by A. N. Wilson
When I said ‘No’, I suddenly heard him start to weep, sobbing like a child. I too cried, and for some time, with the screen between us, we continued to shed tears of joy; and we were not ashamed, but were both so glad that I consider that moment one of the happiest of my entire life. No discussion, no reasoning, could ever have done for me what that did. The tears of a father of sixty can never be forgotten, even in moments of greatest temptation.35
But what if Ilya’s answer had been ‘yes’?
These were the sort of confessions and ‘sharing sessions’ which had formed such a close bond with Chertkov. In the autumn of 1886, Chertkov was married, and Tatyana noted in her diary,
Chertkov’s wedding made me very gloomy. I felt my loneliness and felt regrets. Why not me instead of G[alya – i.e. Anna Konstantinovna Dieterichs]? Why is it not my fate to be married to so wonderful a man? I am too bad for that: I could not be as he would want. I give way to all sorts of temptations too easily; I am too lazy, too fond of myself and my useless body. All the same, though I do not love him, my heart tugs every time that I might have been in her place. . . .36
It is a sad thing for a girl of twenty-two to have penned. By then, she had read What I Believe and was trying to fashion her life after her father’s ideals.
The bad relations between their parents could not be viewed merely as a grotesque domestic tragi-comedy. Tolstoy and his wife were looking at the world itself, and at Russia, with different eyes. The ‘wonderful man’ Chertkov, whom Tanya thought it would have been such a privilege to serve as a wife (its unrealism recalls Dorothea’s feelings for Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch), struck her mother merely as ‘sly, malicious, obtuse and narrow-minded’. But the domestic civil war reflected the divisions at the heart of Russian society itself. As far as Tolstoy and Chertkov were concerned, it was not merely a case of Sofya Andreyevna being selfish and stubborn. It was a case of the whole governing class of Russia blinding itself to what was going on. The warfare between Tolstoy and his wife was a terrible symbol of the division in Russia itself. On the one hand, there were those who believed in the autocracy, in the Orthodox Church, and the status quo, who feared the violence of the revolutionary movements which threatened Russia at home, and the Turks, the British, the Germans, who threatened her stability abroad. Or there were those, perhaps the majority, who were so intent on preserving their own rich life style that they did not think at all, but were merely cynically content to allow things to go on as they had always gone on. On the other hand, there were those who, with eyes in their heads, saw things were changing, and that this Holy Religion and this great autocracy were only held together by lies and violence and oppression. It is this tension in microcosm which we witness in the Tolstoy home, and it is this which makes it so terrible. Tolstoy was not just a solipsist interested in saving his own soul. He genuinely believed – however mistaken we may now consider him – that he had found the solution to the Russian, to the human problem.
Dostoyevsky’s great speech at the time of the unveiling of the Pushkin monument had excited cries of ecstasy from the crowds. ‘You are a saint! You are a prophet!’ Even Turgenev had wept. It was the famous assertion of the destiny of the Russian people. ‘The Russian heart is more adapted to universal, all-humanitarian brotherly fellowship than any other nation,’ he had told the foaming crowds. ‘Not we but the future Russians, to the last man, will comprehend that to become a genuine Russian means to seek finally to reconcile all European controversies, to show the solution of European anguish in our all-humanitarian and all-unifying Russian soul . . . to utter the ultimate words of great, universal harmony, of the brotherly accord of all nations abiding by the law of Christ’s gospel.’
With the accession of Alexander III, Dostoyevsky’s friend Pobedonostsev had lost no time in pushing forward a programme of Russification, and a purge of all elements in Russian society which might threaten the all-unifying Russian soul. Tolstoy’s religious works, very naturally, fell foul of the censor. For example, on February 18, 1884, the police had burst in upon the Kusherev printing works and tried to seize all the copies of What I Believe. The head of the Moscow Civil Censorship Committee reported that ‘the book must be considered an extremely harmful book as it undermines the foundations of social and governmental institutions and wholly destroys the teachings of the Church’. But the book had already gone ‘up the line’ and found its way, like the political writings of revolutionaries and other dissidents, into secret hideouts and foreign printing presses. This was where Chertkov was of invaluable help to Tolstoy. In 1884–85 he managed to do English translations of the major religious works and get them printed in England. German editions appeared in Leipzig, and Prince Urusov’s French translations were printed in Paris.
By driving them thus underground, the Russian authorities lent a huge amount of weight to Tolstoy’s religious reflections. As yet, though his name was famous abroad, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were barely known in the West. It was through his religious tracts that, for thousands of English readers, Tolstoy burst upon the world. And since Orthodoxy, in an English or American context, does not really mean anything, what struck Tolstoy’s thousands of new foreign readers were firstly the lucid urgency and sincerity of his prose, and secondly the indictment which they constituted of his barbarous country. (The pattern has been continuing ever since, but the Russians never seem to learn anything, as a roll-call of dissident names from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn would testify.)
Pobedonostsev’s policy of Russification was identical to that of Stalin some forty-five years later. Between April 1881 and June 1882, for example, a million Jews had fled the country, taking with them some twenty-two million pounds; Prince Meshchersky pronounced, ‘When the microbes have to be destroyed, we do not pause to inquire how many microbes like the process.’ The Russian press was censored ‘with a bitterness which recalled the time of Nicholas I’. While pogroms in Elizavetagrad, Kiev and Odessa assailed the Jews, there were vigorous attempts to Russify the ‘difficult’ parts of the Empire. The Poles, the Lithuanians, the Georgians, the Ukrainians all had to face the choice between freedom or submission to the all-humanitarian Russian soul. Religious dissidents – Molokans, Dukhobors, Old Believers, and others – were forced into accepting the brotherly accord of the Orthodox Church. In Russian Turkestan, the children were forced in their new primary schools to learn Russian. On the Asiatic borders of the Empire, the Russians harried the Afghans. There was a clash between Russian and Afghan forces on March 30, 1885, which made the Gladstone Government contemplate war, and there was talk of Russia invading Turkey and establishing the dream which had been so dear to Dostoyevsky’s heart, the Russification of the old Empire, the re-Christianisation of Constantinople.
It was into this international atmosphere that Tolstoy’s controversial writings burst, adding fuel to the emotion in which the Anglo-Saxon world most delights to indulge, self-righteous moral indignation. Novoye Vremya was able to make a good debating point in reply to English hostility to the fierceness of Alexander Ill’s regime. ‘The concern of England, which has beggared the population of India and Egypt, which has poisoned the people of China with opium, which destroyed, like dangerous insects, the natives of Australia and which, under the pretext of abolishing the slave trade, is now exterminating in the most wholesale fashion the numerous races of Africa – the concern of people who do these things is certainly astonishing.’ The point is well made, but it ignores, as such Russian protests always ignore – as in their ‘What about Northern Ireland or South Africa?’ taunts now, or their protests during the 1960s about the plight of American blacks – that though the western pot may be as black as the eastern kettle, it is not a debate which could conceivably be won by a nation that so vigorously denies freedom of expression to its people. A pen may not be mightier than a sword, but it reaches more people, and the effects of its wounds can still be felt, like those of a nuclear weapon, for generations after the sword has rusted.
It was the si
tuation at home, and above all the plight of the urban poor in Russia, which excited Tolstoy’s furious indictment of the all-humanitarian brotherly fellowship of the most holy Russias. The two decades after the emancipation of the serfs had witnessed major upheavals and revolutions in the lives of the poor. On the one hand, the immediate effect of emancipation had been to make life infinitely more difficult for the peasants, who therefore abandoned the life style which had been lived by their people for generations and poured into the cities. At the same time, the administration was desperately attempting to transform an essentially agrarian rural economy into an industrialised one, worthy to compete with the Empires of Prussia and England. The mineral resources of the Empire suddenly began to be exploited. Production of pig iron in Russia doubled between 1862 and 1886. In the twelve years after emancipation, three hundred and fifty-seven new joint stock companies were formed; fifty-three new railroad companies, seventy-three new private banks; a hundred and sixty-three major new factories. Coal production multiplied sixfold in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Oil began to be drilled in Azerbaidzhan, Baku, Tiflis. Cotton, in the regions of Moscow and Vladimir, was produced in enormously increasing quantities, with all its familiar concomitants of mills and factories, and the squalid housing of ‘cheap labour’. Dickens and Carlyle and Ruskin had watched all this happening to England fifty years before. It came late to Russia, and it came even later to Tolstoy who had been so caught up in the adventure of his own existence, and so marooned in the country that, until he was forced to move to Moscow in 1881 for the children’s education, his eyes had not been open to what was happening. The hallmark of his art was to ‘make it strange’, to see things completely afresh, an art which, when carried into the field of theological controversy, had produced a number of palpable hits, but which were obscured by the bees in his bonnet. What Then Must We Do? brings this quality to reportage of the urban scene; and, by implication, to the political sphere. It is one of Tolstoy’s most impressive and unforgettable books.
The first part of the book might be defined as a Russian Mayhew, or a Muscovite Dickens. He describes, and few descriptions of urban poverty have ever been bettered. It all starts when he sees a ragged peasant, swollen with dropsy, being arrested for begging. His shock at the sight takes him to dosshouses around the Khitrov market. The first fourteen chapters of the book contain human sketches which are every bit as good as anything in his novels, animated by a sense of violent moral outrage about the divisions between rich and poor. When, having read this book, one thinks of Russia in the 1880s it will always be of these people that one thinks: the two prostitutes, dying mother of forty and ragged daughter of thirteen, who describe their profession as ‘sit[ting] in the tavern’, and cannot quite bring themselves to use the word ‘prostitute’; the washer-woman with soapy arms, beating off the attentions of a drunken man in the filthy stench of some tavern yard; ragged boys in thin coats skating down the pavements; the old apple seller and his wife, living in a tiny room which they kept very clean, carpeted with apple sacks, and adorned with twinkling icons; another old man dying in a cellar of typhus; the fifteen-year-old prostitute, standing in the snow, smoking a cigarette, being cursed by the policeman who arrested her, ‘We shall freeze to death with you here, blast you!’; and, the most Dickensian pair of all, an old-looking mother of thirty and her daughter, their faces drawn and grey, two creatures who appear to be subject to St. Vitus’s Dance and who have in effect turned themselves into cigarette-making machines, their fingers twitching and moving so rapidly that you can hardly see how the cigarettes are made. For fourteen years the mother has lived in this way, constantly inhaling tobacco.
The second part of the book devotes itself more theoretically to answering the question of its title. At first, Tolstoy had assumed that it was a mere question of philanthropy. Even on this level, he found that his rich friends in society were capable of being quite thick-skinned. ‘For a box at the theatre to see Sara Bernhardt they hand over the money at once, to clinch the matter. But here, of those who had agreed to give money and had expressed their sympathy, not one offered the money at once. . . .’ The contrast between the riches which he saw all around him in his own circle and the degradation and poverty which existed in the Muscovite slums eventually made him recognise that Russia faced a problem much greater than could be solved with condescending acts of patronage or generosity from the rich. And in the best Biblical tradition he denounces the Ahabs and the Jezebels who are responsible for so much waste, devastation and misery. Nor is there any doubt in his mind what will happen if nothing is done to help the poor.
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed masses are increasing, and the physical and moral forces of the wealthy classes are weakening; the deception on which everything depends is wearing out, and the wealthy classes have nothing to console themselves with in this mortal danger.
To return to the old ways is not possible; only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that ‘things will last my time’ – after that let happen what may. That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws near.37
This in 1886: they had just thirty years to learn the truth of what Tolstoy was saying.
What Then Must We Do? is not Marxist, nor revolutionary in the political sense at all. And one of the most impressive things about it is its description of how Tolstoy grew out of wishing to patronise the poor, and discovered that it was impossible to romanticise their position. ‘Among them, as among us, there were some more or less good and more or less bad, more or less happy and more or less miserable; and the unhappy were just as exist among ourselves; people whose unhappiness depends not on external conditions but on themselves – a kind of unhappiness bank notes cannot cure.’
No reader can doubt that the situation which he describes in What Then Must We Do? was one which actually existed, any more than they can doubt that its worst and gloomiest prophecies were fulfilled. With catastrophic consequences, the advocates of political violence were able to exploit the plight of the poor and bring about a situation which was, if possible, worse than the one which Tolstoy describes.
Where Tolstoy will probably find a mixed response among modern readers is in his own analysis of how the catastrophe could be avoided, and in his generalised reflections on the way we ought to live. The solution is at first given in one Biblical word: Repent! And on one level Tolstoy describes what is not only (to the present writer at least) obviously desirable; it is, as it happens, a description of what has been forced upon the privileged classes in the West, faute de mieux. Tolstoy, that is to say, advocates self-sufficiency. He questions the assumption that, for example, writers and intellectuals need other people to do their physical labours, while they provide ‘spiritual’ nourishment to their hearers or readers. He started to do some calculations.
It turned out that I – a very prolific writer who for forty years have done nothing except write, and have written some five thousand pages – if I had worked all those forty years at a peasant’s usual work then, not counting winter evenings and workless days, if I had read and studied for five hours every day and had written only on holidays two pages a day (and I have sometimes written as many as sixteen pages a day) I should have produced those five thousand pages in fourteen years.
I came upon a wonderful fact – a very arithmetical calculation a seven-year-old boy could have made, but which I never made before. There are twenty-four hours in a day; we sleep eight, so sixteen remain. If a brain-worker devotes five hours a day to his work he will get through a huge quantity. What becomes of the remaining eleven hours?
It turned out that physical labour, far from rendering mental work impossible, improved and helped it.38
So Tolstoy advocates manual labour for all, simplicity of life, simple food, simple clothes, etc. The humour (deliberate) of the concluding chapters veers between G. K. Chesterton and Chekhov – u
nlikely poles. Many modern medics would now agree with the Chestertonianism of the
. . . profound complexities of medicine and hygiene for people of our class are such as a mechanic might devise in order, when he has heated a boiler and screwed down all the valves, to prevent the boiler from bursting.
And when I understood all this, it seemed to me ludicrous. By a long series of doubts, searchings, and reflection, I had reached the extraordinary truth that man has eyes in order to see with them, ears in order to hear with, legs in order to walk with them, and hands and a back to work with, and that if he does not use them for their natural purpose it will be the worse for him.39
Many modern business executives recovering from their first bad ulcer or coronary thrombosis will probably agree with these words. Likewise anyone reading the plays of Chekhov will recognise the world that Tolstoy depicts when he says ‘When we ask: What then must we do? – we do not really ask anything, but merely affirm. . . . that we do not want to do anything.’40 His depictions of the idle rich in their ballrooms and house-parties are puritanical, but also extremely funny.
What I find hard to understand is why Tolstoy should attribute all the many ills which he anatomises to the existence of property. Before the curtain goes down, he has started to play all the old Proudhon gramophone records: ‘Property, is the root of all evil. . . .’ Those who fulfil the word of God do not own things, etc. etc. This has a fine sound to it. But the Leninist question has to be answered: Who? Whom? Who is going to control the lives of the happy peasants, writers and aristocrats who – in the Tolstoyan vision – are all leading pure, teetotalling, non-smoking lives, ploughing and sowing and stitching boots, and hewing wood and drawing water by day, and writing their five hours of nonsense each evening before the sun goes down? If they owned their little patch, and their hut in which all these wholesome activities took place, then it might be said that they were approaching something like a service which was perfect freedom. But if they did not own the hut, then they would always be at the mercy of the man, or the council or the corporation who did; and that is a simple fact. By asserting his silly ‘property is theft’ creed as though it were an immutable law of the universe, Tolstoy spoils the whole case which he is making out, because in attacking the notion of property, he makes any realistic plan for human betterment impossible. Property never has been abolished, and never will be abolished. It is simply a question of who has it. And the fairest system ever devised is one by which all, rather than none, were property owners.
