Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  *

  Later in 1872, there occurred an incident which did, indeed, very nearly prompt him to emigrate – simply to stop being that intolerable thing, a Russian.

  The previous year, he had bought an estate of sixty-seven thousand acres in Samara near Buzuluk. ‘The country is beautiful,’ he had written, ‘in its age – it is just emerging from its virginity – in its richness, its health, and especially in its unperverted population.’14 Tolstoy loved the nomadic people, the Bashkirs, who wandered in the hills and plains of Samara. They were living a way of life untouched by anything which had happened in the last thousand years; they were like tribesmen described by Herodotus. Also, with his great penchant for peasant minorities, with their beliefs and cultures, Tolstoy was enchanted by a sect who flourished in the outlying Samaran villages of his estates – the Molokans. They were simple Bible Christians, who held the Orthodox Church, the Government and indeed most forms of human activity in abomination. They followed what they took to be a simple Bible creed, which involved imitating the prophet Elijah and John the Baptist (though not Jesus himself) in abstaining from alcohol. Their name means milk-drinkers, and this part of Russia was famous for its kumys, fermented mare’s milk which tastes not unlike a rough yoghourt. Tolstoy loved the stuff, and had, on more than one occasion, been to Samara for the kumys ‘cure’, which meant living on mare’s milk for months at a time.

  In the summer of 1872, in spite of the fact that he was now a landowner there, he only had time for a brief visit. But exactly the same thing happened as had occurred when he took the kumys cure in Samara back in 1862: in his absence, Yasnaya Polyana suffered a police raid.

  It happened that a bull ran wild on the farm at Yasnaya Polyana and gored a young herdsman. The Tula magistrate, a thrusting young liberal whom Tolstoy disliked, said that it was possible that the landlord (absent though he may have been) was responsible in law for this accident. The police arrived, and on his return, Tolstoy was placed, in effect, under house arrest, being told that he was not allowed to leave his estate until an inquest had established what had happened.

  It was almost certainly at this period that Tolstoy, confined to Yasnaya, wrote his story God Sees the Truth but Waits, a tale which he was to add to the ABC book. It is a story which strikes a new note in Tolstoy’s feelings of anger and alienation with his own country. The protagonist, Aksyonov, is falsely accused of murder, flogged with the knout, and sent to exile in Siberia. After twenty-six years he meets the real murderer, Makar Semyonich. If Aksyonov turns the murderer in to the authorities, he will be free. He does not. The murderer, before escaping through an underground tunnel, begs Aksyonov’s forgiveness. But the past is beyond forgiveness. ‘ “God will forgive you!” said he. “Perhaps I am one hundred times worse than you are!” And at these words, his heart lightened, and the yearning for home left him. . . .’15 He dies, less in a state of Christian blessedness than in one of almost Buddhist detachment. If one tried to date this story just in terms of what we know about Tolstoy’s biography, one would almost certainly think it was very late: a product of years in which he had hated the Government, expressed disillusionment with the penal system, fallen in and out of love with Christianity and bred his own new breed of religion based on Oriental detachment. In fact, God Sees the Truth but Waits anticipates all that. It is a good example of how, in artists’ lives at least, life really does imitate art. Tolstoy was unconsciously trying on new masks which in future he would wear, not on the page, but in his own persona.

  His immediate, lordly instinct, while having this trouble with a wild bull and a petty local police official, was to write direct to the Government. Old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace would have done just the same. But the Prince would not, as Tolstoy did, have expressed the desire to get out of Russia altogether. Tolstoy began to hanker after the land of the free and dreamed of living in Bournemouth. He wrote in almost apoplectic outrage to his cousin Alexandrine in St. Petersburg:

  It’s dreadful to think of, dreadful to recall all the vile things that they have done, are doing, and will do to me.

  It’s intolerable for a man like me, with a grey beard and six children, with the consciousness of a useful industrious life, with the firm conviction that I can’t be guilty, with the contempt that I can’t help feeling for the new courts from what I’ve seen of them, with the sole desire to be left in peace as I leave everyone in peace – it’s intolerable to live in Russia with the fear that any boy who doesn’t like my face can make me sit on a bench before a court and then in jail. . . . I’ll die of fury if I don’t give vent to it. . . . If I don’t die of fury and anguish in jail where they’ll no doubt send me (I’m convinced that they hate me) I’ve decided to emigrate to England forever, or until such time as the freedom and dignity of every man is assured in our country.16

  He had all his plans set. A rough calculation told him he was worth two hundred thousand roubles. The children loved their English governess, his wife spoke English well and loved all things English. Russia, as far as the Tolstoys were concerned, had had it. They planned to settle on the south coast of England near the good schools and the aristocratic families.

  During September and October 1872, Tolstoy bombarded his cousin Alexandrine with long, repetitive, manic letters, telling the story of the gored herdsman again and again. To add to his troubles Sofya Andreyevna became ill with suspected mastitis. ‘Only in England,’ he kept repeating, ‘is the freedom of the individual guaranteed.’17 But by the end of October, the crisis was passed. The charges were withdrawn. It turned out the examining magistrate was legally in the wrong in holding Tolstoy responsible for the mad behaviour of his own bulls.*

  Tolstoy’s letters to Alexandrine, though they were no less long, fell to discussing matters other than the bull case and the condition of Russia. He gave her long descriptions of his children, of whom he was very fond. He was at that point singularly delighted by Ilya, a rather violent, ‘sensual’ boy, big for his six years, who had pleased the author of the ABC by making up a story of his own along similar lines. The story was this: a boy once asked, ‘ “Does God have to go to the lavatory?” God punished him for asking this question, and the boy had to go to the lavatory every day for the rest of his life.’18 These family letters are among the most delightful things Tolstoy wrote. In them the pugnacity and cheekiness which Ilya had inherited have a sort of crazy charm. He lays down the law, as he does in his ‘serious’ writings, but here, the laws he lays down have a Through the Looking-Glass zaniness. ‘There are two sorts of men – those who hunt and those who don’t. Those who don’t like children can pick them up in their arms; those who hunt have a feeling of fear, disgust and pity for babies. I don’t know any exceptions to this rule. Try it out on your friends.’19 Hilaire Belloc could have written that.

  Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a ‘God-bearing’ nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country – that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.

  How can it be that the country chosen by God, or by the destiny which moves nations, or by the unseen inevitability of dialectical materialism, should have produced, in each succeeding generation, a political system which made life hell for the majority of inhabitants and which, every so often, threw up tyrants of truly horrifying stature? These are
questions which have haunted in particular those few Russians who have ever been in Tolstoy’s fortunate position of being able to choose whether to stay in Russia or to take the money and run. Today, we read precisely similar tensions in the utterances and writings of Soviet dissidents, and in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose hatred of his country’s Government seems almost equally balanced by a fervent patriotism, a tragic knowledge that a Russian can only be himself when he is on his native soil.

  A simple, though by no means exhaustive answer to the problem is: Peter the Great. He is the man who can be seen or said to have made Russia what it is. Every Russian schoolchild learns The Bronze Horseman. In that poem the little man, Yevgeny, whose love, whose house, and in the end whose life are swept away by floods, comes face to face with the great bronze statue of Peter, put up in the reign of Catherine the Great. All Russians have felt this to be an image of the suffering individual confronted by the heartless face of absolute power. For most Russians, this is the essence of their national tragedy; it is a tragedy which they seem pre-destined, every so often, to repeat. One thinks of the particular delight with which Stalin read the biographies of Peter the Great, his favourite historical hero.

  Tolstoy, in good Pushkinian tradition, had a feeling of love-hate for Peter the Great, and his feelings of anger with the Government and isolation from Russia in all its official manifestations prompted him to plan an historical novel based on the tyrant. His feelings about Peter were much the same as his feelings about Napoleon. The idea of his novel would be to cut the superman down to size, to reveal him as cruel, vindictive, petty and, as far as his country’s subsequent history was concerned, morally disastrous. It was Peter who had opened the window on to Europe. The Slavophil, ‘Muscovite’ side of Tolstoy could happily slay Peter for wishing to make Russia a European nation while, at the same time – lofty European and potential Bournemouth resident as Tolstoy was – attacking Peter for his fundamentally Slavic barbarism, his unshakeable tyranny, his having established a form of autocratic government from which decent people were still suffering.

  Tolstoy’s tremendous capacity to give himself over to an intellectual enthusiasm, to make himself the master of a subject, was thoroughly in evidence throughout 1872 as he accumulated a vast library on the subject of Peter. He made voluminous notes. In one book, he recorded in exact detail all the costume of the period. . . . ‘What a period for a painter! Everywhere you look – a mystery which can only be penetrated by poetry. The whole secret of Russian life is there.’20 Pushkin the poet had glanced at it, the seemingly terrible mystery that the Russian people almost wanted to be governed by brutes. But Tolstoy the writer of prose could not somehow get into it. It may seem paradoxical to say so, but Tolstoy had too much common sense to be able to understand it. In this sense, he was too Europeanised to get the hang of Russia – too Europeanised, and too aristocratic, independent and free. The essence of The Bronze Horseman is that the Russians are a slave race. The owner of two hundred thousand roubles, who would contemplate emigrating because he did not want to be bothered by the local police, had already moved out of a sphere in which this could be understood.

  Also, the problem of Peter the Great and ‘the whole secret of Russian life’ was something quite exterior to Tolstoy. When he came into contact with it – as with the minor incident of the mad bull – he screamed with fury. The majority of Russians – then as now – lived with the presence of the autocratic regime the entire time. Those without money, and without the privileges of birth, had no choice but to submit to it. The secret of Russian life was therefore in a strange way quite alien to Tolstoy; and since he was only ever capable of writing about issues which directly affected himself, it is no surprise that the Peter the Great novel obstinately refused to come. ‘I read, I take notes, I want to write, but I cannot.’21 It was a desperate position.

  ‘The period is too far removed from me,’ he complained in March 1873, ‘I can’t put myself inside the people, they have nothing in common with us.’22 (By ‘us’, he meant ‘me’.) After what he claimed to be seventeen attempts to start the Peter the Great book, he decided to give it up.

  The only legacy of his Peter-obsession was the decision to call his sixth child, born in June 1872, after the architect of modern Russia. It was not a propitious naming. Tolstoy’s wife was ill after the birth of little Pyotr, or Petyushka as they called him; Tolstoy moved the whole family to Samara for the summer, where the intense heat and fresh air did much to revivify the older children, but made life uncomfortable for the mother and baby. He survived, but only fourteen months. On November 9, 1873, Petyushka died of croup. ‘I fed him for fourteen and a half months,’ his mother wrote. ‘What a bright, happy little boy – I loved my darling too much and now there is nothing. He was buried yesterday. I cannot reconcile the two Petyas, the living and the dead; they are both precious to me, but what does the living Petya, so bright and affectionate, have in common with the dead one, so cold and still and serious? He loved me very much – I wonder if it hurt him too to leave me?’23

  That diary entry, surely, ranks high in the prose of nineteenth-century grief. It was their first great loss, the herald of a whole series of deaths in the family. Tolstoy, as the strangely disturbing experience at Arzamas had shown, did not need much prompting to give himself over to morbid reflections about death. Together with these reflections, there was the grey, middle-aged sense of disappointment with life. Natasha Rostova, the bright, animated essence of youthful energy, grew into the slightly frumpish and boring Natasha Bezukhova. It was a horrible knowledge, redeemed only by ideas of romantic love which were themselves, probably, illusory.

  There was a good example of this truth in the life of one of Tolstoy’s neighbours, back in the January of 1872. One of his neighbours, a landowner called Bibikov, cast off his mistress, Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, and took up instead with the German governess of his children. The railroad had recently been extended into the Tula province, and in her despondency, Anna had rushed down to a piece of the track and thrown herself under a train. The corpse was taken to an engine shed which was an easy ride from Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, who had never known the woman, cantered over for a squint at her mutilated remains. His early biographers relate how upsetting he found the experience without further remarking that few men would have exposed themselves to witnessing anything so horrible. The callousness is comparable to the ghoulish spirit which led him (nobody forced him) to witness the guillotining in Paris. Dickens, who loved going to mortuaries just to gaze at the waxy, grotesque inmates, would have fully understood. Tolstoy’s dread of death has a love-hate quality. He did not record what thoughts passed through his head as he stood and looked at the mangled body of Anna Pirogova: nor why the desperate plight of a foolish woman should have succeeded where research into his nation’s history had failed. It took time, but within a year he had started to write a novel about a woman called Anna who threw herself under a train.

  * An irony of the case is that, in modern England at least, the owner of a bull who gored a farmhand would certainly be held responsible in law!

  Chapter Twelve

  Anna Karenina

  1872 – 1877

  To us Russians, the most painful thing is that in Russia even the Levins ponder over these questions, whereas their only possible solution, a specifically Russian one, and not for Russians only, but for mankind as a whole, is the moral, i.e. Christian approach to them. In Europe such an approach is inconceivable, although even there, sooner or later – after floods of blood and one hundred million heads – they will have to recognise it because in it alone lies the solution.

  Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer

  ‘“What am I frightened of?” “Of me,” answered the voice of Death. “I am here!”’ The voice which he had heard at Arzamas haunted Tolstoy and all his family in the middle 1870s. In 1874, Tolstoy’s beloved aunt Toinette died, having spent the last fifty years almost continuously at Yasnaya Polyana. With her usual d
elicacy of feeling, she begged to be taken out of her room before she died. ‘ “Look here, mes chers amis, my room is a good one and you will want it. If I die in it,” (her voice trembled), “the recollection will be unpleasant to you, so move me somewhere else.”’ As she sank into unconsciousness, she wanted no one near her except ‘cher Léon’. Whenever she saw him, her face lit up with joy. When she died, Tolstoy felt unutterably sad ‘that [he] had not been kind enough to her when she was alive’.1 He wrote to Alexandrine, ‘She was a wonderful being. Yesterday, as we carried her through the village we were stopped at every door: a peasant man or woman came out to the priest, gave him money asking him to say a prayer and took their farewell from her. And I knew, I knew that each stop was the recollection of many kind deeds that she had done. She lived here fifty years and never caused injury to anyone, not even any unpleasant feelings yet she feared death; she did not say that she feared it, but I saw that she did.’2

  She left behind her a companion, an old woman, Natalya Petrovna, who almost immediately became deranged and, after painful scenes, Tolstoy and his wife had to get her taken into an asylum. Aunt Toinette’s room was almost immediately occupied by his old Kazan aunt, Pelageya Yushkova, who was much aged and incapable of maintaining an establishment on her own; she had been living the last few years in a convent. Meanwhile, Sofya had another child, named Nikolay after Tolstoy’s brother and father. He was not to live long. At only ten months, he died in howling agony of meningitis. That was in February 1875. Almost immediately afterwards, Sofya became pregnant again, and a month before her confinement, she reflected on the appalling boredom which had followed the numbness of their grief. Evenings were always the same. She sat darning, and watched her husband and his aunt Pelageya playing ‘endless horrible games of patience together’.3 ‘This year, God knows, I have struggled with these shameful feelings of boredom, and tried, all on my own, to assert my better self, and to reassure myself that it is best for the children, emotionally and physically, to live in the country, and I have managed to subdue my own selfish feelings, but then I realise to my horror that this turns into an appalling apathy and a dull, animal indifference to everything, which is even harder to struggle against. Besides, I am not on my own, I am tied to Lyovochka and the bonds have grown even tighter with the passing of the years, and I feel it is mainly because of him that I am sinking into this depression. It is painful for me to see him when he is like this, despondent and dejected for days and weeks on end, neither working nor writing, without energy or joy, just as though he had become reconciled to this position. It is a kind of emotional death, which I deplore in him.’4