Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  Every crisis is a gift bestowed by destiny upon the creative artist. This boon conferred a new and more perfect symmetry to Tolstoy’s spiritual outlook on the universe, and likewise to his art. The contrasts interpenetrated and balanced one another; the frenzied struggle between the lust for life and its dread counterpart gave place to a harmonious mutual understanding; the life that was slowly ebbing and the death that was casting an ever deeper shadow before its coming were now splendidly and poetically confluent, wave of creation following wave in the heroic twilight of his declining years. As Spinoza would have it, his tranquilized feeling at length finds repose in a pure suspense between hope and fear of the last hour: “It is not good to fear death, nor yet to long for death. The scales must be so balanced that the pointer is vertical. Life goes best when this condition is fulfilled.”

  The tragic discord has at length been resolved. The veteran Tolstoy does not hate death, nor flee from it, nor look forward with impatience to the last encounter. He is content to meditate on death serenely, as an artist sketches the outlines of a work which is already finished in the hidden realm of the unconscious. That is why, when the dark hour comes, fate is kindly, giving him a death great as his life has been, a death that is the ripe fruit of his own works.

  THE ARTIST

  The only true pleasure is the pleasure of creative activity. One can create pencils, boots, bread, children — that is to say, human beings. Without creation, there is no true pleasure, none that is not tinctured with anxiety, suffering, pangs of conscience, shame.

  FROM A LETTER

  No work of art attains its climax of beauty until those who contemplate it can forget that it is an artificial creation, and are able to regard it as naked truth. Tolstoy’s writings often produce this sublime illusion. They seem vividly real. We forget that they are fiction, that the characters are imaginary. When we read him, we fancy that we are looking through an open window into the world of fact.

  Were all artists like Tolstoy, we might readily come to believe that art is a simple matter; sincerity, a self-evident affair; imaginative writing, nothing more than a faithful account of reality, an effortless transcription. We might suppose that an author need merely possess (in Tolstoy’s own words) “a negative quality, that of not being a liar.” His writings have the self-sufficiency, the naïve naturalness of a landscape, they are as full of life and color as nature itself. The mysterious powers of poetic frenzy, the fruitful ardors, the phosphorescent vision, the bold and often illogical fantasies, that are elemental in the creative artist, are to all appearance lacking in Tolstoy’s epic work, and we fancy that he has no need of them. In his case, not a drunken demon, but a clear-sighted and perfectly sober man, has been at work, observing facts, recording them faithfully, and with perfect ease fashioning a replica of reality. Thus do we figure his method to ourselves.

  Here the perfection of the artist’s touch has led us astray, for what is more difficult than truth, more arduous than clarity? The original texts of his works show that Leo Tolstoy was not a man to whom writing came easily. He was one of the most painstaking and diligent of penmen; his literary frescoes were mosaics, laboriously pieced together out of millions upon millions of details, out of countless minute and particular observations. What looks as if it had been sketched freehand in broad and bold and clear outline, has really been the result of strenuous craftsmanship on the part of a man who did not see things in sweeping visions, but set to work slowly and patiently and concretely. Like the German old masters, he built up his pictures by stages. First came the groundwork, followed by close attention to the flat surfaces and by scrupulous accuracy in contour and line. In the next stage, the color tone was added. Not until then did he endow his epic fable with the radiant actuality of life, by developing of set purpose the lights and the shades. War and Peace, which runs to two thousand pages, was written over and over again, seven times in all. Great chests were filled with the notes and references concerning this book. Every detail was checked with meticulous care. In order to give an accurate description of the battle of Borodino, Tolstoy spent two days in the saddle, riding hither and thither over the battlefield, map in hand. He journeyed far to visit survivors, on the chance of being able to glean picturesque items. Not content with printed books, with plowing through the contents of public libraries, he wrote to the heads of noble families and to the keepers of archives asking for a sight of letters and other documents which might yield up to him some fragment of truth. Thus in the course of years upon years of labor did he collect innumerable droplets of quicksilver, which coalesced, in the end, into one enormous, well-rounded, and homogeneous globule. Not until his search for truth was finished did he begin to strive for clarity. We know that a writer of lyrics, such as Baudelaire, must polish every facet. Tolstoy, with the zeal of the artist who aims at perfection, was no less scrupulous in scouring and refining, in hammering and oiling and smoothing his prose. A redundant sentence, an inappropriate adjective, in a voluminous book, would exercise his mind so much that, after reading and correcting and returning proofs, he would telegraph and have the press stopped in order to modify a discordant syllable. This first printing was cast back into the crucible of his mind, there to be melted once more, and refashioned. If ever an art was labored, the epithet applies to the seemingly effortless, outwardly natural and spontaneous work of Tolstoy. During seven years, he toiled for eight or ten hours a day. Can we be surprised that, robust though he was, he should have suffered from a psychical collapse after production of each of his great novels? His stomach would go on strike, his senses would be clouded, and the man who had just written a masterpiece would be affected by a sense of failure intensified to the verge of melancholia. Then his only resource was to seek solitude. He had to get far away from civilization, live in a Bashkir hut on the steppe, diet himself on koumiss for a while, and thus regain his equanimity. This writer of epics that are Homeric in their grandeur, this raconteur whose tales are preeminently natural and crystal-clear and endowed with the primitiveness of the folk spirit, is, under the skin, a profoundly self-critical and self-tormented artist. (Are there any artists of a different kind?) But, as a crowning mercy, the toilsomeness of the process leaves no trace upon the finished product. Of our time, and yet transcending time, this prose which is the outcome of art that conceals art gives the impression of having always existed, of being self-created, ageless as nature. Nothing stamps it as belonging to any specific epoch. If one of his novels were to drop into your hands by chance, and you were to read it for the first time without knowing the name of the author, you would hesitate to guess in which decade or even in which century it had been penned. That is why I describe his writing as timeless. The folktales Three Old Men and Does a Man want much Land? might have been written, like the story of Ruth and the story of Job, a couple of thousand years before the invention of printing and when the alphabet was a recent discovery. The Death of Ivan Ilich and Polikoushka and Linen-Measurer may belong to the nineteenth century or the twentieth or the thirtieth; for what finds expression here is not the contemporary mind as voiced by Stendhal and Rousseau and Dostoevsky, but the primitive mind, which is changeless and perennial — the terrestrial soul, the primal sentiment, primal anxiety, primal sense of loneliness, felt by man brought face to face with the infinite. Perfect mastery frees itself from the trammels of time. Tolstoy never had to learn how to tell a tale, and he never lost the art. In this matter, his genius was of spontaneous growth. It could not wither, and could neither improve nor deteriorate. Take the descriptions of scenery in The Cossacks, written when the author was twenty-four, and compare them with the incomparably brilliant account of an Easter morning in Resurrection, penned when he was sixty, a storm-tossed generation later. Both of them are equally full of nature’s direct and universal appeal, both are equally instinct with sensuous enjoyment.

  For the very reason that his writing is thus perfected to a degree which lifts it above the realm of the individual and makes it timeless, w
e are scarcely aware of the personality of the artist in the work of art. We do not regard him as a writer of fiction; he is a master-recorder of realities. We hesitate, in fact, to term him an “imaginative writer,” a “poet,” for this name applies to those who modify and mold, producing a new type of humankind, mysteriously interpenetrated with mythos and magic. It applies to the ecstatic, who, in the intoxication of his visions, embodies his ineffable experiences in Pythian words; to the visionary, who finds in melody a solution for the insoluble, and in the symbol an understanding of the incomprehensible.

  Tolstoy does not belong to this category. He is not a man of the “higher” type, but wholly of this world; not super-earthly, but the sum and substance of all that is earthly. Never does he outstep the limits of the comprehensible, the clear, the palpable; yet within these limits, what perfection he displays! His qualities are not those of a muse or a magician; they are ordinary qualities, intensified. As compared with Everyman, his mind functions more vigorously, and his senses are keener; he sees, hears, smells more acutely, more extensively, and more consciously, than the average individual, and he has a more delicate sense of touch; his memory is more trustworthy and more logical; his thought process is swifter, more efficiently associative, and more accurate. He never crosses the boundary line between the normal and the abnormal. That is why people are slow to speak of him as a genius, though they give this name to Dostoevsky as a matter of course. His writings are never inspired, never animated with that elemental afflatus of the incomprehensible which is peculiar to the seer, the visionary, the prophet. That is why he is so clear; that is why you can always understand him. His earthbound imagination cannot outsoar the region of “factual memory” to discover something which is not part of Everyman’s experience. Hence his art remains positive, intelligible, thoroughly human; a day-lit art, depicting reality raised to the nth power.

  Tolstoy does not create dream worlds; he describes realities. Consequently, when he is telling a tale, we do not seem to hear an artist speaking, but the facts telling their own story. Men and beasts come forth from his world as if from their own warm abiding places, moving with their own natural and unforced rhythms. We do not feel that behind them is a vehement being who urges them forward, hounds them along (as Dostoevsky drives his characters) with a scourge, so that, hot and shrieking, they burst impetuously into the arena of their passions. When Tolstoy is telling a tale, we do not hear his breathing. He tells it as upland peasants climb their native hills; slowly, equably, step by step; without rushes, without impatience, without fatigue, without weakness; and the throbbing of his heart never troubles the smooth tone of his voice. That is why we do not lose our composure when we are in his company. Dostoevsky hurries us up to the dizzy altitudes of delight; suddenly plunges us into unfathomable abysses of misery; and then makes us soar with him in the dreamland of fantasy. But with Tolstoy we are always wide awake, like students of science. We stumble, we doubt, we tire; yet, with his strong hand clasped in ours, we climb his epic mountains stage by stage, the horizon widening as we climb. Incidents disclose themselves slowly; only by degrees does the prospect clear: but everything happens with the assured and infallible movement of a clockwork mechanism, as when, on a hill at sunrise, we watch the light spreading inch by inch across the lowlands. Tolstoy tells his story simply and dispassionately, like the epic writers of early days, the rhapsodists and psalmists and chroniclers of times which had not yet waxed impatient, when nature was still at one with her creatures, before there was an arbitrary classification of beings into humans and animals and plants and stones, and when little things and great were regarded as equally deserving of reverence and equally instinct with the divine fire. He sees things from a universal outlook, anthropomorphically. Although in moral matters no one could be less of a Hellene, in that he is an artist his feeling is thoroughly pantheistical. For him there are no gradations in rank between the howls and twitches of a dying dog, the death of a beribboned and bestarred general, and the fall of a tree blown down by the wind because it has perished at the root. The beautiful and the ugly, the animal and the human, the clean and the unclean — he contemplates them with an artist’s vision, as equals in all of which he sees the soul. It matters little whether we say that he naturalizes man or that he humanizes nature. The result is that, within the sphere of earthly being, nothing is locked away from him. Women have often asked with amazement how it is that this man can be so familiar with their most intimate and hardly communicable bodily sensations, so that he can describe, as if he had felt them, the dartings and draggings in the breasts of a mother about to give suck, and the agreeable shudder that runs up and down the arms of a young girl who exposes them for the first time at a ball. Could animals read Anna Karenina and speak, they would express no less wonder at the uncanny intuition which enables him to sense the eager, painful longing aroused in a spaniel by the smell of snipe, or the instinctive urge to begin a gallop which inspires a thoroughbred when the hunt is up. Here Tolstoy is able by his native powers of perception to realize all that the zoologists and entomologists, from Buffon to Fabre, have learned by elaborate study. Nor is his accuracy of observation affected by preferences for this or that object which comes within his ken; his love knows no favorites. Being incorruptible, he does not regard Napoleon as more of a man than the most insignificant of the emperor’s soldiers; nor is this latter a more important being than the cur that runs at his heels; nor yet the dog than the stone which it treads under foot.

  One who sees so much and so well does not need to invent; one who observes imaginatively does not need creative imagination. Tolstoy spent his life using his senses, and recording their impressions; he had no dreams of a world beyond reality. His art did not come from above, but worked its way into the interior; it was (to quote Nötzel’s admirable phrase) an architecture of the depths, not of the heights. In full possession of his faculties, thereby contrasting with Dostoevsky the visionary, he never emerged from the confines of the ordinary to enter the realm of the wonderful. Instead of building an airy edifice in a region of supramundane fantasy, he planted his props in the common earth and in everyday human beings. Moreover, in the sphere of the human, Tolstoy had no need to study abnormal and pathological types; or, going further than this, like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, to conjure up new intermediates between god and beast, Ariels and Aliashas, Calibans and Karamazovs. He burrows into the depths of reality so effectively, that in his presentation the most commonplace peasant assumes a mysterious aspect. As shaft leading into the deeps, anything will serve his turn: a tiller of the soil, a soldier, a drunkard, a dog, a horse, a what-you-will; not costly and rare and refined materials, but whatever comes first to hand. Yet he endows these ordinary figures with unprecedented spiritual attributes; and he does it, not by embellishing them, but by revealing their true inwardness. His whole technique is comprised in this revelation of the truth. He uses no other instrument than the sharp and penetrating instrument of truth; but he uses his boring tool with such relentless vigor, and thrusts it so deep into every happening, every object of contemplation, that, marveling, we discern a deeper world within the world, a spiritual stratum to which no miner before him has pierced. Realities, not dreams, incite him to his formative task. Like the sculptor, he must have clay to mold and marble to shape; he cannot, like the musician, create out of winged air. It is quite in keeping that Tolstoy should never have written a line of verse, for to him, an arch-realist, poetry of every kind was necessarily antipodal. His books speak the language of naked truth and none other; this is his limitation; but they speak that language more perfectly than the books of any other imaginative writer, and this is his greatness. For Tolstoy, beauty and truth are one.