Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  The most famous bit of the essay is the passage where he tries to do for King Lear what, in Resurrection, he had done for the Orthodox liturgy. That is, he describes it in such a way that it sounds ridiculous. ‘ “How old art thou?” “Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for anything,” to which the King replies that if he likes him not worse after dinner he will let him remain in his service. This conversation fits in with neither Lear’s position nor with Kent’s relation to him, and is evidently put into their mouths only because the author thought it witty and amusing. . . .’ etc. etc.23 Tolstoy can construct arguments in this reductio ad absurdum manner so readily that he does not realise how inapposite and stupid his analyses of King Lear actually seem. George Orwell in a famous essay24 suggested that the reason for this was that Tolstoy was himself Lear, blind to the folly of giving away all his possessions, and preparing unconsciously for running, white-bearded and half mad, out into the heath and the storm.

  The dramatic force of Orwell’s essay can never be forgotten, even though none of the details exactly fit (Lear had no sons, no recalcitrant wife, no followers with the operational skill of Chertkov, who, far from allowing his master to give anything to his family, engineered him into writing wills which all but disinherited the Tolstoys in favour of the Tolstoyans. Tolstoy, far from being betrayed by his daughters, was served by them devotedly. There are many other points of difference.) We tend to remember Orwell’s image of Tolstoy-as-Lear and forget the rest of Tolstoy’s essay which reveals the actual clue to the reason for its composition.

  After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy apostasised from his view that novels should make us laugh and cry and present us with the illusion of living characters. Instead, he espoused the dreary and narrowing view that an artist’s function was to tell the world how it should behave. In Shakespeare, who is the archetypal artist, the man who buries himself in the passions and sympathies of his created characters, Tolstoy met his greatest reproach, the most blatant possible reminder of what he had given up when, after Anna Karenina, he turned to writing works of half-baked religious thought. ‘Shakespeare,’ it has been wisely said, ‘displays the dance of human passion. . . . Hence he has to be objective; otherwise he would not so much display the dance of human passion, as talk about it.’25 Tolstoy, who in his greatest fictitious creations seems second only to Shakespeare, sets out in his petty and destructive essay to show two things. First, he tries to show that Shakespeare could not portray human characters at all. Even Tolstoy cannot deny that Falstaff is ‘a thoroughly natural and characteristic personage’; (‘unfortunately,’ he adds, with the sour note of some governess or puritanical village dominie, ‘the artistic effect of the character is spoilt by the fact that it is so repulsive in its gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, naughtiness, dishonesty. . . .’).26 But our impression that when we read the other works of Shakespeare we are being confronted by an extraordinary range of human characters and passions is, we gather from Tolstoy, quite illusory. Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, all are as wildly unreal as Lear himself. There is an almost Mephistophelian arrogance in the way that Tolstoy asserts Shakespeare’s inability to depict character: there is the unspoken suggestion that if you want real characters you would find them in Tolstoy’s early and greater novels; and there is the vandalistic desire to dismiss the whole idea of character in literature as of any importance.

  But Shakespeare arouses in Tolstoy more than a horror of what he himself had abandoned in mid-career. Tolstoy is repelled by Shakespeare’s generosity of temper, his largeness of view, his tolerance, his humanistic enjoyment of people being themselves. By the time he had grown old, all these qualities repelled Tolstoy. He quotes a German scholar, G. G. Gervinus, as saying that ‘Shakespeare considers that humanity should not set itself ideals but that all that is necessary is a healthy activity and a golden mean in everything.’ And then he goes on to discover in Shakespeare a scorn of the common people and a belief in political oppression. The truth is that Shakespeare’s plays breathe a sunny common sense, in which the personality of the artist has been subsumed in the artifact. Political and ethical views can be extracted from the plays, but never with certainty because Shakespeare did not see it as his function to boss his audiences into thinking as he did. Shakespeare and the Drama does not make happy reading. When we compare Tolstoy’s irascible, chuntering dismissal of Shakespeare as ‘insignificant and immoral. . . . cannot possibly serve to teach the meaning of life’ with the late romances from Shakespeare’s own pen, there is an inescapable feeling of pathos. The essay on Shakespeare diminishes Tolstoy, not least because it feels as if it is motivated by unconscious envy, but chiefly because it is so very foolish. Like an idiot blinking at the sun, he claims that there is nothing to see because he has shut his eyes. Or perhaps he simply never stopped being a little boy, staring at the boxes on the other side of the theatre, never giving one glance to the stage, and being puzzled, after two uncomfortable hours, that the audience should be so loud in its applause for something he had not seen.

  Tolstoy had achieved what almost every writer sets out to achieve: celebrity. He had done so on a scale unparalleled in the history of literature, and he paid the price of achieving fame as much for his views and his hostility to the system as for his literary masterpieces. Those who live by the news will perish by the news. This certainly happened to Tolstoy; the first famous man whose death rattle was inaudible because of the rolling Pathé news cameras outside the window. He was the first of many lesser figures in the twentieth century whose loudly and publicly expressed desire to be alone attracted crowds wherever he went. A crude claim, made by many writers, is probably true. The Russian bureaucracy reckoned that foreign visitors would only want to see three things in Russia – St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana. The journey between the two capitals was effected by rail. Rather than give visitors a true impression of what road travel was like in the rest of the Empire, they constructed the tarmacadamed highway down to Tula. Pilgrims could enjoy a smooth ride and all modern conveniences on their journey to the great enemy of progress.

  Observers of the literary scene in Russia since Tolstoy’s death cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between his treatment and that of dissidents in the reign of Stalin and since. There were plenty of figures in the bureaucracy who would have liked Tolstoy muzzled and locked up. Perhaps an element of subtlety contributed to the fact that, unlike his disciples, he was never himself imprisoned or sent into exile for his repeated lambasting of the whole social order, and his urging upon the populace of a programme of civil disobedience.

  There was also an element of personal affection for the old man. Not only was he related to many former members of the Government and the Court, but he had now become old, and the Russians, even more than the rest of us, revere old age. No British Government can ever have liked George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell, but once they had passed the age of eighty, they both became almost national institutions. The sight of Russell being carried into police vans protesting against the nuclear threat was not a westernised version of Gulag. It became as good-humoured and as frivolous as everything else in English public life.

  A little of this irony hung around Tolstoy’s last days in Russia. Many of the pilgrims came because they believed that he was the Master, who had revealed to the world the great truths about human life. And in a sense this was true. Others came to pay homage to the greatest of Russian writers, which he unquestionably was. But a good number came with a mixture of such feelings blending with the simple desire to be entertained. And Tolstoy did not fail to oblige.

  One of his hundreds of visitors was the young English writer Desmond MacCarthy, who had been given an introduction and was invited to stay at Yasnaya Polyana. He approached, up the rutted drive, through the famous turreted entrance, and came up to the low-slung, two-storeyed wooden house, by the standards of English country houses little more than a villa. It was a bright, hot, summer
day. On the lawn, there was a Chekhovian scene. Countess Tolstoy was taking tea with her daughters and some relations. She rose to greet her young visitor and, all politeness, offered him tea. Her husband was out in the fields, but he would be returning shortly. Her husband always liked to show guests to their rooms by himself. She hoped that Mr. MacCarthy would understand.

  Everyone spoke excellent English. The tea party was agreeable and mild. As he was finishing his second cup of tea MacCarthy looked up and saw that the Master was making his entrance: the cap, the long white beard, the belted peasant shirt and felt shoes all gave the visitor instant visual gratification: this was what he had come to see.

  Tolstoy was completely without ‘side’, and very friendly. He led MacCarthy inside the house, speaking to him as if they had been friends all their life. He led the young man to a bedroom down a surprisingly narrow corridor. The room was exactly what was expected: an iron bedstead, a washstand, everything quite clean but austere. Tolstoy announced that he liked to be in his study in the later part of the afternoon, but that they would meet again for dinner. Oh, and there was one small thing – the chamber pot. If MacCarthy did not very much object, Tolstoy liked his guests to empty their own chamber pots. He felt that it was demeaning to ask the servants to perform this office on anyone else’s behalf. MacCarthy agreed that he would empty his own slops, and Tolstoy shuffled off down the corridor.

  While he was unpacking, MacCarthy heard some very different footsteps in the corridor, hastier, lighter steps. They approached his door, and someone knocked.

  ‘Come in!’

  It was Sofya Andreyevna.

  ‘I hope that you are comfortable.’

  ‘Very comfortable, thank you.’

  ‘Has my husband shown you where everything is?’

  ‘Yes, thank you very much, Countess Tolstoy.’

  ‘But has he’ – her voice becoming shriller – ‘has he told you about the chamber pot?’

  ‘Yes, it is perfectly all right, I do assure you. I am quite happy to empty my own . . .’

  By now Sofya Andreyevna’s voice is loud and sharp.

  ‘Always he tells the guests this nonsense. Our lazy servants, what do we pay them for if they do no work? I must ask you most strictly, Mr. MacCarthy, not to empty your own chamber pot. It really is too humiliating that my husband should have asked you such a question!’

  The summer nights were warm. The lawn was nearby. MacCarthy was young. The chamber pot went unused.27 But the little incident reflected in miniature the conflict which was being enacted inside the house. Should one man ask another man to empty his pot? This is a lavatorial version of Lenin’s great question – Who? Whom? – and Russia was to answer it in Lenin’s way. That is to say, it was to bypass as wholly irrelevant both the Tolstoys’ points of view. To Sofya Andreyevna, it was self-evident that servants should do as they were told. To Tolstoy, each man was an island entire to himself. In political terms, neither belief is true, but it did not stop them fighting the battle to the death.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Last Battles

  1906–1910

  My consciousness of me . . .

  Letter to Chertkov

  Nineteen hundred and six was a year for renewing old contacts and opening up of old wounds. In February, after an estrangement of nine years, Sofya Andreyevna had invited Sergey Taneyev the composer to Yasnaya Polyana. The visit was not a success. They were both ‘strained and unnatural’.1 In August, another ghost from the past resurfaced: Chertkov. His mother was ill, and the authorities accepted a plea of clemency that he should be allowed to revisit Russia to see her.

  There was only time, on this short trip, for Chertkov to make a brief visit to Yasnaya Polyana. He returned to England that autumn, still tireless in his work for the cause. Mysteriously enough, Tolstoyism (like so many other religions, including Christianity) had developed more easily in the absence of the Master. Its principles were clearer than ever. As Master and disciple sat facing one another, it was not quite clear any longer which was which. Seeing a mosquito crawling across Chertkov’s by now balding head, Tolstoy stretched out affectionately and swatted it. ‘What have you done?’ asked the horrified Chertkov. ‘You have killed a living creature, Lev Nikolayevich. You should be ashamed of yourself!’2 What had begun in Tolstoy’s soul as a spiritual reverence for life had become, in Chertkov’s legalistic mind, an organised code as fanatical as that of the Jains.

  If 1906 was a year of renewed links with the past, it was also a year of loss. In the spring of 1906, three of Tolstoy’s daughters went abroad for a holiday. After a series of miscarriages, Tanya, at the age of 42, had managed to produce a baby. The experience left her exhausted, so Masha and Sasha took her to Rome for a recuperative few weeks. While they were there, Tolstoy wrote to Masha, ‘I advise you to get the most that you can out of Europe. I myself don’t want anything from it.’ He went on to deplore the fact that the Russians were continually borrowing bits of ‘political parties, electoral campaigns, etc. Terrible!’ The only consequence of all this westernisation, in his view, would be that men would more and more come to abandon the soil, ‘the only basis for an honourable and reasonable life’.3 Like so many of Tolstoy’s prophecies, this was the absolute opposite of what took place in Russia over the next thirty years. Lenin failed precisely because the kulaks refused to abandon the soil.4 By recognising the advantages of moderate political reform and land ownership, Tolstoy would have protected the rights of the very people he claimed to be most estimable. As it was, by opposing all forms of government, and declaring that land ownership was wicked, he with his great influence helped to pave the way for the overthrow of the society in which the peasant smallholders were beginning to flourish. The only way that Stalin could defeat the kulaks and impose upon them his scheme of collective agriculture was by massacre, and enforced removal of the peasants from their land. He ‘moved’ twenty-five million. God knows how many he killed – no less than ten million and probably many more.

  A month after writing this letter, Tolstoy came near to losing his wife. She fell seriously ill in September. A Moscow doctor, Snegiryov, was summoned and discovered a large uterine tumour. She was too weak to be moved to hospital. Snegiryov had to perform the surgery in her bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana.

  Before she was anaesthetised, Sofya Andreyevna held Tolstoy’s hand and whispered, ‘Lyovochka, forgive me, forgive me.’ It seemed as though her life was ebbing away. All the children had assembled, and when the moment for surgery came Tolstoy was deeply sceptical. He thought that ‘the great and solemn moment of death was approaching, that we should submit to God’s will and that any interference on the part of doctors would only violate the grandeur and solemnity of the great act of death’. In all this, there was more than a wish that she had come to the end of her journey, but the children insisted that the doctors do their best. How much tragedy would have been avoided had the doctors done nothing and allowed the poor Countess to die!

  Tolstoy was in a great state of agitation about the operation. He went off into the Chepyzh grove, some hundreds of yards from the house. There he prayed, alone. ‘If the operation is successful,’ he told the children, ‘ring the big bell, twice, and if not. . . . No, don’t ring it, I’ll come myself.’

  Half an hour later, the operation was successfully completed. Masha and Ilya ran down to the woods to tell their father. ‘Successful! Successful!’ they shouted. He came out of the undergrowth, and stared at them. He was pale. ‘Good, go back, I’ll come in a minute,’ he said, and went back into the wood. He returned to the house a little later, and went in to see his wife as she was recovering from the anaesthetic. ‘Good heavens, what a horrible thing! They won’t even let a person die in peace. A woman lies there, her stomach cut open, tied to the bed and without pillows, groaning louder than before the operation. It’s some kind of torture!’5 Whether the torture was worse for her or for him, we shall never know.

  It was not Sofya Andreyevna who was to die th
at year. It was Masha. She, of all the children, was closest to her father. He was curiously undemonstrative with them, unable to hug or touch them. She alone was brave enough to stroke his hand or kiss him, or soothe his troubled old brow with her caresses. She, too, was the most deeply Tolstoyan of all the children. Sasha might be a vegetarian and wear simple clothes but, as she tells us in her semi-credible memoirs, she always knew that Masha was more deeply and naturally Tolstoyan. Masha had a particular rapport with peasant people. She was tireless in good works, endlessly in and out of the izbas with little gifts of food or clothing. Since by now Tolstoy’s diary was left open on a table in Yasnaya Polyana for all the faithful to read – rather like the works of Mrs. Baker Eddy in a Christian Science Reading Room – he had to be guarded in what he said. On August 24 he wrote disarmingly of how much he had enjoyed a visit to Masha and her husband (Obolensky, whose small estate was only a few versts from Yasnaya Polyana): ‘I was going to say that Masha is very dear to me, but everyone reads my diaries.’6

  During the autumn the Obolenskys came over to Yasnaya Polyana and at the end of November, Masha suddenly fell ill with a cold. By the second day it became obvious that her condition was very serious and that she had contracted pneumonia. Very quickly, and within a few days, her whole appearance changed. Her face became thin and hollow. Red spots began to inflame her cheeks, and her husband and Sasha took turns to nurse her.