by Stefan Zweig
His sons are mortified, his wife is hurt; the interviewer pricks up his ears, and makes a mental note of the aphorism.
At length the meal is over, and the company goes to the drawing room. Tolstoy has an argument with the young revolutionist who, though respectful, does not hesitate to contradict the old man. The latter flares up, talks tempestuously, almost shouting, for he still becomes vehement in dispute, throwing all his energies into it, as he used to throw them into the chase and lawn tennis. Suddenly he restrains himself, lowers his voice, and says: “Perhaps I am wrong. God sends His thoughts at random into men’s minds, and which of us can tell whether he is uttering God’s ideas or his own?” To turn the conversation, he says cheerfully: “Let’s take a stroll in the park.”
They set out, but there is an interruption. In front of the house, beneath the “tree of the poor,” an ancient elm, are some common folk, waiting to see Tolstoy. They have tramped many miles, to ask advice or beg for money. They are sunburned, weary, their shoes powdered with dust. When “His Worship the barin” appears, some prostrate themselves, Russian fashion. Briskly, he steps up to the group saying: “What do you want?” ”I want to ask, Excellency,...“ ”I am not excellent,” breaks in Tolstoy. “No one is excellent but God.” The peasant twists his cap uneasily between his fingers, but at length manages to stammer out his inquiry. Is it true that the land is now to belong to the peasants, and if so when is he to get his plot? Tolstoy answers impatiently, being always annoyed by anything that is difficult to explain. A forest guard is the next questioner. He wants to know all sorts of things about God. “Can you read?” asks Tolstoy. Being answered in the affirmative, he sends for a copy of What Is to be Done, and dismisses the inquirer with this book for answer. The beggars are dealt with summarily, being given a copper apiece, for Tolstoy is growing impatient. Turning around, he notices that the journalist has snapped him in the act. His face darkens again. “So you have taken a picture of me, the good Tolstoy, always helpful, bestowing alms on the peasants! Anyone who could see into my heart would know that I have never been good, though I have tried to learn how to be good. I have never really cared about anything beyond my own self. I have never been helpful, and what I have given to the poor in the whole course of my life does not amount to half of what I have, as a young man, gambled away in a single night. It never occurred to me, though I knew Dostoevsky was starving, to send him a couple of hundred rubles which would have freed him from his troubles for a month. Yet I allow people to make much of me, to glorify me as a man who shows true nobility, though I know all the time that I have scarcely begun to set my foot upon the right path.”
He has been longing for his walk in the park, and, when it at length begins, he presses on so impatiently that the others find it hard to keep up with the nimble old man. As a matter of fact, he does not want any more conversation; only to enjoy the play of his muscles for a while, and then to watch his daughters at a game of tennis, to enjoy innocent bodily activity in himself and others. At the tennis court, he follows every movement with keen interest, laughing heartily at a clever service or a quick return. Then, with his senses refreshed, he takes another stroll. Now he goes back to his study, to read a little, to rest a little; he tires more readily than of old, and his limbs are apt to feel heavy as the day goes on. Lying down on the sofa, closing his eyes, feeling old and worn, he thinks: “Better so! How I used to dread death, the specter from which I wished to hide, trying to pretend that there was no such thing. That anxiety has departed, and I am glad to feel death near.” A tired old man, plunged in reverie, alone with himself and his thoughts! At such a time, he is beautiful to look upon.
In the evening he rejoins the family circle, for his day’s work is done. Goldenweiser, the pianist, offers to play something. “Yes, yes!” says Tolstoy, and leans on the piano, shading his eyes with his hands that no one may see how profoundly he is stirred by the music. This music which he has so often decried, how wonderfully it affects him, softening the asperities of life, making the soul gentle and good. “Why should I ever have reviled art? Where else can we find solace? Thinking confuses us, science bewilders us; where else can we feel God’s presence so plainly as in the creations of the artist? Beethoven and Chopin, you are my brothers. I feel that your eyes are resting on me, and that the heart of all mankind is beating within my breast. Forgive me, brothers, for my invectives!” The piece ends with a mighty chord; there is a burst of applause, in which Tolstoy joins after momentary hesitation. The music has cured his restlessness, and he can now join cheerfully in the conversation. At length, after all the ups and downs of the day, tranquility reigns.
Before going to bed, he returns to his study. In accordance with his usual practice, he must hold an assize over himself, critical concerning every hour of this day as concerning every hour of his life. He opens the diary, and the eye of conscience stares at him from the blank pages on which he is to write. He thinks of the peasants, of the poverty for which he holds himself responsible, of the way he has ridden to and fro without giving any help beyond the bestowal of a few pitiful coins. He was impatient with the beggars; he harbored unkind feelings towards his wife. All these offenses are now recorded in his diary, the book of self-accusation, and, summing up, he writes: “Slothful once more, palsied in soul. Have not done enough good! Even now I cannot learn the hardest thing of all, to love the people around me, rather than humanity at large. Help me, God, help me!”
He writes the date of the following day, and the initials for the words “If I live.” Another day has been lived through to the end. With bowed back, the old man goes into his bedroom, takes off his blouse and his heavy boots, flings himself on his bed, and, as always before going to sleep, meditates on death. For a time his thoughts continue to flutter vividly, like brightly colored butterflies; gradually the colors fade, as in the forest when night is falling. The pleasing confusion that heralds sleep takes possession of his mind...
He comes to himself with a start. Was not that a footfall in the neighboring room? Yes, furtive steps! Noiselessly he gets out of bed, and looks through the keyhole into the study. There is a light in the room. Someone is rummaging his desk, turning over the pages of his diary, prying into the recesses of his conscience — Sofia Andreevna, his wife. She wants to learn his intimate secrets, will not even allow him the privacy of being alone with God. Everywhere, in his house, in his life, in his soul, he is exposed to the shafts of greed and curiosity. Tremulous with anger, he is about to fling open the door and berate the spy, the traitor, his wife. But he masters his rage: “Perhaps this test has been laid upon me.” He creeps back to bed — to lie awake for hours, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, the greatest, the most gifted man of his time, betrayed in his own house, tortured by doubts, in an agony of loneliness.
RESOLVE AND TRANSFIGURATION
One who wishes to believe in immortality, must lead an immortal life here on earth.
DIARY, MARCH 6, 1896
Leo Tolstoy was seventy-two years old when he crossed the threshold of the new century. Erect in mind, and yet already a quasi-legendary figure, was the heroic old man as he moved towards the completion of his career. The aged pilgrim’s countenance above the snow-white beard looked gentler than of yore, the skin yellowing, translucent as parchment, and (like a venerable parchment) profusely wrinkled, inscribed with numberless runes. A captivating and indulgent smile often fluttered over his lips; rarely were his bushy brows knitted in anger; the mood of a man temperamentally prone to wrath had mellowed with time. “How kindly and considerate he has become,” said his brother, who had known him all these years as ever ready to flare up, as untamable. It was true. The intensity of his passions was abating. Weary of the unending wrestle, weary of self-torment, his spirit was becoming tranquil, and would often allow itself rest. That was why his face looked peaceful and good-natured in the last rays of the setting sun. In this transfigured shape the face of Tolstoy comes down to posterity as a universal heritage. It is the serious and calm
visage of the man as he was in extreme old age that countless generations will cherish as the likeness of Tolstoy.
Old age, which in general plays havoc with the image of a hero, gives majesty in this instance. Harshness has been transformed into sublimity, passion transmuted into gentleness, rough intolerance refined into sympathetic understanding. In actual fact, the veteran fighter wants nothing but peace, “peace with God and man,” peace even with his worst enemy — death. The panicky dread, the animal terror of dying has happily become a thing of the past, and the inevitable is faced with composure. “I remind myself that tomorrow I may not be alive, trying day by day to familiarize myself with the thought, and growing accustomed to it.” Now note the wonder! As soon as the terror of death has been allayed, the author’s creative faculty takes on a new lease of life. Just as Goethe in the evening of his days came back from the distraction of scientific work to his “main business,” so Tolstoy the preacher and moralist returns in his eighth decade to the art which he had renounced and reviled. In the twentieth century the greatest imaginative writer of the nineteenth rose again in the flesh. Fearlessly restringing his mighty bow, he recalls an experience of his Cossack days, and forges it into the epic tale Hadji Murad, resounding with the clash of arms, a heroic legend, told as simply and as grandly as in his best earlier manner. The tragedy of the Living Corpse, the masterly tales After the Ball and Kornei Vasiliev, and a number of short stories, were the splendid results of his return to art, of his emancipation from the moralist’s introspective torment. No reader of these works would ever guess them to have been penned by the tired hand of a very old man. Their prose has a free and unconstrained flow, like that of a mighty river which runs for all eternity, and the author’s gaze, undimmed by senility, pierces to the heart of man’s destiny. The judge has laid aside his robes to become the observer and recorder once again. Aware, at length, that the divine purposes are inscrutable, he ceases to inquire into them, and is content to describe what happens. Tolstoy has grown kindly, not tired. A primitive peasant, he will go on tilling the inexhaustible soil of his thoughts, will continue to elaborate these thoughts in his diary, until the pen drops from his dying hand.
This indefatigable worker cannot rest, since he regards it as his destiny to continue the struggle to the end. One sacred piece of work still awaits completion. It does not bear mainly on life; it concerns his own approaching death. The last endeavors of this mighty sculptor are to be devoted to the shaping of that death in such a fashion that it shall be worthy, shall be exemplary. At none of his works of art did he toil so long and so strenuously, as at this problem of how to die fitly; to no other did he devote so much anxious thought. A true artist, always trying to improve his work, he was especially eager that the last, the most universally human of them all, should come as near as possible to perfection.
The struggle for a worthy death is the decisive battle in the seventy years’ war for truth; and of all his battles, it is the one which demands from him the greatest sacrifices, for it has to be fought against his own household. A crowning deed has still to be done, a deed from which he has shrunk for reasons that are no longer obscure to us. He must finally, irrevocably, rid himself of his property. Like Kutuzov in War and Peace, who would like to avoid a decisive battle, and hopes to get the better of his formidable antagonist by the device of a strategic retreat, Tolstoy has again and again put off the ultimate disposal of his possessions, and has tried to appease his conscience by taking refuge in the “wisdom of inaction.” His every attempt to renounce the posthumous rights in his literary work has been frustrated by the fierce opposition of his family, for he is too weak (or too humane) to ride roughshod over their wishes. Year after year he has contented himself with personally refusing to touch the money his writings earn, or to make any use of his income. But, as he says in self-condemnation, he did this only because he had rejected ownership on principle, and would be open to the charge of inconsistency had he been careful to maintain his own proprietary rights. “I was animated by false shame.” Again and again, after attempts each of which is a domestic tragedy, he postpones for an indefinite period a clear and binding decision upon this matter.
But in 1908, when his attainment of the age of eighty is to be celebrated by the issue of a complete edition of his works, the declared enemy of property is forced to take action. Henceforward Yasnaya Polyana, the shrine of pilgrimage, the place regarded with veneration by millions in the Old World and the New, is, behind closed doors, the theater of a quarrel between Tolstoy and his nearest relatives. This dispute is all the more harsh and hateful because it is about a despicable matter, about money; and it is one whose violence is but inadequately disclosed even by the shrill outcries in the diary. “How hard it is to shake oneself free from this filthy, sinful property,” groans Tolstoy on July 25, 1908. Half the members of his family are clinging desperately to dross, fighting for it tooth and nail. The scenes that take place are fit for the pages of a sensational novel. Drawers are broken open; cupboards are rifled; eavesdroppers listen to private conversations; efforts are made to put the old man’s affairs in commission. These things alternate with tragic moments; with attempts at suicide on the part of Sofia Andreevna, and with Tolstoy’s threats that he will flee from the “hell of Yasnaya Polyana.” But the extremity of torment helps to steel his will, and at length, a few months before his death, resolved that this death shall be a worthy one, determined to put an end to all ambiguity, he decides to draw up a will which shall make all mankind the heir of his spiritual property. One last lie is needed for the achievement of this ultimate truth. Convinced that he is spied upon at home, he goes as if upon an ordinary ride to the neighboring forest of Grumont, and there, upon a tree stump, in the presence of three witnesses and some impatient horses, he signs the document that is to make his wishes valid after his death.
Now he has broken his fetters, and he believes that he has decided the issue. But the hardest and most important step has still to be taken. Nothing can be kept secret in this abode of chatter, where suspicion lurks in every corner. Soon his wife and the others guess that Tolstoy has clandestinely made a will. They use false keys to open boxes and cupboards, pry into the diary to see if they can find mention of a significant visit; and again the countess threatens suicide, this time unless the detested “confederate” Chertkov ceases to visit the house. Tolstoy realizes that here, amid passion and greed, in an atmosphere of hatred and unrest, he cannot achieve what is to be his last work of art, a worthy death. He is overwhelmed with anxiety lest they should succeed in depriving him of “those precious minutes which are perhaps the finest of all.” From the depths of his being, there surges up the thought which has never been absent from his mind during all these years, the thought that, to attain the true end of life, he must be willing, for holiness’s sake, to leave wife and children and worldly possessions. Twice before, he had fled from home. The first time had been in 1884, when strength had failed him in the act, and he had constrained himself to return to his wife, then in the throes of childbirth. That night, Aleksandra had been born, the daughter who now rallied to her father’s side, and was ready to help him on his chosen path. In 1897, thirteen years later, he had made another attempt, leaving for his wife the imperishable letter in which he set forth the reasons of conscience which had driven him to flight: “I resolved on flight, first of all because, as I grow older, I find my present life more and more burdensome, and I long ever more earnestly for solitude; and secondly because, now that the children are grown up, my presence in the house is no longer necessary... The main thing is this. Just as the Indians withdraw into the jungle when they attain the age of sixty, so every religiously-minded man feels, when he grows old, a longing to devote his last years to God, instead of wasting them on amusement, sport, chatter, and lawn tennis. So do I, now that I am approaching seventy, feel a yearning for rest and solitude, that I may live at peace with my own conscience, or, if that be unattainable, that I may at least put an end to the g
laring disharmony between my life and my faith.”
This time, too, he had returned home, the familiar ties of kindliness being too strong for him. He was not equal to the demand he made on himself, the call was not yet loud enough. Now, thirteen years after the second flight, twice thirteen after the first, the impulse had become irresistible, the inexplicable lure of distance had grown too strong to be withstood. In July, 1910, he wrote in his diary: “I have no choice but to flee, and I say to myself, ‘Now the time is come to show your Christianity!’ C’est le moment ou jamais. No one needs me here. Help me, God; instruct me; I want only to do thy will, not mine. I write these words and ask myself, ‘Is it really true?’ Am I not still posturing before God? Help! Help! Help!” Even now he hesitates. Anxiety regarding the fate of the others holds him back. He is alarmed lest the wish to flee should be sinful, after all. Scrutinizing his own soul, he asks himself whether there may not come a summons from within, an imperious order from above, to decide matters for him when his will is still hesitant. On his knees, as it were, praying before the inscrutable Wisdom in whose guidance he believes, he confides his anxieties and distresses to his diary.
At length, when the hour has come, an inner voice speaks to him the ancient commandment: “Rise up, take thy staff and thy cloak, and set forth upon thy pilgrimage!”
THE FLIGHT TO GOD
Man must be alone, if he is to draw near to God.