Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  This is where the Voltairean sceptic is observable. It is possible to read the rest of Tolstoy’s life as an heroic attempt to live as Jesus Christ told his followers that they should live. That, up to a point, is what it was. But it is also possible to read the next thirty years as an extraordinary demonstration of the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is an unliveable ethic, a counsel of craziness which, if followed to its relentless conclusion as Tolstoy tried to follow it, will lead to the reverse of peace and harmony and spiritual calm which are normally thought of as the concomitants of the religious quest. Tolstoy’s religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work.

  The progress from artist to sage or holy man, which, to western readers, seems embarrassing or a bit of a bore, is a fairly common phenomenon among Russian writers. Leskov did it, Gogol did it. In his own fashion, Dostoyevsky did it. We have the contemporary example of Solzhenitsyn. In almost all cases, the majority of westernised critics find, within such transformations, an artistic falling-off. It is hard to judge in such a subjective matter. If we were predisposed in favour of holy men and wiseacres we might be more inclined to take seriously the later work of Russian writers. Only by an early death, it seems, such as blessed the careers of Pushkin and Lermontov, can the great Russian writer escape the desire to become a prophet.

  Tolstoy’s life follows this pattern, but, as we should expect, to an exaggerated degree: so exaggerated, that it is very hard not to think of his life as falling into two distinct halves, divided by the publication of Anna Karenina. It is right to point out, as nearly all writers on Tolstoy do, that there is a continuity between his former and his later self. Even as a young soldier, we are reminded, he was planning to start a new religion based on the ethics of Christ without the miracles. In his early stories, as in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he holds up self-images which are transformed by some sort of spiritual alchemy. All his life he had dreaded death. All his life he had sought, for at least some of the time, a spiritual solution to the eternal questions. Yes, yes, but this is to miss the obvious point that after Anna Karenina there are no great novels. There were to be many magnificent novellas and short stories from his pen over the next thirty years, and one large work of fiction, Resurrection. But Tolstoy was never again to recapture the sustained brilliance of the first seven parts of Anna Karenina. The quarrel which blew up over the eighth part was symptomatic of the disaster which he knew had overtaken him. There would henceforth be an abundance of good minor stuff, and of major stuff magnificently flawed. But the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina was tragically written out.

  Why tragically? Could he not be content with having written two of the greatest, if not the two greatest, novels in the history of literature? Apart from the answer being very obviously a negative, this question rather misses the point of what had happened to Tolstoy. The creative processes were still powerfully at work in him; they were to go on being thus at work for the next thirty years. But they had no matter to work upon. Just as the acids of the full stomach provide a useful work in digesting food but, in an empty stomach, start to consume the very walls of the belly and to cause ulcers, so with the creative processes. One cannot explain them. But one can point out that in the case of Tolstoy they worked in close conjunction with experience. And now the whole career had been, as it were, gobbled up and used. The childhood and early life had been Copperfielded in the 1850s. The time among the Cossacks had been laundered and transformed as befitted the bridegroom of the virginal young Sofya Bers. Then Russia and all its past, together with all Lev Nikolayevich’s past, had been anatomised, distorted and revivified on the most magnificent epic scale. And finally, modern marriage and the fear of death – the two subjects closest to his heart – had been used. Chronologically, spiritually, intellectually, he was going to have to scrape the barrel in future if he was to continue his policy of writing out of experience, particularly since the experience in Anna Karenina had been so close to the recording of it. As we have already observed, all the great crises of the book – not merely those of Levin and Kitty, but those of Vronsky and Anna, Anna and Karenin, Anna and Sergey – are Tolstoy’s own. His mono-mania had never had fuller, or more creative range. And it was not surprising that when the novel reached its conclusion he should suffer an emotional and spiritual collapse. In some senses, having finished such a novel, one large part of himself ceased to exist. And he had in him no particle of the Prospero, no desire whatsoever to throw away his wand. Having used himself up in one capacity, it was necessary to rediscover himself in another.

  That so intelligent and self-aware an artist as Tolstoy did not know that he was, to all intents and purposes, finished as a novelist, defies belief. He certainly knew. And the knowledge was no mere artistic tragedy. When he tried to go back to his fourteen-year-old scheme to write about the Decembrists, the novel stubbornly refused to come. The entries – few enough – in Sofya Andreyevna’s diaries reveal a pathetic anxiety to see him started once more. She knows the vital emotional importance, for all of them, of Tolstoy being able to write fiction.

  October 23, 1878. The weather is windy and unpleasant. Lyovochka was just saying that he had read his fill of historical material, and was going to start on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit for a rest. I happen to know, however, that when Lyovochka turns to English novels he is about to start writing himself. . . .10

  A stream of writings were to continue to pour forth, but not the sort of stuff which Sofya Andreyevna nor the world might admire or revere. For the first time since before War and Peace, he had started a diary, in the spring of 1878. Later, he was to record:

  Went to mass on Sunday. I can find an explanation which satisfied me for everything in the church service. But prayers for a long life and the subjugation of one’s enemies is blasphemy. A Christian should pray for his enemies, not against them.

  Read the Gospels. Christ says everywhere that everything temporal is false, and that only the abstract is real. ‘The birds of the air,’ etc. The children Ilya and Tanya have been telling secrets: they are in love. How terrible, nasty and sweet they are. Started to write ‘my life’.11

  Emerging from their nursery world, the Tolstoy children now began to observe their parents not as inevitable facts of nature, but as separate individuals. They were aware of a whole world of secrets, a whole, separate past, which was never mentioned in front of the young people. Aunt Tanya Kuzminskaya, the sister of their mother Sofya Andreyevna, seemed to be at the centre of it all. Some of the children knew about Tanya’s brief fling with Uncle Sergey. Others began to suspect that she and Papa – Lev Nikolayevich himself – were in love.

  Much of what we know of Tolstoy’s family life derives from the memoirs and reminiscences of his children. It is strange to think that none of them knew the Tolstoy we know. They never knew the anguished adolescent who had no idea of what direction his life would take. They never knew the soldier of the Crimea, or the tiresome young literary lion who quarrelled with Turgenev. Saddest of all, they never knew the author of War and Peace, happily married and fully engaged in the sublime act of artistic creation. Those years when Lev Nikolayevich and Sofya Andreyevna worked in partnership were now waning.

  The pair the children saw on the sofa after dinner were growing apart. Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis was both a symptom and a cause of that. In a family circle as large as theirs, it was no simple thing to observe. There were never just the two of them sitting there. As often as not, Sofya would be sitting with her sister Tanya, both with a baby or a young child on their laps. They were so close to one another that they would take it in turn to suckle one another’s children. And the grand old man himself would be shuffling in and out, losing his temper and muttering about Gospel simplicity. In such an atmosphere it was hard for the older children to know where to place their loyalty, from where to derive their security. The inevitable pattern tended to be that the daughters began to see things from their father�
�s point of view and the sons to sympathise with their mother. By now Sergey was sixteen and almost totally uneducated. He longed to go to Gymnasium and the University in Moscow, and in this his mother supported him. Ilya, too, one of the most observant of the children, did not want, at thirteen, to grow up as a country bumpkin. They would be their mother’s chief supporters in the move to buy a house in Moscow. But for Tanya, at fifteen, who was more than a little in love with her father, Yasnaya Polyana was enough, and the spiritual quest in which her father was engaged was more exciting than any school or dance or theatre. Thus began that dislike of her mother, soon to be taught to some of the younger children, which was a necessary concomitant of being a fully-fledged Tolstoyan.

  *

  From now on, Tolstoy’s diary-self and the diary-war with his wife – in which each wrote rude remarks meant for the other’s perusal – become important channels of literary energy. Viewed one way, it was a reversion to an earlier stage of creativity, to the phase before he started writing fiction. If War and Peace, the great non-novel, was anticipated and underpinned by the many attempts at self-chronicling represented by the early tales, by his reading of family history and genealogy, by The History of Yesterday, by his rules of conduct and by his journals, so the resurrection of the diary habit was an attempt (conscious or unconscious) to start storing up the next great non-novel. But it was always stillborn, never quite to be created. There were at least a dozen books of which a lesser artist would have been proud but nothing on the old grand scale of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Henceforward, art was always a distraction from the grand business of autobiography. The diaries and letters which fill such multitudinous volumes of the Collected Works were only part of the show. There was the daily spectacle of St. Lev or the Old Monster (varying between the two from hour to hour) laid on for the edification of the children and close intimates. There was Lyovochka the village idiot or yurodivy, muttering his holy thoughts, mowing (very badly) in the fields or attracting the derision of simpletons and sophisticates alike by his hamfisted attempts to make his own boots. There was the bearded prophet, doling out wise saws and advice to pilgrims with the portentous self-confidence of the starets. There was, still refusing to go away, the retired army officer and landed aristocrat, straight-backed and haughty, riding over his coverts, his sharp, blue eyes as ready as any good squire to spot a fox, a broken fence or a nice bit of woman.

  To all this was brought the same manic creative fervour as had been devoted to the chronicles 1805 and 1812. In War and Peace, the extraordinary osmosis had occurred so that what begins as an exercise in self-obsession comes to us off the page as independent and very nearly as selfless as Shakespeare. What originally animated the characters in War and Peace might well have been Tolstoy’s ego but he is as invisible as a good puppet master when he leaves Prince Andrey gazing at the sky at Austerlitz or Nikolay Rostov hating himself for gambling, or Natasha sobbing at her folly over Anatole Kuragin. In the second half of Tolstoy’s life the puppet master is suddenly revealed and all these completely inconsistent roles – squire, starets, yurodivy, lecher, saint, husband, historian, private landowner, public dissident, etc. etc., are revealed as cameo roles designed to show off the virtuoso skills of a crude but self-assured actor. This is not to say that Tolstoy was in control, or that he was hypocritically pretending to be any of these figures; merely that the instinct in a novelist of trying on masks is so strong that it will continue even after the practice of fiction has been abandoned. Tolstoy’s life as a religious sage should not be compared with other religious leaders so much as with Dickens’s spell of public performances of his work on stage. The effect is not unlike the famous Ealing Studios comedy where all the members of an eccentric aristocratic family – suffragette aunt, boring parson, apoplectic general, etc. – are played by the same actor, Alec Guinness. As in this movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, what is in outline an essentially sad story becomes wholly farcical when we see the same face cropping up again and again in different costumes. The ideal place for such ‘role play’, as mid-twentieth-century jargon would term it, is in the pages of a novel. But something had happened – no one can explain what it was – which held him back from writing fiction on the scale which his genius and temperament required.

  The most important upshot of the quarrel with Katkov was the response to the whole affair of Dostoyevsky. It is one of the ironies of nineteenth-century literary history that Tolstoy – with his advancing anarchism and extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo in Russia – should have published Anna Karenina in Russkii Vestnik under the editorship of the arch-reactionary Katkov, whereas Dostoyevsky (whose views were much closer to Katkov’s) should have published the greatest imaginative indictment of political liberalism (The Devils) in The Contemporary under the editorship of the leftist Nekrasov. The last part of Anna Karenina, rejected by Katkov and published separately by Tolstoy as a pamphlet, excited the most violent reaction in Dostoyevsky, who devoted pages of his The Diary of a Writer to answering Levin’s latent pacifism.

  Is it for mere vengeance, for mere killing, that the Russian people have risen? And when was it that assistance to the massacred, to those who are being exterminated by entire regions, to assaulted women and children in whose defence there is no one in the whole world to intercede, was considered a callous, ridiculous and almost immoral act, a craving for vengeance and blood-thirst! And what insensibility side by side with sentimentalism! In fact, Levin himself has a child, a boy! He loves him! When this child is bathed in a bathtub it is almost a family event! Why doesn’t his heart bleed when he hears and reads about wholesale massacres, about children with crushed heads crawling around their assaulted, murdered mothers with their breasts cut off? This happened in a Bulgarian church where two hundred such corpses were found, after the town had been plundered. Levin reads all this, and there he stands and meditates:

  ‘Kitty is cheerful today; she ate with an appetite; the boy was bathed in the tub, and he begins to recognise me: what do I care about things that are transpiring in another hemisphere? No immediate settlement for the oppression of the Slavs exists or can exist – because I feel nothing.’12

  Is this how Levin brings to a close his epopee? Is it he whom the author seeks to set forth as an example of a truthful, honest man? Men, such as the author of Anna Karenina, are teachers of society, our teachers, while we are merely their pupils. What then do they teach us?

  This is a direct challenge to Tolstoy from the other great genius of the age. And Dostoyevsky scored a very palpable hit when he noticed that Tolstoy thought the Eastern question was unimportant because it did not affect him personally. That is precisely what was happening at this point in Tolstoy’s life.

  They never met, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. They would have had every opportunity of doing so at Father Amvrosy’s cell in Optina monastery. They were both friends of Strakhov. Had they wished to meet, there would have been every possibility of arranging such a thing. Instead, like two great monsters, they sniff and pace the ground and never come into contact. Dostoyevsky (who was not in Tolstoy’s later sense of the term in the least ‘aware’) exposes his obsessions with Tolstoy, as with all the great questions of the day – the future of Russia, the destiny of the Christian religion, the perfidy of Turks, leftists, etc. – in the pages of The Diary of a Writer, a journalistic diary, designed for public consumption. Tolstoy at this period is much more inward looking. He had retreated into himself. He is on the threshold of various exercises in self-exploration and self-revelation – A Confession and What I Believe (almost, an aggressive Just What I Believe) – but they are doomed to be censored. No one will read them. And yet, as they pace around their prey, like two giant cats, they are sniffing at the same things, seeing the same problems, absorbing the same huge facts into their imaginative worlds.

  For both of them, nothing less is at stake than the spiritual future of the human race, the very essence of what we are. For both of them, the spectacle of ignorant armies cl
ashing in Bulgaria or the Balkans, or of the pitiful crying of the urban poor, excite religious questions. Both respond to these religious questions in violently different ways, and because Tolstoy says nothing publicly in response to Dostoyevsky, it may be assumed that all the controversial running is on Dostoyevsky’s side. But this is a false assumption. Enemies and admirers of Tolstoy alike have taken his own word for it that his spiritual odyssey happened as a result of rational quest. But as Dostoyevsky so repeatedly shows us in his fiction, human beings are not rational creatures, and in response to religion it is not possible, or even desirable, that they should be. Precisely during the years of Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis, Dostoyevsky was reaching the climax and culmination of his religious thinking. It cannot be that the two facts are unconnected. Ever since Crime and Punishment and War and Peace appeared month by month as alternate episodes in the same periodical, the two giants had been placed before the reading public in a vast, metaphysical coexistence. It was something much bigger than feelings of pure literary rivalry, though that came into it. Rather, it is almost as though the Godhead had chosen to become incarnate in two beings, the fullness of His truth being too mysterious, and too immense for embodiment in a single human life. The boldness and profanity of the comparison is one at which even Dostoyevsky would have blushed. But what emerged from it all was not merely two quite different sorts of novel. It was two different Christs.