Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  For this man who has no powers of invention, who is competent only to recount the experienced and the perceived, can never exclude himself, the experiencer, the perceiver, from the field of vision. Being egocentric to a degree which arouses his own despair, he cannot forget himself even in moments of ecstasy, cannot transcend the restrictions of self-awareness even under the stress of passion. Not even where he is most in his element, in the free environment of nature, can he escape for a second to merge himself in his surroundings — much as he longs to cease being shadowed by the ego. “I love nature, when she is all around me” (note the “me” and the “I”), “but I must be in her. I love her when the balmy airs enwrap me, and then move onwards into the infinite; when the tender grass-stems, which I press to the ground as I recline on them, tint the broad pastures with their green.” We see that for him the most entrancing landscape is no more than radius and circumference of the circle at whose center the ego is fast fixed; and that, as far as he is concerned, the whole spiritual world revolves forever around his bodily personality. This does not mean that he was vain in any base sense of the word; that, arrogantly overestimating his own importance, he considered Tolstoy to be the navel of the universe. Despite the intensity of his self-feeling, no one was ever more self-critical. But he was cabined within his own body, was prisoned by his own selfhood, was unable to ignore himself. Since he was wingless, there was withheld from him that supreme gift of destiny — the ability to outsoar himself, in a dream, in a flight of fancy, in an illusion.

  Incessantly, therefore, as if under compulsion, and always in opposition to his conscious will, by day and by night, to the verge of exhaustion and beyond, he had “to keep watch over” his own life, to study it and explain it. Never could his autobiographical frenzy abate, any more than his heart could stop pulsing in his breast, the stream of consciousness cease to flow through his brain; for him the art of the writer was summed up in the endeavor to hold assize upon himself and pass judgment. Consequently, there is no form of self-description which Tolstoy has not practiced: simple narration, a purely mechanical record of memories; examination of conscience, moral appraisement, and confession; self-description as a means of self-control and self-incitation; autobiography as an aesthetic and religious exercise — the confusing multiplicity of these types of self-portraiture, some naked and others veiled, almost defies analysis. This much is certain, that just as Tolstoy was the most photographed man of modern days, so also is he more effectively autobiographed than any other. From his diary we know him as thoroughly when he is seventeen as when he is an octogenarian; we learn of his youthful passions, the tragedy of his marriage, his intimate thoughts. These are recorded with the same frankness and accuracy as are trivialities and foolish escapades. In this we see another contrast with Dostoevsky, who lived “with closed lips,” whereas Tolstoy liked to live “with doors and windows always open.” Owing to his mania for self-revelation, we know every detail, every episode, of his long life as thoroughly as (from innumerable photographs and sketches) we know his physical aspect when shoemaking and when talking to the peasants, on horseback and at the plowtail, at his desk and playing tennis, in the company of wife and friends and grandchildren, asleep and lying dead. Moreover, this vivid portrayal is countersigned by the numberless memoirs and sketches penned by those who came in contact with him; wife and daughter, secretaries, interviewers, and casual visitors. The woods of Yasnaya Polyana, turned into paper, would hardly supply enough for the printing of these memoirs of the lord of the manor. No other writer has ever, of set purpose, made his inner self so widely known to the world; rarely indeed has any been of so communicative a disposition. Since Goethe, no great figure in the world of letters has been pictured with such a wealth of detail by all the arts of subjective and objective description.

  Tolstoy’s urge to self-observation begins with the dawn of consciousness. It appears in the rosy-skinned infant, making busy but awkward investigatory movements before it has learned to speak; and ends only on the deathbed of the old man of eighty-two, when the failing lips can give vent to nothing more than unmeaning breath. Between the silence that came before the beginning and the silence that followed the end, there was not a moment without speech or writing. At nineteen, when he had just left school, Tolstoy bought a diary. On the opening pages we read “I have never kept a diary before, not seeing the use of it; but now, when I am engaged in developing my faculties, a diary will help me to follow the course of their development; it will contain rules for my life, and in it my future activities must be foreshadowed.” Thus in the beardless youth we can already discern the Tolstoy of later days; the world-teacher; the man who regarded life from beginning to end as a “serious matter,” which must be lived accordingly. Like an accountant, he starts by drawing up a balance sheet, showing debits and credits, promise and performance. This young man is fully aware that his personality is a good asset. He records the fact that he is an “exceptional man,” upon whom is imposed an “exceptional task.” At the same time, he is under no illusions as to the amount of voluntary energy he will need in order to coerce into moral activities a nature inclined to sloth, to extravagant outbursts, to fits of impatience, and to sensuality. With a sure instinct, this precocious psychologist recognizes his chief dangers, which are typically Russian: those of excess, thriftlessness, waste of time, lack of discipline. He therefore devises an apparatus for the control of his daily doings, so that there may be no void spaces of time. His diary is, first and foremost, to be a stimulus; it must continually help him in the work of self-instruction, and must enable him to read his own heart. Again and again, in these communings, we are reminded of Tolstoy’s determination “to keep watch over his own life.” Thus unsparingly does the lad summarize the record of one of his days: “From 12 till 2 with Bigitshev; spoke too openly, vain, self-deceptive. From 2 till 4, gymnastics; little tenacity and patience. From 4 till 6, ate dinner, and made some needless purchases. Did not write home, laziness; could not make up my mind whether I should drive to Volkonsky; said very little there, cowardice. Have behaved badly; cowardice, vanity, heedlessness, weakness, laziness.” Thus early and thus ruthlessly does the young man grip himself by the throat, and the grip is not relaxed for the sixty years and more that remain to him of life. At eighty-two, as at nineteen, Tolstoy has the whip ever ready to lacerate his own hide. The diary he keeps in old age still tells us abusively that he had been “cowardly, bad, indolent” when the tired body has failed in discipline, has not succeeded in responding adequately to the Spartan demands of the will. From the beginning to the end, Tolstoy posts sentries in front of his life. Like a Prussian drill sergeant, a choleric martinet, he endeavors with shouts, menaces, and blows to scare away tendencies toward self-indulgence and to quicken his advance towards the goal.

  The artist in Tolstoy was hardly less precocious than the moralist, and was in like manner introspective. At twenty-three he began (and there is no second instance in world literature) a three-volume autobiography. The first thing Tolstoy contemplates as artist is his own image in the mirror. A very young man, knowing little of the world, he is thrown back for materials into the tiny realm of his own experiences, the memories of his still recent years of callowness. With the naïveté of Dürer, who at twelve snatches up the silver stylus to sketch his girlish face, still unfurrowed by time, upon the first piece of paper that comes to his hand, Artillery Lieutenant Tolstoy, with the down new-grown on cheeks and chin, fired by the lust of pen craft, sits down in a fortress in the Caucasus to tell of his “Childhood,” his “Boyhood,” and his “Adolescence.” No question as to for whom he may be writing seems to have entered his mind; and still less is he concerned about being printed in a periodical or a book, about publicity of any sort. He acts instinctively, prompted by an urge towards self-enlightenment by self-description. The prompting is blind, is not clarified by any conscious aim; nor is it illuminated by what he will in later years insist upon as the justification for art, “the light of a mor
al demand.” The young officer’s action is purely impulsive. Curious as to the possibilities of life, and more than a little bored by the life he is actually leading, he devotes himself, in the spirit of an amateur, to the task of sketching his home and his childhood. He knows nothing as yet of the revivalist spirit which will overpower him in later years; he does not speak of “confessing his sins,” of a conversion “to the good”; he does not aspire to depict the “abominations of his youth” as a warning to others. Not wishing to “do good” to anyone, he is moved solely by the sportiveness of a youth who is still half boy, the sum of whose experiences concerns the way in which he “has glided on out of being a little child” into being a young man. In this mood he describes his first impressions, his father, his mother, and his other relatives, his tutor, human beings in general, animals, the world of nature; and he is successful, thanks to the splendid frankness which none but the purposeless can know. How different is this carefree narration from the serious and analytic soundings of Leo Tolstoy when he has become an author animated with a conscious intention, one who feels it incumbent upon him to show himself to the world as a penitent, to artists as an artist, to God as a sinner, and to himself as a model of humility. The youthful autobiographer is nothing more than a young man of birth and breeding who has no taste for spending the whole of his evenings at the card table, and who (feeling a trifle homesick in this remote and unfamiliar place) wishes to warm his heart by contemplating in imagination those whom he cannot now see in the flesh.

  When the unexpected happens, when this artless and purposeless autobiography brings him fame, Leo Tolstoy does not write the anticipated sequel, “Manhood”; the well-known author cannot recapture the tone of the unknown scribbler. Not even at the climax of his powers does the master craftsman succeed in limning another self-portrait so expressive as the first. For insofar as an artist gains recognition, he loses something that is irrecoverable, the ingenuousness of self-communing on the part of one who has no thought of being watched and overheard, and has no ulterior aim; he forfeits a childlike candor which is possible only in the darkness of anonymity. In every writer except those who are hopelessly corrupted by literary success, there begins when success comes an intensification of spiritual bashfulness. The elements in his nature that demand privacy must hide behind a mask, lest a pose of theatricality or an assumption of falseness should distort the sincerity which can exist unmasked and unalloyed in those alone to whom fame, with its buzz of the world’s curiosity, has never come. Therefore in the case of Tolstoy (whose life history has the breadth of a Russian landscape) half a century must elapse before the artist systematically devotes himself to self-portraiture in pursuance of the scheme debonairly initiated in youth. Now, thanks to his religious bent since the crisis, the aim is a new one. Autobiography has acquired a moral, a pedagogic purpose. He does not write in order that he may learn to know himself; he wants his self-portraiture to instruct and convert the world. “Every man can gain a great deal for himself by writing as faithful a description as possible of his own life, and he cannot fail thereby to do much good to his fellows.” In these weighty terms does he herald his undertaking, and the octogenarian makes elaborate preparations for what is to be the justification of his latter day outlooks. But hardly has he begun the memorial than he desists from it, though he tells us that he still considers “such a perfectly faithful autobiography more useful... than the artistic chatter which fills the twelve volumes of my works, to which my contemporaries ascribe a quite unmerited importance.”

  His standard of sincerity has grown with increasing knowledge of his own existence. He has come to recognize that truth is mutable, can be variously interpreted, and is of abysmal depth. Thus, whereas the young man of twenty-three skied swiftly and unconcernedly across the smooth surface of the snow, the old man, deliberately questing for truth and equipped with an anxious sense of responsibility, hesitates and shrinks back in alarm. He is troubled by “the inadequacies and the unfairnesses which inevitably creep into an autobiography”; is afraid lest “such an autobiography, even if it were not directly falsified, might become equivalent to a lie owing to the display of false lights, owing to a deliberate thrusting of good points to the front while keeping bad points in the background.” He frankly admits: “Furthermore, when I had made up my mind to describe the naked truth, and not to gloss over any of the badness of my life, I grew alarmed at the thought of the effect which such an autobiography could not fail to have.” Tolstoy the moralist, the man who is concerned with the effect of his actions upon others, grows more and more convinced that there is no safe and upright course to be steered “between the Charybdis of selfishness and the Scylla of excessive frankness.” Having planned to write an account of his own life which should reveal “all its baseness and shamefulness,” which was to be an autobiography penned “from the standpoint of good and evil,” he realizes that the plain speaking would be too dangerous, and renounces the undertaking precisely because he has so much veneration for absolute sincerity. We need not greatly deplore the loss, for the writings of this period (My Confession, for instance) show that from the time of the religious crisis onwards Tolstoy’s craving for sincerity took the form of longing for self-abasement, a flagellant’s lust for self-castigation, so that what he regarded as “frankness” concerning his own thoughts and actions had become tantamount to a persistent vilification of himself. The Tolstoy of the closing years did not want to describe himself to men, but to humiliate himself before men, wanted to tell them things which he was ashamed to admit even to himself. We are therefore entitled to assume that this definitive autobiography, with its trumpeting of alleged basenesses and its pillorying of reputed sins, would have been a caricature.

  Besides, what need have we of formal autobiography when, as already said, Tolstoy (like Goethe) writes the fullest and most truthful of autobiographies in the complex of his works? The novels and the tales contain perfectly recognizable portraits of their author in every phase of his career. His double stalks through the pages. In The Cossacks, Lieutenant Olenin, who runs away from melancholy and idleness in Moscow to seek refuge in his profession and in the arms of nature, is, down to every thread of his attire and every line of his face, Artillery Captain Tolstoy. Look at the meditative and dejected Count Bezukhov in War and Peace, and at Squire Levin, the seeker after God, the man greatly troubled about the meaning of existence, in Anna Karenina; in both you have Tolstoy shortly before the crisis, drawn to the life. Who can fail to see, hidden under the cowl of Father Sergius, the famous author’s own struggle for holiness? What reader of Devil can fail to perceive in that work a study of the aging Tolstoy’s resistance to the promptings of the flesh? Prince Nekhlyudov, the most remarkable of all the creatures of his fancy, stalking symbolically through many books, is the ideal Tolstoy, the author as he would like to be, the mirror of his conscience, the man to whom he ascribes his own intentions, and upon whose shoulders he unloads the burden of his own moral deeds. Saryntsev, in And the Light Shineth in the Darkness, wears so thin a mask, and the drama is so full of the atmosphere of Tolstoy’s domestic tragedy, that every actor who plays the title role makes himself up as an impersonation of the author. A nature so comprehensive as Tolstoy’s had inevitably to be distributed among a number of fictional personalities. We have to piece it together again, to assemble it out of the parts scattered in many books; when we have done so, the writer’s entity is unmistakable. That is why anyone who reads Tolstoy’s novels and tales, anyone who does this while keeping his wits about him, can dispense with biographical details. No outside observer could give us so clear a picture as we get in Tolstoy’s self-observations. He reveals the most perilous of his conflicts, discloses the most hidden of his feelings. Tolstoy’s prose, like Goethe’s verse, is a general confession, in which picture supplements picture, unceasingly, throughout a long life.