by Leo Tolstoy
Brekhunov’s end is moving, and also, in a curious way, both happy and comic. It makes us want to laugh and cry, an objectionable formula when used in a blurb, or in praise of Russian ‘soulfulness’, but here neither more nor less than the truth. One is left feeling that Tolstoy’s humour here is something he is not in the least concerned with, and that probably he would despise the notion. None the less humour comes out from under his hand involuntarily when his narrative is at its best. There is the same sort of involuntary humour in the detail of the narrator’s visit to the monastery in Youth.
It may be Tolstoy’s lavish and always graphic use of detail, together of course with its romance and exotic setting, which for many readers has made The Cossacks the most popular of all his works. Conrad and Hemingway greatly admired it, and the latter virtually copied from it. And yet Tolstoy himself was never satisfied with the story, and said hard things about it in the heyday of his artistry, when he was writing War and Peace. It is true the joints of the narrative creak a little. The young Olenin’s departure from Moscow and his arrival in the mountains of the Caucasus are wonderfully done; but the Cossacks themselves seem to occupy a kind of pastoral space into which Olenin blunders, like an eighteenth-century French hero among a tribe of Noble Savages. When the Chechen braves, the abreks, cross the river Terek, what do they come for? Obviously to ambush and attack the Russians. But the Cossack village appears to take few if any precautions against them, and the one who swims over by night seems to do it chiefly in order that Tolstoy should make a fine set-piece description out of his killing.
After Tolstoy joined the army and was posted as a young lieutenant to the Caucasus, he became seriously interested in military life and made his own kind of study of it. One of his sketches from that period, The Wood-Felling, is a little masterpiece, revealing Tolstoy’s close observation of officers and simple soldiers, and his sympathy with the latter. The story is slight – merely an account of how his artillery unit is required to cut down a band of forest so that the Chechens who lurk there, with whom they are in perpetual guerrilla conflict, can be kept under fire. The soldiers come to life even more vividly in this tale than they do in the Sevastopol Sketches which Tolstoy wrote a little later whilst on active service during the Crimean war. He had a mania just then for lists, definitions, and ways of analysing human beings, their conduct and character, and The Wood-Felling contains an amusing specimen of this, dividing soldiers into three types: the submissive, the reckless and the domineering – the last being classed under two sub-types, ‘the sternly domineering’ and ‘the diplomatically domineering’.
Shortly after he left the army Tolstoy wrote Two Hussars, a striking tale which shows his continuing interest in such types, and also the growing conservatism of his outlook, a conservatism which will permeate in a more disguised form the philosophy of War and Peace. The older officer in the story has many faults – recklessness, bravado, and the love of gambling which Tolstoy himself indulged at one stage of his army career. But he is open and honest and would not cheat or lie. His conduct contrasts with that of the young Hussar of the next generation, a cold-hearted correct creature, who maintains appearances but has few if any scruples.
After leaving the army Tolstoy settled on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and began to think about marriage and a family. He became interested in various girls, and with his usual wish to get everything settled in his own mind he began to plan a sort of experimental nouvelle, setting out what he conceived a marriage in its early stages should be like. The result was Family Happiness, a work which contains much admirable writing and its author’s usual shrewd observation, but which possesses a certain awkwardness arising from what was for him the hypothetical nature of the relationship. Tolstoy had to know such things intimately before he could really settle down to writing about them. In spite of the idyll which Family Happiness hopefully suggests, and which was implemented in the marriages of Mary and Nicholas and Natasha and Pierre in War and Peace, it also contains the themes of uneasiness and guilt, themes that will become obsessive in the long stories Tolstoy wrote after his spiritual crisis in middle age.
The strangest and most morbid of these is The Kreutzer Sonata. It is full of the more tormented side of Tolstoy’s own personality, which he exaggerates immensely to create the pathological figure of Pozdnyshev. The relation between author and character is thus exceptionally unbalanced: as if Shakespeare had let us know that he hated sex, but not as much as Hamlet does, or Timon. The playwright was silent on the issue but Tolstoy was not, and he cannot detach himself and his own views from those of the character he has created. No writer explores the marriageness of marriage so directly and so exhaustively as Tolstoy, and The Kreutzer Sonata gives us another view of the question, which in part at least was coming to be Tolstoy’s own. In Family Happiness he envisaged marriage; in War and Peace he described it; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he denounces it.
Like many more ordinary stories it has a strong element of daydream, and also of nightmare.
I think of running away from her, hiding myself, going to America. I get as far as dreaming of how I shall get rid of her, how splendid that will be, and how I shall unite with another, an admirable woman – quite different …
The intended power of the tale is to compel us to own up – who doesn’t sometimes have similar daydreams? – but the accusing finger fails to disconcert us as much as it wants to. The melodrama of the murder is sensational rather than moving, but the conclusion of the story surely moves us very much. Its narrator says goodbye to Pozdnyshev in the railway carriage where the tale has been told.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, holding out my hand. He gave me his and smiled slightly but so piteously that I felt ready to weep.
‘Yes, forgive me …’ he said, repeating the same words with which he had concluded his story.
‘Forgive’ is almost the same word in Russian as ‘goodbye’. Since his wife’s death has deprived him of forgiveness, Pozdnyshev can only ask it of strangers.
Guilt is also the theme of another story, The Devil, which Tolstoy wrote just before The Kreutzer Sonata. It too concerns marriage, and the sexual guilt which the author himself had come to be obsessed by in his own life. But the longest, most detached and most successful working out of the theme is the story told in Resurrection, meditated for some time by Tolstoy and completed in 1899. He made use of a character to whom we were first introduced in Youth. Nekhlyudov there is essentially a comic character, beautifully perceived and described; the sort of person who takes himself more seriously than his friends do, and who often does the opposite of what he really wants because it gives him a feeling of self-satisfaction. In this way he takes up as a friend a poor student whom he does not like and with whom he has nothing in common. This philanthropic act makes him feel happy, but the student who is the hapless object of his philanthropy soon becomes very uncomfortable under the burden of supporting his patron’s self-esteem.
As a result of his actions in that story, and their consequences, Nekhlyudov in Resurrection becomes very much more of a serious character. But his essential temperament remains the same; and the way Tolstoy now presents it adds considerably to the interest of a story which might otherwise be too much like an enlarged version of Tolstoy’s parable tales. The young Nekhlyudov in Youth has the unconscious and slightly comic innocence of a clever young man: in Resurrection he has the innocence of a determined and conscientious convert; yet never loses the reader’s sympathy and even affection. But his motives, none the less, are not able to stand up to Tolstoy’s always remorseless and as if automatic powers of analysis. Maslova too, the girl he originally seduced and who has ended up in prison, is quite able to see in Nekhlyudov’s obstinate attachment to her not so much true remorse and repentance as the desire to display these qualities, to her but above all to himself. As she puts it to him once with brutal simplicity: ‘You want to use me now spiritually as you once did physically.’
Maslova too is very much a real p
ersonality in her own right. The fact that she had ended up as a convict on the way to Siberia is, in the circumstances, both wholly convincing and deeply pitiable as well. Tolstoy does not dismiss human justice wholesale, but he shows what may happen if it goes wrong, and how inertia and ineptitude reinforce official rigidity at each step of Maslova’s trial. If only they had done this, and had not forgotten to ask that … Is the system, corrupting and deforming those who attempt to supervise its working, always unjust, or has an exceptional miscarriage of justice occurred here? This is a point of some importance, but Tolstoy ignores it. He has to, because he believes all governmental procedures to be inherently wrong and bad. The information about such procedures which he acquired for the occasion, and which he deploys in such detail, emphasizes this underlying anomaly. He did a great deal of research. He found out about senatorial protocol, and what clauses in the penal code dealt with the various offences and with degrees of guilt. The Tolstoy archives in Moscow contain long lists of such queries.
In the end, though, the strength of Resurrection, as in the case of the other longer stories, is in the power and pictorial animation of its individual scenes – Maslova’s trial, the Siberian prison, the prison fortress of Peter and Paul at St Petersburg, the convicts’ march across Moscow. It is on such pages that the author’s magnificence as narrator and storyteller is at its height. They leave one wondering, too, at the vitality and above all at the variety of these stories by the man whom Turgenev called ‘Great writer of our Russian land’. They can be read again and again: there is always something new and fascinating to find in them.
John Bayley
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
MAUDE, AYLMER: The Life of Tolstoy, 2 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1930 (revised version of the 1908–10 edition). Besides translating Tolstoy’s writings, Maude was Tolstoy’s friend and follower, and has insights not available to later biographers. This Life remains a classic.
SIMMONS, ERNEST J.: Leo Tolstoy, 2 volumes, Vintage Books, Boston, 1945–46 (Vintage paperback edition 1960), Routledge, London, 1973. A detailed and scholarly account by a distinguished American critic.
TROYAT, HENRI: Tolstoy (first published in French, 1965), Doubleday, New York, 1967, W. H. Allen, London, 1968, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970. A detailed and popular biography (denounced by Nabokov as ‘a vile biographie romancée’). Highly readable if somewhat bland, and thin on the implications of Tolstoy’s ideas. Comprehensive in its references to the shorter fiction.
CRANKSHAW, EDWARD: Tolstoy – The Making of a Novelist, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974. Less detailed and more idiosyncratic than the titles above, but a knowledgeable and well-illustrated study concentrating largely on Tolstoy’s personal and spiritual development before 1880.
WILSON, A. N.: Tolstoy, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1988, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1989. A stimulating, consciously unreverential treatment which is very readable, and good on the ideas as well as the literary writings. Refers to most of the more important short fiction.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES
CHRISTIAN, R. F. (editor and translator): Tolstoy’s Letters, 2 volumes, Athlone Press, London and Scribner’s, New York, 1978.
CHRISTIAN, R. F. (editor and translator): Tolstoy’s Diaries, 2 volumes, Athlone Press, London and Scribner’s, New York, 1985.
These two comprehensive collections, clearly presented and well annotated, provide invaluable tools for the reader who wants to explore the connections between Tolstoy’s life and his fictions.
LITERARY CRITICISM
BAYLEY, JOHN: Tolstoy and the Novel, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966 (paperback edition 1968). The main focus is on War and Peace, but there are many references to the shorter writings.
CAIN, T. G. S.: Tolstoy (Novelists and their World series), Paul Elek, London, 1977. A survey of Tolstoy’s work which foregrounds his ethical and spiritual struggles. Includes discussions of Family Happiness, the post-conversion writings and Hadji Murad.
CHRISTIAN, R. F.: Tolstoy, a Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1969. A methodical and detailed survey of Tolstoy’s writings. Includes a discussion of Tolstoy’s earliest writings and a chapter on the later stories.
EIKHENBAUM, B. M.: The Young Tolstoy, tr. G. Kerne, Ardis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1972. A translation of the great Soviet critic’s 1922 study which has much to say about narrative technique.
GIFFORD, HENRY (editor): Leo Tolstoy – A Critical Anthology, Penguin Books, 1971. An interesting anthology of reactions to Tolstoy’s writing, from contemporaries and later readers.
GREENWOOD, E. B.: Tolstoy – The Comprehensive Vision, Dent, London, 1975, paperback edition Methuen, London, 1980. A densely written survey covering the full range of Tolstoy’s fiction with an emphasis on psychology and ideas. Devotes more space than most critics to the shorter fiction of the early, middle and late periods.
JONES, MALCOLM (editor): New Essays on Tolstoy, Cambridge University Press, 1978. A symposium of contributions by ten writers which includes an essay on Hadji Murad by A. D. P. Briggs and a bibliography of Tolstoy studies in Great Britain.
KNOWLES, A. V. (editor): Tolstoy – The Critical Heritage, Routledge, London and Boston, 1978. A rich collection of criticism and comment on his works from Tolstoy’s own lifetime.
MATLAW, RALPH E.: Tolstoy – A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967. A representative collection of a dozen essays drawn from a wide range of writers. Half the pieces are thematic but Wasiolek’s thoughts on Ivan Ilych are included, as well as Shestov’s essay on Tolstoy’s late works which focuses on Diary of a Madman and discusses After the Ball and Master and Man.
ORWIN, DONNA TUSSING: Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880, Princeton University Press, 1993. A detailed examination of the main philosophical and intellectual influences on Tolstoy during his major creative period.
STEINER, GEORGE: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky – An Essay in Contrast, Faber, London, 1960. A remarkably full introduction to Tolstoy’s world view and art, considering that he shares the focus of the book with Dostoevsky. Many references to the shorter fiction.
WASIOLEK, EDWARD: Tolstoy’s Major Fiction, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1978. A concise overview of Tolstoy’s fiction which gives the shorter works unusual prominence: Wasiolek includes useful sections on Three Deaths, Polikushka and Family Happiness, as well as chapters devoted to The Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man.
CHRONOLOGY
DATE
AUTHOR’S LIFE
LITERARY CONTEXT
1828
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy born 28 August at Yasnaya Polyana, his father’s estate 130 miles south of Moscow.
1830
Death of his mother.
Stendhal:
Scarlet and Black
.
Pushkin:
Boris Godunov
.
1832
1833
Pushkin:
Eugene Onegin
.
1835
Balzac:
Old Goriot
.
1836
The family moves to Moscow.
Gogol:
The Government Inspector
.
1837
Death of his father.
Pushkin dies after a duel.
Dickens:
Oliver Twist
(to 1838).
1838
Death of his grandmother.
1840
Lermontov:
A Hero of Our Time
.
1841
On the death of their guardian (an aunt), the Tolstoy children move to Kazan to live with another aunt.
Lermontov killed in a duel.
1842
Loses his virginity. Starts to read Rousseau.
Gogol:
Dead Souls Part 1, The Overcoat
.
1843
Martin Chuzzlewit
(to 1844).
1844
Enters Kazan University.
Thackeray:
Barry Lyndon
.
1846
Dostoevsky:
Poor Folk, The Double
.
1847
Inherits Yasnaya Polyana and leaves Kazan University without graduating. Suffering from a venereal disease. Returns to Yasnaya Polyana and attempts to institute a programme of social reform directed at the peasants.
Herzen:
Who is to Blame?
Goncharov:
An Ordinary Story
.
Belinsky:
Letter to Gogol
.
Charlotte Brontë:
Jane Eyre
.
Emily Brontë:
Wuthering Heights
.
Thackeray:
Vanity Fair
(to 1848).
Herzen:
From the Other Shore
(to 1851).
Turgenev:
A Sportsman’s Notebook
(to 1852).
1848
Goes to Moscow.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
France: July Revolution.
Rebellion in Poland (to 1831).
Great Britain: First Reform Act.
Great Britain: Factory Act.
Great Britain: Accession of Queen Victoria.
First Russian railway line constructed.
Ban on sale of individual peasants.