Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  One can imagine the fun which gossips and hostesses had with all this, and how galling the Tolstoys would have found it had they known the half. Chertkov, who was an intelligent reader of Tolstoy’s works, felt that it was a very great mistake to give to Pozdnyshev, the murderer, so many of Tolstoy’s own views, and to make a man who was slightly mad, and an obvious rotter, the vehicle for the newly discovered Tolstoyan view of sex. Might it not confuse the issue? Tolstoy, significantly, did not reply to these suggestions for a good three weeks,19 and only did so when he had half-decided to write an Afterword, from which we have already quoted, giving the party line to the faithful.

  But Chertkov had been right, and Tolstoy knew it. There was something profoundly odd, from a missionary point of view, quite self-destructive, about the way in which Tolstoy’s famous ‘views’ are put into the mouth of such a person as Pozdnyshev. John Bayley, the most percipient literary critic to have written about Tolstoy in English, is tantalisingly brief in his analysis of the tale. He sees as a confusion behind the tale what could be regarded as its haunting strength, when he says that ‘it is as if we knew that Shakespeare had hated sex, but not so much as Hamlet does; and was disgusted with human beings, but not in quite so sensational a fashion as Timon’.20 This is well said, but perhaps it is not because Pozdnyshev is made to act as ‘Tolstoy’s agent in the story’. Rather the opposite. In the story, Tolstoy’s imagination is liberated from his views. It is not that he abandons them or is disloyal to them. But it is rather as we see Sir Walter Scott – a high Tory in life – able in his fiction to see the limitations and absurdities of his own point of view. Remember, Tolstoy sets out, not to write a tract about sex, but a murder story, and it ‘catches him’, inspires him, on those two evenings with the actor, and in the innumerable drafts in the study, on a purely imaginative level. That is why he is so ‘high’ on September 11, 1889, in the knowledge that his talent has been ‘restored’. Moreover, The Kreutzer Sonata is a great departure; it is unlike anything in the œuvre which has gone before. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is immediately recognisable as the sort of desolating aperçu which could have occurred to someone in one of the great novels. It is not so far removed from some of Prince Andrey’s blacker moments, or Anna’s. Nor would it surprise us in the least if we found out that Ivan Ilyich was actually acquainted with Karenin. But in The Kreutzer Sonata, we step outside the Tolstoyan world. If we were told merely the outline of the plot, without knowing its author, we would guess that it had been written either by Maupassant or Dostoyevsky – two authors much on Tolstoy’s mind at this date. And it is this straying outside his normal territory as much as the so-called autobiographical slant to the tale which leads to our sense of displacement here, our feeling of an imagination not so much out of tune with its material as at war with it. By the time eighteen months had passed, the loyal Tolstoyan vision had reasserted itself, and he was able to write to Chertkov that any mention of the story was ‘terribly offensive’ to him. ‘There was something nasty about The Kreutzer Sonata.’ It was in fact, to use the title of one of Dostoyevsky’s early works, ‘A Nasty Story’; it does not really have a moral: if it did have one, it would be rather more Swiftian than Tolstoyan. In Pozdnyshev, the wife-murderer met on the train, there is a level of anarchic evil which is much more Dostoyevskian than anything Tolstoy had attempted before. His exaggerations and generalisations are not a reflection of Tolstoy’s own views. They are a grotesque distortion of Tolstoy’s own vision of sex. It is as though Tolstoy’s imagination came upon Tolstoy’s brain buzzing with ideas and used the phenomenon, just as it used the external details of the man’s story from Andreyev-Burlak’s anecdote.21 Thus we all know that Tolstoy was highly sexed but only those who wish to disbelieve all evidence and suppose him to have been mad (or very stupid) can really think that he would echo, with his serious mind, Pozdnyshev’s view that women act so powerfully on men that it is not safe to let them out in ball-dresses: when he sees them so arrayed, Pozdnyshev tells his train companion, ‘ “I want to call a policeman and ask for protection from the peril, and demand that the dangerous object be removed and put away. Ah! you are laughing,” he shouted at me, “but it is not at all a joke.”’ But Tolstoy’s imagination can see that it is, and that to speak in this way is deranged, dotty. We feel this nowhere more strongly than when he expects his companion to see that there is an obvious connection between sexual desire and the ‘Kreutzer’ sonata, or to believe that because music has power to excite passion, it is only safe that it should be performed in rooms where this passion can be given no sexual outlet. ‘How can that first presto be played in a drawing room among ladies in low-necked dresses?’ Pozdnyshev is a nut. The tension in the story (because he tells us very early on that he has murdered his wife) consists in watching him working up to the point of explosion where it seems reasonable to cancel his meetings of the zemstvo, and travel back to Moscow by overnight train with the sole purpose of murdering a woman he believes to be having an affair with a violin teacher. And the reason he believes it, and he is probably right, is that the violin teacher has expensive Parisian clothes and a big bottom, and sensual lips and whiskers. Pozdnyshev is in the grip of lust and jealousy. His wife probably (though it may be that she is a Desdemona – we are only allowed to see her through his eyes, which is one of the very clever things about the story) is in the grip of lust, but not jealousy. They have both been disillusioned by the experience of marriage and because of the modern doctrine that sex is good for you (here, if at all, an element of the tract creeps in) they have become victims. True, much of Pozdnyshev’s self-disgust, his weeping at his first sexual experience, his addiction to sexual experience while loathing himself for doing it, his hatred of his wife, have formed part of Tolstoy’s experience. But it is a gross simplification to think that Pozdnyshev is Tolstoy. On the contrary, he is the greatest indictment of the Tolstoyan view of men and women that was ever imagined. And it is almost as if he is like some terrible puppet that has got out of control on the end of Tolstoy’s arm. It may very well be that when Tolstoy started to revise the story he had wanted Pozdnyshev to be a cipher for his own views (though there is in fact no evidence for this). But what happened is that all kinds of inarticulate things in Tolstoy’s subconscious rose up and created Pozdnyshev as he actually is. The old pattern was at work of Tolstoy using fiction to purge and to sanitise existence. In early stories his imagination had washed experience, leaving him, for example, as an innocent and not a fornicator in The Cossacks. Here, the imagination was doing more disturbing work. It was unearthing, beneath all the doctrines of love and chastity, the violence and the hatred which were inseparable from sexual passion in Tolstoy’s life.

  Sofya Andreyevna was a woman with a violent temper, and though clever, she was not in the least logical. She was also extraordinarily vain, and when she realised that the story had become a matter of tittle-tattle in the drawing rooms, she became more than ever anxious to make certain facts clear to the world. The first, rather touching fact which she wanted to publish to the world was that she and her husband were still ‘sexually active’. She therefore let it be known that her chief dread was that the true postscript to The Kreutzer Sonata would be another baby. What sort of a fool would that make of her? Well, none at all, as she knew perfectly well, but it would have made a bit of a fool of her husband. By now she had taken it into her head that The Kreutzer Sonata was some sort of attack upon her, or upon women, and so she composed a disastrously feeble little reply, a short story called Who is to Blame? Luckily, friends prevailed upon her not to publish it, otherwise she really would have been made a fool of. It tells the story of one Prince Prozorovsky, a lecher of thirty-five who marries a poor innocent girl of eighteen, and makes her miserable. When a painter loves her (but only Platonically) the brute of a husband becomes violently jealous and kills her. If her artless little story makes any kind of point, it is to show that Sofya Andreyevna had completely missed the point of The Kreutzer Sonata. So, more surprisi
ngly, has Troyat. If one takes the view (which is barely tenable) that The Kreutzer Sonata is an autobiography, and that the crazy Pozdnyshev, so anxious to attend meetings of the zemstvo (Tolstoy despised these local councils and would have nothing to do with them) is a portrait of the author, then who comes out of it badly? Certainly not Pozdnyshev’s dull little wife. No reader of the story can blame her for the fact that she arouses feelings of completely irrational anger in her husband. Troyat says, ‘It is hard not to imagine the irritation Tolstoy must have felt in Sofya’s presence when Pozdnyshev says, speaking of his wife, “ ‘I watched her pouring out the tea, putting the spoon in her mouth and swinging her foot, noisily sucking on the liquid, and found myself loathing her as though she were committing some hideous crime.’ ”’22 But we are surely not being invited at this point to think that Pozdnyshev is being reasonable? So why should Sofya Andreyevna take offence? Because she herself has irritated Tolstoy in similar ways? But if the story has a moral or a point, it is surely to demonstrate that sexual passion and marriage reduce people to these conditions of hatred. And it is the truth of this, rather than its alleged ungallantry, which all readers find uncomfortable. Tolstoy does not say in this story that it is a universal truth. But there is enough evidence around us to know that it is true.23

  Its truth may lend power to the story, and it may be more to the point than Sofya Andreyevna’s annoying habits. But even that is by the by. To repeat: this is a murder story. It is not, as so many critics seem to imagine, an evangel placed upon the lips of the most inappropriate preachers. It is the sort of story of unbridled and terrifying passion of which Dostoyevsky made himself the master. And while it has all Tolstoy’s directness, and largeness, and clearness, there are suggestions at various points that he was actually writing with Dostoyevsky in his eye. A question which dogged Tolstoy, in life and in art, was that of our consciousness, our consciousness of existence itself. One remembers Anna Karenina in the train, reading the English novel and envying the characters their life. So, when Pozdnyshev describes doing his wife in, he makes this highly apposite and Tolstoyan observation: ‘ “When people say that in a fit of rage they do not remember what they are doing, that’s twaddle, a lie. I remember everything, and not for one second have I stopped remembering. The more steamed up I got, the more clearly the light of consciousness [svet soznaniya] flared up inside me, so that I could not but see what I had done. I knew what I was doing for every second.”’

  There follow, in the most graphic details, all his passing thoughts and sensations as he drives the dagger home. ‘ “I heard (and I remember) the momentary resistance of the corset, and of something else as well, and then the knife sinking into something soft.”’ It is one of the best murders in literature. And we catch within it a sort of literary reply to the great murder-expert himself. After Raskolnikov has committed his second murder in Crime and Punishment, ‘A dreamlike and even absent-minded condition gradually came over him; at moments he seemed to lose all awareness of self, or rather, to lose sight of the important things in favour of trifles. . . .’24 For Dostoyevsky’s characters, evil is like a drug on which they can get high, drunk; for Tolstoy’s characters, it sharpens their hideous awareness of things. It is as though Pozdnyshev is saying to Raskolnikov, ‘You may have lost your awareness of self when you did your murders, but I was overwhelmingly aware of self when I did mine.’ He is just as self-aware as all the early and middle-period heroes and heroines. Only what – even for Anna – was a source, much of the time, of joy – the knowledge that ‘I am I’ – has become for Pozdnyshev (pozdny means ‘late’ in Russian and he is born out of time in his unhappy author’s imagination) a source of perpetual, scorching torment. He is a soul in hell.

  In March 1891, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov in St. Petersburg asking him to buy some books – Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena. As for payment, Strakhov was to get the money off ‘Sofya Andreyevna who will be in Petersburg a few days, I think, to my great regret, to petition for the publication of Volume XIII. You can’t imagine what a misunderstanding there has been about it – first tragic and now comic.’25

  From now onwards, both the Tolstoys were obsessed with their posthumous reputations, and chronicled their lives even more fully than they had done before. Both – but particularly Sofya Andreyevna – seemed to have been engaged in a perpetual Dogberry-exercise, anxious to be writ down an ass. Events which are meant to be full of dignity, or pathos, had a tendency to become completely ludicrous. And the aftermath of The Kreutzer Sonata is a case in point. There is something inescapably absurd about Sofya Andreyevna’s position. On the one hand, with Who is to Blame?, she wants us to believe that she has been somehow or another wronged by the story. On the other, she exhibitionistically and tirelessly petitions to be the highest authority in the Empire to make sure that the story is published with maximum publicity. And while she was pulling strings at Court to get her audience with the Tsar, she was able to let fall in all the right ears that she was afraid of being made a ‘fool’ of by her husband in his new role as prophet of celibacy. She may be forty-five years old but – oh, he was a beast! He could not stay away from her.

  The audience with the Tsar was arranged through friends of Alexandrine. For nearly a fortnight after writing to Alexander III, Sofya Andreyevna despaired of getting an audience, and then, on the Saturday before Passion Sunday, she was told that her request had been granted and that his Imperial Majesty would receive Her Excellency the Countess Tolstaya.

  The first impression given by the Emperor to his loyal and excellent subject was disconcerting. He reminded her of Chertkov, especially in his voice and manner of speaking. What is more, the hated Chertkov was one of the people whom the Emperor wished to discuss. ‘Do you see much of Chertkov, the son of Grigory Ivanovich and Elizaveta Ivanovna? It seems your husband has completely converted him.’ Sofya Andreyevna was quite unprepared for this question and for a moment lost her composure. Then she said that over two years had passed since they last saw the Chertkovs; but that she and her husband had had the idea of publishing good, moral, popular literature at a low price to replace ‘the many stupid and immoral books which were being published for popular consumption’.

  In a totalitarian state, all questions put by those in authority to their subjects are threats. On the one level, this is a conversation between a genial monarch and an aristocratic lady: it could be George V and the Duchess of Buccleuch. ‘How’s so-and-so’s boy? Got a lot of cranky ideas, what?’ But this is Russia, and on another level, the conversational parallels are more like some alarming telephone call from Stalin to the wife of a man of genius. How much of this does Sofya Andreyevna realise? Instinct makes her lie; she wants to underestimate the degree of closeness between her husband and Chertkov. She knows that Chertkov is politically dangerous; that religious heresy is politically dangerous; that Pobedonostsev’s secret police have been investigating her husband and her husband’s friends. The Tsar expresses his regret that Lev Nikolayevich has left the Church. ‘ “There are so many heresies springing up among the simple people, which are having a very harmful effect upon them,” says the Emperor. To this I replied, “I can assure your Majesty that my husband has never preached any philosophy either to the people or to anyone else. He has never mentioned his beliefs to the peasants and not only does he not distribute the texts of his manuscripts to other people, he is actually in despair when other people distribute them. . . .”’ Again, she longs to exonerate her husband from implication in seditious conduct. At the same time, she is desperate, as a commercially astute person, to get permission to publish Volume XIII. She starts to get carried away with lies. Only the other day, Lev Nikolayevich was saying that he had completely moved away from any interest in philosophical and religious matters, and would like to write something more along the lines of War and Peace. ‘Ah,’ said the Tsar, ‘how good that would be! What a great writer he is!’ It would certainly encourage him to return to litera
ture, wheedled Sofya Andreyevna, if the Tsar would permit him to include The Kreutzer Sonata in the Collected Edition. ‘Well,’ asks the Tsar, ‘would you give it to children to read?’ But in the event, he relented. After all, few enough people could afford the thirteen volumes of the complete set. ‘It will not have a very wide circulation.’26 Curiously enough, Chertkov met with exactly the same response twenty-five and thirty years later when he was allowed to start work on his Collected Edition of Tolstoy. Both Christian Emperor and Marxist Dictator fell back in the end upon the power of Mammon.

  Nothing could have been more calculated to annoy Tolstoy. And when he heard what his wife had been saying to the Emperor, he had a little explosion of wrath. In particular he objected to her lie about manuscripts being stolen from him and published without his permission. But soon, rather to his surprise, his anger evaporated. There was, after all, something more than a little flattering about the whole incident. The Tsar of Russia wishing that he would write some more in the vein of War and Peace; his wife having the energy and persistence to have gone through with it all. What helped to allow the anger to die down were two very refreshingly normal impulses. First, no one more than Tolstoy himself yearned for the return of that talent which had enabled him to write War and Peace. No one. And second, he was touched that the incident implied that perhaps she was really quite fond of him after all.27

  Illness, however minor, in her husband always increased Sofya’s fondness and about a month later, she was able to record that ‘Poor Lyovochka has inflamed eyelids and has been sitting alone in a darkened room for the past two days. He was a bit better today. Yesterday I sent for Doctor Rudnyov and he prescribed bathing the eyes in Goulard water which he sent us. Yesterday Lyovochka dictated to Masha a letter on religious matters for Alekhin (a dark one) and I was amazed by how good it was, and how totally it corresponded to my own feelings.’28 Such moments of sympathy and correspondence between the two of them led inevitably to the dirty, libidinous old man, the fornicator (as he had variously described himself) to thinking and doing dreadful things. ‘Whether I explained properly or not why the greatest sexual continence is necessary I don’t know,’ he wrote in his diary a week after dictating the letter whose spiritual content so impressed Sofya by its likeness to her own opinions. ‘But I do know for certain that copulation is an abomination which can only be thought of without revulsion under the influence of sexual desire. Even in order to have children you wouldn’t do this to a woman you love. I’m writing this at a time when I’m possessed myself by sexual desire, against which I can’t fight.’29