by Leo Tolstoy
He remembered further that N.N. said something in her ear and at once moved away to join another group which had formed round the General and the Guards officer, and that this woman took him by the hand, and that they went off somewhere together.—
An hour later on the steps of this same house all four companions were taking leave of one another. Seriozha, making no reply to N.N.’s ‘Adieu’, sat down in his carriage and burst out crying like a child. He was remembering the emotion of innocent love which had filled his breast with elation and vague longings, and realizing that for him the time of such love was now irrevocably past. And why was the General so full of cheer as he drove N.N. home in his carriage, and the latter jokingly remarked ‘Le jeune a perdu son pucelage?29 Yes, I do so enjoy bringing attractive young people together.’
Who is to blame? Surely not Seriozha, for having given himself up to the influence of men whom he liked, and to a natural desire? Certainly he is to blame; but who will cast the first stone at him? Is N.N. to blame, then, and the General too? Is it actually the essential function of men like these to do evil, to serve as tempters, that thereby goodness may take on a greater value? But you too are to blame, for tolerating such men, and not merely for tolerating them, but for choosing them as your leaders.—
Why? Who is to blame?
And how sad it is that two such excellent human beings, so wonderfully suited to one another and having only just become aware that this is so, should have their love ruined. They may perhaps still encounter someone else in times to come, and even fall in love, but what sort of a love will it be? Better that they should spend their whole life repenting, than that they should stifle this memory which they hold within themselves, and supplant with a guilty love, this true love which they have tasted, if only for one moment.
1 A pair of gloves, please.
2 Your size?
3 Six and a half.
4 Give this most distinguished of his clients a touch of the comb.
5 Pay court to.
6 Débardeur. Literally ‘a longshoreman’ – a popular fancy-dress costume in the nineteenth century.
7 Shop girl.
8 Vicious circle.
9 He is an excellent match, my dear.
10 How absurd young Ivin is.
11 From a bird’s eye view.
12 Just one more turn, please.
13 Would you consent to a little waltz, Countess?
14 Not for myself, Countess; I feel that I am too ugly and too old to claim that honour.
15 We will have a chat.
16 The bottom of the bottle.
17 Let’s take his cork out once and for all.
18 Let’s go to the b … [brothel].
19 Let’s go in.
20 Street idler, beggar.
21 The Tomb of Askold, A Life for the Tsar: popular Russian operas by Verstovsky (1799–1862) and Glinka (1804–57).
22 Charming, delightful!
23 No, it’s no good without Mashka, this choir is quite useless, isn’t it?
24 Let us be going.
25 Let’s go to the b[rothel].
26 I’ll do whatever you are doing.
27 If wife did but know that I was out on the spree with you …
28 La Dame aux Camelias (1848), by Dumas fih.
29 The lad has lost his maidenhead, eh?
APPENDIX II
FOUR LATE STORIES not included in the Centenary Edition
PREFACE
TOLSTOY’s late stories have had a troubled critical history. In July 1883 Turgenev, then on his deathbed, sent Tolstoy the last letter he ever wrote, begging him to ‘return to literary work’. Tolstoy’s first published fictions after Anna Karenina and the moral and religious crisis which seemed to have ended his literary career were the cluster of ‘popular tales’, including Where Love is, God is, which appeared in 1885. It is doubtful whether Turgenev would have felt that this was ‘literature’ as he understood the word. The following year, with the appearance of The Death of Ivan Ilych, many of Tolstoy’s admirers felt, in the words of one critic, that ‘his train had come out of the tunnel’, and this story was not the last to be greeted as a masterpiece on the level of the two great novels: Hadji Murad (ten drafts, 1896–1904) has long enjoyed a similarly high valuation. Yet Hadji Murad was written with a guilty conscience by a man who felt that it was a betrayal of his new-found moral principles, and of the new aesthetic which he was to state at length in What is Art?
This new aesthetic was to be based on simplicity, clarity and moral ‘infectiousness’ – that is, effectiveness in influencing the reader’s outlook for good. From the point of view of the later Tolstoy, a simple moral fable which could be readily understood by a newly literate peasant was of far greater value than Anna Karenina, whose moral confusion and structural sophistication now seemed reprehensible. Not many later critics have agreed with the later Tolstoy, but estimates of how much of his post-1880 writing is valuable have varied widely, from the view that none of it beyond Resurrection and a very few stories is worth reading, to the view that anything Tolstoy wrote, even a child’s reading book, must be of some value because it is by Tolstoy. The Centenary Edition (1928–37) of translations by Aylmer Maude (1858–1938) and his wife Louise included a selection of short tales in the folk idiom and a number of simple moral fables but did not attempt to be exhaustive. It excluded, along with most of the ‘reading book material’, a good many more substantial stories published posthumously, and the opportunity has now been taken to include a selection of these in the present edition.
In his essay on Hadji Murad A. D. P. Briggs, referring to the brutal raid on the Chechen village carried out on the orders of Nicholas I, writes: ‘This is not only good storytelling, it is as effective a condemnation of cruel government and militarism as a trunkful of anarchist and pacifist pamphlets.’ The same could be said of at least three of the stories printed below, and it neatly encapsulates the impossibility of separating the ‘literature’ from the ‘pamphlet’ in Tolstoy’s late stories, which are consciously propaganda (literally: ‘things to be propagated’) as well as pieces of literary art.
After the Ball (1903) is a prime example: its raison d’étre is the harrowing description of an army deserter being made to run the gauntlet, a punishment which was effectively a death sentence (although officially capital punishment did not exist in Russia at the time of Nicholas I). This description, and the effect the sight has on the man who witnessed it, provides the moral explosive charge of the story, but it is enclosed within an apparently anodyne tale of rapturous young love. The narrator recalls his youthful passion for Varenka, the daughter of a distinguished army colonel (‘with white, curled moustaches à la Nicholas I’) who is almost as captivating on the dance floor as his lovely daughter, and the account of the ball at which father and daughter dance together is intoxicating in its exuberance – calculatedly so, of course, for early the next morning it is Varenka’s father whom the narrator sees as the officer in charge of the punishment battalion, urging on the soldiers to strike harder and ordering fresh sticks. The story is an elegant theorem: its QED, the brutality of the militaristic state and the disgust it should provoke in all humane people.
What For? (1906), though longer and more complex, is connected to After the Ball by a similar scene of brutal punishment, and to Hadji Murad by the scene in Chapter XV of that story where Tolstoy depicts the Tsar’s loathing for the Poles and shows him sentencing a Polish exile to death by running the gauntlet. What For? is, like Hadji Murad, a miniature historical novel, if on a more modest scale. It ends with another bitter attack on Nicholas I, whose reign was the high-water mark of Russian militarism and chauvinism, but even in the days of Nicholas II this story would not have been considered publishable: it undermines the whole edifice of Great Russian patriotism and raises uncomfortable thoughts about political freedom by telling the story of the Polish insurrection of 1830 from an exclusively Polish point of view – a deeply shocking act in Russian eyes. I
f the result is somewhat simplistic, reading in places like an adventure story for school children, with a relatively happy ending, this is very likely in keeping with Tolstoy’s design for a story which would entertain but also educate, to be read by young people – or by adults for whom literacy was only a recently won achievement.
The most ambitious by far of these four stories is The Forged Coupon. The idea of the story seems to have been in Tolstoy’s mind for quite a long time: it is mentioned in a list of titles in 1895, and was ‘half finished in rough’ early in 1904. These dates place it in the same creative era as Hadji Murad. While this story is more clearly didactic than Hadji Murad, and less elegantly shaped, it shares with its more famous brother the honour of being Tolstoy’s last exercise in the epic genre – if ‘epic’ can look forward to the linear, moralistic story-telling of Brecht, as well as back to War and Peace, The Cossacks and Homer.
The Forged Coupon, like Resurrection, is a story tracing the consequences of an evil action. Its moral message is close to the heart of Christianity (whether Tolstoy’s version or any other): our actions are infectious, for good as well as for evil, and we are all responsible for one another. Resurrection pursues this theme in a single story line developed at great length. The Forged Coupon, in a much smaller space, attempts something more ambitious: to follow the ramifications of a simple act of dishonesty as they affect the lives of more and more characters in a variety of places and at many social levels. The Forged Coupon pushes at the limits of the reader’s capacity to remember multiple groups of characters, but in doing so it achieves a remarkably wide panoramic view of Russian society from convict to Tsar, and something like a God’s-eye view of human behaviour.
In Part One, Chapter VIII the narrator hints at ‘something far more serious than anything merely human eyes could perceive’ having happened: Tolstoy, the master of detailed observation and psychological analysis, is now pursuing God-like omniscience into the moral sphere. This involves a strong conviction not only of the power of darkness, but of the power of light. The central point of the story is the brutal murder of the saintly Mariya Semyonovna, and Part One ends with her killer Stepan, overcome with weariness and vodka, collapsing in a ditch where he lies until two days later. It is on the third day that he rises again, not yet to a redeemed life, but to the Tolstoyan equivalent of purgatory. Mariya Semyonovna’s death haunts her killer and ultimately brings about Stepan’s moral regeneration, and the salvation of others with whom he comes into contact, so that he comes nearest to being the hero of the story – if it had one. Despite the contrived nature of its structure, The Forged Coupon, like almost everything Tolstoy wrote, retains his extraordinary ability to make us feel that this is all part of real life, and as in many of his fictions the ‘open’, indeterminate ending seems a confirmation of this: life continues, the truth marches on, and despite the suffering and squalor there is hope.
Tolstoy coined his own term, oproshchéniye (from prostói – simple), to denote the process of simplifying down to embrace a way of life closer to that of the peasantry and the soil, and there are characters in The Forged Coupon who exemplify this process in action. The technique of the story, however, remains complex and sophisticated, even though its language is low-key throughout and in places approaches the speech of the common people. Alyosha Gorshok (1905) takes this linguistic process of simplifying down much further, and narrates the life (and since this is Tolstoy, the death) of a peasant character in the sort of language which he himself would have used – had he been articulate enough to tell his own story, which he certainly is not. Alyosha Gorshok is, for Tolstoy, an extreme example of laconicism, which has been justly compared to Chekhov. There are only two named characters in the story – Alyosha (or Alyoshka when he is very young, and when people are talking down to him) and the cook Ustinya, and all the material details are the humdrum details of daily life which would be much the same anywhere for the lower classes in Russia. Thus Alyosha becomes a semi-anonymous representative figure, and also a late example of the well-known Holy Fool, who smiles, obeys orders and ‘dies well’. Yet the cryptic nature of the story gives no real clue to whether Tolstoy sees Alyosha as a hero, or merely as a victim, and the final impression is one of tragic waste, together with a mute, smouldering anger at the social system of which Alyosha is a victim. Despite everything, however, the economy of means and the implied sympathy produce a result which is both beautiful and moving. Would Turgenev have approved?
*
I should like to express my sincere gratitude to the following people for their help in the translation of these and the two preceding stories: to Gillian Squire of the London University School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, for her assistance in tracing texts; and to Ignat Avsey, Leonid Feygin, Prince Andrei Golitsyn, Dmitry Usenko, Susan Wilkins and Helen Wozniak, for their invaluable advice on matters of fact and language.
N. J. Cooper
April 2000
AFTER THE BALL
‘WHAT you are saying is, that a man is incapable of deciding for himself what is good and what is bad, that everything depends on the environment, that man is the victim of his environment. But as I see it, everything really depends on chance. Listen, I will tell you about something that happened to me personally …’
These words were spoken by our universally respected Ivan Vasilyevich at the end of a discussion we had been having about whether, in order to achieve individual perfection in life, it was first necessary to alter the conditions in which people live. In fact no one had actually argued that it is impossible to decide for oneself what is good and what is bad, but Ivan Vasilyevich had a curious way of answering questions of his own which had arisen in the course of discussion, and using these thoughts of his as a pretext for telling us about episodes which had occurred in his own life. He would frequently lose sight of the reason which had originally set off his narrative, and get carried away by the story, all the more so since he was an exceptionally sincere and truthful story-teller.
And so it was on this particular occasion.
‘I will tell you about something that happened to me personally. My whole life has been like this – not influenced at all by environment, but by something else altogether.’
‘By what, then?’ we asked him.
‘Well, it’s a long story. It will take some telling if you are really going to understand.’
‘Then please go on, and tell us.’
Ivan Vasilyevich reflected for a moment, then nodded his head.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘my whole life was changed by what happened one night, or rather one morning.’
‘So what was it?’
‘The thing was, I had fallen deeply in love. I had been in love many times before, but this time my feelings were something far stronger. It’s a long time ago now; she even has married daughters of her own. Her family name was B—–, yes, Varenka B—–’ (here Ivan Vasilyevich mentioned the family name). ‘Even at fifty she was still an outstanding beauty. But when she was young, at eighteen, she was absolutely enchanting: tall, shapely, graceful, and imposing – yes, really imposing. She always held herself very erect, as though it was not in her nature to do otherwise, with her head thrown slightly back, and this, together with her beauty and her tall stature, and despite her thinness, boniness even, gave her a sort of regal air which might have been intimidating, had it not been for the charming, always joyful smile of her mouth and her wonderful shining eyes, and the general effect of her lovely, youthful being.’
‘What a picture Ivan Vasilyevich is painting for us!’
‘Well, describe her as I may, it is impossible by describing her to make you see her as she really was. But that is not the point. The events I want to tell you about took place in the 1840s. At that time I was a student at a provincial university. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing I have no idea, but in those days our university contained no intellectual groups, no theories whatever; we were simply young men and we lived as young
men typically do – studying, and enjoying ourselves too. I was a very jolly, lively young fellow, and well off into the bargain. I was the owner of a really spirited horse, an ambler; I used to go tobogganing with the young ladies (skating having not yet come into fashion); and I was much given to celebrating with my companions (in those days we never drank anything but champagne; and if there was no money we didn’t drink at all – we never drank vodka instead, as they do nowadays). And my chief delight was going to evening parties and balls. I was a good dancer, and not at all bad-looking.’
‘Come now, there’s no need to be quite so modest,’ put in one of the ladies in our company. ‘We are quite familiar with your daguerreotype portrait. It isn’t true to say that you were not bad-looking – you were handsome.’
‘That is as may be, but that is not the point either. What matters is that just as my love for her was reaching its peak, on the last day of Shrovetide, I attended a ball at the house of the district marshal of the nobility, a genial old man who was wealthy, well known for his hospitality, and a chamberlain at court. His wife, as good-natured as he was, received the guests wearing a puce-coloured velvet gown, a diamond ferronnière on her forehead, and with her ageing, puffy shoulders and bosom on display, as in those portraits of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. It was a splendid ball: a beautiful ballroom with galleries for the musicians, and an orchestra, well known at that time, which was made up of serfs belonging to a landowner who was an amateur musician, and a veritable ocean of champagne. Although I was fond of champagne I didn’t drink any, for I was already drunk without wine, drunk with love; but I still danced to the point of exhaustion – quadrilles, waltzes, polkas; and as far as possible of course, I danced them with Varenka. She was wearing a white dress with a pink sash, white kid gloves reaching almost to her slender, pointed elbows, and white satin shoes. The mazurka was filched from me by a most unpleasant engineer by the name of Anisimov – even today I cannot forgive him – who had asked her for this dance almost the moment she arrived, whereas I came in late, having called at the hairdresser’s to collect my gloves. So I did not dance the mazurka with her, but with a German girl whom I had been pursuing some time before. But I’m afraid I treated her quite rudely that evening – not talking to her, not looking at her: I had eyes only for that tall, shapely figure in the white dress with the pink sash, her flushed, radiant face with its dimples, and her gentle, affectionate eyes. I wasn’t the only one either: everybody looked at her and admired her, men and women alike, though she eclipsed them all. It was impossible not to admire her.