by A. N. Wilson
Pirogovo, with its many servants, and its well-organised seigneurial routines, represented a way of life which was soon doomed to pass away for ever, as surely as its master had done. It was here perhaps that Lev Nikolayevich conceived his remarkable story After the Ball. He wrote it out in a single day, the previous August, at Yasnaya Polyana. Together with The Restoration of Hell, it represents the very best of Tolstoy’s later genius. The extreme popularity which the tale has always enjoyed in Russia (during those periods when it has not been censored) testifies to the singular truth about that country which it embodies. The original title was Daughter and Father. In the story, the protagonist, who loves the young daughter of a crusty old colonel, watches her dance with her father at a provincial ball. In his devotion to the young woman, the old man seems so touching, so humane, so civilised. Everything at the ball is beautiful – the clothes, the food, the cut glass and the crystal. But the young man returns from the ball at dawn and sees the old colonel in a different light. A court martial has taken place, and a poor wretch is being punished by running the gauntlet while all the men in his regiment strike him with the knout. For all his shrieks and pleas, the colonel shows no mercy.13
After the Ball is written with all the prophetic passion of the later Tolstoy, but with all the observant consciousness of things as they are which had characterised the great work of his maturity. It is great Tolstoy: it ranks with the very greatest things he ever wrote. And it shows how even at the end, when he was determined with his bronchitis-is-a-metal side to get the tone of the times completely wrong, nevertheless, with his artistic sense, he was unerring. Even if no other literature survived from Russia in the first decade of this century except this one, extremely short story, we should be able to predict the Revolution, and the subsequent character of Russian life in the twentieth century. It contains all the horrible paradox that a nation which can feel so tenderly has somehow been condemned to policemen and armies and governors of the most ruthless severity. After the Ball seems to contain within it the secret of how one nation could produce in the same generation Nijinsky, Shostakovich, Akhmatova . . . and the Stalinist purges.
Tolstoy’s attitude to this people, with whose history and sufferings he had so long identified, suffered the most painful strains as, throughout 1904 and 1905, it underwent the experiences of war and social revolution. Beelzebub, in The Restoration of Hell, had been puzzled by the central and fundamental question about war: which is, how do you persuade people to do it? Killing another human being because you do not like them is understandable, perhaps – though Tolstoy does not say so. But why should you be prepared to kill another human being merely because your Government has fallen out with their Government? Easy, says the devil who invented nationalism. ‘We do it like this: we persuade each nation that it is the very best in the world – Deutschland über alles, France, England, Russia über alles, and that this nation (their name is legion) ought to dominate all the others.’14
This diabolical view is probably endemic in nationhood, but during the 1890s, it became epidemic. In the two decades before the First World War, fervent nationalism, for reasons which no historian has ever been able properly to analyse, began to run wild, leaving the poorer nations of the world entirely at the mercy of the rampaging lunacy of the richer ones. China was one of the worst-hit nations. The full extent of British exploitation of the Chinese will probably never be known: but it was the Chinese slaves, shipped over to the diamond mines of the Transvaal, who ensured that the wealth of South Africa continued to pour into London, even after the disasters of the Boer War; just as later (though subsequent British Governments all tried to hush it up and they buried the wretches in unmarked graves) it was Chinese slaves who were bought by the British and used as cannon-fodder on the Western Front between 1914 and 1916.
The Germans and the French were no better, nor were they alone. The Russians had no business in Manchuria, nor did the Japanese; but in those days the Chinese with a civilisation infinitely more ancient and distinguished than all their exploiters put together could do nothing about it. The Japanese considered that they owned the Chinese Liaotung Peninsula, and ever since the Russians had seized it from them in 1898 the Japanese wanted to get it back. They therefore staged a surprise raid on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904. It was no Pearl Harbor. They managed to destroy only one Russian battleship. But Port Arthur was besieged, and the war which ensued was a damaging one, with dreadful consequences. The Russians came to the rescue of their fleet, the Japanese held firm, and it was January 2, 1905, before the Russians surrendered Port Arthur. By then, a hundred and ten thousand Japanese had been killed in or around Port Arthur. In the land battles, notably the Battle of Mukden in February and March 1905, the casualties were of the order of fifteen thousand Russians and twenty-four thousand Japanese killed in one month.
The war was a humiliation for the Russians; it was the first time in modern history that an Asian power had achieved a victory over a European. ‘Japan in the space of a few decades not only drew level with European and American peoples, but surpassed them in technological advances,’ Tolstoy observed. ‘The success of the Japanese in the technology not only of war but of all material advances as well has shown how clearly and how cheap these technological advances which are called culture are. It doesn’t cost anything to copy them and even to invent new ones. What is invaluable, important and difficult, is a good life. . . .’15
These reflections came to Tolstoy in the summer of 1905 after the Japanese had routed two Russian naval squadrons off the island of Tsushima. The war excited in him painful feelings of patriotism. In spite of his devotion to the religion and the mysticism of the East, it obviously hurt his national pride that the Russians were being defeated by yellow men. He put it down to the fact that the Russians were at least notionally Christians, whereas the cruel Japanese could give themselves up wholeheartedly to the art of war. ‘Although we are bad Christians it is impossible not to hide the incompatibility between the Christian faith and war. Recently (that is in the last thirty years or so) this contradiction has come to be felt more and more [that is, by him. . . .]. And therefore in a war with a non-Christian people for whom the highest ideals are the fatherland and the heroism of war, Christian peoples are bound to be defeated. . . .’16
This view reflects not only a touching affection for his own fatherland, but also a gentle interpretation of Russia’s predicament which is quite at variance with the spirit of the times. It is the voice of an Ant Brother speaking from under a chair. Later that summer, the elder statesman Sergey Witte accepted President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to go to New Hampshire and enter peace negotiations with the Japanese. The American President had suggested himself as the peacemaker, and they spent the month of August bountifully doling out bits of Chinese territory to the Russians and the Japanese respectively. The Russians kept the Chinese Eastern Railway and the whole of the northern part of Manchuria. The Japanese got back the Liaotung Peninsula. Witte was a stubborn negotiator on the Russians’ behalf, but no one could disguise the fact that it was a Japanese victory.
The war had seriously weakened the position of the Government and strengthened the hand of the violent revolutionaries. ‘How right the Slavophils are when they say that the Russian people try to avoid power, that they run away from it. They are prepared to offer it to bad people rather than be soiled by it themselves,’ Tolstoy observed.17 Rather than regarding this national characteristic as a disastrous one, Tolstoy added, ‘I think that if that is so, they are right.’ Not everyone agreed with him. The year 1905 was marked by a series of disruptions whose collective effect was to change Russia for ever. It was particularly noticeable (considering how comparatively small they were in numbers) how powerfully instrumental were the urban proletariat in bringing about this social disturbance.
A strike was declared in the capital, which by January 7 immobilised St. Petersburg. Then on January 9 Father Gapon had led his famous demonstrati
on. A crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand marched on the Winter Palace. They were forbidden by their sacerdotal leader to carry red flags or socialist paraphernalia. Instead they bore icons, religious banners and assurances of their ‘unshakeable trust in the Tsar’.18 They wanted a separation of Church and state; the introduction of income tax; the replacement of indirect taxation by progressive income tax; an amnesty for political and religious prisoners. As history knows, they were greeted by violence, and several hundred people were killed by Cossack troops.
After Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, the general strike in St. Petersburg spread to all the large towns in the Empire. In February there were peasant revolts in the Kursk and Oryol provinces. In June, just before the Council of Peace in New Hampshire with the Japanese, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied at Odessa. In defiance of police prohibitions, a joint congress of zemstvo and city representatives was held in Moscow in July demanding a representative assembly, the first steps towards a democratic Parliament and constitution. Meanwhile, there were petty mutinies going on throughout the armed forces, and outbreaks of rebellion and violence among the rural poor.
The whole Empire was seething: waiting for change. Russia suddenly felt young, vigorous, violent. Milton, just before the Civil War in England which ended in the execution of Charles I, wrote, ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. . . .’19 This was what it was like in Russia in 1905. Tolstoy, who was rereading Taine’s History of the French Revolution, knew quite well that his own woolly theories of universal love and brotherhood would cut no ice whatsoever with people who suddenly felt as if it were in the very air the possibility of changing a hateful and oppressive political system. Aylmer Maude tells us that when he visited Russia in 1902, Tolstoy was a national hero – the man who had dared to reply to the Synod and rebuke the Tsar. When Maude returned in 1906, things were very different. ‘Politics had become to most people as the breath to their nostrils, and consequently Tolstoy, who was telling them to leave politics alone, was to the Liberals a stumbling-block and to the Socialists a snare.’20 Tolstoy’s role in the Revolution was analogous to the role of the Church in modern South Africa. When the whole thing is over and everyone is wallowing in blood one will see that the various well-meaning clergymen who believed themselves to be important to the people and their struggle are, after the event, all but forgotten.
Russia was changing. It was like the moment, described so incomparably by Tolstoy in Resurrection, when Nekhlyudov and Maslova, as very young people, emerge from the Easter liturgy in darkness and hear the sound of breaking ice coming to them upon the midnight air. Spring and dawn and resurrection are in the sound. On October 8, 1905, a railroad strike was declared, followed by general strikes in all the major cities of the Empire. The Bolsheviks at this stage were a tiny minority party representing the interests of a tiny minority of the population. They were deeply divided amongst themselves on questions of tactics and ideology. We are not to imagine all these discontented people as proto-communists, though, as Lenin gleefully recognised, they were doing the communists’ work for them. They were ‘a noble and puissant nation’ who had had enough. They did not yet know in any detail what they wanted instead of the present absurdly unjust state of things. But they wanted change. The Emperor was guided in everything by his unpopular German wife, a stubborn, religious maniac who by now acted upon the advice of the holy man Rasputin. The Tsar’s folly in retrospect is hardly possible to believe. His reaction to the October strikes was to say that he would appoint a strong military dictator to crush out the spirit of the times. His cousin the Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich was selected for this unenviable role. The Grand Duke said that if appointed to such a role he would shoot himself, and that the Emperor must accept Witte’s moderate proposal for an elected Duma or Constituent Assembly. At least a modest start had been made. They were miles away from having a decent system of government. But at least they had a Duma, a place where members (albeit elected chiefly by great landlords and rich businessmen) could criticise what was going on.
Tolstoy’s irresponsible view that the Russians hated power and would not soil their hands with it was ultimately a romantic fiction. Their system was so constituted that they could not get their hands on power without huge constitutional upheaval. By the time of the second Duma, it looked as if some sort of reform might take place, but all hopes for this were dashed by the third Duma. The Tsar and his little circle of advisers were solely responsible for this terrible folly. Tolstoy, with the Slavophils and religious cultivators of indifference who agreed with his point of view, was also responsible in a small measure. After the abolition of slavery in 1861, there was nothing about the structure of nineteenth-century Russian society which could not have been reformed by a gradual process of liberalisation. The state could have offered religious freedom to the people and disestablished the Church. The tax system could have been reformed so that rich merchants and big landlords helped the masses rather than the other way around. The majority of the population of the Empire were peasant farmers, who merely wanted to farm their land in peace, owning their own property and harbouring their own profits. Tolstoy could not approve of them because he regarded it as an a priori truth, culled from the writings of Henry George, that land should be in public ownership. But public ownership implies an all-powerful state, and Tolstoy did not want that either. His muddled political thinking, which carried away so many Russians at the beginning of the century, was understandably discarded for wilder counsels. The fact that he ever had influence at all on any wide scale is a symptom of how terrifyingly out of control Russia had become.
Lenin, watching from abroad, was completely fascinated by the ‘really glaring’ contradictions in Tolstoy’s works, ideas and teachings. Lenin was chiefly struck by the contradiction between the incomparable artist and the ‘landowner obsessed by Christ’. He was unimpressed by the ‘worn-out sniveller’ who beat his breast and boasted to the world that he now lived on rice cutlets. But there are other Tolstoys. ‘On the one hand, there is the pitiless criticism of capitalist exploitation, the exposure of violence perpetrated by the Government, the revelation of all the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and the achievements of civilisation and the spread of poverty, the degradations and sufferings of the working masses.’21
Lenin, who was more relentlessly logical than Tolstoy, saw the vast contradictions in Tolstoy’s person and standpoint as symptomatic of ‘those contradictory conditions in which the historical activity of the peasantry in our Revolution was set. . . .’ Lenin saw that the interests of different groups of people must ultimately find a political expression. This is common sense, and therefore Tolstoy rejected it. But with the wise and imaginative part of himself he saw that if you refuse to soil your hands with power, there will be others who are not so squeamish.
This wilful absence of common sense in Tolstoy was ultimately the death of his artistic imagination. He had been trying to hammer it on the head ever since his breakdown following Anna Karenina. But it would not quite die. The battered baby obstinately kept crying. In spite of the fact that Tolstoy in various moods only wanted to be a Buddhist mystic or a peasant in a field or social prophet, his artistic imagination kept breaking out – the grass between paving stones. Witness After the Ball, dashed off in a single day.
Bronchitis-is-a-metal hated all this and between the years 1903 and 1906 he wrote and rewrote his ridiculous essay on Shakespeare in order to convince himself that art was an unnecessary adjunct to the good life.
The first time Tolstoy was taken to the Bolshoy Theatre as a little boy, he saw nothing at all. ‘I did not know that it was necessary to look at the stage sideways and I looked straight in front of me at the opposite boxes.’ He recalled this fact in 1903, when he was beginning to reread Shakespeare, and the tunnel vision which the story reveals is everywhere apparent in one of the most disagreeable pro
ductions of his later years: the long essay, Shakespeare and the Drama, finally published in 1906.22 He spent three years of desultory work on the subject, rereading a lot of Shakespeare and his critics in preparation for this notoriously unsuccessful and somehow embarrassing attempt to dislodge Shakespeare from his pedestal. When we consider how much else was going on in Tolstoy’s life at this time, the Shakespeare essay seems all the stranger. It was published in the year in which he nearly lost his wife, and he did lose his favourite daughter. When not distracted by his own illness, or that of his family, or by quarrels which tore Yasnaya Polyana apart, or by his followers being put into prison, or by his peasants causing an affray, or by the generally deteriorating state of Russia itself, Tolstoy still had a huge amount of literary work on hand. Even if he were never to finish Hadji Murat and Father Sergius, there was all the work of propaganda to be done – denunciations of war, capital punishment, property and oppression wherever they might be found, letters to followers and disciples all over the world, a compilation of spiritual reading. Why, in the middle of all this, did he choose to write fifteen thousand words of nonsense about Shakespeare?
