Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  In the years during which Tolstoy had been telling the world how it ought to behave, there had been many occasions when he had been tempted to lay down the mantle of the prophet and take up that of the hierarch. Chertkov and the Tolstoyans did, in effect, regard Tolstoy as the founder of a new religion, and themselves as the appropriate guardians of the sacred truth. But this was not how Tolstoy saw himself. In November 1888, a girl came to see him, asking how she should live, and when she had gone, he felt depressed. It was a fundamental part of his experience and belief that we are each guided by our own conscience. And yet, here came these people, like the girl, wishing to be guided, not by their own conscience but by Tolstoy’s. It was all wrong.

  I tried to persuade this young lady not to live according to my conscience, as she wanted to do, but according to her own. But she, poor girl, doesn’t even know if she has a conscience of her own. That is a great evil. What people need most of all is to find out for themselves and to develop their own conscience and then live according to it: and not, as everybody does, take somebody else’s completely foreign, inaccessible conscience and then live without one at all, but lie, lie, lie in order to look like a person living according to some other chosen person’s conscience. I truly prefer a convivial rake who never reasons and rejects all rational considerations to a thinker who lives according to someone else’s conscience, i.e. without one. The rake may develop a conscience, but the other man will never do so until he returns to the state of the first man.60

  ‘He is a Tolstoyan,’ he once said contemptuously of a visitor to the house, ‘that is a man with convictions utterly opposed to mine.’61

  Boris Pasternak, whose father Leonid did such hauntingly successful illustrations for Resurrection, was never more truly Tolstoyan than when he made Zhivago say, ‘The Gospels are an offer, a naïve and tentative offer: “Would you like to live in a completely new way? Would you like to enjoy spiritual beatitude?” And everyone was delighted, they all accepted, they were carried away by it for thousands of years. . . . When the Gospels say that in the Kingdom of God there are neither Jews nor Gentiles, do they just mean that all are equal in the sight of God? I don’t believe it means only that – that was known already – it was known to the Greek philosophers and the Roman moralists and the Hebrew prophets. What the Gospels tell us is that in this new way of life and of communion, which is born of the heart and which is called the Kingdom of God, there are no nations, but only persons.’62

  Resurrection explores and celebrates this idea with profound intelligence. Its author is under no illusions, as the Tolstoy of the pamphlets sometimes is. He knows that the tyranny of the bureaucrats, bishops, judges, procurators and generals will one day give place to the tyranny of the revolutionaries and that this will probably be infinitely worse. But the novel asserts that you don’t destroy the evil of the system by replacing it with another system. Only persons can undermine systems. And the more twentieth-century leaders have ruthlessly attempted to behave as though persons were statistics, the more prophetic Resurrection has become. Hence its vast popularity in the Soviet Union in the days of Lenin and Stalin. Once the Politburo and the Cheka and the Gulag and the whole odious machinery of Soviet Communism had been established, there was no means of undermining it by political or military means. And yet individuals did not just survive. It was by being individuals that, in a million tiny areas, they did in effect defeat the system, as we learn from the testimony of Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam and others. In books like The Gulag Archipelago or Hope Against Hope we discover that human individuality, like the grass between the paving stones at the beginning of Tolstoy’s novel, is ultimately indestructible.

  Without it, art cannot flourish – one reason why twentieth-century art, with its love of trends and movements, has been such a strange mixture of worthless, official stuff and individual brilliance, and why so many of the best poets and novelists of the twentieth century have not been westerners busily following the latest fashion, but Russians who had reason to cherish their artistic individuality. Resurrection is an exciting monument in Tolstoy’s own life because, in the course of writing it, he rediscovered and reasserted his artistic freedom. Whether it was Chertkov’s absence, or a particularly helpful bout of hatred for his wife, or the knowledge that he was seventy years old and approaching the end of his creative life, who can tell? But with an energy which he had not been able to rouse since finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote his great novel.

  The undertaking disrupted the entire household, particularly in its last year of 1899–1900. Visitors, children, in-laws – anyone who could write – was enlisted to help Sofya Andreyevna to copy and recopy Tolstoy’s semi-legible manuscript. Then there were interruptions when Tolstoy fell ill. Sometimes, his stomach was cripplingly painful. What did he expect, asked Sofya Andreyevna, if he sat down at the table and ate three cucumbers? On other occasions, she would insist that his masseur rub the small of Tolstoy’s back three times a day. At other moments, the story just got stuck.

  After he had reached Part III of the novel, he was seized with uncertainty about how the story should proceed. Should Maslova accept Nekhlyudov’s gallant offer of marriage or not? This uncertainty held up the writing for several weeks and Tolstoy could do nothing except play games of Patience until the matter was resolved in his head. This was an habitual way with him of coping with writing problems. If the game came out, she would marry Nekhlyudov; if not, she would turn him down.63

  There is never much likelihood of ‘winning’ a game of Patience. Tolstoy’s instinct knew better than his mind what shape the story should take. We may only wonder that he was in any doubt, for, to the reader, it is clear that he is not only exercising his own artistic freedom in Resurrection. He is also reworking and resolving his relationship with the giants: as some critics would say, wrestling with the anxiety of influence. The characters of Nekhlyudov and Yevgeny Onegin could hardly be more different, nor those of Tanya and Maslova. Nevertheless, for one who had Pushkin’s poem in the bone, as it is in all literate Russian bones, there could be no surprise in the denouement of Resurrection. ‘Ya vas proshu, menya ostavit! [I beg you, leave me!]’64 The heroine’s rejection of the hero, in terms of the simple mechanics of the plot, is purely Pushkinian.

  The stuff of the story, its actual matter, is altogether un-Pushkinian. These prisoners, exiles, whores, revolutionaries and social destitutes are not the characters we should expect to find in the pages of the early Tolstoy either. They seem to belong to another novelistic world. Twenty years previously, Tolstoy had told Strakhov that he did not know ‘a better book in all modern literature – Pushkin included’ – than Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. Dostoyevsky, by paradox, never wrote more straightforwardly, more Tolstoyanly, than in this prototype of all Russian prison stories. Resurrection is both a homage to Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of Siberia and a proud artistic assertion that Tolstoy can write with the same vigour about prison villages, convoys and punishment blocks as he had, in his prime, written about ballrooms and battlefields.

  This earlier self, the Tolstoy of War and Peace, is the third of the great giants, after Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, whom he confronts in Resurrection. There is here a deliberate and fascinated reconsideration of some of his own greatest effects, as though a composer had chosen to introduce a theme from some grand earlier symphony into a later, more tightly wrought chamber work. One obvious such occasion is the scene where Maslova (still, then, Katyusha) comes to catch a glimpse of her beloved Nekhlyudov at the railroad station. It is quite as vivid as anything in Anna Karenina. But in Maslova, there is always this sense that life will have its power to snatch her back from the jaws of death. She is not a ‘good’ person; but in a way which the moral Nekhlyudov can never be, she is good at being alive: competent in the way that an animal is competent to look after itself. Her separation from Nekhlyudov is enforced in our minds by the image, on that wet, muddy, autumn night, of her trying to catch Nekhlyudov’s attention. He is
in the train, just passing through. She is pregnant, ruined. He does not know about any of that. He does not know that she is pregnant; he does not even know that she is there, looking at him, as he lolls back on the velvet upholstery of the railroad car and plays cards in his shirtsleeves.

  As soon as she recognised him, she knocked on the pane with a frozen hand. But at that very moment, the third bell rang, and the train slowly moved off, at first back, and then one after another the interlocking carriages began to move forward in jerks. One of the players got up with the cards in his hand and began to look out of the window. She knocked again and pressed her face against the glass. At that moment, the carriage by which she was standing started up with a jerk and pulled out. She followed it, looking through the window. The officer wanted to lower the window, but just could not. Nekhlyudov got up and, pushing aside that officer, began to lower the window. The train increased speed. She was walking with quick steps, not falling behind, but the train was gathering more and more speed and at the very second that the window was lowered, the guard pushed her aside and leapt into the carriage. Katyusha was left behind, but even so, she ran along the wet boards of the platform; then the platform stopped and she could only just stop herself falling, as she ran down the steps to the ground. She ran, but the first-class carriages were far ahead. The second-class carriages had already whizzed past her. Then, even more quickly, the third-class carriages passed, but she kept running. When the last carriage had shot by, with the lamp behind, she was behind the water-tank and no longer sheltered from the wind, which snatched her headscarf from her head and made her dress stick to one side of her legs. . . .65

  It is at that moment, almost literally dragging her way through mud and slime like the girl in the song, that she decides to do away with herself by throwing herself under the next train to pass. The little girl who is running along beside her, trying to keep up, calls for her to come home, but she goes unheeded. And then, as so often in this book, nature itself intervenes.

  He, that is to say the child, his child which was in her, suddenly started, knocked against her, and smoothly stretched himself and then again started to push with something thin, delicate and sharp. And suddenly, everything which a moment before had so tortured her that it seemed it was impossible to live, all her malice against Nekhlyudov and her desire to be avenged on him, if only by her own death, all this suddenly receded. She calmed down, straightened herself, tied back her shawl and hastily went home.

  Exhausted, wet, muddy, she returned home and from that day began that spiritual transformation in consequence of which she became what she was now. From that dreadful night, she stopped believing in God and in the good. Before that, she really believed in God and believed that other people believed in Him; but from that night, she became convinced that no one believed in this and that everything they say about God and His laws is a fraud.66

  The popular Soviet editions of the novel to this day neuter the passage. They say merely that from that day onwards, she stopped believing in goodness, which the scenes of her life in prison prove to be untrue; and they add a sentence of propaganda about people only using belief in God as a means of deceiving others. Tolstoy’s point – identical to one about himself in A Confession – is thus completely lost.67 Maslova has the gift of life (which Anna Karenina loses a long time before her suicide) but she is rudderless without God. Maslova has plenty of innate decency, but no sense, as she had before, of a moral law governing her destiny. Her conscience has been stifled. Something of the same kind, the book would have us believe, has happened to Russia itself. By the end of Anna Karenina, we have come to doubt the simple patriotism of War and Peace. To Nikolay Rostov, it was natural to love Russia. For Levin, cultivating his garden while the troops move into the Balkans, patriotism has lost its innocence. In Resurrection, sex itself has undergone a similar contamination. The novel ends on the stirring note of Nekhlyudov reading the Gospel of St. Matthew and deciding to go out and establish a Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

  Many readers have wondered how such a thing is possible for someone who follows Tolstoy’s line of complete non-involvement in all forms of political life. Nekhlyudov seems like the man censured by Pastor Bonhoeffer in his book Ethics (a book born out of the agonising choices of political involvement under the Government of Hitler): ‘If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility, he detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence. . . . He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men.’68

  The novel fails to recognise the fact which so obsessed Dostoyevsky, that if good men do not hold on to power, bad men will take it from them. Power is not a neutral thing which will simply evaporate if, as Nekhlyudov, with such incredible folly, desires, you disband the armies and let all the criminals out of gaol. Anyone with sense knows what would happen if murderers were allowed to roam free, or if small countries had no defence against large countries. St. Augustine remarked that it was a characteristic of heretics that ‘they are unable to see what is perfectly obvious to everyone else’.69

  A contemporary of Tolstoy’s was to write, ‘Power is great and terrible because it is a sacred thing. . . . Power exists not for itself alone but for the love of God. . . . To live without power is impossible.’ These words were written by Pobedonostsev himself, whose Reflections contain more obvious sense than Resurrection. ‘Only fools have a clear conception of everything. The most cherished ideas of the human mind are found in the depths and in the twilight: around these confused ideas which we cannot classify revolve clear thoughts, extending, developing and becoming elevated.’70 It is usually suggested that Pobedonostsev censored Resurrection merely out of pique, because he objected to the portrait of himself as Toporov. (Topor means an axe and the adjective from it, toporny, means clumsy or uncouth.) In Nekhlyudov’s interview with Toporov, Tolstoy places into the fictitious Procurator’s mouth the exact words spoken by Pobedonostsev to Tanya: ‘I know all about this case. . . . and I am most grateful to you for reminding me of it. The provincial authorities have been somewhat over-zealous. . . .’71

  Certainly, Pobedonostsev would not have liked the assertion that ‘in the depth of his soul he did not believe anything. . . .’ or ‘his attitude to the religion which he upheld was like that of a poultry keeper to the offal on which he feeds his fowls: offal is very unpleasant, but the fowl eat it and love it, therefore they must be fed on offal.’72

  The personal slights, however, extending throughout a whole chapter, got past the censor and were published and distributed to thousands of readers. Russia in 1899 was not a nice place to live. But there have been worse places, such as Russia in 1935. It is worth remembering that the assault on Pobedonostsev (one of the most powerful men in Russia) was allowed to be read by the entire literate populace. Compare this with the fate of Osip Mandelstam, a little over thirty years later, who committed the crime of reading aloud to a disloyal friend, in what he thought was privacy, a sixteen-line poem which denounced Stalin, ‘the Kremlin mountaineer’. By the standards of a later generation, the draconian ‘Pob’ was a softy.

  But he recognised that in Resurrection Tolstoy had composed the most unforgettable assault on the Russian Imperial regime. Both abroad and in Russia, Resurrection was more widely disseminated than anything Tolstoy had previously written. For every person who had read War and Peace there were twenty who had read Resurrection; and the book makes it abundantly clear that Russia is about to explode. The medicines prescribed by it may be foolish; the diagnosis of the illness was accurate.

  Pobedonostsev could not stop intelligent foreigners from reading the book and concluding that Russia was in a terrible political mess. But, as Procurator of the Holy Synod, he could not ignore Tolstoy’s claim that Russia had departed, not merely from decency, but from God himself. It was in this area that the propaganda war between Tolstoy and the Government was to be waged, for, short of locking Tolstoy up and making him into a political martyr, there was little the Government could do, save tak
e the extremest possible measures to brand Tolstoy as a godless heretic.

  The trouble with the war was that both parties played into the other’s hands. To be anathematised by Pobedonostsev was just what Tolstoy wanted. Part of the daemon, the impulse which kept him writing the novel, was the liberating knowledge that he was striking out on his own and annoying, not just the Procurator, but many other people as well. In England, where the book was banned by the circulating libraries, it is doubtful whether Chertkov liked the book all that much. And it must have been with unmixed glee that Tolstoy watched his wife transcribing the manuscript and correcting the proofs, her brow furrowed with disapproval. She described herself as ‘repelled by the calculated cynicism of his description of the Orthodox liturgy. For instance, “The priest extended to the people the gilt image of the gallows on which Jesus Christ was executed” instead of “the cross”. The sacrament he calls “kvass in a cup”. It is scurrilous and I hate it.’73 She did not dare to object, or she would lose the right to keep Resurrection for her Collected Edition. She was meant to hate it. So were the clergy, with whom Tolstoy had been enjoying a battle ever since he had published A Confession.

  That there were imperfections in the Orthodox Church, no one would deny. Pobedonostsev imagined a self-righteous foreigner, an Englishman, coming to Russia and saying, ‘Prove me your faith by your deeds!’ Pobedonostsev admitted that if an Orthodox were challenged in this way ‘he could only hang his head. He would feel that he had nothing to show, that all was imperfect and disorderly. But in a minute he might lift up his head and say, “We have nothing to show, sinners as we are, yet neither are you beyond reproach. Come to us, live with us, see our faith, study our sentiments, and you will learn to love us.”’74 Tolstoy, however, was a tougher nut to crack than the supercilious foreign visitor. He had been baptised and brought up in the Orthodox Church and he did not like what he found. In Resurrection, he depicted the Orthodox religion in as offensive a manner as he could. He said nothing of the good which poor Orthodox priests did in the towns, nor of the mystical tradition kept alive in the monasteries, such as the Optina monastery where he himself had been a grateful visitor. By inserting such crude attacks upon the Church into his novel, Tolstoy enabled the Government, in the person of Pobedonostsev, to sidetrack the terrible political assault which the book represented. The Church could respond in a manner which was calculated to make Tolstoy a suspect character in the eyes of ‘ordinary Russians’.