by Stefan Zweig
Always and everywhere we feel that what Tolstoy dreaded most in the world was himself, his own bear’s strength. His delight in his splendid health was invariably shadowed by his panic fear of the bestial unrestraint of the senses. True, he controlled them as few others before him or since; but he knew that he had to pay the penalty for being a Russian, and therefore an inheritor of a passion for excesses and extremes. That was why it became a point of prudence with him to tame his body by trying to weary it; that was why he always kept his senses on the stretch, gave them plenty of exercise, supplied them with fresh air and an abundance of harmless amusements. He tired his muscles out by berserker activities with plow and scythe, by vigorous games, by riding and swimming to the point of exhaustion. In an open-air life, he could find an outlet for energies which, had he been pent up at home, cut off from free contact with nature, would have been a torment and a danger. That was why he was so devoted to the chase, in which all his senses could be indulged, both higher and lower. Then feelings which were at other times repressed became active; the slumbering instincts of Muscovite and perhaps Tartar ancestors awakened, the instincts of the wild horsemen of the steppes, of nomadic and fighting races; sensuality raised its head once more. The Tolstoy of the pre-apostolic days was intoxicated by the smell of sweating horses, by the excitement of riding hell-for-leather, by the joys of the hunt and the kill; he took a savage delight (which the apostolic Tolstoy, the advocate of an all-embracing compassion, found incomprehensible) in the terrors of the quarry. “The pangs of the dying beast give me exquisite pleasure,” he avows when he has brained a wolf with the butt end of his gun; and this outburst of bloodlust is an index to the brutality which found issue during the mad years of youth, but was sternly repressed throughout the remainder of his life. Long after he has, on moral grounds, abandoned all these blood sports, his hands twitch involuntarily when, out walking, he puts up a hare; the fettered instincts rattle their chains. Resolutely, however, he calls his passions to heel, and in the end he is content to gratify the lusts of the flesh by an innocent delight in the contemplation and delineation of all that lives — a delight that remains ecstatic to the end. The instant he goes out into the open and enters into communion with nature, his sportive senses are quickened, begin to appraise, to appreciate and to apprehend. Now the utmost trifle can excite interest and arouse enthusiasm. He laughs heartily on catching sight of a fine horse; pats and strokes the warm, silken neck with an almost voluptuous pleasure, heartily enjoying the flow of animal heat by conduction into his fingertips; indeed, the whole world of animality fills him with rapture. For hours he is entranced as he watches young girls dancing, fascinated by the graceful movements of the lithe bodies. When he meets a good-looking man, a handsome woman, he will stop short, enter into conversation, quite forget his surroundings, while he exclaims: “How wonderful a sight is a well-shaped human being!” He loves the body because it is the vessel that holds life, because it has a surface that is sensitively responsive to light, because it inhales the marvelously compounded aromas of the air, because it provides the wrappings for the hot and swiftly flowing blood; he loves the body, in all its swelling fleshliness, as the very meaning and the very soul of life.
A passionate animalist, he loves the body as a musician loves the instrument upon which he plays; he loves the body as man in the natural and elementary form, and he loves himself in the body much more than in the flawed and disingenuous soul. He loves the body in all its shapes and at all seasons from the beginning to the end, and his first conscious memory of this autoerotic passion dates from the second year of his life. The point needs to be emphasized, if we are to realize how crystal clear, how sharply defined, Tolstoy’s memories remained, in defiance of the obliterating touch of time. Whereas in Goethe’s case and in Stendhal’s memory began with the eighth year or at earliest with the seventh, the two-year-old Tolstoy enjoyed feelings that were no less complex, no less multiform, and no less integrated, than those of the full-grown artist. Read his description of his first bodily sensation: “I am sitting in a wooden bathtub completely engrossed in the smell (new to me, but not disagreeable) of a fluid with which my body is being rubbed. It must, I feel sure, have been bran-water. The novelty of the impression has its due effect, and for the first time I become pleasurably aware of my little body and of the ribs showing through the skin; I note the smooth, dark cheeks and the turned-up sleeves of my nurse; I perceive the warmth and the wetness of the bran-water, and am conscious of its peculiar smell; but especially do I recall the feeling of smoothness which I experienced whenever I passed my hand over the inner surface of the bathtub.”
Having read this passage, let the reader analyze and arrange the memories of childhood it reveals, let him classify them in accordance with the sensory zones to which they respectively belong. He cannot fail to be astonished at the comprehensiveness of the two-year-old’s perceptions. Little Leo sees the nurse, smells the bran, distinguishes the new impressions, feels the warmth of the water (heat sense), hears it splashing, feels the smoothness of the inner surface of the bathtub (touch sense) and all these simultaneous impressions received by the various sensory nerves coalesce into a “pleasurable” self-contemplation of the body as the general surface whereby all the sensations of life pass into consciousness. We see, in his case, how early the suckers of his senses have clung, like limpets, to existence; we see how, already in the little child, the manifold influences radiating from the outer world have awakened a precise, a well-defined consciousness. Readily, therefore, can we understand that when this same child has grown to manhood, when the senses have been stimulated by riper experience, when the perceptions have been intensified by a maturer consciousness, when the nerves have been more fully awakened by curiosity — every impression will be refined and intensified a thousand fold. Then the child’s gratification at the discovery of his own body in the bathtub will have expanded to become a savage and almost frenzied delight in existence, a delight which (just as in the child) mingles outer and inner, the world and the ego, nature and life, in a unified paean of intoxication. The fully grown Tolstoy, merging himself with his environment, often does so in an ecstasy which borders on drunkenness. Read how he goes into the forest that he may contemplate the world which has singled him out from among millions to perceive it, to feel it, more intensely and more wittingly than them all; he fills his chest and flings his arms wide, as if he hoped to embrace the infinite. Read how, moved no less strongly by the infinitely small than by the infinitely large, he stoops to smooth out tenderly the leaves of some trampled plant, or with passionate joy he looks at the quivering wings of a dragonfly; then, since his friends are watching him, he turns his face away lest they should see that his eyes have filled with tears. No other contemporary writer, not even Walt Whitman, has so keenly felt the bodily pleasure of the fleshly organs. This Russian, sensuous as Pan, as much at one with the world-all as was that ancient God of the Hellenes, is unrivalled for the vigor and success with which — looking, handling, probing — he makes every item in the universe his own. We understand his extravagant and boastful-seeming assertion: “I myself am nature.”
This Russian oak, spreading its branches wide, a universe within the universe, is firmly rooted in the earth from which it springs. Nothing, one would think, could threaten its stability. But even the solid earth trembles now and again, quakes under Seismos’ touch; and Tolstoy, no less, trembles from time to time, his steadfastness shaken. His eyes are fixed in a rigid stare, and he gazes into vacancy. Something that he cannot understand has entered his field of vision; something which, scrutinize it as he may, is alien, chill, hostile to the warm, teeming life of the body. To him, a man of the senses, it remains incomprehensible because it is not a thing of this earth; not a thing which he can touch, taste, handle, assimilate. It is an unfriendly shadow behind all the frank delights of the senses; and it cannot be ranged among them, cannot be joyfully accepted as part of himself by this man who feels himself at one with the world
of warm, living experience. How is he to face the terrible thought which suddenly splits that world in twain, the thought that these eager senses will one day be stilled; that the hand will no longer be able to feel; that the body through which the blood is coursing so merrily will fall to pieces, and become food for worms; that nothing will be left of it but a grisly skeleton? What if it were to seize him, today or tomorrow, this Nothing, this black shadow, which is nowhere yet everywhere, which is manifest and inevitable and palpable though invisible and incomprehensible? Tolstoy’s blood ran cold when the thought of death forced itself upon him. His first encounter with the dread specter took place in childhood, when he was five years old. They led him to his mother’s corpse. On the bed lay something cold and stiff, which yesterday had been a living woman. Never could he forget the sight. With a heartrending cry, he tore out of the room in a panic, chased by all the furies of terror. Other deaths in the family, his brother’s, his father’s, his aunt’s, had a similar effect on him. He felt as if a cold hand had been laid on the nape of his neck; he shuddered.
In 1869, not long before the crisis in his life, he describes the “white terror” of such an access: “I stretched myself on my couch, but had scarcely done so when a sense of horror forced me to get up again. I had a feeling of intense anxiety, like that which one has when on the point of vomiting. It was as if something had torn my existence to shreds, without quite putting an end to it. Again I tried to sleep, but the terror was there, red, white; something had given way in me, and was nonetheless holding me together.” A dreadful thing had happened. Before death had laid even so much as a finger on Tolstoy’s body, forty years before the end, there had come a foretaste which was to endure as long as life lasted. Anxiety sat at night by his bedside; it devoured his joy in life; it lurked between the pages of his books; and it gnawed ceaselessly at his brain, blackening his thoughts and corroding them.
Obviously, Tolstoy’s fear of death is as overwhelming as his vitality. It would be a euphemism to speak of it as mere nervousness, comparable with the neurasthenic phobia of an Edgar Allan Poe; with the mystical, pleasurably tinged dread of a Novalis; with the melancholic gloom of a Lenau. In Tolstoy’s case, we have to do with a crudely animal, a barbaric, terror; with a violent revulsion of feeling, a hurricane of fear, a panic revolt against death. When he shrinks from the inevitable, it is not as a thinking man, not as one endowed with a virile and heroic spirit. He shrinks as a slave who had been branded would, with a yell, shrink from another application of the red-hot iron; his terror finds vent in animal fashion, taking the form of an explosion of uncontrollable alarm. He manifests the loathing of death which has for countless generations been incarnate in all creatures that live and breathe, a loathing and a fear that in him find embodiment and voice in a human frame. He rebels against the thought of death; he will not die, he will not — and the realization of what must be masters him nonetheless, after an agonizing struggle. For we have to remember that the thought takes him by storm at a moment when he feels perfectly safe; that in this Russian bear there is no transition to temper the passage from the idea of life to the idea of death. He is in such rude health that for him death is something utterly alien, whereas for the generality of us there are bridges between the two, bridges on which we have often walked, the bridges of illness. Few are the men of fifty in whom death is not already latent, so that his coming cannot take them by surprise. Hence they do not shrink with so much horror from his first energetic onslaught. Dostoevsky had once stood, blindfolded and tied to a post, awaiting a volley from a firing squad; and, being an epileptic, he was familiar with the paroxysms in which death comes near. Such a man, accustomed to suffering, is less disconcerted by the thought of death than will be one who has never had an hour’s serious illness, has never really had to look his dread adversary in the face. His blood will not run cold, he will not be affected by what we can scarcely avoid calling a craven fear of death. For Tolstoy (who regards life as worth living only when his ego is in the full tide of expansion, when he is “drunken with life”), the most trifling reduction of vitality signifies illness — so that we find him at thirty-six already speaking of himself as “an old man.” That is why the new sensation makes him feel as if he had been shot through the heart. Only one whose existence is characterized by such vitality can feel so overwhelming a dread of the non-existence which is the absolute complement of life; only one to whom health is a stupendous reality will be so rabidly insurgent against the yet more stupendous reality of death. But for the very reason that in this case an elemental vitality was confronted by a no less elemental fear of death, there occurred within Tolstoy a veritable combat of the giants, unparalleled in world literature. For only a titan can battle like a titan, can resist like a titan. A masterful man, an athlete of the will, does not capitulate without striking a blow, does not run away from Nothing to seek a refuge behind the church door. After the first shock of the assault, he rallies his forces in the endeavor to overthrow the enemy. Recovering from his initial alarm, he entrenches himself in philosophy, raises the drawbridge of his fortress and bombards the unseen foe with missiles propelled by the catapults of logic. Contempt is his first line of defense: “I take little interest in death, mainly because, so long as I am alive, death does not exist.” Death is “incredible.” The only thing he is afraid of is, “not death, but the fear of death.” He continues (for thirty years!) to reiterate that he has no fear of death, while his asseverations are belied by the fact that from the time he is fifty down to the end he is almost exclusively occupied in discussing the problem of death “with all the energies of the soul.” His assurances deceive no one, not even himself. There can be no doubt that for him the wall of spiritual and sensual security had been breached during the first attack of anxiety neurosis, so that all his nerves and all his thoughts lay open thenceforward to assault; that after he had passed the age of fifty, Tolstoy was able to fight only with the aid of vestiges of a self-confidence which had once been perfect. The more desperately he tries to escape from the obsession, the more clearly does he realize that he has been hopelessly beset. Step by step he has to yield ground, to admit that death is no mere hobgoblin, no mere scarecrow, but a formidable adversary, not to be scared away by brave words. He asks himself whether some sort of accommodation may not be possible; whether, since he cannot go on living in perpetual warfare against death, he may not be able to live on terms of armistice with the enemy.
When he has realized this possibility, there begins a new and fruitful phase in his relations with death. He no longer kicks against the pricks; no longer gives himself up to the illusion that he can keep death at bay with sophisms, or exclude the idea of death from his mind by an exercise of the will: he tries to fit the idea of death into a niche in his daily life, to merge it with that life, to reconcile himself to the inevitable, to “accustom” himself to the thought of death. Giant Life has to admit that Giant Death is invincible; but the thought of death is not invincible, and Giant Life must therefore consecrate his energies to the struggle against this thought. After the manner of the Spanish Trappists, who sleep every night in their coffins in order that familiarity may breed contempt for death, Tolstoy endeavors to steel his will by daily autosuggestion, by a perpetual memento mori, forcing himself to think continually of death without shrinking. All the entries in his diary begin with three mystical letters of the alphabet, the initials of the Russian words that mean “if I live.” For years, he begins each month by reminding himself: “Nearer to death.” Thus does he habituate himself to looking death in the face. Habit overcomes hostility, and conquers fear, so that in the course of thirty years death comes to seem a friend rather than an enemy. Death, taken to his arms, is now one of the spiritual constituents of his life, and in this way the erstwhile anxiety is “practically nullified.” The white-haired sage can face with composure what used to be an object of terror. “One need not think about death, but one must always have his picture before one’s eyes. Then one’s life
becomes more festive, momentous, sincere, fruitful, happy.” Tolstoy has made a virtue of necessity. Adopting the perennial device of the creative artist, he has rid himself of his anxiety by objectifying it. He holds death and the fear of death aloof by incorporating them in the creatures of his fancy. The upshot is that what at first seemed annihilating, ends by making his life more profound, and (contrary to all expectation) promotes the splendor of his art. When he has accepted the fact that he must die, when he has made death his familiar, he knows all about death. Thanks to his heart searchings, thanks to having already died a thousand deaths in imagination, this devotee of life becomes an expert in the representation of death, the master of all those who have ever depicted it. Anxiety, outspeeding reality, eagerly questioning the multifarious possibilities, winged by fancy and with every nerve aquiver, has always been more creative than heavy-footed and dull-witted health. How much more so, the awakened primal anxiety, the arch-horror of a titan, who has been shuddering, panic-stricken, for decades! This panic terror teaches him to know the symptoms of bodily extinction; he becomes intimately acquainted with every line which Thanatos the destroyer marks with his graving tool upon the dying flesh; experiences all the miseries and alarms of the soul that is passing into the void. The artist is summoned to his task by the very perfection of his knowledge. The death of Ivan Ilich with his hideous outcry, “I will not, I will not,” the pitiful end of Levin’s brother, the various passings in Three Deaths — how could these greatest of Tolstoy’s psychological achievements, these eavesdroppings at the uttermost margin of life, have been possible, but for the author’s personal experience, the mental catastrophe through which he had passed, the soul-searching horror he had endured, and the alert, almost superhuman watchfulness of his new poise? Only as a contrast to the radiance of perfect health could the finest shades of thought and the most trifling bodily changes of the dying be described with so much precision. Sympathy presupposes that the sympathizer must have gone through a kindred experience — at least in imagination. Before Tolstoy could describe these hundred deaths, he must have lived through them in the recesses of his tortured soul. The apparent meaninglessness of the sudden overshadowing of his existence kindled in the mind of Tolstoy the artist a knowledge of new meanings. Premonitory anxiety was the goad which drove his art from the shallows of life, from the mere contemplation and reproduction of the superficial aspects of reality, into the innermost depths of knowledge. That and nothing else was what enabled him to supplement his Rubens-like vision of actuality by the tragic illumination from within, not so much physical as metaphysical, which animates the canvases of Rembrandt. Because Tolstoy suffered more keenly than other men from the agony of death in life, he was able to limn that agony more vividly than any other writer.