Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
At no time in his life would it have been much fun to know the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).
As a young man, Tolstoy was a gambler and a womaniser, riddled with insecurity and unable to control his impulses. As a middle-aged man, he made preposterous demands on his wife, Sonya, who married him when she was sixteen and he was thirty-six. Those demands started at the time of their wedding when, with characteristic insensitivity, he required her to read the diaries which detailed his previous relationships. With further insensitivity, he turned this incident into fodder for the characterisation of Levin in Anna Karenina (1877). Tolstoy never fully recognised the debt he owed Sonya, with whom he had thirteen children, insisting that she give birth on the same battered leather couch on which they had been conceived.
He was a man of almost bestial appetites: his diet included curdled horse milk. He was an aristocrat who wanted to live like a serf. But he could never think like a serf. As an old man, he elevated himself above the common herd of humanity and became a kind of guru; many of the writings of that period dealing with non-violence, justice and the crisis of faith inspired the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther-King. In Long Walk to Freedom (see Chapter 9), Nelson Mandela pays tribute to the effect on him of War and Peace while he was incarcerated for decades. Tolstoy wrote wonderfully about compassion. He wasn’t nearly as good at practising it. My sympathies are nearly always with Sonya. If she had not painstakingly copied his manuscripts, Tolstoy’s great novels would have remained a sheaf of illegible scrawl.
For all that, I owe to Tolstoy a greater debt than to possibly any other writer. Tolstoy understood the difference between pleasantness and happiness.
I will never forget the Saturday night in 1974 when we were all taken into Sydney Hospital to say our final goodbyes to Dad, who was expected to die that night from renal failure. I was twelve. We had just taken delivery of a colour TV, the latest technological advance. We arrived home in a sorry state and put it on as a distraction. The first episode of the BBC’s production of War and Peace began and instantly I was hooked. I had never heard of War and Peace. It was a terrific story and, best of all, it had nothing whatever to do with my life at that point. It is set two hundred years ago in Russia and is full of costumes and banquets, at least at the start. The BBC production features a young Anthony Hopkins. He plays the part of Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a great count who, in the opening episode, is about to die. Through the machinations of an aunt, Pierre is made legitimate and inherits an enormous fortune. He embarks on a pleasant but desperately unhappy life.
I started reading War and Peace in sync with each week’s episode. I still have my tie-in copy with all my adolescent underlinings as well as countless bits of coloured paper on which I have dutifully written out quotes that struck me as worthy of my attention, such as ‘we must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy’ and ‘youth is no bar to courage.’ It is a long book, about fourteen hundred pages, but a page-turner. Somebody called it the greatest work of pulp fiction ever written.
War and Peace follows Pierre Bezukhov in his search for meaning. He tries everything. He has an unhappy marriage, gambles, fights a duel, dabbles with freemasonry and considers the army. Indeed, when Pierre goes through initiation as a freemason, being confronted by such images as a skull, a coffin and a burning candle, he is disappointed because they are not extreme enough. Pierre was ‘hoping to enter a new life absolutely removed from the old one’.
Meanwhile, Russia is being invaded by the Napoleonic forces. Everyone flees Moscow ahead of the conquerors, and Pierre is left wandering alone in his two enormous and very pleasant mansions. He is taken prisoner and narrowly escapes the firing squad. For the first time in his life, he is among peasants and has no idea of how to look after himself.
Luckily, he is befriended by one of my favourite characters in literature, Platon Karataev, a wily peasant with a fund of wise sayings. Platon asks God to lie him down like a stone every night and in the morning raise him up like new bread. That is a great approach to life. Platon takes Pierre under his wing, which is just as well because the Cossacks are moving the prisoners through the snow at a remorseless pace and anyone who can’t keep up is taken to the side of the column, shot and left for dead. Without Platon’s help, this would have happened to Pierre. Tolstoy was developing a philosophy that it is the so-called little people, those like Platon, who are the architects of history more than those with famous names.
~
Then comes the time when Platon gets sick and he can’t keep up. The Cossacks take him aside and shoot him. What follows is a line buried on about page eleven hundred of a huge dogeared paperback that changed my life. The line says that when Platon is shot, Pierre doesn’t even look back. I have been literally winded by a book on only a small number of occasions. One was when I first read the last line of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘He loved Big Brother.’ Another was in Year 12 when we were reading Dickens’ Great Expectations and Pip realises what he has done to his gentle mentor, Joe Gargery. Seeing the way Pierre Bezukhov trashed his dear friend has stayed with me for forty years.
That moment is the beginning of Pierre’s rebirth. He came to realise that he was capable of as much evil as Napoleon or the Cossacks or anyone else. He touched the bedrock of his humanity and found it bare. But once he had owned the truth of himself he was able to begin again and to build. He discovered his own need for forgiveness and healing. This was the start of happiness. There was nothing pleasant about it.
What started for me as escapism brought me back to reality by another door. This has been the greatest gift of reading to me.
~
Earlier in the novel, another troubled character, Andrei Bolkonsky, is returning to his family estate after his first experience of war. He is shattered. At the gate, he sees a grumpy old oak tree, refusing, it seems, to join the rites of spring. The tree reminds him of himself:
With huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, with gnarled hands and fingers, it stood, an aged monster, angry and scornful, among the smiling birch-trees. The oak alone refused to yield to the season’s spell, spurning both spring and sunshine.
But as he leaves a few days afterwards, he notices that even this angry and bitter tree has been brought back to life:
The old oak, quite transfigured, spread out a canopy of dark, sappy green, and seemed to swoon and sway in the rays of the evening sun. There was nothing now to be seen of knotted fingers and scars, of old doubts and sorrows. Through the rough, century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted, so juicy, so young that it was hard to believe that aged veteran had borne them.
‘Yes, it is the same oak,’ thought Prince Andrei, and all at once he was seized by an irrational, spring-like feeling of joy and renewal.
~
Thirty years later, Tolstoy was to compress many of the most powerful insights of War and Peace into the slim novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a work I have loved sharing with students. Tolstoy had learnt the philosopher’s art of condensation and distillation, a painful art to practise. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is wonderful in its simplicity.
The main character has a pleasant life. A decent life, you might say. But that is a far thing from a happy life. Yet he ends up having a happy death. Tolstoy believes that a happy anything, even death, is better than a pleasant anything, even life. Pleasantness is about matching someone else’s ideas, measuring your life by what might be in fashion. Happiness is about freedom, and this includes freedom from the tyranny of pleasing, especially the tyranny of pleasing yourself.
Tolstoy lived into his eighties, so he had a long time to think about things. He believed with good cause that all happiness lay in finding freedom from the ego. His own life proved the point. He was an egomaniac and, for the most part, desperately unhappy.
One of my life’s ambitions is to visit the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about two hundred kilometres south of Moscow. It has little in common with the world in which I live. Yet what happened there has enriched me enormously. I am just quietly happy that I won’t be required to meet Count Tolstoy when I get there.