Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Anna Karenina was finished, and its author was spiritually exhausted. ‘Pushkin once said to his circle of admirers, “Fancy what Tatyana has gone and done. She’s got married. I would never have expected it of her.” I could say exactly the same of Anna Karenina. My heroes and heroines sometimes take steps which I would not have intended. . . .’13 But on another occasion Tolstoy said, ‘There was nothing else she could do – struggling her whole life through with that tedious Karenin.’14

  The sensation of characters taking on a life of their own provides the novelist with the most magnificent feelings of freedom and release; but when they vanish, and the book is published, and more characters obstinately refuse to come to life in the author’s head, he is thrown back on himself, and on his family.

  The routines of Yasnaya Polyana continued as before. At nine o’clock Tolstoy would shuffle down in a dressing gown on his way to breakfast. His dressing room and study were on the ground floor. Usually, on the staircase, some of the children would run out to meet him. After breakfast, he would go into the drawing room and sit with his wife. He would drink tea and she had coffee. Then he would go out into the entrance hall and swing on the parallel bars to try to use up some excess energy. At about eleven o’clock he would go into his study and ‘write’. But he was not writing fiction. He would scribble down ‘thoughts’ on stray bits of paper, the backs of envelopes. Sometimes he would write them up at greater length. He would sit there in his study until four. ‘Lyovochka works all the time,’ complained Sofya Andreyevna in 1879 in a letter to her sister,

  but alas, he is writing some kind of religious dissertation to prove that the Church disagrees with the teaching of the Gospels. There will be barely ten people in Russia who interest themselves in it.15

  Like so many of Countess Tolstoy’s cruel remarks, this hits home (though as it happens, she was entirely wrong about the numbers of people who would be interested by Tolstoy’s religious reflections). At this time, ‘Lyovochka’ was deeply isolated from his friends, from the world, from his family.

  The habit of church-going, which might have served to unite Tolstoy with his neighbours and fellow countrymen, only increased his feeling of isolation. He would return from the liturgy in a black mood. The peasants whom he had hoped to woo as brothers and sisters in Christ all bowed to him and doffed their caps. And the church service itself was simply nonsense. ‘Just listen to the words and chants they sing in the chancel,’ he said one day in a disillusioned mood. ‘They are absolutely not being sung for the peasants. Even I can’t understand what they are singing. Take for example the “sequence” which they sing on Christmas day. . . .’16 And he went into his study and produced a book to read the passage aloud.

  This sort of thing – his studying the Scriptures and the texts of the liturgy – would go on until teatime; by then, he would be ready for a walk or a ride. He rode and walked very fast, so if you went out with him it was difficult to keep up. When he came back from his ride, he would have dinner. It was rather a stately affair, with flunkeys in white gloves and frock coats. After dinner he would go back into the study for more burrowing into the question of religion. Then, in the evening, at about eight, he would emerge and sit with the family. Sometimes he played Chopin or Beethoven on the piano. If his sister happened to be staying, he would play a duet with her. Music always moved him to tears – even if he just heard snatches of a child’s practice from two or three rooms away. The children would then be packed off to bed, and the grown-ups would sit together drinking tea until midnight. Usually, there would be talk, but sometimes Sofya Andreyevna or Lev Nikolayevich would read aloud.

  On the surface, it seemed a happy enough existence, but Tolstoy was not happy. The drama of his unhappiness could not be fashioned into truth by becoming a novel. It now came bursting out of him, rawly unreal, as A Confession.

  A Confession, which has been described as ‘the finest of all Tolstoy’s non-fiction works’17 and ‘one of the noblest and most courageous utterances of man’,18 was probably begun in 1879. For some time, the juices had been gnawing at an emptied imagination, the stomach wall having to exercise its usual digestive function of turning experience into fiction. In the previous summer of 1878, he had toyed with the idea of writing a proper autobiography and jotted down some reminiscences of his childhood, but, like his attempt to expurgate his ancestral past in The Decembrists, it came to nothing.

  Approaching A Confession ‘blind’, the reader will indeed be arrested by its overpowering emotional force, and might even mistake its apparently ratiocinative thrust, its burning intellectual sincerity, for a piece of argument. But for those who have followed Tolstoy’s life and work in a chronological order, its ninety or so pages give off disconcerting impressions. It is not the book which its author intends us to read. Doubtless, while he was writing it, A Confession felt as noble and courageous as some modern readers have found it; and there is – unquestionably – a high nobility about it. But it is not, as Tolstoy so heart-rendingly believes, the record of a mind clearing, of a troubled soul coming at last to peace. Newman’s Apologia in a different way gives off highly comparable danger signals. His insistence that joining the Roman Church was ‘like coming into port after a stormy sea’ (a strange way of describing the anguish he had felt ever since becoming a Catholic) is highly comparable to Tolstoy’s claim at the end of A Confession that he has found the secret which will give his soul peace. Tolstoy’s A Confession is outwardly the story of a thoughtless sensualist, who had put all thoughts of God, the meaning of life, soul or goodness aside. He had pursued first, as a young soldier, the sins of the flesh, and the cruel pleasures of war. Then, as a literary man, he had pursued fame and money, and had enjoyed the didactic role thrust upon the Russian writer, even though he had nothing to teach. Then he had got married and become wholly absorbed in his family. He had, however, been haunted by a terrible sense of the pointlessness of existence in upper-class society. He had known both the anguish of ennui so profound that he had often been tempted to commit suicide; and on the other hand, or at the same time, a terror of death which poisoned his whole life. He had turned this way and that for a solution to the questions Who am I? and What is the point of living? Philosophy (Kant and Schopenhauer) had been as impotent to help as had natural science. Finally, he had discovered that while the pampered intelligentsia and aristocracy were leading lives which were indeed pointless, and which led only to despair, there was a huge category of persons who had faith, who were able to live and who did, apparently, know life’s secret. These were the peasants. He had thrown himself into adopting their Holy Orthodox faith, but he had been unable to resist thinking about it and going into it, and the more he went in, and the more he thought, the more obvious it became to him that the Orthodox Church was founded on a lie, that its insistence upon such esoteric or improbable doctrines as the Trinity, the Ascension, or the miracles of the saints, was as blasphemous as its refusal to take seriously the central moral teachings of Him whom they claimed to be the second person of the Trinity. But this liberation from the Church, this discovery that the monks and the archimandrites and the bishops and the theologians had got everything wrong, did not shake Tolstoy’s faith in the honest Christianity of the peasants. Nor did it drive him back into a pure Voltairean negativism. On the contrary, it was when he realised that being Orthodox was incompatible with true Christianity that he felt a true peace, and he resolved to practise the five great commandments given by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount. Henceforth, like Levin at the end of Anna Karenina, he would live by this simple creed, and he would achieve salvation, that is, not some mystical or supernatural benefit bestowed upon him by the Church, but the inner certainty that he was leading a life as it was meant by God to be led.

  Such, in essence, is A Confession. The violence of its similes, his life as a boat careering down a fast river as he tries to row against the stream, knowing that the bank is God, or the man about to fall into the dragon jaws of death, pausing to lick
two drops of honey, is a taste of the Tolstoy who was now struggling to be born. They reflect the appalling conflicts which were going on inside him; and they suggest that he had undergone, or was undergoing, what in slightly outmoded modern jargon would be termed a mental ‘breakdown’. Every bit of his life is seen as an aching torment. There are various moments when the unconscious egoism of a man who is lying back on the analyst’s couch shows a sign of painful dislocation. For example, in section eleven, where it suddenly dawns on him that ‘life is evil and an absurdity’ (a generalisation applying to the whole of humanity) is not necessarily true because ‘my particular life of senseless indulgence of desires was senseless and evil’. Or again, in a slightly different mood, when he describes his anger with the scientists for being unable to answer the question ‘Why do I live?’

  Tolstoy writes in such a frank and readable manner that his rhetoric can deceive us into thinking that such a proposition makes some sort of sense. But who are these scientists and why should ‘they’ have devoted their minds either to the rather nebulous question of whether life has a meaning (not their job) or to the more specialised question of why Lev Nikolayevich should exist?

  Once one is alerted to the danger signals, A Confession, precisely because of its artless sincerity, is revealed as a transparent piece of self-deception: transparent, that is, to everyone except the author. It simply is not true, for example, that at earlier phases of life Tolstoy thought only of sensualism, or only of fame, or only of money. Throughout his life, he had been troubled by a conflict between an unyielding, intellectual rationalism and a passionately religious temperament. He had often thought of amending his life along the lines of some simplified form of Christianity, purged of its ‘dogmas’. He had often flirted with the Orthodoxy of his boyhood, yearned to lead a simple life, and to imitate the peasants. He had always – except for brief crazes and intervals – preferred the country to the town. So the picture of his slow turning-away from the life of the urban intelligentsia towards rural piety is a totally false one. Nor does his picture of, for example, the St. Petersburg intelligentsia bear any relation to what it had actually been like at the time. His claim that they were all burning to teach their readers great moral truths was as untrue of Turgenev as it was of Tolstoy’s great friend, Fet, an unwavering devotee of art for art’s sake.

  Just as Childhood bore less relation to his actual childhood than it had done to the period when the book was being written, so these ‘memories’ of St. Petersburg society when Tolstoy was a young man are actually direct responses to what was happening at the time he was writing his confession. He is referring not to Fet and Turgenev, but to Dostoyevsky’s challenge, ‘Men such as the author of Anna Karenina are teachers of society.’

  The most extraordinary claim of all is that in the early years of his marriage he regarded authorship as being of no possible importance, and that he only wrote ‘insignificant work’ for the sake of monetary reward.19 Does this describe the fervent energy with which he wrote and wrote and recorrected Sofya’s copies of War and Peace? Apparently, it is meant to. Even if there had been no financial reward, there could have been no greater possible satisfaction for a novelist than to have written War and Peace which is indeed one of the ‘noblest utterances. . . . of man’. Tolstoy’s capacity to forget had blotted it all out. Moreover, in describing his state of mind upon finishing Anna Karenina he reveals his extraordinary, and surely psychotic, ability to find dissatisfaction precisely in the areas which should have given the greatest and the noblest forms of pleasure. ‘ “Very well,” he had said to himself; “you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world – and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all.’20 The reason he could find no reply is that it was not a rational question. It is almost unimaginable that Pushkin, Molière or Shakespeare would have asked themselves such a question. Tolstoy thinks that by asking it he reveals his indifference to literature. In fact, it reveals quite the reverse. It shows that he had seen it all as a competition: a competition which, moreover, he had won. Having decided implicitly that he was in fact the greatest literary genius in the world, it was not like him to rest on his laurels. Having got some laurels, he proceeded to tear them leaf from leaf. There is nobility, there is grandeur here. But there is also titanic arrogance, and a peculiar destructiveness which is all Tolstoy’s own. Tolstoy’s question suggests that so long as there were these geniuses, his own was to be rebuked; and this attitude was to harden over the coming years as he developed his theories of art. But, once more, there is a genius whose name very conspicuously does not appear in the list, and we almost expect to hear it later on in A Confession when he tells us that having failed to find anyone among his own class who understood the meaning of life, his eyes were opened. ‘And of such people, understanding the meaning of life and able to live and to die, I saw not two or three or tens, but hundreds, thousands and millions. And they all – endlessly different in their manners, minds, education, and position as they were – all alike, in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, laboured quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died, seeing therein not vanity but good.’21

  What is this if it is not the voice of the Devil who speaks to Ivan Karamazov in his dream: ‘I would surrender this super-celestial life, all ranks and honours, if only I could become incarnate in the soul of a seven-pood merchant’s wife and put up candles to God.’22

  It may be that part of the unconscious, motivating force for the conversion of Tolstoy was a panic-stricken longing not to be Dostoyevsky. For having steered so firmly in the direction of a seven-pood merchant’s wife, and having put up candles to God, Tolstoy became convinced, and devoted the next five years of his writing life to proving that, while the peasant worshipper had somehow or other got hold of the secret of life, his or her faith was actually based on lies and misconceptions. But one must emphasise that any part Dostoyevsky played in all this must have been marginal, and unconscious. The figure who was about to be passed through the digesting machine of Tolstoy’s imagination was none other than Christ Himself, and the theological outpourings which now came from Tolstoy’s pen reflect his famed genius for ‘making it strange’.

  Just as in his fiction, he is able to give the impression that he is Adam on the first day of creation – the first person who ever heard a newborn infant cry, who ever saw a storm or felt the heat of the sun – so in his newly-found scholarly enthusiasm, Tolstoy manages to write as if he were the first person who had ever read the Gospels. And there is in his reading something abidingly refreshing, and strange, something which the Christian reader, however orthodox, must cherish, and which will always disturb the rationalist. A Confession was intended as a preface to his Critique of Dogmatic Theology, and the Critique forms a natural complement to the collation of the Gospels at which he was hard at work during 1881. So, it makes sense to discuss them altogether.

  It is worth making the point, perhaps, that Tolstoy, though with one part of himself a rationalist, would, with another, have sympathised with Dostoyevsky’s self-professed irrationalism. And the point has been well made, by Lev Shestov, that to believe in the Gospel ethics as Tolstoy did was more fantastical than to accept, with Dostoyevsky, the Gospel miracles. Many Orthodox critics have understandably found Tolstoy lacking in any transcendental sense whatsoever. But if this were true, his position would probably be easier to understand, less disturbing. There are many passages in the Critique which confirm Shestov’s view that Tolstoy was ‘willing to err with Christ against all reason’.23

  One thinks of the great invocation – of course designed to ridicule Trinitarian Orthodoxy, but also a genuine prayer – to which probably the young Wordsworth would have said ‘Amen’. ‘O God, God inconceivable, but who art, God by whose will I live, Thou hast put in me this aspiration to know Thee, and to know myself. I have erred, I have sought out an infallible truth. I knew that I was going astra
y. I gave myself up to evil passions, while knowing that they were evil, but I never forgot Thee; I always felt Thy presence even in the very moment of my sins. I all but lost Thee, but Thou hast stretched forth a hand which I seized and all my life is filled with light. Thou hast saved me, and, henceforth, I will look for only one thing, to grow near to Thee and, so far as it is possible to me, to understand Thee. Help me, teach me! I know that I am following the good, that I love, or want to love, everyone, that I want to love the truth. Draw nearer, Thou God of love and truth, reveal to me all that I can understand of Thee and of me.

  ‘And this good God, this God of truth replies to me through the mouth of the Church, “The Deity is One and Three.”’24

  His rationalistic dismissal of the doctrine of the Trinity should not blind us to the genuine flights of (admittedly vague, and unsubstantiated) transcendentalism in the prayer.

  The Critique dismisses all the traditional Christian doctrines – the Incarnation, the resurrection of Christ, the ascension into heaven, the miracles of the Gospels and of the saints. Inevitably it also therefore disposes of all the theology of grace, any suggestion that Christ has taken upon us our sin, or created a reconciliation between the human race and the Father. Nor is the dismissal made with tones of regret or humility. Tolstoy makes no bones about his assertion that the Orthodox theologians (he examines in particular the Patriarch Philaret’s Catechism and Patriarch Macarius’s Introduction to Theology) were knowing and deliberate liars who had perverted and distorted the simple message of the Gospel.

  There is one area where Tolstoy was indisputably right, and since it is of such momentous importance for the development of his writing and thinking, it must be mentioned here, although there will be further discussion of it when he comes to write his innumerable essays on pacifism. And that is that Christ in St. Matthew’s Gospel forbade His followers to take their revenge for evil done against them; that He told them to turn the other cheek if they were struck, to forgive their enemies, and to bless those who persecute them. This is an unquestionable part of the Gospel teaching. Equally unquestionable is the fact that the Orthodox Church, like almost every other Christian denomination in history except the Society of Friends, made no bones about disavowing the plain tone of Christ’s pacifist teaching. There are plenty of arguments against pacifism. Tolstoy got used to most of them, and even conceded their force. They are based on patriotism, or practical common sense, or a desire to protect the defenceless, or fear, or a combination of all these things. What they can never be based upon is the teaching of the Gospels, even though the attitude of Christ in the Gospels (and of John the Baptist) to soldiers appears to have been less critical than many modern-day pacifists. So there is an ambiguity. But the fundamental idea that Christians do not practise what they preach is a bullseye shot, never aimed with more immediacy or more violence, or more passion, than in Tolstoy’s religious writings. At an early stage in A Confession he said that it was, and is, impossible to judge from a man’s conduct whether or not he was a Christian believer.