Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  This continuity it is, and nothing else, that raises Tolstoy’s writings as a whole into the highest rank of self-portraiture, and makes them supreme in this respect as far as prose works are concerned. Casanova writes memoirs once and for all; Stendhal is fragmentary; but Tolstoy, inseparable as a shadow, glides at the heels of the figures in his books for the whole of his literary career. Of course every artist uses the same method at times; every artist is familiar with the urge to incorporate himself among the creatures of his fancy. The poet, the being who is burdened with more destinies than his own, the being whom every experience fertilizes and makes heavy with child, hands on to the children he bears both the ecstasies that thrill him and the crises that transform him. But whereas most writers do this once only, presenting themselves to the public in one impersonation (Stendhal as Fabrice, Gottfried Keller in Der grüne Heinrich, Joyce as Stephen Dedalus), Tolstoy shows himself to us each decade in a new form. We do not know him in a fixed and final presentation. We know him as child and boy, as light-hearted lieutenant, as happy bridegroom, as the Saul and Paul of the days of crisis, as warrior and half-saint, as old man who has attained clarity of vision and tranquility of mind; always varying, and yet ever the same; a cinematographic portrait in a continuous flux, instead of a rigid and immutable photograph.

  In addition to the pictorial series, we have, as a magnificent supplement, the author’s conceptual self-supervision in the form of diaries and letters, continued day by day and hour by hour till death claims him. The result is that there is scarcely an unexplored region in the vast extent of his existence. His social experiences, his private life, his epic and other literary activities, his wrestlings with physical and metaphysical problems — all are exhaustively discussed. And because Tolstoy, despite his extraordinariness, despite his seemingly superhuman qualities, was (like Goethe) thoroughly normal, healthy, well-balanced, anything but pathological; because he was a perfect specimen of human kind, a model of mental and bodily equilibrium; because he was an archetypal and universal figure — we feel of him (once more, just as we feel of Goethe) that the existence he has recorded for us so faithfully is an epitome of human life.

  CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION

  The most important incident in a man’s life is the moment when he becomes aware of his ego. The consequences of this incident may be most beneficial or most terrible.

  NOVEMBER, 1898

  To creative activity, every danger becomes a boon, every hindrance a help and an advantage, for it generates and regenerates unknown forces. If a life is to have an effect upon the world, it must not stand still, for mental creative force, no less than bodily, springs from variety and transformation; there can be nothing more dangerous to an imaginative writer than contentment, mechanical labor, and a smooth course. Once only in his career did Tolstoy pass through such a phase of self-forgetting relaxation — so happy for the man, so perilous for the artist. Once only, on its pilgrimage, does his restless spirit allow itself a period of repose. For sixteen out of his eighty-two years, from the time of his wedding until he has finished the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy is content with himself and his work. For thirteen years, from 1865 to 1878, even the diary, the warder of his conscience, is dumb. Tolstoy, happily immersed in the task of composition, is no longer watching himself, and is satisfied with watching the world. He does not ask why he is engaged in creative activity, why he procreates seven children and produces the two greatest of his books. During this peaceful interlude, and then only, he lives free from care like any other man, enjoying the respectable egoism of family life, delighted at being freed from the torment of questioning. “I no longer brood over my position (brooding is done with), and I do not burrow into my own sentiments; in my relations with my family, it is enough for me to feel, and I do not reflect. Hence I have an unwonted amount of spiritual freedom.” The stream of creative thought is no longer checked by introspection. The inexorable sentry who watches over this moral ego has gone to sleep for a while, so that the artist has freedom of movement, unrestricted play for his senses.

  During these years, he becomes famous; his worldly wealth is quadrupled; he educates his children and enlarges his house. But lasting content with an existence of this kind is impossible to a man of Tolstoy’s temperament. Fame cannot satisfy him, and he cannot bask in the sunshine of wealth. From the work of objective creation, he must in the end turn back to his task of self-perfection; and since no god summons him to a life of affliction, he sets out in search of it himself. Since no tragic fate is imposed on him from without, he will fashion it for himself from within. Life must be ever on the wing; above all, so mighty a life as his. If the outward sources of destiny cease to flow, new springs gush forth within the spirit, that the circulation of existence may be maintained. That which happened to Tolstoy when he was verging on fifty, that which seemed inexplicable to many of his contemporaries, namely his sudden turning away from art and towards religion, must not be regarded as abnormal. There are no abnormalities in the development of this healthy being. The only unusual thing about the process is its intensity, characteristic of Tolstoy. The transformation which took place in him during the fiftieth year of his life was one which happens to us all, though in most persons it may escape notice. What happened was nothing more than the inevitable adaptation of the bodily organism to the approach of old age, the climacteric change which occurs in artists just as in other men.

  “Life stood still and grew sinister” — it is thus that he formulates the beginning of the crisis. At fifty he has reached the “dead point” where the formative capacity of the plasma begins to decline, and the soul tends to grow rigid. No longer can the senses knead the clay with the old creative energy; at the time when the hair is turning grey, impressions from the outer world begin to lose their vivid tints. Now opens that second epoch, which we can study also in the self-revelations of Goethe; the epoch when the play of the senses yields place to conceptual activities, when object becomes phenomenon, when the image grows into a symbol, when the longing to create a world full of light and color becomes transformed into a longing to effect a crystal-clear classification of thoughts. This rebirth transforms the mind, and likewise brings about a measure of bodily discomfort, arousing an uneasy sense that a stranger, perhaps an enemy, is approaching. A chill feeling of anxiety, a terrible dread of impoverishment, takes possession of the disquieted soul; and thereupon the body, like a sensitive seismograph, records the tremors which show that an earthquake is at hand. Meanwhile (and here we enter a region which is still imperfectly explored), what time the soul is as yet unable to foresee the precise nature of this attack out of the darkness and can only shiver at the premonition of danger, the organism has already begun spontaneously to arm in self-defense, and in the psychophysical domain nature has begun to take her precautions without any knowledge of the matter on the part of the person most concerned and without any exertion of his conscious will. Just as in the lower animals, before the winter cold begins, the body protects itself by a thickening of the fur, so does the human spirit, at the first approach of old age and when the zenith of life has been barely past, provide itself with a new protective covering against the chill epoch of decline. This profound change, proceeding from the bodily into the spiritual, originating perhaps in the cells of the glands but making its influence felt in the remotest vibrations of creative production, this climacteric epoch which I may term the age of antipuberty, manifests itself like the age of puberty (equally determined by changes in the blood, and equally assuming the aspect of a crisis) in the form of a mental and spiritual disturbance. In this field there is much work still to be done by physiologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts; for neither the underlying bodily changes nor the resulting mental transformations have as yet been adequately studied. In the case of women, indeed, seeing that in them the changes in question are more obvious and palpable, we are somewhat better informed; but as regards men we still grope in the dark. This much is certain, t
hat the climacteric of the male is almost invariably the period of great conversions, of religious and poetic and rational sublimations, which are derivatives for the sense that the animal being is less richly blooded than of yore; they are a substitute for reduced bodily sensuality, an intensification of world-feeling at the cost of self-feeling, a substitute for the lowered intensity in life’s potential. The complement of puberty (no less dangerous in the weakly, no less vehement in the vehement, no less productive in the productive), this climacteric in the male inaugurates a new type of creative work.

  In the life history of every noted artist, we discover this critical phase; but in no other does it show itself with such earthquaking, volcanic, and almost annihilating impetuosity as in Tolstoy. No one else has disclosed so plainly as this man of energetic and normal temperament Everyman’s universal dread at the restriction of life’s possibilities, universal horror at the impending abatement in creative faculty. For the very reason that his senses have been so vigorous, and that thanks to this he has been able to create so abundantly, he feels the first threat of a decline in their powers as the imminence of doom, as the menace of annihilation. If we look at the matter objectively, realistically, we see that what happens to Tolstoy in his fiftieth year is nothing more than what is proper to his age. He feels that he is getting older. He loses some of his teeth; his memory is not so trustworthy as it used to be; his thoughts are less brilliantly clear. Every man of fifty is familiar with these symptoms. But Tolstoy, whose virility has been so exceptional, whose physical and mental energies have been so exuberant, is more than usually alarmed by the first touch of autumn, feels withered, and ripe for death. He says: “How can one go on living when one is no longer intoxicated with life?” Neurasthenic depression and a sense of utter weakness assail him, so that he is ready to lay down his arms and capitulate at the first assault. He can neither write nor think. “Mentally speaking, I have gone to sleep and cannot wake up; I feel out of sorts, and am in low spirits.” Till he can finish Anna Karenina, he must drag it after him like a chain, and he now finds the book “tedious and commonplace.” His hair turns grey, his brow is furrowed, his digestion will not work properly, and his limbs are feeble. Brooding, he says: “I can no longer take delight in anything; I have nothing more to expect from life; I shall soon be dead... With all my energy, I turn away from life.” Just after this, his diary speaks of the “fear of death.” A few days later, he writes: “Il faudra mourir seul.” I have already shown how to this man of outstanding vitality, death is the most gruesome of all specters. That is why he crumples up so pitifully when he detects a few weak spots in his armor.

  Nevertheless, the man of genius who is thus diagnosing his own illness is not wholly wrong when, snuffing the air, he scents carrion. Part of the original Tolstoy perishes once for all in this crisis. Not the man in full vigor; but the free-spirited and unreflecting artist, who took the world as he found it, and regarded it as part of himself, as a huge extension of his own body. Hitherto Tolstoy had never questioned the universe as to its significance. He had contemplated it as an artist looks at his model, and had watched phenomena with the delight of a child. Whenever he had wished to describe them, they had yielded themselves to his will, had allowed him to caress them, to take them into his creative hands. Now, when mistrust has arisen in his mind, this objective contemplation and unquestioning record of life has become impossible. The communion between subjective and objective has been broken. An abyss has yawned between the world and the ego. Things no longer come to him confidently, no longer give themselves to him unreservedly. He feels that they are hiding something from him; that a shadow, a question, a gloomy and unnamable peril, lurks in the background. For the first time, this man of lucid vision feels that existence is a mystery; has inklings of a meaning which cannot be grasped by the senses. He becomes aware that, for the perception of what is hidden in the background, he needs a new instrument, an eye that is conscious, a thinker’s eye. The items in his environment have put on unfamiliar hues; indeed, there are no longer any items, there is nothing that exists apart. Everything has an enigmatic relation to a community that eludes him. In every phenomenon he is now constrained to seek for a moral meaning, and even the things that are most remote have to be considered as interwoven with his own destiny.

  A few examples will help throw light upon this inward transformation. In his campaigning days, Tolstoy had seen hundreds of men killed, and had never questioned the right or the wrong of the matter. In his books, he had described their deaths with an artist’s objectivity, or with the impassivity of a scientific observer who records the images cast on his retina. Now, on a visit to France, he sees an execution by guillotine, and thereupon his whole nature rises in revolt against mankind. As barin, as lord of the manor, Count Tolstoy had ridden a thousand times past the peasants on his estate, and, while the hoofs of his galloping horse bespatter them with mud or powder them with dust, he has taken their servile greetings as a matter of course. Now, suddenly, he begins to notice that they go barefoot, are poverty-stricken, timid, cut off from human rights; and he questions his own right to ignore their misery and their ceaseless toil. Times without number, driving in a sleigh through the streets of Moscow, he has sped past rows of shivering beggars without even turning his head to look at them. Poverty, wretchedness, oppression, soldiering, prisons, Siberia, have been to him facts as natural as that snow should fall in winter and that rivers should flow seaward. Now, when a census is being taken, the newly awakened man realizes that the deplorable situation of the proletariat is an accusation leveled against his own superfluity in this world’s goods.

  Since he can no longer regard mankind as material “for study and observation”; since his fellowmen have become brothers whose existence imposes duties on him; since the ominous figure of death has warned him of his own mortality — the life of quiet contemplation has been shattered. He can no longer look upon existence as a mere spectacle, but must persistently inquire as to the meaning and counter-meaning, the rights and the wrongs, of everything that happens. He cannot envisage humanity from an egocentric, an introverted standpoint, but must regard things socially, in a brotherly spirit, as an extrovert. Awareness of his kinship with everyone and everything has “seized” him like an illness. “One must not think,” he groans; “it is too painful.” Now that the eyes of conscience are open, the sorrows of mankind, the primal misery of the world, will henceforward be his most intimate concern. Out of his horror of the Nothing, there emerges a new and eerie creative attitude towards the All. The spirit of complete surrender urges on the artist to the task of building his world anew, as a moral edifice this time. Saved from death’s menace, he now enjoys the miracle of rebirth; and there comes into being that Tolstoy whom the world honors as artist and as the most human of men.

  To begin with, in that agonizing hour of collapse, in that uncertain moment before the “awakening” (as Tolstoy subsequently, when he had found consolation, terms this period of disquietude), the man who has been thus taken by surprise does not foresee that a healing transformation is nigh. Before he has been granted the new kind of vision, before the eye of conscience has opened, he feels blind, environed by chaos and the darkness of night. His world has broken up, and, paralyzed with terror, he stares into the unmeaning gloom. “Wherefore live, seeing that life is so horrible?” he asks, in the undying question of Ecclesiastes. Why trouble to plow, when death reaps the harvest? Despairingly, in this crypt-like world, he gropes his way along the walls, endeavoring to find an outlet, to see a ray of light, a sparkle from the star of hope. When at length he realizes that no one outside is going to extend a helping hand or to throw a gleam of light on a way of escape, he sets to work systematically, that he may mine a passage, foot by foot. In 1879 he writes the following “unknown questions” on a sheet of paper:

  (a) Wherefore live?

  (b) What is the cause of my existence and of everyone else’s?

  (c) What is the purpose of my existence and
of everyone else’s?

  (d) What is the meaning of the cleavage into good and evil which I feel within myself, and why does it exist?

  (e) How ought I to live?

  (f) What is death — how can I save myself?

  “How can I save myself? How ought I to live?” A cry of anguish, a cry from the depths of the heart, a cry which Tolstoy will continue to send forth until his lips are closed by death. He no longer believes the glad tidings brought to him by his senses; art gives no solace, the heedlessness of earlier years has vanished; the intoxication of youth has been succeeded by a cruel sobriety; from all sides coldness radiates out of the abyss of mortality, out of the invisible realm of death which surrounds life. How can I save myself? More insistent and more poignant grows the cry. How can he believe that what appears to be unmeaning is really so — though the meaning he is in search of will not be one he can touch with the fingers, see with the eyes, know with the intellect, but will be a meaning that dwells beyond and above truth? For the intellect suffices only to give knowledge of life, and cannot give knowledge of death. The man who had been a nihilist has come to feel that a new kind of power is requisite for the comprehension of the incomprehensible. Since this unbeliever cannot find this power in himself — overcome by terror, overwhelmed by anxiety, he humbly kneels before God, contemptuously casts aside the worldly knowledge which has filled him with rejoicing for fifty years, and impetuously prays for faith: “Give me faith, Lord, and let me help others to find it.”