Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘Yes, that I will,’ replied Sidney, ‘I will try to be like Christ in remembrance of you.’17

  And the curtain falls with everyone in tears.

  This ‘spoony’ stuff obviously made a great impression on Chertkov, and Tolstoy, likewise, was entranced by it. ‘Full of pathos, but good,’ he noted in his diary:18 while to the beloved Chertkov, he said that it was ‘very good’.19

  Chertkov had asked in another letter how Tolstoy understood the idea of getting external help from God in prayer. He recalled, in his reply, an incident which had happened quite recently when Alexeyev had still been a tutor in the household. Tolstoy arranged ‘a most loathsome act’ with a woman, and made a date with her. As he was going to keep his appointment with the peasant woman, he passed his son’s window in the garden, and he called out to remind him that he had a lesson that day. Tolstoy came to his senses and did not keep the appointment with the woman. ‘Clearly it can be said that God saved me,’ he said. But he went on to point out that the temptation did not pass. It was only when he confided the whole matter in Alexeyev. ‘He was a good man. He understood me and looked after me like a child.’20

  The only thing which could save him from the lusts of the flesh, Tolstoy seems to state, was the loving affection of a pure-minded young man.

  One other thing. On one occasion this year I was lying beside my wife. She wasn’t asleep, nor was I, and I suffered painfully from the awareness of my own loneliness in the family because of my beliefs, and that they all in my eyes see the truth but turn away from it. . . . I don’t remember how, but being sad and miserable, and feeling that tears were in my eyes I began to pray to God to touch my wife’s heart. She fell asleep; I heard her quiet breathing and suddenly it occurred to me: I suffer because my wife does not share my convictions. When I speak with her under the vexation at her rebuffing me, I often speak coldly, even in an unfriendly manner; not only have I entreated her with tears to believe in the truth but I have never even expressed to her all my thoughts lovingly, and gently, yet there she is lying beside me, and I say nothing to her, and what I ought to, what ought to be said to her, I say to God.21

  The letter seems to anticipate the opening of Meredith’s Modern Love, even Larkin’s ‘Talking in Bed’. The extraordinary thing is that he should have chosen to share these extremely intimate scenes with Chertkov. Only to his brother Sergey had Tolstoy hitherto confided that all was not well with the marriage (though of course the rows were discernible to the whole household and to all the visitors, and were therefore notorious). To no one had he ever confided this version of the bedroom intimacies. Chertkov, whom he had known less than a year and met only a handful of times, drew this out of him. To Chertkov, as to the diary, Tolstoy was able to reveal a little of the yawning dichotomy in his soul, a split which had always existed between flesh and spirit but which had begun to be wholly polarised in his mind. The wider the split became, the less ‘in control’ he was. The more he strove to be like Jesus or the Buddha, the more he grew like Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. He might well have been thinking holy thoughts, but he was behaving like a murderer. So, juxtaposed diary entries can be as farcically contrasted, as September’s:

  A talk in the morning, and unexpected malice. Later she came down to my room and nagged at me until she was beside herself. I said nothing and did nothing, but was depressed. She ran out in hysterics. I ran after her. I’m terribly exhausted.

  12 September. Read about Buddhism – its teaching. Wonderful. . . .22

  And so on. He had come to believe that his family were the flesh which it would be impossible to live a virtuous life without renouncing. The spiritual life which called him was the life of Chertkov, who was so priggishly sure of what was right and what was wrong, and who also, like the young man in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was so admirably a cold fish, ‘unmoved, cold and to temptation slow’. Chertkov, in the diaries, becomes an ideal figure, repeatedly mentioned. ‘His mother hates me, as well she might. Dreamed about Chertkov. He suddenly began dancing, gaunt as he was, and I saw he’d gone mad,’23 was an entry at the height of his rows with Sofya. ‘I must be naïve like Chertkov,’24 a thought which he had had earlier in the summer.

  The open rivalry between Tolstoy’s wife and his new friend was not immediately apparent. Sofya felt some relief that Lev Nikolayevich should have found a disciple at last who was well-connected, rich, presentable – she even, on occasions, found young Vladimir Grigoryevich a charmer. They had in common, au fond, an impenetrable and rather magnificent humourlessness, which is perhaps necessary in the spouses and companions of great seers. But rivals, in the course of 1884, they most unquestionably became.

  The widow Dostoyevsky had set to work, ever since her husband’s death, in preparing an Edition, a collected Dostoyevsky, and emboldened by her example, Sofya Andreyevna thought that she might do the same. This was no mere piece of oneupmanship. The Tolstoy family income, since Lev Nikolayevich had started to become a saint, had dropped violently. Stewards on his various estates, like all the stewards in Russian novels, were not slow to take advantage of their master’s lack of interest in the revenues of land and villages, and the money mysteriously vanished. The farms, which Tolstoy had formerly supervised with a modicum of rough-and-ready efficiency, started to go to ruin. The united revenues from Yasnaya Polyana, Nikolskoye and Samara, whose capital value was hundreds of thousands of roubles, shrank to fifty thousand roubles or five hundred pounds of Aylmer Maude’s money. It was all very well to speak of wickedness, of laying up treasures on earth. But Tolstoy chose to ignore the parts of the New Testament which commend good husbandry, and the wise investment of talents. He was not getting the value of what he had, because he was filled with guilt about having anything. In consequence, the properties were run down, the people who might have benefited from them failed to benefit, and there was no extra money left over for any charitable purposes which might have interested him. At the same time, he went on forcing his wife to have children and, in spite of all his protests, this meant minds to be educated by tutors, and governesses, bodies to be dressed and bathed by nursemaids, mouths to be fed by cooks, tables to be served by lackeys. Where was the money to come from? Why should they all go and live like pilgrims or holy idiots merely because Tolstoy said so?

  One does not ask these questions in the Countess Tolstoy’s ‘defence’. It is simply important to understand at the outset why the Collected Edition of her husband’s works was so important to her. It was not just that she wished to save his reputation by putting and keeping in print those great works of his which she had so ecstatically, patiently copied. It was also that, since he had abandoned any responsibility for them, she wished to take on the role of breadwinner for a large family and two big households. She could not dig, to beg she was ashamed. But she did have it in her power to produce a Collected Edition.

  But in the course of 1884, Chertkov had formed the idea of starting a small, independent publishing house himself. It would be based in the country. It would only publish ‘improving’ literature, and works which were accessible to the poor. From his point of view, it was obviously desirable that cheap editions of Tolstoy’s work should be made available. Chertkov founded a press which he called The Intermediary and, from the first, Tolstoy was ardent in his enthusiastic support for the venture. While Sofya Andreyevna set up the publishing office for the Collected Works of L. N. Tolstoy in an annex of their house in Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street in Moscow, Chertkov, aided by his young secretary (another ardent Tolstoyan, and Tolstoy’s first Russian biographer, Pavel I. Biryukov) printed A Captive in the Caucasus, What Men Live By, and God Sees the Truth but Waits. They also printed a short story by Leskov, Christ Visits a Peasant. Over the next few years, Tolstoy was to supply them with more ‘simple’ tales; most of the stories printed in Aylmer Maude’s Twenty-Three Tales began life in this way. Chertkov may have discarded the fundamentals of his Evangelical creed, but he has retained the Evangelical’s zest for publication. Evangelicals
are Christians for whom the Flesh becomes the Word, and wherever they may be found, there are bookshops, bookstalls, pamphlets, literature. It may be supposed that in a country where literacy was as low as in nineteenth-century Russia, such people would not have much of a sale. But Chertkov knew what he was doing. In the first four years of its foundation, The Intermediary had sold twelve million little booklets, published at only one or one and a half kopecks. His example was one of which the Bolsheviks were justly envious. The habits of modern Soviet publishers, their desire to print good cheap editions and distribute them on a huge scale, owe much to Chertkov’s pioneering work. So too does his wholly cavalier, not to say piratical attitude to the laws or obligations of copyright. On Tolstoy’s recommendation they published foreign stuff too: Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Edwin Drood, Felix Holt (a particular favourite of Tolstoy’s) and Hypatia by Charles Kingsley; also Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma.

  But it was more than a spiritual kinship. That is not to say that it was physical, or sexual. Indeed, the whole point of young men in Tolstoy’s life was that he could not have sex with them. He sentimentalised them, and got spoony about them in precisely the same way that a certain type of homosexual falls in love with young women, who excite in him not feelings of lust, but fantasies of love and beauty purged of the sordidities of sex. Moreover, lesser men than Tolstoy have felt the flattery of having a disciple; and Tolstoy’s total, out-and-out egotism positively needed something akin to worship. In the days when he was slaving at War and Peace, this worship had been given unstintingly by Sofya. But now he hated her. And even if she had wanted to embrace his new beliefs, he could not even bring himself to explain to her what they were.

  It becomes still more difficult to find

  Words at once true and kind

  Or not untrue and not unkind.25

  Marooned in Moscow in November 1884, he wrote to his beloved Chertkov, ‘I would terribly like to live with you. I want to see whether you are always in that tense state you are in when I see you. You can’t be like that at home. . . . I would wish you more calmness, more idleness, more good-natured, kindly and indulgent calmness and idleness. I would like to live with you, and if we are still alive, I shall live with you. Never cease to love me, as I love you. . . .’26

  In a letter he wrote to Chertkov some months after he had finished What Then Must We Do? Tolstoy revealed that he had just finished reading Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and found it ‘very good’.27 The famous fable of the divided self was a subject to which Tolstoy would have been qualified to bring an abundance of rich meditation and experience. In no decade perhaps more than the 1880s were the contrasts in his nature more strikingly evident. What Then Must We Do?, for instance, contains some of his very finest thoughts, and some of the best writing in the whole œuvre. It also contains some of the silliest nonsense ever written by anyone. How can one reconcile the high genius of Tolstoy (and it is not merely a literary genius, but also a very great quality of mind) with his incredible, perverse silliness? He sees the dreadful desolation in Moscow which has been caused by a combination of the callousness, greed, weakness and stupidity of the various people involved in the drama, and he announces that he has found a ‘solution’ to the problem. Go home, give up smoking, try to make your own shoes and give your wife twenty babies.

  Tolstoy’s own wife must often have wondered during these years, as she lay and watched his sleeping form, and saw the patriarchal beard draped over the sheets, or watched him sitting in his study scratchily covering page after page, whether she was looking at Count Jekyll or Lev Nikolayevich Hyde.

  The children, too, were confronted with the puzzle. Hitherto, it had all been a question of Papa and his smelly friends being tiresome and upsetting Mama. The warfare between them was initially perceived as one of pure emotional torment. (‘Wherever you are the air is poisoned,’28 the children overheard him shouting at their mother one day when she was being slow to understand his doctrines of love and forgiveness.) But as time went on – and particularly for the daughters – it was possible to see that there was a genuine ideological seriousness in this mysterious, alarming figure, their father.

  At first, it must have seemed little more than Father being ridiculous. Why was Papa neglecting the writings which had made him rich and famous, and getting Pavel Arbuzov, the son of the children’s nurse Marya Afanasyevna, to teach him the difficult art of shoe-making? They watched him doing it for hours at a stretch, splicing bristles, knocking quarters into shape, nailing the soles. He was not good at it, but nor was he good at admitting defeat. The day he learnt to splice a bristle was as proud as the day that he had finished a great book. Prouder. ‘Allow me, Lev Nikolayevich,’ the shoemaker would say, tactfully, leaning over his clumsy pupil. ‘No, no, I’ll do it myself. You do your work, and I’ll do mine.’29

  There was all the embarrassment, as far as the family were concerned, of visitors seeing these antics. And that was the part which Tolstoy seemed to like the most. One day, Prince Obolensky, a cousin by marriage, called, and discovered that the great writer had just learnt how to drive tacks into the sole of a shoe.

  ‘You see how well it’s turned out?’ he said in triumph.

  ‘What’s so difficult in that?’ asked Obolensky.

  ‘You try.’

  ‘I’d be glad to.’

  ‘Good, but on one condition: for every tack you drive in I’ll pay you a rouble, and for every one you break you pay me ten kopecks. Agreed?’

  Obolensky took the boot, the awl, the hammer and broke eight tacks one after the other. He joined in the general laughter and handed over the eighty kopecks which were given to Tolstoy’s shoemaker tutor.30

  For children, Tolstoy’s humour was his most beguiling characteristic, but it could also be troubling. Tatyana recalls that if she made a criticism of someone, said that they were boring or stupid, he would always ask, ‘More boring than you? Stupider than you? “I understood the lesson he was trying to teach me perfectly well, but I refused to accept it and would answer back insolently, “Yes, stupider than me, more boring than me, plainer than me.”’31 But this was an exchange born of intimacy between the parent and child. The irony was a shield for tenderness which neither could control. One of her most treasured memories was recovering from dangerous scarlet fever when she was only a little girl. As she began to recover, the door opened, and Father came in and sat on the bed. ‘Well, Choorka, still pretending to be ill?’ ‘There is tenderness in his eyes and I feel I could ask him for anything he liked. But there is nothing I want. Taking his big strong dry hand I pull off his wedding ring. He goes on looking at me, smiling benevolently, putting up no objection.’32 He would have had no objection to a child, or anyone else pulling off that ring and dissolving the union which now caused him so much anguish and torment.

  The first child to sense that their father was not merely lovable but might also be right was little Masha (Marya Lvovna) when she was only fifteen. In 1885, she started to recognise the appalling poverty, the actual starvation, which was happening even on their doorstep in the village at Yasnaya Polyana, and she began to befriend the peasants who were also her father’s friends. The older brothers were on the whole unsympathetic to their father, but Ilya also began to see that his father had something to say which was of lasting importance, not just about them but about life, and about Russia. When Tanya (Tatyana Lvovna), an art student in Moscow studying under Repin, wrote to her father to say that she had come to share his ideals, he wrote back ecstatically. ‘Well done. . . . That is my only dream, and my greatest possible joy which I daren’t hope for – namely to find brothers and sisters in my family, and not what I have seen so far – estrangement and deliberate opposition – in which I see partly contempt – not for me – but for the truth.’33

  He had become wholly convinced that they should not be living in this way: the servants, the large houses, the money. He had renounced all that he could. He had made ov
er his properties and his copyrights to his wife, but this had had no effect whatsoever. He was living a simple life, but surrounded by opulence. It made a mockery of his entire position.

  In one of the saddest letters which he ever wrote, never sent, to his wife, he asked for a divorce. ‘It’s not far short of ten years since the quarrels between us would all end in my saying that we shouldn’t be friends again until we came to the same view of life. . . .’ Since that period, he has gone even further in his desire for renunciation of property, for simple life; but she has done nothing to understand his point of view. ‘A struggle unto the death is going on between us. Either God’s works, or not God’s works.’34 Tolstoy’s reiterated point was not that he merely chose to live in this way, but that it was the only sane way to live. But while he wanted to learn prayer, and a governing of the passions, and manual labour, Sofya Andreyevna went on worrying about furniture, servants, society, and a pattern of education for the children of which their father wholly disapproved.

  It meant that for the previous ten years the father had felt alienated from the children. And his methods of drawing close to them, where it worked with some, would have repelled others. Ilya, who became a devotee of his father at about this time and while never sharing all his ideals tried to understand them, recounts a scene when his father tried to find out if he was a virgin.

  My father’s delicacy in his relations with us amounted almost to shyness. There were certain matters he could never touch on for fear of causing us pain. I shall never forget how in Moscow one day I happened to run in to change my clothes and found him sitting at the table in my room writing. My bed stood behind a screen, and I could not see him from there. Hearing my footsteps he spoke without looking round.

  ‘Is that Ilya?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you alone? Shut the door. . . . Now no one can hear us and we shan’t see each other, so we won’t feel ashamed. Tell me, did you ever have anything to do with women?’