Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  It is tempting to hope that one or more of the women who plied their trade in the Haymarket attracted the custom of the future author of The Kreutzer Sonata. But we have no evidence that any such transaction took place. Certainly, Tolstoy had every chance to witness the ‘laws of morality’ being flouted in the household of Alexander Herzen who, over the previous twenty years, had experienced a series of amorous catastrophes, if possible involving a woman called Natalya. Natalya the First, whom Herzen had seduced away from her Muscovite husband, and who was to bear him children and to marry him, had been consistently unfaithful to him with one of his best friends. She had died, and after a period of several years’ mourning, Herzen had received into his London home a Russian radical called Ogaryov and his wife. She was also called Natalya and she was to bear Herzen three children. At the time of Tolstoy’s visit, this complicated emotional story was in full swing. A daughter by Herzen’s first union – another Natalya – was such an admirer of Childhood that she begged her father’s permission to sit in the corner of the study and listen as the two great men conversed. It should have been worth listening to: the greatest Russian novelist, and the greatest radical Russian thinker of the nineteenth century. Moreover, they had something to talk about. On March 2, the Illustrated London News informed its readers, ‘Tomorrow morning nearly forty millions of the human family who tonight will retire to bed as slaves will rise up free. The 3rd March (Feb 19th Old Style) has been fixed upon for the emancipation of serfs throughout the Russian Empire.’ It is inconceivable that the two Russians did not discuss emancipation, but not in the hearing of little Natalya. She was mortified when the servant showed in Count Tolstoy. He was dressed in new fashionable clothes, and he spoke to her father about prize fights, of which apparently he had seen a good number since his arrival in London. She never heard one word of ‘good talk’ between the two men.

  Herzen, for his part, found Tolstoy as annoying as did most of his fellow littérateurs. He wrote to Turgenev that they were seeing each other most days. ‘We have quarrelled. He is stubborn and talks nonsense, but is a naïve and a good man.’

  It was inevitable that Tolstoy should consort with a fellow countryman, particularly one with such impeccably radical credentials as Herzen. But he also did what he could to taste English life, and see some of the great men of the time. He went to the Houses of Parliament and heard Lord Palmerston making a speech for three hours. Not surprisingly, he found it pretty boring. One wonders how well he understood spoken English. On March 14, he went to St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly and heard one of Dickens’s famous readings – from A Christmas Carol. A portrait of the great novelist was always to hang in Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana. He read and reread Dickens. As an old man he was to say, ‘Dickens interests me more and more. I have asked Orlov to translate A Tale of Two Cities, and I will ask Ozmidov to do Little Dorrit. I would undertake Our Mutual Friend myself if it were not that I have something else to attend to.’ We do not have any record of Tolstoy meeting his hero, though we have a good example of the way in which first-hand biographical ‘material’ is often misleading. Tolstoy told his first biographer Biryukov that he had once heard Dickens in a large hall ‘lecturing on education’. It has been more or less proved that Dickens did not give any ‘lectures’ on education at the time of Tolstoy’s visit to London. His only recorded public appearance is the reading of A Christmas Carol. Such a fact leaves us to draw one of two conclusions. One is that Tolstoy’s English was not up to understanding the famous dramatic renderings which Dickens made of his own work. This is a tempting comic interpretation: that Dickens with all his histrionic powers was trying to recreate the Ghost of Marley and the Spirit of Christmas Past only to give to an intelligent foreigner the impression that he was ‘lecturing on education’. These Englishmen. Sadly, the duller alternative is probably true. Tolstoy told Biryukov that he had heard Dickens in a large public hall and Biryukov, knowing of Tolstoy’s and Dickens’s interests in pedagogy, supplied the deadly untruth.40

  The impression would be an easy one to make, since Tolstoy continued, while in London, to make his survey of European educational methods. Was he not now in the land of Mr. Gradgrind himself?

  A few days after his arrival in London, he set off on a tour of seven schools with a note from the Education Department in Downing Street: ‘I shall feel much obliged to the teachers of the above named schools, if they will kindly enable the bearer of this, Count Leon Tolstoy, a Russian gentleman interested in public education, to see their schools, and if they will give him, as far as they can, all the explanations and information which he may desire. Count Leon Tolstoy is particularly anxious to make himself acquainted with the mode of teaching Natural Science, in those schools where it is taught. Matthew Arnold.’41

  It is tantalising, once again, that we have no record of what passed between Tolstoy and Arnold when they met, on the occasion when this letter was composed. Arnold, as an Inspector of Schools, had an unrivalled knowledge of the Nonconformist Board Schools throughout England and therefore, perhaps, a more comprehensive experience of the English poor than any man of his class or learning. Those who know him only as a poet and critic can have no idea of how hard Arnold worked, and of how much he knew of what was going on. Tolstoy rather surprisingly left any such areas of inquiry until much later in his career. His What Then Must We Do? of 1881 is a horrified account of the Moscow slums. It makes it quite clear that Tolstoy in all his previous sixty years had been only dimly aware of the way that the urban poor lived. Arnold could have no such illusions.

  Another reason why we should value more knowledge or information about their meeting is that Arnold, with his remarkably cosmopolitan tastes in reading, was the first Englishman to write an intelligent account of Tolstoy’s novels. His essay on Anna Karenina remains one of the very best things ever written on Tolstoy. Perhaps if some Boswell had been present he would have found Tolstoy wanting to quiz the great poet and critic about prize fights. But I doubt it. I think they would have had something to say to each other.

  Armed with Arnold’s letter, Tolstoy set off for the schools. It shows how much he valued his days with the London children that he kept mementoes for the rest of his life. At St. Mark’s Practising School in Chelsea, for instance, the children were asked to write an account of how they spent the day, and to present these ‘compositions’ to their noble foreign visitor. The little essays are preserved in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, and like the frozen figures of Pompeii or Herculaneum the neatly copied, little copperplate scripts carry us back at once to the scene: ‘Chalkley Age 12 years, Dear Sir, When I came to school I played at marbles and lost all mine’ – Tolstoy would have sympathised with that! – ‘then we were called in and when we had had three lessons we came out to play again then I had some more marbles and lost them and then we went in and had Latin and Music and while we had Music there was a hailstorm but when we came out to dinner it left off raining them [sic] I bought some more marbles and lost them then I played at egg at [sic] then we were called in school for afternoon’s work first we had arithmatic [sic] and now we are having composition which I like very much.’42

  A German educationalist, Leopold Weise, visiting England a decade before Tolstoy, disliked what he found. There was a lack of ‘unrestrained joyousness, the poetry of boyhood and youth. . . .’ Even little boys in England wore hats and were ‘from as early a period as their twelfth year treated in all respects as men’.43 Tolstoy felt very likely the same, but his reading of Dickens would have convinced him that the English had seen through the faults of their own system. Rather than feeling that Dickens had got things right, he must have had the much eerier sense that the whole of London, and in particular its poor schoolchildren, had actually been conjured up by Dickens’s imagination. The fact that we have an essay in Chalkley’s own hand does not dissuade us of the obvious truth that Chalkley was invented by Dickens. It must have given the young novelist pause when he left London behind him and took the road fo
r Brussels, where the French anarchist philosopher Proudhon was residing.

  Proudhon later told Herzen that ‘Monsieur Tolstoi’ stood out with great individuality among the many Russians who had visited him. They spoke of emancipation and all it would mean to the new Russian Empire. They spoke of the Christian religion to which Proudhon was implacably opposed. One hears much of Proudhon in Tolstoy’s later tones. Here is some of Proudhon’s Jesus: ‘In my own home I have seen my mother, my aunts etc., reading the Bible and following the preacher of Nazareth like the holy women; today the people no longer understand the Gospels and do not read them at all. The miracles make them laugh and all the rest is Greek to them. As for the moral side, they no longer feel it is in their hearts.’44

  Tolstoy a little sycophantically informed the sage that he had never previously understood Proudhon’s obsession with Roman Catholicism; but having seen England and France all was made clear. ‘Only then did I understand how right you were.’ What? In England in 1861? How did Tolstoy form that impression? Anyway it was all right, he informed Proudhon, because ‘in Russia the Church amounts to zero’.45 This may have been true in the inner life of intellectuals but it is scarcely an accurate picture of Russia, nor a helpful comparison with countries through which Tolstoy was travelling. Whatever the faults of the Wesleyan and Jewish schools which he saw in London they were not, like all Russian institutions – universities, the army, the prisons – doggedly sworn to obedience to the national religion. True, French Catholicism made various feeble attempts to win back the intellectuals from the seductive power of Renan – later of Loisy. But it was a doomed cause since the Church in France had none of the political power of the Church in Russia. Heresy was not in France, as in Russia, a criminal offence. Were these remarks meant seriously? If so, did Tolstoy have any idea of how life was lived in his own country by those who were not cocooned and protected by membership of the landed class?

  His instinctive reaction to things was always that of a landed aristocrat, who enjoyed the almost monarchical independence afforded by being lord of his own estates, and governor of his own people’s destiny. From time to time, he would fulminate against the autocracy, or plead with the Tsar for clemency, or in some way or another clash with the Government. But it was not really like just anyone clashing with the Government. It was done in the spirit of a man who knew that his cousins were all at Court; in the spirit of an aristocrat whose imagination was fed on the memories of the Decembrist Rising and, before that, the assassination of the mad Tsar Paul. He assumed, always, that it was the aristocrats’ function to tell an autocrat when he went too far. Like all those grand families who claimed that the lineage went back to Prince Ryurik, Tolstoy – on his Volkonsky side at least – could believe himself to be of older, better family than the Romanovs themselves.

  The remark about the Church is typical: ‘In Russia the Church amounts to zero.’ This means that the majority of writers he had met in St. Petersburg were non-pratiquants and that at Yasnaya Polyana churchgoing was left to people like aunts. As a remark about Russia, it means nothing at all.

  Perhaps the most important idea of Proudhon’s to be absorbed into the Tolstoyan world view, however, is the phrase La propriété, c’est le vol. This will remain truer, in Tolstoy’s view, than the truth of the British constitution as long as mankind exists. On it alone, he opined in 1865, ‘can the Russian revolution be based’.46 For the purposes of Tolstoy’s future development, it does not much matter that he did not mean the same by this phrase as Proudhon had done. Proudhon’s main criticism of the communists was that they wished to destroy private property. He was not opposed to innocent property-owners. He denounced rather those big property owners who used their property to exploit the labours or freedom of others. In his book What is Property? Proudhon began by saying that if you asked ‘What is slavery?’ you could answer in one word – murder. ‘Why then to this other question, what is property, may I not likewise answer “theft”?’

  Happily, it lies quite outside the scope of this book to say whether Proudhon was right or wrong in the analyses which he proposed.47 Nor must we recount the ways in which Proudhon backtracked and changed his mind on this and other questions. The anarchic strain in Proudhon was what appealed to Tolstoy; and when the time came, the phrase about property being theft would explode in Tolstoy’s life. But Proudhon is more famous, perhaps, in the Tolstoyan connection, for having provided Tolstoy with one of his better-known phrases.

  At the time of their meeting Proudhon was just finishing a book entitled War and Peace. The Russian chronicler of Tolstoy’s days and months, who normally gives us such a full account of things, merely says, ‘evidently, since he was just approaching the end of his work La Guerre et la Paix, Proudhon told Tolstoy about it’.48 For many years of this century, it was barely possible to mention Proudhon in Russia because of his lamentably un-Marxian form of socialism. When Eykhenbaum was bold enough, in 1928, to express his astonishment that not one Russian literary critic had ever perceived the close association between Proudhon and Tolstoy’s great novel, he received an icy reception from the establishment. This particular theory of Eykhenbaum’s was suppressed, and the book in which it occurs was published abroad. In 1957 Eykhenbaum mysteriously renounced his former theories, urged his readers to take no notice of his own work on Tolstoy and to read only the immortally-fascinating essays of Lenin.

  Two things come together here: the fact that Proudhon was, from a Marxist point of view, a heretic; and the much more damaging fact that he was not Russian. Among the Russians there is an intense national pride in the novel War and Peace, and in its author, Lev Tolstoy, ‘The Soldier and Patriot’, as one Russian study published in the 1960s calls him.

  There are things in Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix which encourage comparison with Tolstoy. For one thing, the book, which is an indictment of war, begins on an almost epic scale, describing the great battles of the past, and admitting that war brings out the best in men, qualities of strength and courage and unselfishness. But Proudhon believed modern war is essentially a product of capitalism; its foundations were really economic. Change the nature of society, reform its economic structure, and you will have brought an end to war. War will be outgrown, ‘henceforth heroism must give place to industry’.49

  Strangely enough, although Tolstoy does appear to have absorbed many of these arguments in his later non-fictional writings about poverty – in particular What Then Must We Do? – he does not appear to have shared Proudhon’s view of the origins of war, nor the Frenchman’s definition of what was wrong with war. The most articulate and beguiling Tolstoyan of contemporary times (using the word here to mean a man who regards Tolstoy as a great thinker, and who shares his views) has demonstrated that Proudhon was not really as much of an influence as Eykhenbaum supposed. Professor Sampson points much more to the influence of three more seemingly cynical observers – Stendhal, Herzen and de Maistre. All of them were very different. But all, crucially, were men of 1812. De Maistre, who gloried in war and loved oppression, naturally saw in Napoleon a man who had changed the very nature of warfare by making it bloodier than it had ever been before. He was plenipotentiary of the King of Sardinia at Alexander I’s Court at St. Petersburg. Stendhal, as an officer in Napoleon’s army, had wintered in Moscow in 1812, and had been one of those who miraculously survived the retreat. For Herzen, it was the scene and time of his birth. As a newborn baby, he was left behind in the blazing city when the inhabitants set fire to Moscow. All three men could see that there was something special about the 1812 campaign. Napoleon himself said that ‘Borodino was the most terrible of all my battles.’ There had never been a battle of such scale or horror. Professor Sampson likens it, in Tolstoy’s day, to Hiroshima in our own, an event after which it is impossible to view the world in quite the same way.50

  Tolstoy’s encounter with Proudhon reminds us of the movements of Tolstoy’s mind at this period. The foreign travels of 1861 are more pregnant with the future th
an the earlier jaunt to Germany, because they stirred up such profound reflections upon the past. His brother Nikolay’s death had torn him back to the lost world of his childhood innocence; and the encounter with the Volkonskys in Florence had reminded him of a yet remoter lost Eden – Russia before the Decembrist Rising, when aristocratic, free-thinking men such as Herzen had, or might think they had, the Emperor’s ear. With Herzen himself, and with Proudhon, Tolstoy had time to reflect upon the unjust way in which the world is ordered, but with neither of their solutions was he truly in sympathy.

  Doubtless there are many reasons for this, but the imaginative ones are clear. He was not a socialist for the simple reason that he did not believe in society. This had always been true, but the death of Nikolay and the isolation of abroad confirmed it. Tolstoy did not want to belong to a clique or a group or a movement or a gang. Moreover, his glimpses of ‘abroad’ had made him long to get settled into Russia, and in particular into Yasnaya Polyana, its immediate, local difficulties and problems. He looked back now with distaste upon his flirtation with the free-thinking, Europeanising world to which Turgenev had introduced him. (As Eykhenbaum brilliantly observes, all this rejected side of Tolstoy’s own nature gets embodied, when he comes to write his novel, in Napoleon; the Bonaparte of the novel, with his free-thinking and progressive ideas, is in many ways quite different from the actual Emperor of history.) ‘God has been restored,’ Tolstoy wrote, as he returned home, ‘hope and immortality.’ In the whole course of his life, he never left Russia again.