TOLSTOY BEGINS TO WRITE. “A HISTORY OF YESTERDAY.” FOR SOME REASON SHKLOVSKY TORE UP THE FIRST VOLUME OF TOLSTOY’S COMPLETE WORKS. THE YOUNG TOLSTOY LEFT FOR THE CAUCASUS WITH AN ENGLISH DICTIONARY, A FLUTE, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, AND A SAMOVAR. AN ANCESTOR OF OURS LEFT OUT OF ZOO, OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE. FRIGHTENING, POETIC DREAMS. WHAT DOES REALISM MEAN?
Italian readers have recently had the opportunity to read your monograph on Tolstoy, a writer who, to you, as you told me one day, feels like a contemporary. A writer who has kept you company for fifty years, without ever boring you, you also said. If today you were to resume, in a completely free and “familiar” way, your discussion of Tolstoy, where would you start?
From the beginning. From his first work. There’s a Tolstoy text that rarely gets published, “A History of Yesterday.” In the so-called “Jubilee” edition of Tolstoy, it’s included in the first volume. And it is, or was, considered the literal account, in diary form, of Tolstoy’s visit to the Bolkonsky estate in 1851—if you want I could even tell you the date, March 24, but these are unimportant details. Actually, “A History of Yesterday” isn’t just Tolstoy’s first work, even earlier than Childhood; it is also a great literary invention, a revelation. Someone, Tolstoy (who in that period was clearly under Sterne’s influence), says he wants to record his every thought, to the letter, and along with them the thoughts of those around him; but, for a book of that sort, he goes on, all the ink in the world wouldn’t be enough . . . In the manuscript version, the text takes up twenty-six pages of a large format notebook. The pages were torn out of the notebook and remained in that state, they were never retranscribed in a clean copy; yet, see, this is a great revelation, great and at the same time premature. But I must tell you something strange: if I cite anything from that text of Tolstoy’s, I’d ask you to check it. Because, though I own the Jubilee edition of Tolstoy, the first volume is torn up. Not all the way, but the pages are quite ruined. I have no idea what state I was in the day I did that to it. Undoubtedly in a state of madness. At one time, you must know, I had an impulsive, furious disposition, I often got into street fights and so on . . . But back to the “History.” What does Tolstoy write? A young man goes to visit a woman he is enamored with. Her husband comes home, the woman says something about the young man, in French, in the third person. He wishes he could understand: what does this mean, translated into Russian? Is it utterly impolite, or very intimate? When the woman’s husband asks him to stay for dinner, he replies by saying his evening is completely full. But as he says these words, his body sits down in a chair and places his hat on the floor. His conscience intervenes at this point, saying: “Well, what are we going to do?” And the young man begins conversing neutrally with the husband. That is, there begins a double, triple discourse: of the conscience, the body, and the subconscious. Then he returns home. And he analyzes the nature of dreams. Tolstoy says we’re the ones who make up our dreams, and that they’re nothing but our desires. In the morning, when we get out of bed, we create the dreams that we have later. Yes, “A History of Yesterday” is a too little known work. My dear friend, get the book from the library and cite a few passages, it’s truly worth the trouble . . .
Certainly, but in the meantime, we can speak from memory. Tolstoy claims he wants to analyze the zadushevnaya element of human behavior. The dictionary translates this word as “intimate,” but perhaps there’s more to it . . .
Yes, of course, and I understand that word as dodushevnaya, i.e., preceding the soul. In spoken, colloquial Russian, we say that a conversation is zadushevnaya to say that it’s sincere, heartfelt, uninhibited, but when you have that sort of conversation with yourself, then it’s not so much frank and intimate as it is “before the soul.”
So, we have the notion of the subconscious.
Essentially, “A History of Yesterday” is an attempt to analyze and explain subconscious mechanisms, to explain our chains of decisions. Lev Nikolayevich believed that people choose which thoughts to apply to the decisions they’ve made. That is, first they decide something and then they ask themselves: why did I make that decision? In this respect, he anticipated the psychological novel—take, for example, Crime and Punishment. The problem isn’t what Raskolnikov thinks, but why Raskolnikov thinks it. What is behind or comes before his thoughts.
You said that the “History” is a revelation as great as it is premature. Perhaps that why it was left unfinished?
Tolstoy didn’t finish writing the “History of Yesterday” because he suddenly decided to leave for the Caucasus. He left abruptly, on foot, as if cast off by life. Tolstoy, at that time, was a big gambler, a young man who loved gypsy women and who had squandered half of his fortune. In Yasnaya Polyana he met his older brother, Nikolai, who was going to the Caucasus, and he tagged along. Nikolai Nikolayevich Tolstoy was an excellent writer who died without having written much of anything, but the little that he did leave behind, like “Hunting in the Caucasus,” is wonderful. Lev Nikolayevich said of him that he had a huge flaw that kept him from being a writer: he was too good of a person. When his brother—Tolstoy, the great Tolstoy—arrived, he’d just abandoned university. He studied poorly and rarely. To tell the truth, Lobachevsky, who was rector of the University of Kazan at the time, had noticed that young man, he’d said he was a person with great thoughts. And thus Tolstoy lived happily without working or going to school. And here in Russia, people who don’t know what to do with themselves go to the Caucasus. People still went into exile in the Caucasus: Lermontov, Odoevsky, Pushkin himself. When he was there, in the Caucasus, some soldiers asked him if something bad had happened, if he was unhappy—why was he—Count Tolstoy—wearing a humble soldier’s uniform? But he wasn’t unhappy. He was confused. He had thoughts “before the soul.” He wanted to write about what hadn’t yet matured in the conscience of man. So, he decided to leave. When he left he took the big notebook where he had begun writing “A History of Yesterday.” But the pages he had already written, he ripped them out and left them at home. He took his English dictionary, because he loved Sterne, and his flute, because he wanted to learn how to play. And his brother says to him: Leva, you’re a lost cause. You’ll never learn English or the flute. Lev Nikolayevich did learn English—the flute, no, even if he continued to study music, from a theoretical point of view. He was an incredible man, he possessed that incredible energy of delusion. Tolstoy wanted to explain what men hide from themselves. He doesn’t believe men, what they say. So, for example, in War and Peace, he doesn’t believe it was Arkady who seduced Natasha. He thinks, and moreover, he wrote it too, that Natasha likes making love. And therefore, she would have been corrupted regardless. Of course, she’s confused, she tries to find justifications. But her subconscious is another matter.
And to what extent, in your opinion, did Tolstoy really succeed in explaining what man hides from himself?
Sometimes he did succeed. In War and Peace, it’s not a war in which men decide or think anything. Well, yes, they do think and decide some things, but it’s different. There’s Napoleon who thinks something, and Davout thinks the same thing, but then Davout suddenly takes pity on the man who was accused of setting the fire in Moscow, an armed man in disguise. And then he forgets having done so. And Pierre goes to jail, and goes as if he’s heading to freedom, because everything has already been taken from him and finally he is truly himself. Tolstoy writes about the war and since he experienced two of them (in the Caucasus and in Sevastopol), he wants to show that everybody lies, that everything actually happens in a different way. Tolstoy admired Stendhal for how he represented Waterloo. For the fact that the protagonist, after the battle, no longer knows if he was really at Waterloo or not. Tolstoy discovers that the world is driven by unconscious desires. And he wants to shake people and say, “Stop, return to your selves, wake up!” But everyone keeps following their unconscious paths, even today. But this doesn’t mean that the problems of humanity can be resolved with Freud. Freud explains everything with the fact that, for example, a man needs a woman, or another man, but I’m convinced that even the most instinct-driven monkey can’t be reduced to just that. He also lives for the fact that he can jump on the trees, that he can express himself through his actions. You know, something happened once that I saw with my own eyes, I was going to put it in Zoo, but then I never did. A monkey was locked in a room and they hung some fruit high up on the wall. Underneath it, there was a crate. If he turned the crate on its side, the monkey could almost reach the fruit. But to get it, he would also have to use another crate, which was next to the first. He would have to stack them on top of each other. But he would also have to be sure to put the second crate lengthwise, otherwise it wouldn’t have been tall enough. And that monkey, our distant ancestor, did everything right. But when he got the fruit, he was so excited he threw it all over himself. He was inspired. He didn’t just want to eat, he wanted to create. What I mean is that, man, since primordial times, has the desire to express himself. One shouldn’t believe that man only thinks about sex.
But, Viktor Borisovich, it’s not as if Freud puts it exactly in those terms . . .
Yes, but what I’m trying to say is that man doesn’t only think about fulfilling his desires, but also about fulfilling himself. You see, “A History of Yesterday” can be read according to the Freudian triple schema: language, dream, dream analysis. But Tolstoy didn’t continue down that path. On the other hand, though, all the heroes in his works dream. I don’t know . . . in, for example, Anna Karenina, Anna dreams certain details that are later repeated at her suicide: the old man working at the rails along the platform, muttering to himself . . . Or thinking of another of Tolstoy’s early works, the story “The Snowstorm,” a singular work written exquisitely by a young writer. The story is this: master and servants go out in a telega, and they get lost during a snowstorm. It’s very Russian. The nobleman is afraid, whereas the serfs bicker, tell stories. They don’t know the art of fear, they don’t have the means. But the nobleman, who is Tolstoy, falls asleep and dreams he kisses one of the peasant’s hands. Well, what he’s seeing is nothing but a citation of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, when Pugachev expects Grinyov to kiss his hand. That dream contains all the noble Tolstoy’s thoughts on the people, on the complexity of his relationship with the people, on the terrible revolution to come—because Pugachev’s rebellion was very brutal. And all this was in some little dream. Tolstoy’s dreams were even better than the peasants’, who, in the Bible, end up in prison with Joseph. And, like Joseph, Tolstoy too knew how to interpret dreams. The “terror of Arzamas” is a dream too—Tolstoy knew the revolution would come, and he knew it was inevitable, and he was afraid of it.
For Tolstoy, therefore, writing was also somehow a way to exorcise these frightening, prophetic dreams?
Sure, yes, many writers also write to free themselves, to explain the zadushevnaya or dodushevnaya part of themselves, to try to bring it to maximum clarity, to develop it like a roll of film. Like in Antonioni’s stupendous film, where they develop a photo and accidentally discover a crime . . .
Speaking of Tolstoy, the supreme epitome of realism, it’s funny that all that’s come up have been dreams, the subconscious . . .
Tolstoy, certainly, was a great realist, even if I have never been able to tolerate that word. What does realism mean anyway? There are attempts to describe the world in the most precise manner possible, authors who allow themselves to give free rein to their imaginations, to represent their own dreams with verisimilitude . . . One mustn’t forget that in Homer’s time the Iliad was a reality and that, most likely, when chivalric romances were written, many of them were real: think of the exploits of Cortés, who, with just a small army, conquered empires and continents. But, you see, even the word reality . . . In response to Strakhov telling him that Dostoyevsky might have committed a crime or two, Tolstoy urged him to read Dostoyevsky’s books more carefully; he said that the more you read him, the more understandable he becomes. For Tolstoy, in short, Dostoyevsky, with all the implausibility of the daily life contained in his works, is real. Even if stories like that would be hard to imagine from another writer. Tolstoy himself, of course, was convinced that what he wrote was realism. Let’s put it this way: realism was what they wrote in that epoch, it was the art of Tolstoy’s epoch, of the previous century. It was a way like any other to be able to touch reality. Dostoyevsky used to say that 2 x 2 = 4 is good, but 2 x 2 = 5 is even better. Of course, it was a frustrated and slighted man saying this, but 2 x 2 = 5 represents another logic and even nature, sometimes, conceives it that way. But let’s go back to our realist and his “History of Yesterday.” So, Tolstoy left for the Caucasus, left the pages of the “History” at home, but took with him The Count of Monte Cristo, a samovar, his flute, an English dictionary. Isn’t that fantastic? Much more fantastic than the fantasies of Don Quixote. And, mind you, Tolstoy went to the Caucasus on the Volga. It would have been better to go through the mountains, follow the path Pushkin took. But he went down the Volga. Of course, it was possible, but it was more difficult. Yes, Tolstoy’s relationship with life, with love, is always “before the soul.” Often the poet, the writer, is represented as a prophet. What can I say? Analyzing himself as a person who has developed in a particular environment, the artist becomes conscious of this environment at the same time and can foresee the future. Just think: Columbus went to the Americas and found his way back by predicting the direction of the winds. He came back, in other words, with favorable winds. No one knew they were there, they blew but nobody knew it and all this—understanding, foreseeing, predicting—is very difficult. Einstein said that imagination is stronger than reality, because imagination is the place where anything can happen, whereas in reality there are only obstacles, even if Einstein himself removed not a few of these obstacles. The poet doesn’t remove obstacles but creates new paths to get from one place to another.