of confrontation with death, and the pointlessness of existence – are resolved by religious reawakening and by reading the Gospels.
It is all a good example, in miniature, of the way that Tolstoy liked to rewrite experience and disguise from himself its true significance. After the actual night at Arzamas, he did not have a religious conversion. That was some years in the future. Likewise, though he had had moments of horror at human barbarity – as when he watched a public execution by guillotine during his visit to Paris – he was also capable of being a normal man of his time. As a soldier, he had supervised beatings, and in the recent case of Shabunin, he had not manifested any neurotic distress at the man’s unavoidable fate. So the Christian pacifist version of the night at Arzamas is rewritten after the event. Tolstoy never published the story; it is an unfinished fragment, which in psychological terms makes no sort of sense. It was himself, not the reading public, that he was trying to convince.
Within the kernel of the story, however, there are two features which recur again and again from this point onwards in Tolstoy’s life and which, it is believable, formed part of the original waking nightmare.
First, the title: Memoirs of a Madman. The narrator of the tale ha
s just been assessed by the doctors, and after some disputing he has been declared sane. But he himself is not so sure. Nor, we may imagine, was Tolstoy. What afflicted him in that dreadful night of mental torture at Arzamas was a sense of dislocation. The mind, which had discovered in the grand design of fiction a new harmony, a peace such as it had not known before, now threatened to fly off into nightmare regions, and to afflict him with two completely contradictory horrors. The madman of the story cannot get away from himself:
I am always with myself, I am my own torturer. Here I am, the whole of me. . . . it is myself that I am tired of, and whom I find intolerable and a torture. I want to fall asleep and forget myself but I can’t. I can’t get away from myself.4
On the other hand, although he longs for oblivion, his horror of himself is only rivalled by his dread of death. At the heart of the story there is an hallucinatory experience which was to occur to Tolstoy several times over the next few years.
‘But what folly is this?’ I told myself. ‘Why am I depressed? What am I frightened of?’
‘Of me,’ answered the voice of Death. ‘I am here!’5
The Arzamas experience was a confrontation with the hideous and inescapable fact of death. ‘Life and death somehow merged into one another.’6 He was now unable to think of anything in life without realising that all action, all feeling, all achievement, all desire would one day be swallowed up and rendered pointless by death. He need not have spent the summer reading Schopenhauer to arrive at this fairly obvious truth, but the German pessimist cannot have helped what turned out to be less an intellectual conviction than a psychological crisis.
What had begun in War and Peace as an exercise in mythology – a reconstruction of his personal and national history – had ended in a series of unanswerable questions: what forces move the nations? Why do things happen? Why are we here? In Tolstoy’s personal life, this was quickly translated, with the help of Schopenhauer, into ‘What is the point of anything?’ We know that we have nothing to look forward to but death. The fatalism which characterised War and Peace began to get a grip on his soul. He told his wife, ‘I believe in God, in the expression in the Gospel that not one hair falls unless willed by the Lord. Therefore I say that all is predestined.’7
But this belief did not answer the question of what he should be doing. Presumably, had he absorbed a true belief in predestination with every particle of his being, he would simply have abandoned himself to the will of providence and perhaps spent the rest of his life as a farmer. But it is a characteristic of people who say that they believe in predestination that actually they appear to live by the will. Half the engineers, missionaries, businessmen, doctors and civil servants in the British Empire were Calvinists, but that did not stop them thinking that their own presence was essential to the smooth running of things in every corner of the globe from Saskatchewan to New South Wales. Tolstoy spent the next two or three years in a frenzy of intellectual activity, wrestling with his vocation as a novelist. In the first winter after he had completed War and Peace he spent much of the time in bed with influenza, and deciding that his true calling was to be a dramatist. He read plays omnivorously – Pushkin, Gogol, Molière (phrases from whose work stuck in his head for the rest of his days; whenever he needs a satirical twist in his later controversial essays he borrows from Molière), Goethe and Shakespeare. As he lay in bed, he began to think up plays of his own. This was hardly a restful experience. The characters started to jabber in his head. When he got better, he was able to indulge his passion for skating, and the idea of writing for the theatre seemed to get blown away in the icy air.
Fet, with whom Tolstoy kept up a lively correspondence throughout 1870, excited his friend’s envy by getting a bicycle. There would be a new craze, something to occupy himself. ‘I envy you,’ Tolstoy wrote. ‘I am depressed and writing nothing, though I toil painfully.’8 That was in November 1871. Two months later, a letter to Fet revealed that Tolstoy had discovered something even more exciting than riding a bicycle: Greek.9 The very thing!
Tolstoy had an extraordinary capacity for learning languages. To his French, German, English, rudimentary Latin, Turkish and Arabic (with smatterings of Georgian picked up in the Caucasus) he now added ancient Greek. He began with Aesop and Xenophon. Soon he was reading Herodotus and Homer. After only three months of learning the language, he claimed to have mastered a working knowledge of it. When he made this boast, during a visit to Moscow, a professor of Greek claimed that it was impossible. A volume of Herodotus was produced and Tolstoy was put to the test. When the professor who had been studying the language all his life corrected Tolstoy’s reading of a word here or there with typical self-confidence the novice hotly defended his own interpretation. But the professor was compelled to admit that Tolstoy’s Greek was every bit as good as he claimed. It took its toll. He worked at it so ferociously that he became ill again. His wife complained that he was muttering Greek in his sleep. He justified himself by saying that he was living in Athens. ‘Not for nothing is this a dead language,’ remarked his wife sourly, ‘for it brings a man to a dead state of mind.’10
But for Tolstoy, it was, at that moment, everything. ‘Without a knowledge of Greek,’ he said – rightly, surely – ‘there is no education.’11
His early ambition to be an educator was revived during this fallow period. As well as the children on the estates at Yasnaya Polyana, he had his own children to think about. By 1871, Sergey, the eldest, was eight, Tanya was seven and Ilya was five. Two more had been added to the brood: Lev, born in 1869, and Marya – invariably known as Masha and in grown-up life very much her father’s favourite – in 1870. Pregnancy had become an almost permanent condition of life for Tolstoy’s unfortunate wife. Little Lev had hardly been weaned before she feared herself to be once more with child. ‘With each new child,’ she wrote philosophically in her journal, ‘one sacrifices a little more of one’s life and accepts an even heavier burden of perennial anxieties and illnesses.’12
But for her husband, the thought of new minds to educate, new little beings to boss into a correct way of viewing the world, was irresistibly tempting.
As so often happened when Tolstoy embarked upon something with repellent intentions, he produced sublime results. Throughout the fall of 1871, he and his wife worked on an ABC book for children. If War and Peace had proved him to be the Russian Homer, his ABC book is written by the Russian Aesop. He tells stories about his dogs, Milton and Bulka. He retells old Indian or Arabic legends, Bible stories and folk tales, and he makes up stories of his own, some of which, such as A Prisoner in the Caucasus are great works of art, elegant, concisely told, and completely simple. Some of his ABC book is still in use in primary schools in the Soviet Union today, so perfectly adapted are the stories for a young child learning to read. Moreover, although heavily moral (as we should expect), they are marked by humour and in reading them, we can almost hear the voice of him who was so popular with the children in the Yasnaya Polyana school. Tolstoy reopened the school in January 1872 and set to work teaching the children from his book. In addition to stories and legends, the book contains sections of elementary science and mathematics. But the book was to be a difficult one to publish. In the first place, Tolstoy did his usual annoying trick of summoning back the proofs, and scribbling over them time and again, so that the printers became totally confused as to what they should be setting up on the page. Another difficulty was that the censor was displeased by the book. At that time, education was rigidly controlled by the Government, and it was forbidden to start schools without permission from the Minister of Education. The fact that the Minister of Education, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, was a cousin doubtless explains why the book was not suppressed altogether, but the Government did not like the ABC book, while the literary establishment thought that the author of War and Peace was wasting his time with these educational concerns. Tolstoy got it in the neck from all sides.
He found the matter disillusioning, and wrote Strakhov an extre
mely interesting letter on March 25, 1872. Strakhov, like all intelligent liberals, had bemoaned the fact that Russia was so oppressive and intolerant. Tolstoy’s reaction to this is self-contradictory:
You are right that we have no freedom for science and literature, but you see this as a misfortune and I don’t. True, it wouldn’t enter the head of a Frenchman, or a German or an Englishman, unless he’s a madman, to pause in my place and ponder whether his methods were false or whether the language we write in and I have written in is false, but the Russian, unless he is insane, must ponder and ask himself: should he go on writing, or rather dictating his precious thoughts, or should he recall that even Poor Liza [a sentimental and rubbishy story of Karamzin] was read with enthusiasm and praised by somebody, and look for a different method and a different language?13
Tolstoy, with his enviable ability to say and see two things at once embraces the challenge of being Russian (and the restraints it puts on the writer). And while he throws up his hands in despair at the fact that he is obliged to go on writing in the Russian language, he complains in the same letter about ‘our idiotic literature’. The literary language in Russian is in his view ‘spineless; so spoilt that whatever nonsense you write looks like literature’. He suggests that it is only possible to write in Russian if one rejects any sort of ‘literary’ ambition, and tries to discover a plain, unvarnished style. It is for this reason that he has found so helpful the exercise of writing simple tales in the ABC. At the same time, he specifically hates the sort of nonsense talked by the Slavophil writers, who imply that there is something inherently beautiful in the Russian language. He wants what is ‘clear, beautiful and unpretentious’. It is very much what American writers, from the era of Scott Fitzgerald onwards, felt about ‘literary English’. Tolstoy looked for a new source of vigour in the language. But what is so typical of him is his double attitude. On the one hand, he thinks he might have found it if not in the language of peasants, at least in language which might be understood by the peasants (the ‘deeds and language such as men do use’). On the other hand, the letter keeps open the extraordinary option of going quite another way, of abandoning the struggle to be a Russian writer and choosing some other language in which to express himself. Any Russian of his class and education could, at that period, have written just as easily in French, so the option was a real one.
