Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  It must have been with very mixed feelings indeed that Valerya gradually learnt that her young guardian wanted to back off from any matrimonial possibilities. His tone of voice and manner to her do not suggest that he could ever have been wholly happy married to a woman of his own class or intellectual level. Never really having known anything of family life, he shrank from it; it is hard not to feel that the hectoring bullyism, alternating with grossly sugary endearments, were a subconscious expression of how little he wanted to be drawn into the world of ‘family happiness’, which, if not with his mind, then with his imagination and his instinct, he always held to be an idea of hell. In January, he cut the Gordian knot, and wrote to her:

  Dear Vladimirovna, That I am to blame towards myself and towards you – terribly to blame – there is no doubt. . . . I’m not capable of giving you the same feeling as your fine nature is prepared to give to me. . . . In a few days time, I’m going to Paris, and when I shall return to Russia, goodness only knows. . . .24

  * Ha чтo Вы, дни?, a lyric by Yevgeny Baratynsky, seems to anticipate Larkin’s equally Goncharovian question.

  Chapter Seven

  Travels

  1857 – 1862

  I shall pass through many places

  That I cannot understand –

  Until I come to my own country,

  Which is a pleasant land!

  Hilaire Belloc

  In the spring of 1857, anxious to continue their young friend’s education, Nekrasov and Turgenev took Tolstoy to Paris.1 The foreign capital excited in him a mixture of fear and delight. ‘A new city, a new way of life, no ties, and the spring sunshine which I caught the feel of.’2 In the first few February days, he suffered from indigestion, stayed too long in his shiveringly cold bedroom, and met mainly Russians. Nekrasov, who was only staying in Paris for a few days before going back to Russia, was a gloomy companion, and Turgenev was getting on Tolstoy’s nerves. One day when they went, for some reason, to a shooting gallery, Tolstoy detached himself from their company and went and hired himself an apartment. Doubtless there were reasons for his desire to be independent. By the middle of February, he was picking up interesting acquaintances on the street.

  But, as something to fall back on, Turgenev’s companionship was welcome. The older novelist showed the younger all the sights. They saw the forest and castle of Fontainebleau. They went to Dijon and explored all the churches. ‘Turgenev doesn’t believe in anything, that’s his trouble; he doesn’t love, but loves to love.’3 They played chess together in cafés, chatted and idled away the days. In Dijon, Tolstoy recorded, ‘Turgenev is a bore; I want to go to Paris, but he can’t be left alone. . . . We almost quarrelled.’4

  In March when he had returned to Paris, Tolstoy was visited by one of those mauvais quarts d’heure which were to assail him throughout his life. Returning from a debauch, he lay awake in his apartment and suddenly felt ‘tormented by doubts about everything. And now, even though they don’t torment me, they are still with me. Why? And what am I. . . .?’5 The moment passed. A few days later, his brother Sergey appeared, and they had a happy fortnight together with their friend Obolensky. They went to Versailles. They went to the theatre. Turgenev took them to a number of balls and dinners. They managed to find women readily available. On March 30, they saw off Sergey at the station, and on April 3, Turgenev arrived at Tolstoy’s lodgings and woke him up, in order to confide his worries that he was suffering from spermatorrhoea. ‘But he won’t have treatment and gads about. . . .’6 So far, then, so good. Paris was turning out to be all that the young foreign visitor might expect. ‘I can’t foresee the time when the city will have lost its interest for me, or the life its charm,’ he wrote to his friend Botkin.7

  But the letter was unfinished. The next day, he was – by his own confession – ‘stupid and callous’ enough to go and witness a public execution by guillotine. It was an experience paralleled by Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin, who also saw a beheading in France. When Tolstoy returned to finish his letter to Botkin he had to admit that his whole mood had changed. ‘I’ve seen many horrible things in war and in the Caucasus, but if a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes it wouldn’t have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant.’8

  The letter continues, in a richly Tolstoyan way, to condemn not just the killing, but the system which produced it. There are some fine generalisations: ‘The Law of man – what nonsense! The truth is that the state is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.’9 These sentences suggest that he had been reading Proudhon and de Maistre, or at least mixing with those who had read these authors. Later, they were to be crucial elements in his mental furniture, essential presuppositions for the Tolstoyan way of looking at things.

  The disgustingness of the guillotine remained for Tolstoy one of the most vivid and life-changing experiences.

  When I saw the head part from the body and how it thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind, but with my whole being that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed, and that though everyone from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I knew it would be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but is my heart and I.10

  He wrote those words twenty years after the experience. For the time being, he felt merely revolted, not least with himself for having been party to the spectacle.

  Tolstoy was unable to sleep for days after he saw the execution. Paris suddenly became hateful to him. He felt no interest in the self-consciously ‘literary’ milieu in which Turgenev moved. And, anyway, his lodgings were noisy and uncomfortable. He was staying in a maison garnie, inhabited by thirty-six couples. ‘Nineteen of them were illicit alliances. That infuriated me.’11 A single person in the midst of so much noisy conjugality felt sadly alone in the world. He longed for his own kind. As a student at Kazan, he had come into his inheritance at Yasnaya Polyana, and the knowledge that he could now move solely in the world of his family had sent him rushing home to the companionship of his aunt Toinette. Once again, in Paris, ten years later, he made a similar bolt towards the bosom of the family. This time, he must have been desperate. He heard by chance that some cousins, whom he had barely met during the previous season at St. Petersburg, were spending the winter in Geneva. These were his first cousins once removed, Lisa and Alexandra Alexandrovna Tolstaya. They were ladies-in-waiting to the only daughter of Nicholas I, the Grand Duchess Marie of Leuchtenberg. Lisa had been the Grand Duchess’s governess Alexandra was to be given the charge of educating the daughter of the present Emperor, the Grand Duchess Marya Alexandrovna, who was eventually to marry Queen Victoria’s son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and later Duke of Saxe-Coburg.

  It was therefore into a courtly little group, whom he did not know particularly well, that Tolstoy burst in the spring of 1857. ‘Paris was driving me mad!’ he exclaimed to Alexandra.12

  For all she had known or cared, Tolstoy had been in Russia. But without explanation, he continued, ‘I rushed to Geneva as soon as I knew you were here, certain that you could save me.’13 Like a lot of things spoken in jest between the sexes, this was true. The two cousins began an animated and affectionate conversation which was to last for very nearly the next half-century.

  Here they were just foreigners, from the same class and family and background. But being in Switzerland made it easier for them to make friends. Tolstoy’s clumsy Pierre Bezukhov manners made it hard for him to enjoy the company of courtiers. When he got to know her better, he could find it astonishing that Alexandrovna should wish to spend all her time with the Royal Family. ‘Up the chimney,’ as he called the Royal Household.

  But in Switzerland, in the cold spring weather, they could walk by the lakes and mountains without the constraints which a royal drawing
room would have imposed upon their happy flow of words and jokes and ideas.

  The weather was exquisite, the landscape – need I say? We gloried in it with the delight of dwellers in the plains, though Lev Nikolayevich did sometimes try to curb our enthusiasm by assuring us that this was as nothing compared to the Caucasus.

  Still, it was quite enough for us. . . .14

  After a few happy days at Geneva, Tolstoy disappeared and his cousins went for a walking tour.

  After several days of wandering in the mountains and valleys we went to Lucerne, and there Lev made another of his unexpected and unpredictable appearances. He seemed to spring out of the earth. . . .15

  Alexandra, who probably came to know Tolstoy better than anyone else in the world, including his wife, has not only left us the best reminiscences of him, but was also responsible for drawing out of him, over the next forty-five years, a stream of magnificent letters, in which he revealed more about his life and character than in any other place. They are much better than the diary: they were written for the readership of someone in whose presence it was impossible to pose. Quite simply, Alexandra Alexandrovna liked this young literary genius in the family. In her, he found a companion who was vivacious, witty, sensitive, moral, and nobly born. For a man whose experience of women had hitherto been mainly of aunts or tarts, this was heady, beautiful. Here was a woman whom he could love as a friend. She brought out the best in him. ‘I’m so ready to fall in love,’ he confided in his diary. ‘If only Alexandrine were ten years younger.’16

  She was forty. He was approaching his twenty-ninth birthday. All that summer, they became more fond of one another. She even half made a Christian out of Tolstoy. The diary records a number of confessions and communions. But he could not bring himself to view her as a partner in any but a spiritual, cerebral sense. All summer long, he continued to lust after one girl and then another. Sometimes his lust was gratified, sometimes not. ‘I’m just a silly little boy,’ he said. . . . ‘Alexandrine has a wonderful smile.’17

  Cynics could say that Alexandra had a lucky escape. They think that ‘being married to Tolstoy’ was an absolute condition, rather than one which was uniquely undergone, endured or enjoyed by his wife. Had he married Alexandra, he would have married a kind and mature friend, who understood him, and would have been able to laugh him out of the many calamities of the later years. There are plenty of signs that he found her physically attractive. But somehow or another, during the summer of 1857, it was decided that they were to be ‘just friends’. Never just friends, however. He had to play up the age difference and give her a nickname of babushka, the word in Russian for ‘crone’ or ‘Granny’. It is a bit like calling her ‘old girl’.

  By the time of his birthday, August 28, he was back home, priding himself that he had not had a row with his sister Masha. There was much that the brother and sister did not talk about. Her marriage was going badly. She was getting on too well with Turgenev. His story Faust, which had appeared in The Contemporary the previous year, was obviously all about her. The figure of Vera is a transparent portrait of Tolstoy’s sister. Now, in August 1857, she announced that she was going to stay at Spasskoye with Turgenev, alone. ‘This angered me,’ said Tolstoy. ‘We met rather coldly. . . .’18 But his thoughts were still with Alexandra in Ostend.

  The awful 28th is over, and I hope that you are still alive, my dear [she wrote]. I long for a letter from you. I am awaiting for it as if I were dealing with a reasonable, steady individual, someone capable of remembering his good resolutions. I am waiting for news of your sister, who interests me very much and whom I have often thought about since our conversations. . . . Ostend is a dreadful anthill where the sound of the sea is drowned in the noise of a horribly smart set of people who swarm on the beach from morning till night and plunge into the sea, regardless of age or sex. . . .19

  Nobody knows for certain what happened that summer between Turgenev and Tolstoy’s sister. Probably, it all remained on the level of a flirtation. In the autumn, brother and sister went to Moscow, where they enjoyed seeing Fet, and derived rather less enjoyment from some of their other social encounters. There was the ‘disgusting literary atmosphere’ chez Aksakov. And there was a dinner at the Bers household. Old Bers was a man who mingled medical skill with social climbing and amorousness. He had had an affair with Turgenev’s mother, and was almost certainly the father of Turgenev’s half-sister.20 The Bers were old friends of the Tolstoys. Hitherto, Tolstoy had found them charming, but not on this occasion. Bers’s wife, a woman no more than two years older than Tolstoy himself, struck him that evening as ‘awful, balding and frail’.

  These judgements would be of no interest for us were it not for our knowledge that this awful, bald woman would one day be Tolstoy’s mother-in-law. At this period Sofya Bers was only thirteen years old. She was just one of the little girls he had always known. It was with some relief that he escaped Moscow and took the train to St. Petersburg, the journey which was to be of such significance to his most extraordinary literary heroine. In the autumn of 1857, it was more or less the only bit of railroad track in the whole Empire. (It had been completed six years previously.)

  For the rest of the autumn he was in St. Petersburg. Alexandra ‘is a joy and a comfort. I’ve never seen a woman who could hold a candle to her,’ he reflected at the end of October.21 In November, ‘she is definitely the woman who charms me more than any other’.22 In December, ‘She has me on a string and I am grateful to her for it. However in the evenings I am passionately in love with her, and return home full of something – happiness or sadness, I don’t know which.’23

  They were happy times in St. Petersburg. The new Emperor was a liberal. His wife was a European. For the first time since the days of Alexander I, there was hope that there might be a change for the better in Russia’s political system; hope that Russia might become a place where the intellect, and freedom, and all the things for which Pushkin had lived and written, were valued.

  As has happened with almost every change of regime in Russia in the last two hundred years, optimists saw signs of spring. In the first year of the new reign, for example, there had been widespread reforms and amnesties. The surviving Decembrists were allowed to return. The institution of cantonists – by which the sons of military conscripts were compelled into military orphanages, and themselves made into soldiers – was abolished, thus liberating eighty thousand children. You were no longer fined for being Jewish. The Emperor was known to favour educational reforms, the building of railroads and – most important of all – the emancipation of the serfs. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.’ In that famous saying, the Emperor encapsulated the liberal belief that it was possible to undermine the effects of revolution by getting in with the reforms first. The liberal nobility had their hopes raised by talks of local government reforms and representative assemblies.

  In not so many years, when Tolstoy’s imagination had had time to absorb this period, his excitement at the reforming spirit of Alexander II’s early years and his wonder at the sight of the returning Decembrists would be turned into the Francophile enthusiasm of 1805, and the free-thinking zeal of that ur-Decembrist Pierre. It was the habitual process by which Tolstoy made experience into fiction. Events and experiences of the present, or near past, were fed back into the distant past. The little boy in Childhood is, in many ways, really a young man in the Caucasus. That actual young man in the Caucasus would become, when the time came to revise The Cossacks, a much more innocent fellow than Tolstoy had been. But in the company of his cousin Alexandra a richer ore was being tapped. He had always had the entrée to the great world if he wanted to take it. But it was she who made it possible. War and Peace would be unendurable if, in all the ‘peace’ scenes, we saw the dinners, levées, balls and parties entirely through the myopic eyes of Pierre. The narrator who describes these scenes has liberated the clumsy, awkward side to Tolstoy – the
side who wrote The History of Yesterday – and made him free – free as Jane Austen – to observe, to satirise the world of the Scherers and the Rostovs. This is the world which Alexandra opened up for Tolstoy in the winter season of 1857–58. She quite literally brought out the best in him. It is a good thing to mix with those who like us. Alexandra liked her cousin. She civilised him in a way that Turgenev’s languid manners and political chic could never do. It was she, too, who, in her good-humoured way, saw the essential point about Tolstoy. She saw why his moral aspirations – as they occur in his fiction, and in his life – are so moving, while his moral presumption is so repulsive. She quoted to him a sentence of Charlotte Brontë’s: ‘Do not think I am good: I only wish to be so.’24 There are broad gulfs between wanting to do good and doing good, as she wrote to him in the summer of 1858. By then, she was inescapably tied up at Court and he was in the country. She describes how she and the Grand Duchess and the other ladies of the Court were bumping into each other as they rushed for the magazine tables to find anything new by their new hero. He was at Yasnaya Polyana and his attention was being more and more devoted to the peasants and to their future. But his work and his imagination would have been enormously diminished if he had not been given, through his amitié amoureuse with the ‘old girl’, a glimpse up the chimney.