Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  The Tolstoy we care most about, the man who between 1863 and 1877 wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, kept his journal least assiduously. Again, in the 1890s, when he composed his third full-size novel, Resurrection, there was a slacking off. The Tolstoy we might do with less of, the elderly prophet in baggy peasant shirt and forked white beard, who lived on and on into this uncongenial century, became quite attached to daily diary entries, and well over two-thirds of Mr. Christian’s seven-hundred-page selection comes from the years between 1880 and 1910. The young Tolstoy, up to his marriage to Sonya Behrs at the age of thirty-four, accounts for one hundred and sixty-five pages. He priggishly announces to himself at the outset: “I have never kept a diary before, because I could never see the benefit of it. But now that I am concerned with the development of my own faculties, I shall be able to judge from a diary the progress of that development.” Finding odd moments between bouts of dissipation and soldiering, of European travel, estate management, and educational theory tested upon peasant children, he takes note of his toothaches and losses at cards (both prodigious) and even now and then of his considerable literary successes, which began with “Childhood,” composed when he was twenty-three. He is a tireless compiler of lists of rules for himself—“Rules for developing the physical Will,” “Rules for developing the emotional will,” “Rules for subordinating to the will the feeling of love of gain,” “Rules for developing lofty feelings and eliminating base ones, or, to put it another way, rules for developing the feeling of love and eliminating the feeling of self-love.” His was an ego determined to concoct a superego as powerful as itself: “I am beginning to acquire physical will-power, but my mental will-power is still very weak. With patience and application I am sure that I shall achieve everything I want.” His program for himself was infinitely ambitious: “What is the purpose of a man’s life? Whatever the point of departure for my reasoning, whatever I take as its source, I always come to the same conclusion: the purpose of a man’s life is the furtherance in every possible way of the all-round development of everything that exists.”

  He never moderated that mighty sense of purpose. In these early pages he pays homage to Franklin and Rousseau and Sterne, and reminds us of how much Tolstoy himself remained rooted in the eighteenth century, a man of the Enlightenment to whom “man’s primary faculty” is self-evidently “reason.” We are also reminded that Tolstoy was an orphan from the age of nine, left with no conscious memory of his mother, who died when he was not quite two, and with no very directive image of his father. Nicholas Tolstoy, a dandified playboy whose own father had bankrupted the family with such luxuries as sending his laundry across Europe to be washed in Holland, had married Leo’s mother, Marya Volkonsky, as a way out of financial destitution; she was five years older than he and characterized in a contemporary letter as “an ugly old maid with bushy eyebrows.” A shy, well-educated woman, she was the heiress to the rich estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which Leo, the youngest of the four sons that the couple bore, was eventually to inherit.

  Although “Childhood” should not be taken (as Tolstoy himself insisted) as a purely autobiographical document, the sketch of the father surely conveys the emotional temperature of Nicholas’s paternity: “He was a man of the preceding century and possessed the elusive nature blended of chivalry, initiative, self-confidence, amiability and rakishness characteristic of that century’s youth.… His life was so full of all kinds of diversions that he had no time to form any convictions and, besides, he was so happy in life that he saw no necessity for it.” Within a few years of his father’s sudden death of apoplexy, the child’s affectionate grandmother and his aunt Aline, his official guardian, both died; though the prosperous family matrix provided more aunts (notably his father’s distant cousin, Aunt Toinette) and tutors and servants to fill the void, Tolstoy’s feeling, as recalled in My Confession, was that “I was alone, wholly alone, in my search after goodness. Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart to be morally good, I was met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I gave way to low passions, I was praised and encouraged.” An unnamed “kind-hearted aunt” would tell him that “there was one thing above all others which she wished for me—an intrigue with a married woman.” Tolstoy states of this nurturing time, “I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing.” For all of his life, and in crisis proportion for the last thirty years of it, he was to feel, as a journal entry of 1891 puts it, “depressed by the evil life of the gentry of which I’m a part.” A year later he wrote, “even the people who are always with me—my children, my wife.… In the midst of all these people I am alone, quite alone and isolated.”

  As alone as God, he created himself, and a clangor of resolve and self-rebuke rings through the early journals. “I’m tormented by the pettiness of my life … but I still have the strength to despise both myself and my life. There’s something in me that makes me believe that I wasn’t born to be the same as other people.… I am old—the time for development has passed, or is passing; but I’m still tormented by thirst … not for fame—I don’t want fame and I despise it—but to have a big influence on people’s happiness and usefulness.” The vagueness and largeness of “people” perhaps compensate for something more palpable, a social deficiency that Tolstoy describes as “my inability to get on with people.” He asks, “Why are all people—not only those whom I don’t like or respect and who are of a different bent from me, but all people without exception—noticeably ill at ease with me? I must be a difficult, unbearable person.” The next year, at the age of twenty-four, he asks his journal, “Why does nobody love me? I’m not a fool, not deformed, not an evil man, not an ignoramus. It’s incomprehensible.” And the next year, a soldier now, he asks, “What am I?” and answers:

  One of four sons of a retired lieutenant-colonel, left an orphan at seven years of age [nine, really] in the care of women and strangers, having received neither a social nor an academic education and becoming my own master at the age of seventeen, without a large fortune, without any social position … without patrons, without the ability to live in society, without knowledge of the service, without practical talents—but with enormous self-love!… I am ugly, awkward, untidy and socially uneducated. I am irritable, boring to other people, immodest, intolerant and bashful as a child. I am almost an ignoramus.… I am intemperate, irresolute, inconstant, stupidly vain and passionate like all people who lack character. I am not brave.

  In fact he was brave, and had citations to prove it, and if an ignoramus one who read widely all his life, not only in Russian and the foreign languages expectable among the aristocracy (French, German, and English) but in, as occasion demanded, Dutch, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Ugliness is a self-accusation hard to pin down for rebuttal. Henri Troyat, in his biography of Tolstoy, does not give a source for his affecting word-picture of “little Leo” as he, having admired his face disguised with a turban and a burnt-cork mustache, became grieved to see that “when his make-up was washed off again there was the same old baby face, with its shapeless nose and thick lips and little gray eyes. A big, fat boy, a ‘patapour,’ like Papa said.” A few years later, according to Troyat, “he had hoped his features would improve with time, but at nine, at ten, he still had his cauliflower nose and little steely eyes set deep in their sockets.” The hero of “Childhood,” it seems safe to presume, speaks for “little Leo” when he confesses, “I thought there would be no happiness on this earth for someone with such a broad nose, thick lips and small gray eyes as mine. I prayed to God for a miracle that would transform me into a handsome man, and I would have given all I had and all I might ever have in the future for a handsome face.” On the youthful photographs, he looks as handsome as most, and the face from “Childhood” that we remember is this one, after the hero, made bold by a little champagne, has energetically danced with the lovely little Sonya:

  Passing through Grandmother’s boudoir I glanced at myself in the mirror: my face was bath
ed in sweat, my hair was mussed up and my cowlicks were sticking up worse than ever; but my general expression was so lively, healthy and good-natured that I was pleased with myself.

  But what the mirror sees, or other people see, is less important than what the mind’s eye conceives. “My shyness was aggravated by the conviction that I was ugly,” states the narrator of “Boyhood.” “I am quite certain that nothing has such a telling impact on a man’s cast of thought as his appearance, and not his appearance itself so much as his conviction that it is attractive or unattractive.” Tolstoy thought of himself, with a certainty as unusual as his sense of moral isolation, as physically ugly, and the mother, herself homely, who might have weaned him away from self-dislike on this score (“I am told,” he noted in his “Recollections,” “that she was very fond of me, and called me, ‘mon petit Benjamin’ ”), died before he could remember her. In “Childhood” he constructs a mother who offers the rather stern consolation, “Remember, Nikolenka, that no one will ever love you for your face, so you must try to be a good and clever boy.”

  Try he did, becoming a cruelly demanding tutor to his own lazy and wayward pupil. “It’s sad to know,” he wrote, “that my mind is uneducated, imprecise and feeble (although supple), that my feelings lack constancy and strength, that my will is so wavering that the least circumstance destroys all my good intentions.” “I lack perseverance and persistence in everything. As a result I’ve become unbearably repulsive to myself.” This repulsiveness extends to his writing: “Got up early, got on with Childhood; it’s become extremely repulsive.” Of the same work, he wrote, “I’m absolutely convinced that it’s no good at all. The style is too careless and there are too few ideas to make it possible to forgive the emptiness of content.”

  From the start, he was the most harshly self-critical of writers. Of A Landowner’s Morning, which he had begun with considerable enthusiasm (“Feel positively ashamed to be devoting my time to such follies as my stories when I’ve begun such a wonderful thing”), he finally concluded, “It’s definitely poor, but I’ll publish it,” just as, two months before in 1856, he had noted, “Finished Youth; poor, but sent it off.” Self-condemnation marches in stride with his growing oeuvre. “I’m altogether dissatisfied with the Caucasian tale” (8/18/57). “Received Family Happiness. It’s a shameful abomination” (5/9/59). “Corrected the proofs of The Cossacks—it’s terribly weak” (1/23/63). During the years of his two great novels, the carping diary falls all but silent, and does not show Tolstoy disparaging War and Peace. His work on Anna Karenina, however, proceeded by surges of enthusiasm and indifference, and at the end, as the novel thrived at the bookstores, he grumbled to his family, “What’s so difficult about describing how an officer gets entangled with a woman? There’s nothing difficult in that, and above all, nothing worthwhile. It’s bad, and it serves no purpose.” In My Confession, begun in 1879, he dismissed his great creative period in a paragraph:

  Notwithstanding that during these fifteen years I looked upon the craft of authorship as a very trifling thing, I continued all the time to write. I had experienced the seductions of authorship, the temptations of an enormous pecuniary reward and of great applause for valueless work, and gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material position, and of stifling in my soul all questions regarding my own life and life in general. In my writings I taught what for me was the only truth,—that the object of life should be our highest happiness and that of our family.

  Those around him were dismayed at the new direction he took at the end of the Seventies. Sonya wrote to her sister in November of 1879, “Leo is still working, as he calls it, but alas! all he is producing are philosophical disquisitions! He reads and thinks until it gives him a headache.… My only hope is that he will soon get over it, and it will pass, like a disease.” Turgenev, visiting in 1880, wrote, “In contemporary European literature he has no equal.… But what is one to do with him? He has plunged headlong into another sphere: he has surrounded himself with Bibles and Gospels in all languages, and has written a whole heap of papers.” The superego embodied in the diary has triumphed, and the journals greatly expand, singing the same conscience-stricken, self-hating song—religious self-mortification mixed in with exorbitant artistic standards and a dandyish Weltschmerz. “I often wish to die. Work doesn’t absorb me” (9/2/81). “Shameful and vile. Terrible depression. Full of weakness. I must take care of myself, as though I were asleep, so as not to damage what I need when I’m awake. I’m being more and more dragged into the mire, and my convulsions are of no avail” (4/11/84). “I try to be serene and happy, but it’s very, very hard. All that I do is bad, and I suffer terribly from it” (5/28/84). In his peculiar mire he devoted more energy to making boots, mingling with the peasants, urging chastity and poverty upon his unreceptive family, and reproaching his own laziness and sensuality than to writing: “I’m writing The Kreutzer Sonata and even On Art, and both are negative and evil, and I want to write something good” (7/24/89). “Thought about the fact that I’m fussing over my writing of The Kreutzer Sonata out of vanity; I don’t want to appear in public as not fully finished, clumsy, even poor. And that’s bad” (8/29/89). “In the morning I wrote a new variant of The Kreutzer Sonata—not badly, but sluggishly” (10/6/89). “Looked through the whole of The Kreutzer Sonata, made deletions, corrections and additions. I’m awfully fed up with it. The main thing is that it’s artistically wrong and false” (12/6/89). “Read through all the works of fiction which I’ve begun. They’re all bad” (6/14/94).

  The year 1895 brings us, with a weary sigh, into the second volume of the journals. Tolstoy had fifteen more years to live. In this period he managed to finish Resurrection—“Finished Resurrection. It’s not good. Not revised. Too hurried. But I’m free of it, and it doesn’t interest me any more” (12/18/99). He also produced “Master and Man” (“pretty worthless”) and Hadji Murád (“stupid”), some fables, the play The Light Shineth in Darkness, several volumes of an anthology of the world’s wisdom called A Cycle of Reading, and a large number of pamphlets and pronouncements. “But still I’m a disgusting, repulsive creature,” he reassures his diary. “And how good it is to know this and remember it” (10/9/1900). “Thank God, I’m loathsome and worthless to the last degree” (12/21/09). His struggles with virtue’s impossible demands, the world’s intractable problems, his incorrigible family, his implacably clinging wife, and his own oppressive celebrity make for a hectic atmosphere. His diary seems to be read, almost like a bulletin board, as he writes it, and Sonya is keeping her own, which he in turn reads, while he hides his top-secret diary in his blouse or his boot. She rifles through his papers in the dead of the night and, at the height of her jealousy of Vladimir Chertkov, the chief apostle of the Tolstoyan creed, waves in her husband’s face passages she has copied from his old diaries as proof of his homosexuality. It all seems childishly violent and repetitive, and had been going on for years. In the year 1889 Tolstoy recorded a dialogue with Sonya that captures the tone of their discussions, not entirely to his own advantage:

  I. “What wonderful articles about non-resistance.” She. “Yes, but it’s all talk. Everyone knows it and no one does it, because it doesn’t pay.” I. “That’s because people don’t drum it in.” She. “However much you drum it in, they won’t do it.” I. “Why not, if it’s drummed in in the same way as, say, the holiness of the sacrament?… You don’t understand.” She. “What is there to understand? I understand already what you’re going to say next. You just keep on and on about the same old thing.”

  Tolstoy for all his self-flagellation and willed saintliness only rarely detects the tyrannical egoism of his determination to “drum in,” to achieve the long-deferred “all-round development of everything that exists,” beginning with his wife and recalcitrant, roistering sons. A few months after his dialogue with Sonya, he does confess that “the devil” assails him “in the form of a proud passion, a desire that everyone should immediately share my views.” In 1891 he
rather desperately concludes, in regard to the world’s deplorable plight, “The only possible arrangement is to make all men good.”

  He often notes that he is depressed: “I’m depressed. I’m a worthless, pathetic, unnecessary creature, and moreover a self-centered one. The one good thing is that I want to die” (5/3/84). “I don’t remember such depression for a long time” (5/13/95). “I can’t sleep for depression” (1/12/97). He reads William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and finds that “in James’ book it is said that I’m a melancholic, close to mental illness.” Saturation in these melancholy diaries led this reader to conclude that Tolstoy suffered from the ailment of excessive clear-sightedness. He saw through everything to the hard truth, and art was the one realm where such clairvoyance could be utilized. Having had his spell of sexual adventuring and family happiness, he saw through these pleasures to their bottom of selfishness and transience. He saw the oppression and cruelty in the autocratic, capitalist system that prevailed, but also saw that Socialist revolution was no solution. His critiques of Marxism, two decades before it came to rule his country, are prophetic: