Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Female readers who have followed the argument about the purpose of a man’s body (to work) will perhaps be wondering what is the purpose of a female body in the scheme of things. The fortieth and final chapter of the treatise tells us in unambiguous tones. Not all modern readers will feel satisfied with the manner in which Tolstoy deals with ‘the wonderful nonsense called women’s rights’,41 nor the assumption that women who use methods of contraception because they wish to ‘imitate the sham work done by men’ are evading their duty and putting themselves on the same level as prostitutes. If, however, you are a woman who obeys the will of God, ‘you will not, either after two or after twenty children, say that you have borne enough, any more than a fifty-year-old workman will say that he has worked enough, while he still eats and sleeps and has muscles demanding work’.42 It is hard to see, by the time we reach the end of the book, that Tolstoy thinks women have any function in the world except as breeding stock. Since human life is as brutish, as unfairly ordered, and as doomed to disaster as he has informed us in the first half of the book that it is, we are a little surprised to discover that he advocates women giving up their lives to producing (and feeding, most importantly; he had a horror of wet nurses) anything up to twenty babies. ‘Women, mothers, in your hands more than in those of anyone else lies the salvation of the world,’43 is his slightly peculiar conclusion on the feast of St. Valentine, 1886.

  He had barely finished What Then Must We Do? when he returned to an unfinished story which he had begun in 1882, and polished it off in the space of not much more than a month. It was the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Touchingly, the motive for finishing this searing tale was to have a pleasant surprise for Sofya when she returned from Moscow: a new work to be included in her Collected Edition. She was delighted, considering it the first purely artistic work which he had attempted since the completion of Anna Karenina.

  It is one of his most disturbing stories. Very little happens in it, beyond the fact that Ivan Ilyich, who has a middlingly successful legal career and has become a judge, is confronted with the fact of his own mortality. He contracts cancer, and as he approaches the end, he views his past life as a waste of time, his future death too horrible to contemplate, and diminution and frailty and the sheer stink of his dying body with the profoundest disgust. Above all, he fears death itself. When the disease is in its early stages, he tries to put it out of his mind. ‘And what was worst of all was that it drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at it, look it straight in the face.’44 This he is unable to do, until the very end when, after three days of screaming, and months of physical and moral torment, he is able to face death, and dies. But although he has been visited by the priest he dies without religious consolation; it is merely the acceptance of mortality itself which brings him peace.

  The story disturbs, and appeals, because of its universality. ‘The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic, “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature, quite, quite separate from all others.’45 That is the syllogism which the tale enforces upon the reader. The generality of death becomes particular as we share Ivan Ilyich’s dreadful inner torments on his sickbed. No human life would emerge with any more ‘point’ or justification than his. But we would not necessarily agree with a modern scholar that Ilyich is ‘a man like many other men’46 in his reaction to things. He is in fact a man very much more like Lev Nikolayevich than he is average. For example, before the illness begins, he really hates his family, and for the past twenty years, his wife has made his life a misery by her querulousness. They come together again for brief moments of amorousness and then once more the warfare between them starts up. His only happiness is snatched from his work, or his male friends, or from choosing furnishings for the house. And the illness only serves to emphasise to him the extent to which his family are strangers with him. As he lies dying, too weak even to use a bedpan without assistance, and revolted by the smell of his own breath and by his own excrement, the only individual who can bring him any consolation is the handsome young peasant servant Gerasim, whose good humour is not shaken by the smell, and who is honest enough to accept his master’s illness, and not lie to him. One of Ivan’s only comforts at this stage is being allowed to lie with his trouserless legs over the young lad’s shoulders. ‘Health, strength and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but Gerasim’s strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him.’47 There is nothing of Everyman in this bizarre, but inescapably touching confession. But there is much of Tolstoy.

  By a paradox, however, a severe illness which afflicted Tolstoy during the summer of 1886 did not produce a greater discord between himself and his wife. It had the opposite effect. He had insisted on continuing to follow the plough while suffering from a sore on his leg, and this developed into erysipelas. Tolstoy’s principles and instincts forbade him to consult a doctor, but eventually a specialist from Moscow called Chirkov was brought down by the Countess to Yasnaya Polyana. By now, the ulcer on Tolstoy’s shin was severe, and he had a fever of 104°. The leg was much swollen, and they began to despair of his life. A tube had to be inserted into the leg to drain off the fluid and this caused excruciating pain.

  For nine weeks he was laid up, and the disciples – particularly Chertkov – were kept at bay. ‘Although the last two months, when Lev Nikolayevich was ill, were an agonising time for me,’ his wife wrote in her diary, ‘strangely enough they were also a very happy time for me. I nursed him day and night and what I had to do was so natural, so simple. It is really the only thing I can do well – making a personal sacrifice for the man I love. The harder the work, the happier I was. Now that he is on his feet again, he has given me to understand that he no longer needs me.’48

  These words were written towards the end of October 1886, but her services were still required. While he was on his sickbed, he had been composing a play – a work which had had to be dictated for the most part – and on October 26 Sofya Andreyevna agreed to copy out the first act.

  The Power of Darkness is a play about a peasant family and their handsome young labourer Nikita. In the first act it emerges that he is the lover of his master’s wife, Anisya, and in the next act, egged on by Nikita’s mother Matryona, she kills her husband Pyotr. By the third act, he is married to Anisya, hating her, drinking too much, and carrying on with other women. By the fourth act, he has got with child his sixteen-year-old step-daughter Akulina. To hush the whole thing up, his mother stage-manages another murder, and the baby is buried in the cellar of their cottage. In the fifth act, Nikita gets his comeuppance, and the real villains of the piece – the older women in his life – go free.

  It is a strange play to come from the pen of one who, only so recently, had been converted to a true view of life by observing the beliefs and habits of the peasantry. Their religion is superstitious and unenlightened. One thinks particularly of Matryona, an adept at fortune telling and all kinds of mumbo-jumbo, insisting that they baptise the baby before sending Nikita down the cellar to murder it. His conviction that he hears the bones crunch as he tries to smother the child beneath a piece of wood is one of the less pleasant memories which one carries away from The Power of Darkness. These peasants are crude, cruel, aggressive, greedy, materialistic, and above all, stupid. They have all the faults of the upper class, but with none of the virtues which Tolstoy knew in a Fet or a Turgenev: no wit, urbanity, tolerance or good taste. If it were not so obviously written by Tolstoy, the friend of the peasants, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the work of an ‘enemy of the working class’. It is relentlessly horrible because it is – deliberately – comic. The ghastliness of the peasant family is presented with genuine and exaggerated gusto, and all the peasants who are caugh
t up in this appalling cycle of crime are represented as comic morons.

  Sofya Andreyevna did the copying of the various versions of the play and was really pleased with it. ‘The characters are wonderfully portrayed and the plot is full and interesting,’ was her reaction to the first act; but the second, where there is merely a plot between a woman and a mother-in-law to murder her stupid husband, she considered ‘rather flat – it needs more theatrical effects, and I told Lyovochka so’.49

  Alexander III was also impressed by the play. One of Tolstoy’s friends, M. A. Stakhovich, went and read the play to the Tsar and the Court. Alexander suggested that it be put on by the best actors and actresses who could be found. It was, he declared, ‘a marvellous thing’.50

  This was not how the play struck Konstantin Pobedonostsev when it reached the Procurator of the Holy Synod in the spring of the following year. He wrote to Alexander III to tell him that having finished the play he had scarcely been able to recover his spirits. ‘Even Zola never reached this level of vulgar and brutal realism. . . .’51 But though Pobedonostsev was able to ban the play, his censorship came too late. Already, Chertkov had printed millions of copies in pamphlet form. ‘It is a catastrophe,’ Pobedonostsev wrote, ‘that this minute enormous numbers of copies of Tolstoy’s play have already been printed and are being sold for ten kopecks each in cheap booklet form by peddlars on every street corner.’52

  In Pobedonostsev’s mind, sedition was sedition, and it was the Government’s job to put it down. At about the same time he censored The Power of Darkness a group of six students were arrested on charges of treason. The previous autumn they had attempted a demonstration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dobrolyubov, the radical and friend of Herzen. Their little demonstration had been rounded up and suppressed with the greatest possible brutality, and they had resolved to murder the Tsar. When they were arrested, they were found to have manufactured bombs, and to have collected other explosive devices. They were all condemned to death and hanged. When the news reached Yasnaya Polyana, it agitated Sofya Andreyevna ‘so badly that it has driven everything else from my mind. This evil will beget many others. . . . Lyovochka heard the news in despondent silence. He had so often imagined it happening.’

  She never wrote a truer word than when she imagined this evil begetting many others. One of the students who was hanged, and their ringleader, was called Alexander Ulyanov. On that very day, his younger brother Vladimir swore his revenge,53 and thirty years later he arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd to fulfil his word. By then he was known as Lenin.

  * A modern equivalent might be ‘wet’, ‘yellow’, weak.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Kreutzer Sonata

  1887 – 1890

  I know for certain that copulation is an abomination . . .

  Among all his other creative qualities, Tolstoy has (like George Bernard Shaw) an abiding capacity to irritate his reader. Doubtless it is a capacity which produced in him its own curious satisfaction. But much more than his capacity to irritate, he has a power to disturb, to unsettle, to upset. Although his targets were his own contemporaries – the Government, the Church, the westernising liberals and the literary establishment of the day, together with ‘experts’ and intellectuals of all kinds, medics, scientists, and theologians – he also possessed a prophetic knack. He expressed opinions about the human condition which to this day are capable of getting under people’s skin and making them angry. In no area of his thought is this more apparent than in his analysis, from the late 1880s onwards, of the sexual question. Any modern reader of this phase and group of his writings can expect to be ruffled. While there are probably more people in the world today than ever before who sympathise, in broad outline, with Tolstoy’s ardent pacifism, with his suspicion of alcohol and tobacco, even with his vegetarianism, there are also probably fewer than ever before who are able to stomach his views about sex. It is this non-literary fact which probably explains why almost everybody misunderstands the masterpiece of his penultimate period, The Kreutzer Sonata.

  I wanted to say, first, that in our society generally, at all levels, there has emerged the firm conviction, supported by lying science, that sexual intercourse is something necessary for health, and that since marriage is not always a possibility, then sexual intercourse outside marriage, not binding a man to anything unless to financial payment, is a completely natural thing, and therefore not so much encouraged, as obligatory. This conviction has to such an extent become general and firmly held that parents, on the advice of the doctor, arrange debauchery for their children; governments, whose natural raison d’être consists in concern for the moral welfare of their citizens, institutionalise debauchery, that is, they regularise a whole class of women, obliged to perish physically and spiritually, for the satisfaction of the supposed needs of men, while unmarried people, with a completely calm conscience, give themselves up to debauchery.1

  Modern liberal western prejudice might wish us to see these words as the product of some twisted Augustinian psyche. It is important to remind ourselves of the extent to which sexual standards had collapsed in the latter days of Imperial Russia. A modern biographer of Rasputin (much the liveliest) reminds us that Russia at the turn of the century ‘enjoyed a degree of sexual openness, as opposed to licence, that by the standards of the age was extraordinary’.2 In the one and a half pages of small type ads in the more sober daily newspapers in St. Petersburg, a reasonable proportion would concern accommodation or domestic service. But the greater part would, each day, concern treatment for venereal disease; products such as Urital Galen guaranteed to stop the most stubborn discharge in no time, and were in stout competition with dozens of other quack remedies. Nor was this limited to metropolitan sophisticates or town-dwellers. One thinks of the experience of Mikhail Bulgakov, who served as a zemstvo medical officer in the Smolensk province the year before the Revolution (at Nikolskoye, an estate where Tolstoy spent a lot of time with his friends the Olsufyevs) and found the whole of this rural population riddled with venereal disease. He describes it in his story The Speckled Rash: how it had spread to everyone, old women and children as well as men. It came in many insidious guises. It would take the form of whitish lesions in an adolescent girl’s throat, or of bandy legs, or of deep-seated, slow ulcers on an old woman’s yellow legs, or of oozing papules on the body of a woman in her prime. Sometimes it proudly displayed itself on the forehead as a crescent-shaped ‘crown of Venus’, or, as in indirect punishment for the sins of their fathers, on children with noses that were the shape of ‘a Cossack’s saddle.’3

  Whether a modern reader would choose to share Tolstoy’s moral outlook is another question. As an analysis of what was going on in Russia, his reflections were simply factual.

  It will be as well, perhaps, to discuss Tolstoy’s views about sex at this period, before turning to The Kreutzer Sonata, because although the two are quite obviously interrelated, they are not connected in the way that most modern critics have believed.

  Puritanism had been latent in Tolstoy from the very beginning; and certainly by the time he was finishing Anna Karenina, we find in him a profound disapproval of sexual intercourse, save for the purpose of procreation. These views had been reiterated, with a strength amounting to crudity, in What Then Must We Do? Two quite opposite, or apparently opposite, influences came to work on his mind in the late 1880s, and were still working with full force while he was actually writing his story: one was his desire for Evangelical simplicity, and the other was a deepening misanthropy. The two things came together in his emerging sense that the highest call which could be followed by a human being was one of total celibacy. This was a departure from his position in What Then Must We Do?, in which he had seen some beauty and glory in human procreation. Since then, he had been bombarded with literature from the United States of America, and was in particular impressed by the teachings of a (by now almost extinct) sect, the Shakers. He was very much taken by Doctor Alice
B. Stockham’s Tokology: a Book for Every Woman, which he had devoured at the end of 1888, and which advocated complete celibacy within the married state, and men and women living together as brother and sister. The Shakers abjured the eating of pork and the practice of sexual intercourse. They derived their convictions from a certain Ann Lee, an Englishwoman who had resided at Toad Lane, Manchester until, in 1774, the Spirit moved her to forsake her husband and seek a new life in the American colonies. There her gifts of ecstatic utterance, shouting, convulsions and visionary powers attracted a credulous following. God revealed to her directly that the Original Sin practised in the Garden of Eden had been sexual intercourse. He also revealed that Jesus Christ was Chief Elder of the Shakers and that Mother Ann was the Head Eldress. After her death in 1794, her followers worshipped Ann Lee as the second Christ and confidently expected her to return to earth on clouds of glory. Since they are not allowed to reproduce themselves, the Shakers have inevitably declined in numbers; although in the nineteenth century they attracted converts, there have been very few in the twentieth century.4 Should Ann Lee return to earth today in the manner expected by the faithful, she would find only a tiny band of wise virgins, watching for her Parousia in New England.