OF all the intellectuals we are examining, Leo Tolstoy was the most ambitious. His audacity is awe-inspiring, at times terrifying. He came to believe that by the resources of his own intellect, and by virtue of the spiritual force he felt welling within him, he could effect a moral transformation of society. His aim, as he put it, was ‘To make of the spiritual realm of Christ a kingdom of this earth.’1 He saw himself as part of an apostolic succession of intellectuals which included ‘Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, the early Greeks, Buddha, Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Feuerbach and all those, often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teaching on trust, thought and spoke sincerely upon the meaning of life’. But Tolstoy had no intention of remaining ‘unnoticed and unknown’. His diaries reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny. ‘Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work.’ ‘I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.’ He felt in his own soul ‘immeasurable grandeur’. He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: ‘Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.’2 Tolstoy always felt a certain apartness from other men, however much he tried to sympathize and identify himself with them. In a curious way he felt himself sitting in judgment over them, exercising moral jurisdiction. When he became a novelist, perhaps the greatest of all novelists, he effortlessly assumed this godlike power. He told Maxim Gorky: ‘I myself, when I write, suddenly feel pity for some character, and then I give him some good quality, or take a good quality away from someone else, so that in comparison with the others he may not appear too black.’3 When he became a social reformer, the identification with God became stronger, since his actual programme was coextensive with divinity as he defined it: ‘The desire for universal welfare…is that which we call God.’ Indeed, he felt himself divinely possessed, noting in his diary: ‘Help, father, come and dwell within me. You already dwell within me. You are already “me”.’4 But the difficulty about both Tolstoy and God dwelling in the same soul was that Tolstoy was extremely suspicious of his Creator, as Gorky noted. It reminded him, he said, of ‘two bears in one den’. There were times when Tolstoy seemed to think of himself as God’s brother, indeed his elder brother.
How did Tolstoy come to feel about himself in this way? Perhaps the largest single element in his sense of majesty was his own birth. Like Ibsen he was born in 1828, but as a member of the hereditary ruling class in a vast country which, for the next thirty years, was to retain the form of slavery called serfdom. Under this, serf families, men, women and children, were bound by law to the land they tilled, and ownership of them went with the title deeds. Some noble families had as many as 200,000 serfs when the institution was abolished in 1861. The Tolstoys were not rich by these standards; Tolstoy’s father and grandfather had both been spendthrifts, and the father saved himself only by marrying the plain daughter of Prince Volkonsky. But the Volkonskys were of the very highest rank, co-founders of the realm, on a social level with the Romanovs when their dynasty emerged in 1613. Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather had been Catherine the Great’s Commander-in-Chief. His mother’s dowry included the Yasnaya Polyana estate near Tula, and Tolstoy inherited it from her, with its 4000 acres and 330 serfs.
In his young days Tolstoy thought little of landed responsibilities and indeed sold off portions of his estate to pay gambling debts. But he was proud, indeed vain, of his title and lineage and of the entry it gave him to fashionable salons. He appalled his literary friends with his posing and snobbery. ‘I cannot understand,’ wrote Turgenev, ‘this ridiculous affection for a wretched title of nobility.’ ‘He disgusted us all,’ was Nekrasov’s comment.5 They resented the way he tried to get the best of both worlds, high society and bohemia. ‘Why do you come here among us?’ asked Turgenev angrily. ‘This is not the place for you-go to your princess.’ As he grew older, Tolstoy abandoned the more meretricious aspects of his caste but developed instead a land-hunger which went much deeper, using his literary earnings to buy land, piling hectare on hectare with all the grim cupidity of a dynastic founder himself. Until the moment came when he decided to give it all up, he not merely owned land but ruled it. His spirit was authoritarian, springing directly from hereditary title to earth and souls. ‘The world was divided into two parts,’ his son Ilya wrote, ‘one composed of ourselves and the other of everyone else. We were special people and the others were not our equals…[My father] was responsible to a considerable degree for the groundless arrogance and self-esteem that such an upbringing inculcated into us, and from which I found it so hard to free myself.’6 To the last Tolstoy retained the belief he was born to rule, in one way or another. In old age, wrote Gorky, he remained the Master, the barin, expecting his wishes to be obeyed instantly.
Together with this fundamental desire to rule came a fierce unwillingness to be ruled by others. Tolstoy had an adamantine will which circumstances helped to harden. Both his parents died when he was young. His three elder brothers were weak, unfortunate, dissolute. He was brought up by his Aunt Tatiana, a penniless second cousin, who did her best to teach him duty and unselfishness, but she had no authority over him. His account of his early years, ‘Boyhood’, and his diaries mislead the reader, like Rousseau’s, by their apparent honesty but really conceal more than they reveal. Thus he describes being beaten by a ferocious tutor, Monsieur de Saint-Thomas, ‘one reason for that horror and aversion for every kind of violence which I have felt throughout my whole life’.7 In fact there were many kinds of violence, including his own violent nature, which did not dismay Tolstoy until late in life. As for Saint-Thomas, Tolstoy had got the better of him by the age of nine and thereafter his life was as indisciplined as he chose to make it. At school he read what he wanted and worked when he felt like it (often very hard). By the age of twelve he was writing poetry. At sixteen he went to Kazan University on the Volga and for a time studied Oriental languages with a view to a diplomatic career. Later he tried law. At nineteen he gave up university and returned to Yasnaya Polyana to study by himself. He read fashionable fiction-de Kock, Dumas, Eugène Sue. He also read Descartes and, above all, Rousseau. In a number of important respects he was a posthumous pupil of Rousseau; at the end of his life he said that Rousseau had had more influence on him than anyone else, except the Jesus Christ of the New Testament. He saw in Rousseau a fellow spirit, another gigantic ego, conscious of superlative goodness, anxious to impart it to the world. Like Rousseau he was essentially self-educated, with all the pride, insecurity and intellectual touchiness of the autodidact. Like Rousseau he tried many things before settling down to a career as a writer-diplomacy, law, educational reform, agriculture, soldiering, music.
Tolstoy found his métier almost by accident, while serving as an apprentice officer in the army. In 1851, aged twenty-two, he went to the Caucasus, where his elder brother Nikolai was on active service. He had no real motive in going there, other than to do something, to fill in time, and to win medals which would serve him well in the salons. He was in the army the best part of five years, first in mountain frontier-warfare, then in the Crimea against the British, French and Turks. He had the assumptions and attitudes of a Russian imperialist. On being accepted by the army and assigned to a gun-battery-the natives had no artillery-he wrote to his brother Sergei: ‘With all my strength I shall help with my guns in the destruction of the predatory and turbulent Asiatics.’8 Indeed, he never repudiated his Russian imperialism or the chauvinist spirit, the conviction that the Russians were a special race, with unique moral qualities (personified in the peasant) and a God-ordained role to perform in the world.
These were the simple, unspoken beliefs of his fellow officers. Tolstoy reflected them. But in other ways he felt himself different. ‘Once and for all,’ he noted in his diary, ‘I must accustom myself to the thought that I am an exception, that either I am ahead of my age or that I am one of those incongruous, unadaptable natures that will never be content.’9 Army opinion about him differed. Some thought him modest. Others saw in him ‘an incomprehensible air of importance and self-satisfaction’.10 They all noticed his fierce, implacable gaze, his at times terrible eyes; he could stare down anyone. No one disputed his bravery, in or out of action. It was a function of his huge will. As a boy he had forced himself to ride. He had overcome shyness. He had likewise made himself hunt, including the dangerous sport of bear-hunting; as a result of his own arrogant carelessness he was badly mauled and nearly killed in his first bear-hunt. In the army he showed himself brave under fire, and this eventually brought him promotion to full lieutenant. But his efforts to get himself medals came to nothing. He was three times recommended for one but at some level the award was blocked. An eagerness for gongs is easily spotted in armies, and disliked. The fact is, Tolstoy was not a satisfactory officer; he lacked not only humility and willingness to obey and learn, but solidarity with his comrades. He was a loner, out for himself, and if there was nothing going on which helped his career, he simply left the front, often without permission or telling anyone. His colonel noted: ‘Tolstoy is eager to smell powder, but only fitfully.’ He tended to avoid ‘the difficulties and hardships incidental to war. He travels about to different places like a tourist, but as soon as he hears firing he at once appears on the field of battle. When it is over he is off again at his own discretion whenever the fancy takes him.’11
Tolstoy, then and always, liked drama. He was willing to make a sacrifice, of comfort, pleasure, even life, provided it could be done as a grand, theatrical gesture, and everyone noticed. As a student, to stress his Russian fortitude, he had made himself a combined poncho-sleeping bag; it was a gesture and it aroused comment. In the army he was willing to perform but not, as it were, to serve. The routine discomforts and hardships, the aspects of army life which had no potential celebrity-value and went unobserved, did not interest him. So it was to be always: his heroism, his virtue, his sanctity were for the public stage, not for the dull, unrecorded routine of everyday life.
But in one respect his army career was truly heroic. During it he made himself a writer of prodigious power. It is obvious in retrospect that Tolstoy was a born writer. Obvious too, from his later descriptions, that from a very early age he observed nature and people with an accuracy of detail which has never been surpassed. But born writers do not always become them. The point at which Tolstoy’s two outstanding gifts came together occurred when he first saw the Caucasus mountains on his way to join the army. The almost supernatural splendour of the sight not only excited his intense visual appetite and stirred a still-dormant urge to set it down in words but evoked his third outstanding characteristic-his sense of God’s majesty and his desire in some way to mingle himself with it. He was soon writing Childhood, then stories and sketches of army life: ‘The Raid’, ‘The Cossacks’, ‘The Woodfelling’, ‘Notes of a Billiard Marker’, three ‘Sebastapol Sketches’, ‘Boyhood’ (part of Youth), ‘A Landlord’s Morning’, ‘Christmas Eve’. Childhood was sent off in July 1852 and published with considerable success. ‘The Cossacks’ was not finished for another ten years, ‘Christmas Eve’ never and some material, the campaign against the Chechen chief Shamyl, Tolstoy saved for his last, brilliant story, ‘Hadji Murad’, which he wrote as an old man. But the remarkable thing was that this considerable body of work was produced in brief intervals of active soldiering or even in the front line, and at a time when Tolstoy, by his own account, was also chasing Cossack women, gambling and drinking. The drive to write must have been overpowering, the industry and will required to satisfy it awesome.
Yet this drive to write was intermittent, and therein lay Tolstoy’s tragedy. Sometimes he wrote with exhilaration, proudly conscious of his power. Thus, in October 1858: ‘I will spin such a yarn there will be no head or tail to it.’ Early 1860: ‘I am working at something that comes as naturally to me as breathing and, I confess with culpable pride, enables me to look down on what the rest of you are doing.’12 Not that his writing was ever easy. He set himself high standards; the work was exacting and arduous. Most of the vast bulk of War and Peace went through at least seven drafts. There were even more drafts and revisions of Anna Karenina, and the changes were of fundamental importance-we see, in these successive revisions, the metamorphosis of Anna from a disagreeable courtesan into the tragic heroine we know.13 From the enormous trouble Tolstoy took with his work at its best it is clear he was conscious of his high calling as an artist. How can he not have been? There are times when he writes better than anyone who has ever lived, and surely no one has depicted nature with such consistent truth and thoroughness. ‘The Snowstorm’, written in 1856, which records his near-death in a blizzard while returning from the Caucasus to Yasnaya, an early example of his mature technique, has an almost mesmeric power. This is achieved directly, by the selection and accuracy of detail. He does not use overtones or undertones, poetry or suggestion. As Edward Crankshaw pointed out, he is like a painter who disdains shadows and chiaroscuro, employing only perfect clarity and visibility.14 Another critic has compared him to a Pre-Raphaelite painter: shapes, textures, tones and colours, sounds, smells, sensations are all conveyed with crystalline transparency and directness,15 Here are two examples, both passages evolved from many revisions. First, the extrovert Vronsky:
‘Good, splendid!’ he said to himself, crossing his legs and, taking a leg in his hand, felt the springy muscle of his calf where he had bruised it the day before in his fall…He enjoyed the slight ache in his strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold August day, which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed exhilarating to him…Everything he saw through the carriage window was as fresh and jolly and vigorous as he was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the setting sun, the sharp outlines of fences and angles of buildings, even the fields of potatoes: everything was beautiful, like a lovely landscape fresh from the artist’s brush and lately varnished.
Then here is Levin shooting snipe with his dog Laska:
The moon had lost all its lustre and was like a white cloud in the sky. Not a single star could be seen. The sedge, silvery before, now shone like gold. The stagnant pools were all like amber. The blue of the grass had changed to yellow-green…A hawk woke up and settled on a haystack, turning its head from side to side and looking discontentedly at the marsh. Crows were flying about the field and a bare-legged boy was driving the horses to an old man who had got up from under his coat and was combing his hair. The smoke from the gun was white as milk over the green of the grass.16
It is clear that Tolstoy’s writing power sprang directly from his veneration for nature, and that he retained both the capacity and the excitement, if spasmodically, to the end. In his diary for 19 July 1896 he records seeing a tiny shoot of burdock, still living, in a ploughed field, ‘black from dust but still alive and red in the centre…It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other had asserted it.’17 When Tolstoy was seeing nature, with that cold, terrible, exact eye of his, and setting it down in words with his precise, highly-calibrated pen, he was as close to happiness, or at any rate peace of spirit, as his character permitted.
Unfortunately, writing alone did not satisfy him. He had a will to power. The authority he exercised over his characters was not enough. For one thing, he did not feel part of them. They were a different race, almost a different species. Just occasionally, above all in the character of Anna, he works himself by prodigies of effort into the mind of the person he is describing, and the fact that he does so with such success in this case reminds one of the dangers of generalizing about this extraordinary man. But as a rule he sees from outside, from afar, most of all from above. His serfs, his soldiers, his peasants are brilliantly rendered animals; he describes horses-Tolstoy had great knowledge and understanding of horses-just as well and in the same spirit. He sees for us, as he takes us through the course of a great battle, almost as though he were observing it from another planet. He does not feel for us. We do feel, as a result of his selective sight on our behalf, and therefore he controls our feelings: we are in the grip of a great novelist. But he does not feel himself. He remains disengaged, aloof, Olympian. Compared to his older contemporary Dickens, his near-contemporary Flaubert-both novelists moving on the same high plane of creation-Tolstoy invested comparatively little of his emotional capital in his fiction. He had, or he thought he had, better things to do with it.
We think of Tolstoy as a professional novelist, and of course in a sense this is true. In both his major works he exercised what can only be called genius: organizing masses of detail into the purposeful pattern of great themes, carried through to their relentless conclusions. Being a true artist, he did not repeat himself: War and Peace surveys a whole society and epoch, Anna Karenina focuses closely on a particular group of people. These books made him a national hero, brought him worldwide fame, wealth and a reputation for moral sagacity which perhaps no other novelist has ever enjoyed. But most of his life he was not writing fiction at all. There were three creative periods: the early stories in the 1850s; the six years he spent producing War and Peace in the 1860s; the creation of Anna Karenina in the 1870s. The rest of his long life he was doing and being a multitude of other things, which in his view had higher moral priority.
Aristocrats under the old order found it difficult to shake off the notion that writing was for their inferiors. Byron never regarded poetry as his most important work, which was to assist the subject peoples of Europe to achieve their independence. He felt himself called to lead, as befitted his class. So did Tolstoy. Indeed he felt called to do more than lead: to prophesy, at times to play the Messiah. What, then, was he doing, spending his time writing? ‘To write stories,’ he told the poet Fet, ‘is stupid and shameful.’ Note the second adjective. This was an intermittent theme, that art was an outrageous misuse of God’s gifts, which Tolstoy orchestrated in ever more sonorous terms when the iconoclastic mood came upon him. So from time to time, and increasingly as he grew older, he would renounce art and exert moral leadership.
Now here was a disastrous case of self-deception. It is remarkable that Tolstoy, who thought about himself as much as any man who ever lived-including even Rousseau-who wrote about himself copiously, and much of whose fiction revolves around himself in one way or another, should have been so conspicuously lacking in self-knowledge. As a writer he was superlatively qualified; and while he was writing he was least dangerous to those around him and to society generally. But he did not wish to be a writer, at any rate of profane matter. Instead he wanted to lead, for which he had no capacity at all, other than will; to prophesy, to found a religion, and to transform the world, tasks for which he was morally and intellectually disqualified. So great novels remained unwritten, and he led, or rather dragged, himself and his family into a confused wilderness.
There was a further reason why Tolstoy felt impelled to set himself to great moral tasks. Like Byron, he knew himself to be a sinner. Unlike Byron, he felt an overwhelming sense of guilt about it. Tolstoy’s guilt was a selective and inaccurate instrument-some of his worst failings, even crimes, the atrocious products of his overweening ego, he did not see as sins at all-but it was a very powerful one. And to be sure there was a very great deal in his youthful life to feel guilty about. He seems to have learned to gamble heavily in Moscow and St Petersburg early in 1849. On 1 May he wrote to his brother Sergei: ‘I came to St Petersburg for no good reason, I’ve done nothing worth doing here, simply run through a lot of money and fallen into debt.’ He told Sergei to sell part of the estate at once: ‘While I am waiting for the money to come through I must absolutely have 3500 roubles straight away.’ He added: ‘You can commit this kind of idiocy once in a lifetime. I have had to pay for my freedom (there was no one to thrash me; that was my chief misfortune) and for philosophizing, and now I have paid.’18 In fact he went on to gamble, intermittently, sometimes heavily and disastrously, for the next ten years, in the process selling much of his estates and accumulating debts to relations, friends and tradesmen, many of which were never repaid. He gambled in the army. At one stage he planned to start an army paper, to be called The Military Gazette, and sold the central block of Yasnaya Polyana to finance it; but when the cash, 5000 roubles, arrived he used it for gambling and promptly lost it. After he left the army, and travelled in Europe, he gambled again, with the same result. The poet Polonsky, who observed him in Stuttgart in July 1857, recorded: ‘Unfortunately roulette attracted him violently…[He] has been completely plucked at play. He dropped 3000 francs and is left without a sou.’ Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary: ‘Roulette till six. Lost everything.’ ‘Borrowed 200 roubles from the Frenchman and lost it.’ ‘Borrowed money from Turgenev and lost it.’19 Years later his wife was to note that, while he felt guilty about his gambling as such, and had renounced it, he seemed to feel no compunction about his failure to settle the debts he acquired at this time, some of them owed to poor men. There was nothing dramatic about paying an old debt.
Tolstoy had an even stronger sense of guilt about his sexual desires and their satisfaction, though here again his self-castigations were curiously selective and even indulgent to himself. Tolstoy believed himself to be very highly sexed. Diary entries record: ‘Must have a woman. Sensuality gives me not a moment’s peace’ (4 May 1853). ‘Terrible lust amounting to a physical illness’ (6 June 1856).20 At the end of his life he told his biographer Aylmer Maude that, so strong were his urges, he was unable to dispense with sex until he was eighty-one. In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him and brought the usual consequences. One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for ‘gonorrhoea, obtained from the customary source’. He records another bout in 1852 in a letter to his brother Nikolai: ‘The venereal sickness is cured but the after-effects of the mercury have caused me untold suffering.’ But he continued to patronize whores, varied by gypsies, Cossack and native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. The tone in his diary entries is invariably self-disgust blended with hatred for the temptress: ‘something pink…I opened the back door. She came in. Now I can’t bear to look at her. Repulsive, vile, hateful, causing me to break my rules’ (18 April 1851). ‘Girls have led me astray’ (25 June 1853). The following day he made good resolution but ‘the wenches prevent me’ (26 June 1853). An entry for April 1856 records, after a visit to a brothel: ‘Horrible, but absolutely the last time.’ Another 1856 entry: ‘Disgusting. Girls. Stupid music, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, girls, girls.’ Turgenev, whose house he was then using like a hotel, gives another glimpse of Tolstoy in 1856: ‘Drinking bouts, gypsies, cards all night long, and then sleeps like the dead until two in the afternoon.’21
When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. These occasionally excited more than simple lust on his part. He wrote later of Yasnaya Polyana, ‘I remember the nights I spent there, and Dunyasha’s beauty and youth…her strong, womanly body.’22 One of Tolstoy’s motives in travelling in Europe in 1856 was to escape what he saw as the temptations of an attractive serf-girl. His father, as he knew, had had such an affair, and the girl had given birth to a son, who was simply treated as a male estate serf, being employed in the stables (he became a coachman). But Tolstoy, after his return, could not keep his hands off the women, especially a married one called Aksinya. His diary for May 1858 records: ‘Today, in the big old wood. I’m a fool, a brute. Her bronze flesh and her eyes. I’m in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought.’23 The girl was ‘clean and not bad-looking, with bright black eyes, a deep voice, a scent of something fresh and strong and full breasts that lifted the bib of her apron’. Probably in July 1859, Aksinya gave birth to a son, called Timofei Bazykin. Tolstoy brought her into the house as a domestic and allowed the little boy to play at her heels for a time. But, like Marx and Ibsen, and like his own father, he never acknowledged the child was his, or paid the slightest attention to him. What is even more remarkable is that, at a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. Possibly he feared later claims. He seems to have been pitiless in dismissing the rights of illegitimate offspring. He resented the fact, perhaps because it showed up his own behaviour, that Turgenev not only acknowledged his illegitimate daughter but took pains to bring her up in a suitable manner. On one occasion Tolstoy insulted the poor girl, alluding to her birth, and this led to a serious quarrel with Turgenev, which nearly ended in a duel.24 So Tolstoy’s son Timofei was put to work in the stables; later, on the grounds of bad behaviour, he was demoted to woodsman. There is no further record of Timofei after 1900, when he was forty-three, but we know he was befriended by Tolstoy’s son Alexei, who made him his coachman.
Tolstoy knew he was doing wrong in resorting to prostitutes and seducing peasant women. He blamed himself for these offences. But he tended to blame the women still more. They were all Eve the Temptress to him. Indeed it is probably not too much to say that despite the fact that he needed women physically all his life and used them-or perhaps because of this-he distrusted, disliked and even hated them. In some ways he found the manifestation of their sexuality repulsive. He remarked at the end of his life, ‘the sight of a woman with her breasts bared was always disgusting to me, even in my youth.’25 Tolstoy was by nature censorious, even puritanical. If his own sexuality upset him, its manifestations in others brought out his strongest disapproval. In Paris in 1857, at a time when his own philandering was surging in full spate, he noted: ‘At the furnished lodgings where I stayed, there were thirty-six ménages, of which nineteen were irregular. That disgusted me terribly.’26 Sexual sin was evil, and women were the source of it. On 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote:
Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc if not women?
The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life. In contrast to his efforts to portray Anna Karenina, he never seems to have made any serious attempt in real life to penetrate and understand the mind of a woman. Indeed he would not admit that a woman could be a serious, adult, moral human being. He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: ‘[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.’ Or again: ‘It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.’27 He disagreed strongly with the emancipationist views expressed in J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women, arguing that even unmarried women should be barred from entering a profession. Indeed, he regarded prostitution as one of the few ‘honourable callings’ for women. The passage in which he justifies the whore is worth quoting:
Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse, as many ‘liberals’ wish to do? Impossible! It would be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a ‘golden bridge’ in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes! What would become of decency and morality, how would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No, I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family.28
The trouble with Tolstoy was that, while he believed in the family he did not really believe in marriage; at any rate in a Christian marriage between adults with equal rights and duties. No one who ever lived, perhaps, was less suited to such an institution. A neighbouring girl in the country, a twenty-year-old orphan called Valerya Arsenev, had a lucky escape. He conceived an attachment for her while he was in his late twenties and for a time considered himself her fiancé. But he only liked her childish aspects; her more womanly, mature side, as it emerged, repelled him. His diaries and letters tell the tale. ‘A pity she has no bone, no fire-a pudding.’ But ‘her smile is painfully submissive.’ She was ‘badly educated, ignorant, indeed stupid…I began to needle her so cruelly that she smiles uncertainly, tears in her smile.’ After dithering for eight months and lecturing her unmercifully, he provoked her into an irritable letter and used this as an excuse for breaking it off: ‘We are too far apart. Love and marriage would have given us nothing but misery.’ He wrote to his aunt: ‘I have behaved very badly. I have asked God to pardon me…but to mend this matter is impossible.’29
His choice finally fell, when he was thirty-four, on an eighteen-year-old doctor’s daughter, Sonya Behrs. He was no great catch: not rich, a known gambler, in trouble with the authorities for insulting the local magistrate. He had described himself, some years before, as possessing ‘the most ordinary coarse and ugly features…small grey eyes, more stupid than intelligent…the face of a peasant, and a peasant’s large hands and feet’. Moreover, he hated dentists and would not visit them, and by 1862 he had lost nearly all his teeth. But she was a plain, immature girl, only five feet high and competing with her two sisters; she was glad to get him. He proposed formally by letter, then seems to have had doubts until the last minute. The actual wedding was a premonition of disaster. On the morning he burst into her apartment, insisting: ‘I have come to say that there is still time…all this business can still be put a stop to.’ She burst into tears. Tolstoy was an hour late for the ceremony itself, having packed all his shirts. She cried again. Afterwards they had supper and she changed, and they climbed into a travelling carriage called a dormeuse, pulled by six horses. She cried again. Tolstoy, an orphan, could not understand this and shouted: ‘If leaving your family means such great sorrow to you, you cannot love me very much.’ In the dormeuse he began to paw her and she pushed him away. They had a suite at a hotel, the Birulevo. Her hands trembled as she poured him tea from the samovar. He tried to paw her again, and was again repulsed. Tolstoy’s diary relentlessly recorded: ‘She is weepy. In the carriage. She knows everything and it is simple. But she is afraid.’ He thought her ‘morbid’. Later still, having finally made love to her, and she having (as he thought) responded, he added: ‘Incredible happiness. I can’t believe this can last as long as life.’30
Of course it did not. Even the most submissive wife would have found marriage to such a colossal egotist hard to bear. Sonya had sufficient brains and spirit to resist his all-crushing will, at least from time to time. So they produced one of the worst (and best recorded) marriages in history. Tolstoy opened it with a disastrous error of judgment. It is one of the characteristics of the intellectual to believe that secrets, especially in sexual matters, are harmful. Everything should be ‘open’. The lid must be lifted on every Pandora’s box. Husband and wife must tell each other ‘everything’. Therein lies much needless misery. Tolstoy began his policy of glasnost by insisting that his wife read his diaries, which he had now been keeping for fifteen years. She was appalled to find-the diaries were then in totally uncensored form-that they contained details of all his sex life, including visits to brothels and copulations with whores, gypsies, native women, his own serfs and, not least, even her mother’s friends. Her first response was: ‘Take those dreadful books back-why did you give them to me?’ Later she told him: ‘Yes, I have forgiven you. But it is dreadful.’ These remarks are taken from her own diary, which she had been keeping since the age of eleven. It was part of Tolstoy’s ‘open’ policy that each should keep diaries and each should have access to the other’s-a sure formula for mutual suspicion and misery.
The physical side of the Tolstoy marriage probably never recovered from Sonya’s initial shock at learning her husband was (as she saw it) a sexual monster. Moreover, she read his diaries in ways which Tolstoy had not anticipated, noting faults he had been careful (as he thought) to conceal. She spotted, for instance, that he had failed to repay debts contracted as a result of his gambling. She observed, too, that he failed to tell women with whom he had sex that he had contracted venereal disease and might still have it. The selfishness and egotism the diaries so plainly convey to the perceptive reader-and who more perceptive than a wife?-were more apparent to her than to the author. Moreover, the Tolstoyan sex life so vividly described in his diaries was now inextricably mingled in her mind with the horrors of submitting to his demands and their ultimate consequence in painful and repeated pregnancies. She endured a dozen in twenty-two years; in quick succession she lost her child Petya, while pregnant with Nikolai, who in turn died the same year he was born; Vavara was born prematurely and died immediately. Tolstoy himself did not help with the business of childbearing by taking an intimate though insensitive interest in all its details. He insisted on attending the birth of his son, Sergei (later using it for a scene in Anna Karenina), and broke into a frightening rage when Sonya was unable to breast-feed the baby. As the pregnancies and miscarriages proceeded, and his wife’s distaste for his sexual demands became manifest, he wrote to a friend: ‘There is no worse situation for a healthy man than to have a sick wife.’
Early in the marriage he ceased to love her; her tragedy was that her residual love for him remained. At this time she confided in her diary:
I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper, and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes, for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy but he won’t give it to me, and all my pride is trampled in the mud. I am nothing but a miserable crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a useless creature with morning sickness and a big belly.31
It is hard to believe, on the available evidence, that the marriage was ever bearable. During a comparatively calm period in 1900, when they had been married thirty-eight years, Sonya wrote to Tolstoy: ‘I want to thank you for the former happiness you gave me and to regret that it did not continue so strongly, fully and calmly throughout our whole life.’ But this was a gesture of appeasement. Sonya, from the start, tried to keep the marriage functioning by making herself the manager of his affairs, in some ways an obsessive one, by rendering him indispensable services, by becoming his rebellious slave. She took on the fearsome task of making fair copies of his novels from his appalling handwriting.32 This was drudgery but in a way she enjoyed it because she early on grasped that Tolstoy was least unbearable and destructive when he was exercising his true metier. As she wrote to her sister Tatiana, they were all happiest when he was writing his fiction. For one thing, it made money whereas his other activities wasted it. But ‘it is not so much the money. The main thing is that I love his literary works, I admire them and they move me.’ She learned from bitter experience that once Tolstoy stopped writing fiction he was capable of filling the vacuum in his life with great folly, certain to hurt the family she was trying to hold together.
Tolstoy saw things quite differently. Raising and maintaining a family required money. His novels made money. He came to associate the writing of fiction with the need to earn money, and so to dislike both. In his mind, novels and marriage were linked, and the fact that Sonya was always pressing him to write fiction confirmed the link. And both marriage and novels, he now realized, were preventing him from taking on his real work of prophecy. As he put it in his Confessions:
The new conditions of happy family life completely diverted me from all search for the general meaning of life. At that time my whole existence was centred on my family, my wife, my children, and therefore on concern for the increase of our means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection, for which I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general, for progress, was…replaced by the effort simply to secure the best possible conditions for my family.33
Hence Tolstoy came to see marriage not only as a source of great unhappiness but as an obstacle to moral progress. He generalized from the particular disaster of his own to inveighing against the institution and marital love itself. In 1897, in a Lear-like outburst, he told his daughter Tanya:
I can understand why a depraved man may find salvation in marriage. But why a pure girl should want to get mixed up in such a business is beyond me. If I were a girl I would not marry for anything in the world. And so far as being in love is concerned, for either men and women-since I know what it means, that is, it is an ignoble and above all an unhealthy sentiment, not at all beautiful, lofty or poetical-I would not have opened my door to it. I would have taken as many precautions to avoid being contaminated by that disease as I would to protect myself against far less serious infections such as diphtheria, typhus or scarlet fever.34
This passage suggests, as indeed does much else, that Tolstoy had not thought seriously about marriage. Take the famous sentence from Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The moment one begins to search one’s own observed experience, it becomes clear that both parts of this statement are debatable. If anything, the reverse is closer to the truth. There are obvious, recurrent patterns in unhappy families-where, for instance, the husband is a drunk or a gambler, where the wife is incompetent, adulterous, and so forth; the stigmata of family unhappiness are drearily familiar and repetitive. On the other hand, there are happy families of every kind. Tolstoy had not thought about the subject seriously, and above all honestly, because he could not bring himself to think seriously and honestly about women: he turned from the subject in fear, rage and disgust. The moral failure of Tolstoy’s marriage, and his intellectual failure to do justice to half the human race, were closely linked.
However, even Tolstoy’s marriage, doomed as it was from the start in some ways, might have fared better had it not been for the additional problem of his inheritance, the estate. After gambling and sex, the estate was the third source of Tolstoy’s guilt and by far the most important. It came to dominate and finally to destroy his settled existence. It was the source of his pride and authority, and of his moral unease too. For the land and its peasants were inextricably tied together: in Russia you could not own one without owning the other. Tolstoy inherited the estate from his mother when he was a very young man, and almost from the start he began to consider the great question-part honourable, part self-indulgent-‘What am I to do with my peasants?’ If he had been a sensible man, he would have recognized that managing an estate was not for him; that his gift and his duty were to write. He would have sold the estate and so rid himself of the moral problem, exercising leadership through his books. But Tolstoy was not a sensible man. He would not relinquish the problem. But neither would he solve it radically. For nearly half a century he wavered, dithered and tinkered with it.
Tolstoy instituted his first ‘reform’ of the peasants when he inherited the estate in the late 1840s. He claimed later; ‘The idea that the serfs should be liberated was quite unheard-of in our circle in the 1840s.’35 That was false; it had been bandied about everywhere for an entire generation; it was the theme of every petty provincial Philosophy Club; had it not been it would never have occurred to Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy accompanied his ‘reform’ by other improvements, including a steam threshing machine he designed himself. None of these efforts came to anything. He soon gave up in the face of the intrinsic difficulties and peasant ‘swinishness’ (as he put it). The only result was the character of Nekhlyudov in ‘A Landlord’s Morning’, who speaks for the disillusioned young Tolstoy: ‘I see nothing but ignorant routine, vice, suspicion, hopelessness. I am wasting the best years of my life.’ After eighteen months, Tolstoy left the estate and went on to other things-sex, gambling, the army, literature. But he continued to let the peasants, or rather the idea of the peasants-he never saw them as individual human beings-nag at his mind. His attitude to them remained highly ambivalent. His diary records (1852): ‘I spent the whole evening talking to Shubin about our Russian slavery. It is true that slavery is an evil, but an extremely pleasant evil.’
In 1856 he had his second attempt at ‘reform’. He declared that he would emancipate his serfs in return for payment of thirty years’ rent. He did this, characteristically, without consulting any of his acquaintance who had actually had experience of emancipation. The serfs, as it happened, believed rumours then circulating that the new king, Alexander II, intended to liberate them unconditionally. They smelled a rat. They did not spot Count Tolstoy’s pretentiousness but feared, rather, his (nonexistent) business acumen, and flatly refused his proposal. He, furious, denounced them as ignorant, hopeless savages. He was already displaying a certain emotional disturbance on the subject. He wrote a hysterical letter to the former Interior Minister, Count Dmitri Bludov: ‘If the serfs are not free in six months, we are in for a holocaust.’36 And to members of his own family who thought his schemes foolish and immature-such as his Aunt Tatiana-he showed a frightening hostility: ‘I am beginning to develop a silent hatred of my aunt, in spite of all her affection.’
He now turned to education as the once-and-for-all solution to the peasant problem. It is a curious delusion of intellectuals, from Rousseau onwards, that they can solve the perennial difficulties of human education at a stroke, by setting up a new system. He began by teaching the peasant children himself. He wrote to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy: ‘When I enter this school and see this crowd of ragged, dirty, thin children with their bright eyes and so frequently their angelic expressions, a sense of alarm and horror comes upon me such as I experienced at the sight of drowning people…I desire education for the people only in order to rescue these Pushkins, Ostrograds, Filaretovs, who are drowning there.’37 For a brief period he enjoyed teaching them. He later told his official biographer, P.I. Biryukov, that this was the best time of his life: ‘I owe the brightest time in my life not to the love of women but to the love of people, to the love of children. That was a wonderful time.’38 It is not recorded how successful his efforts were. There were no rules. No homework was required. ‘They bring only themselves,’ he wrote, ‘their receptive nature and an assurance that it will be as jolly in school today as it was yesterday.’ Soon he was setting up a network of schools, and at one time there were seventy. But his own teaching efforts did not last. He became bored and went off on a tour of Germany, ostensibly to examine educational reforms there. But the famous Julius Fröbel disappointed him: instead of listening to Tolstoy he did the talking, and anyway was ‘nothing but a Jew’.
This was the situation when, suddenly in 1861, Alexander II emancipated the serfs by imperial decree. Annoyed, Tolstoy denounced it because it was an act of the State, of which he now began to disapprove. The next year he married, and the estate took on a different significance: as the home of his growing family and, together with his novels, as the source of their income. This was the most productive period of his life, the years of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. As the income from his books rose, Tolstoy bought land and invested in the estate. At one time he had, for instance, four hundred horses on his stud farm. There were five governesses and tutors in the house, plus eleven indoor servants. But the desire to ‘reform’, not just the peasants but himself, his family-the entire world-never left him. It slumbered just beneath the outward surface of his mind, liable to break into sensational activity at any moment.
Political and social reform, and the desire to found a new religious movement, were closely linked in Tolstoy’s mind. He had written as long ago as 1855 that he wanted to create a faith based on ‘the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism, promising not a future bliss but giving bliss on earth’. This was a commonplace idea, the everyday coin of countless jejune religious reformers through the centuries. Tolstoy was never much of a theologian. He wrote two long tracts, Examination of Dogmatic Theology and Union and Translation of the Four Gospels, which do nothing to raise one’s opinion of him as a systematic thinker. A lot of his religious writing makes little sense except in terms of a vague pantheism. Thus: ‘To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. Live seeking God and then you will not live without God’ (1878-79).
But the religious notions drifting around inside Tolstoy’s head were potentially dangerous because, in conjunction with his political impulses, they formed highly combustible material, liable to burst into sudden flame without warning. By the time he had finished and published Anna Karenina, which greatly reinforced his reputation, he was restless, dissatisfied with writing and ready for public mischief: a world-famous figure, a seer, a man to whom countless readers and admirers looked for wisdom and guidance.
The first explosion came in December 1881, when Tolstoy and his family were in Moscow. He went to the Khitrov market in a poor quarter of Moscow where he distributed money to the derelicts there and listened to their life stories. A crowd surrounded him and he took refuge in the neighbouring dosshouse, where he saw things which further distressed him. Returning home, and taking off his fur coat, he sat down to a five-course dinner served by footmen in dress clothes with white gloves and ties. He started to shout: ‘One cannot live so! One cannot live so! It is impossible!’, frightening Sonya with his arm-waving and threats to give away all their possessions. He immediately began setting up a new system of charity for the poor, using the recently established census as a statistical basis, then hurried down to the country to consult with his current guru, the so-called ‘peasant seer’ V.K. Syutayev, on further reforms, Sonya was left alone in Moscow with their sick four-month-old Alexei.
This desertion, as she saw it, provoked from the Countess a letter which struck a new note of bitterness in their relationship. It sums up not only her own difficulties with Tolstoy but the anger most ordinary people come to feel in coping with a great humanitarian intellectual: ‘My little one is still unwell, and I am very tender and pitying. You and Syutayev may not especially love your own children, but we simple mortals are neither able nor wish to distort our feelings or to justify our lack of love for a person by professing some love or other for the whole world.’39
Sonya was raising the question, as a result of observing Tolstoy’s behaviour over many years, not least to his own family, whether he ever really loved any individual human being, as opposed to loving mankind as an idea. His wretched brother Dimitri, for instance, was surely an object of compassion: he sank into the gutter, married a prostitute and died young of tuberculosis in 1856. Tolstoy could barely bring himself to spend an hour at his deathbed and refused to attend the funeral at all-he wanted to go to a party instead-though he later put both episodes, the deathbed and the refusal, to good fictional use.40 His brother Nikolai, likewise dying of tuberculosis, was another object of pity. But Tolstoy refused to visit him, and in the end Nikolai had to come to him, dying in Tolstoy’s arms. He did little to help his third brother, Sergei, when he lost his entire fortune gambling. They were all, to be sure, feeble creatures. But it was one of Tolstoy’s principles that the strong should come to the aid of the weak.
The record of his friendships is revealing. He was unselfish and submissive only in one case, to his fellow student at Kazan University, Mitya Dyakov, an older man. But this soon faded. As a rule, Tolstoy took, his friends gave. Sonya, copying his early diaries, wrote: ‘[His] self-adoration comes out in every one [of them]. It is amazing how people existed for him [only] in so far as they affected him personally.’41 Even more striking is the willingness of those who knew him, not just hangers-on, dependants and flatterers, but highly critical men of independent personality, to put up with his egotism and to revere him despite it. They quailed before that terrible eye, they bowed before the massive strength of his will, and of course they worshipped at the shrine of his genius. Anton Chekhov, a subtle and sensitive man, well aware of Tolstoy’s many faults, wrote: ‘I dread Tolstoy’s death. If he should die there would be a big empty place in my life…I have never loved any man as I have loved him…As long as there is a Tolstoy in literature, then it is easy and agreeable to be a writer; even the realization that one has done nothing and will do nothing is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all.’
Turgenev had even more reason to be aware of Tolstoy’s selfishness and cruelty, having experienced both in good measure. He had been generous and thoughtful in helping the young writer. In return he received coldness, ingratitude and Tolstoy’s brutal habit of insulting, often brilliantly, the ideas which he knew his friends cherished. Turgenev was a giant of a man, soft-hearted and mild, incapable of paying Tolstoy back in his own coin. But he confessed himself exasperated by Tolstoy’s behaviour. He had ‘never experienced anything so disagreeable as that piercing look which, coupled with two or three venomous remarks, was enough to drive a man mad’.42 When he gave Tolstoy his own novel, Fathers and Sons, over which he had struggled so hard, to read, Tolstoy promptly fell asleep over it and the returning Turgenev found him snoring. When, after the quarrel over Turgenev’s daughter and the threat of a duel, Turgenev handsomely apologized, Tolstoy (according to Sonya) sneered: ‘You are afraid of me. I despise you and want no more to do with you.’ The poet Fet, who tried to make peace between them, was told: ‘Turgenev is a scoundrel who deserves to be thrashed. I beg you to transmit that to him as faithfully as you transmit his charming comments to me.’43 Tolstoy wrote many unpleasant things, often quite untrue, about Turgenev in his diaries, and their correspondence reflects the lack of symmetry of their friendship. Knowing himself to be dying, Turgenev wrote his last letter to Tolstoy in 1883: ‘My friend, great writer of the Russian land, listen to my appeal. Let me know if you receive this scribble and allow me to embrace you once more hard, very hard, you, your wife, and all your family. I cannot go on. I am tired.’ Tolstoy never replied to this pathetic request, though Turgenev lingered on another two months. So one is not impressed by Tolstoy’s reaction when he got the news of Turgenev’s death: ‘I think of Turgenev continually. I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with him.’ It has the ring of an actor, playing the public role expected of him. As Sonya noticed, Tolstoy was incapable of the privacy and intimacy needed for person-to-person love, or real friendship. Instead he embraced humanity, because that could be done noisily, dramatically, sensationally on the public stage.
But if he was an actor, he was one who continually changed his role; or, rather, varied the role on the great central theme of service to mankind. His didactic urge was stronger than any other. The moment a subject attracted him, he wanted to write a book about it, or engage in a course of revolutionary reform, usually without taking the trouble to master it himself or to consult real experts. Within months of taking up agriculture he was designing and making farm machinery. He learned to play the piano and instantly began writing Foundations of Music and Rules for its Study. Soon after opening a school he was turning educational theory upside down. He believed throughout his life that he could seize upon any discipline, find out what was wrong with it, and then rewrite its rules from first principles. He had at least three shots at educational reform, as he did at land reform, on the last occasion writing his own textbooks, which a disgusted and cynical Sonya was obliged to copy out in legible form, complaining: ‘I dispise this Reader, this Arithmetic, this Grammar, and I cannot pretend to be interested in them.’44
Tolstoy was always as keen to do as to teach. As with most intellectuals, there came a time in his life when he felt the need to identify himself with ‘the workers’. It popped up intermittently in the 1860s and 1870s, then began in earnest in January 1884. He dropped his title (though not his authoritative manner) and insisted on being called ‘plain Leo Nikolayevich’. This mood coincided with one of those sartorial gestures intellectuals love: dressing as a peasant. The class transvestism suited Tolstoy’s love of drama and costume. It also suited him physically, for he had the build and features of a peasant. His boots, his smock, his beard, his cap became the uniform of the new Tolstoy, the world-seer. It was a prominent part of that instinctive talent for public relations which most of these great secular intellectuals seem to possess. Newspaper reporters came thousands of miles to see him. Photography was now universal, the newsreel just beginning in Tolstoy’s old age. His peasant dress was ideally suited to his epiphany as the first media prophet.
Tolstoy could also be photographed and filmed performing manual labour, which from the 1880s he proclaimed ‘an absolute necessity’. Sonya noted (1 November 1885): ‘He gets up at seven when it is still dark. He pumps water for the whole house and lugs it in an enormous tub on a sledge. He saws long logs, chops them for kindling and stacks the wood. He does not eat white bread and never goes out anywhere.’45 Tolstoy’s own diary shows him cleaning the rooms with his children: ‘I was ashamed to do what had to be done, empty the chamberpot’-then, a few days later, he conquered his disgust and did so. He took instruction from a shoemaker in his hut, writing of him: ‘How like a light, morally splendid, he is in his dirty, dark corner.’ After this instant course in a difficult trade, Tolstoy began to make shoes for the family and boots for himself. He also made a pair for Fet, but it is not recorded whether the poet found them satisfactory. Tolstoy’s own sons refused to wear the shoes he made for them. Hammering away, Tolstoy exulted: ‘It makes one feel like becoming a worker, for the soul flowers.’ But soon the urge to cobble wore off and he turned to farm labour: he carted manure, hauled timber, ploughed and helped to build huts. He fancied carpentry and was photographed, a chisel stuck in his broad leather belt, a saw hanging from his waist. Then that phase too ended, as quickly as it had begun.
Except in writing, his true trade, Tolstoy was not a man for the long haul. He lacked patience, persistence and staying power in the face of difficulty. Even his horse-breeding, about which he did know something, was mismanaged since he soon lost interest in the stud. Sonya had a blazing row with him on this subject, on 18 June 1884. She claimed that the horses were in a deplorable condition: he had bought well-bred mares in Samaria, then let them die from neglect and overwork. It was the same, she said, with everything he undertook, including his charities: no properly thought-out plan, no consistency, no men trained and assigned to specific jobs, the whole philosophy changing from one minute to the next. Tolstoy rushed from the room, shouting he would emigrate to America.
The muddle Tolstoy created on his own estate hurt only his personal circle. His public acts and still more his public preaching held much wider dangers. Not all of them were misguided. Starting from 1865 Tolstoy made valuable and in part successful efforts to draw attention to the regional famines from which Russia periodically suffered. His relief schemes did some good, especially during the great famine of 1890, the magnitude of which the government tried to conceal. Occasionally he came to the rescue of one of Russia’s many persecuted minorities. He trumpeted the wrongs of the Doukhobors, the vegetarian pacifists whom the government wanted to round up and destroy. He eventually got permission for them to emigrate to Canada. On the other hand, he was harsh about another persecuted group, the Jews, and his views added to their appalling problems.
Far more serious, however, was Tolstoy’s authoritarian view that only he had the solution to the world’s distress, and his refusal to take part in any efforts at relief which he did not plan and control personally. His selfishness embraced even his charity. At various times in his life his views on most political problems, land reform, colonization, war, monarchy, the State, ownership, etc., changed radically; the list of his contradictions is endless. But in one thing he was consistent. He refused to participate personally in any systematic scheme to bring about reform in Russia-to tackle the problems at their source-and he denounced, with increasing vehemence, the liberal doctrine of ‘improvement’ as a delusion, indeed a positive evil. He hated democracy. He despised parliaments. The deputies in the Duma were ‘children playing at being grown up’.46 Russia, he argued, without parliaments, was a much freer country than England with them. The most important things in life were not responsive to parliamentary reform. Tolstoy had a particular hatred for the Russian liberal tradition and in War and Peace he pilloried the first of the would-be reformers, Count Speransky. He has Prince Andrew say of Speransky’s new Council of State, ‘What does it matter to me…Can all that make me any happier or better?’ It is a fact of sombre significance in Russian history, that for half a century her greatest writer set his face like flint against any systematic reform of the Tsarist system and did his best to impede and ridicule those who tried to civilize it.
But what was Tolstoy’s alternative? If he had argued, as Dickens, Conrad and other great novelists did, that structural improvements were of only limited value and that what was required were changes in human hearts, he would have made some sense. But Tolstoy, while stressing the need for individual moral improvement, would not let matters rest there: he constantly hinted at the need for, the imminence of, some gigantic moral convulsion, which would turn the world upside down and install a heavenly kingdom. His own utopian efforts were designed to adumbrate this millenarian event. But there was no serious thinking behind this vision. It had something of the purely theatrical quality of the cataclysm which, as we have seen, was the poetic origin of Marx’s theory of revolution.
Moreover Tolstoy, again like Marx, had a defective understanding of history. He knew very little history and had no conception of how great events came to happen. As Turgenev lamented, the embarrassing history-lectures he inserted into War and Peace bore the hallmarks of the autodidact; they were ‘farcical’, sheer ‘trickery’. Flaubert too, writing to Turgenev, noted with dismay ‘il philosophise!’47 We read this great novel despite, not because of, its theory of history. Tolstoy was a determinist and an anti-individualist. The notion that events were shaped by the deliberate decisions of powerful men was to him a colossal illusion. Those who appear to be in charge do not even know what is happening, let alone make it happen. Only unconscious activity is important. History is the product of millions of decisions by unknown men who are blind to what they are doing. In a way the notion is the same as Marx’s, though reached by a different route. What set Tolstoy on this line of thought is not clear. Probably it was his romantic concept of the Russian peasant as the ultimate arbiter and force. At all events, he believed that hidden laws really govern our lives. They are unknown and probably unknowable, and rather than face this disagreeable fact we pretend that history is made by great men and heroes exercising free will. At bottom Tolstoy, like Marx, was a gnostic, rejecting the apparent explanations of how things happen, looking for knowledge of the secret mechanism which lay beneath the surface. This knowledge was intuitively and collectively perceived by corporate groups-the proletariat for Marx, the peasants for Tolstoy. Of course they needed interpreters (like Marx) or prophets (like Tolstoy) but it was essentially their collective strength, their ‘rightness’, which set the wheels of history in motion. In War and Peace, to prove his theory of how history works, Tolstoy distorted the record, just as Marx juggled his Blue Book authorities and twisted his quotations in Capital.48 He refashioned and made use of the Napoleonic Wars, just as Marx tortured the Industrial Revolution to fit his Procrustean bed of historical determinism.
It is not therefore surprising to find Tolstoy moving towards a collectivist solution to the social problem in Russia. As early as 13 August 1865, reflecting on the famine, he set down in his notebook: ‘The universal national task of Russia is to endow the world with the idea of a social structure without landed property. La propriété est le vol will remain a greater truth than the English constitution as long as the human family exists…The Russian revolution can be based on this only.’49 Forty-three years later he came across this note and marvelled at his prescience. By then Tolstoy had formed links with Marxists and proto-Leninists such as S.I. Muntyanov, who corresponded with him from Siberian exile, refusing Tolstoy’s plea to renounce violence: ‘It is difficult, Leo Nikolayevich, to remake me. This socialism is my faith and my God. Of course you profess almost the same thing, but you use the tactic of “love”, and we use that of “violence”, as you express it.’ The argument, then, was about tactics, not strategy; means, not ends. The fact that Tolstoy spoke of ‘God’ and called himself a Christian made much less difference than one might suppose. The Orthodox Church excommunicated him in February 1901, not surprisingly in view of the fact that he not only denied the divinity of Jesus Christ but asserted that to call him God or pray to him was ‘the greatest blasphemy’. The truth is he selected from the Old and New Testaments, the teachings of Christ and the Church, only those bits he agreed with and rejected the rest. He was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Whether he believed in God is more difficult to determine since he defined ‘God’ in different ways at various times. At bottom, it would seem, ‘God’ was what Tolstoy wanted to happen, the total reform. This is a secular, not a religious concept. As for the traditional God the Father, he was at best an equal, to be jealously observed and criticized, the other bear in the den.50
In old age Tolstoy turned against patriotism, imperialism, war and violence in any form, and this alone prevented any alliance with the Marxists. He guessed, too, that the Marxists in power would not, in practice, renounce the State, as they said they would. If the Marxist eschatology actually took place, he wrote in 1898, ‘the only thing that will happen is that despotism will be transferred. Now the capitalists rule. Then the directors of the workers will rule.’51 But this did not worry him very much. He had always assumed that the transfer of property to the masses would take place under some kind of authoritarian system-the Tsar would do as well as any. In any case, he did not regard the Marxists as the enemy. The real enemy were the Western-style democrats, the parliamentary liberals. They were corrupting the whole world with the spread of their ideas. In his late writings, A Letter to the Chinese and The Significance of the Russian Revolution (both 1906) he identifies himself, and Russia, firmly with the East. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘that the Western peoples do can and ought to be an example for the peoples of the East not of what should be done but of what ought not to be done in any circumstances. To pursue the path of the Western nations is to pursue the direct path to destruction.’ The greatest danger to the world was the ‘democratic system’ of Britain and the United States. It was inextricably bound up with the cult of the State and the institutionalized violence which the State practised. Russia must turn her face away from the West, renounce industry, abolish the State and embrace non-resistance.
These ideas strike us as bizarre in the light of later events and hopelessly incongruous even at the time with what was actually happening in Russia. By 1906 Russia was industrializing herself more rapidly than any other nation on earth, using a form of state capitalism which was to be a stepping-stone to Stalin’s totalitarian state. But by this stage of his life Tolstoy was no longer in touch with, or even interested in, the real world. He had created, was inhabiting and to some extent ruling, a world of his own at Yasnaya Polyana. He recognized that state power corrupted, and that is why he turned against the State. What he failed to see, though it is obvious enough-it was obvious to Sonya, for instance-was that the corruption by power takes many forms. One kind of power is exercised by a great man, a seer, a prophet, over his followers, and he is corrupted by their adulation, subservience and, not least, flattery.
Even by the mid-1880s, Yasnaya Polyana had become a kind of court-shrine, to which all kinds of people resorted for guidance, help, reassurance and miracle-wisdom, or to impart strange messages of their own -vegetarians, Swedenborgians, supporters of breast-feeding and Henry George, monks, holy men, lamas and bonzes, pacifists and draft-dodgers, cranks, crazies and the chronically ill. In addition there was the regular, though constantly changing, circle of Tolstoy’s acolytes and disciples. All in one way or another regarded Tolstoy as their spiritual leader, part pope, part patriarch, part Messiah. Like the pilgrims to Rousseau’s tomb in the 1780s, visitors left inscriptions scrawled or carved on the summer-house in the park at Yasnaya Polyana: ‘Down with capital punishment!’ ‘Workers of the world unite and render homage to a genius!’ ‘May the life of Lev Nikolayevich be prolonged for as many years again!’ ‘Greetings to Count Tolstoy from the Tula Realists!’ and so on. Tolstoy in celebrated old age set a pattern which (as we shall see) was to recur among leading intellectuals who enjoy world fame: he formed a kind of pseudo-government, taking up ‘problems’ in various parts of the world, offering solutions, corresponding with kings and presidents, dispatching protests, publishing statements, above all signing things, lending his name to causes, sacred and profane, good and bad.
From the 1890s Tolstoy, as ruler of this chaotic regime, even acquired a prime minister in the shape of a wealthy former guards officer, Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov (1854-1936), who gradually insinuated himself into a dominant position at the court. He appears in photographs taken with the Master: thin mouth, slitty, pouchy eyes, a short beard, an air of assiduous devotion and apostleship. He soon began to exercise a growing influence over Tolstoy’s actions, reminding the old man of his vows and prophecies, keeping him up to the mark of his ideals, always pushing him in more extreme directions. Naturally he made himself chorus-master of the flattering choir, whose voice Tolstoy heard with complacency.
Visitors, or members of the inner circle, noted down Tolstoy’s obiter dicta. They are not impressive. They remind one of Napoleon’s Sayings in Exile or Hitler’s Table-Talk-eccentric generalizations, truisms, ancient, threadbare prejudices, banalities. ‘The longer I live the more I am convinced that love is the most important thing.’ ‘Ignore literature written during the last sixty years. It is all confusion. Read anything written before that time.’ ‘That One which is within us, every one, brings us all closer to one another. As all lines converge at the centre, so we all come together in the One.’ ‘The first thing that strikes you about the introduction of these airplanes and flying projectiles is that new taxes are being levied on the people. This is an illustration of the fact that in a certain moral state of society no material improvement can be beneficial but only harmful.’ On smallpox inoculation: ‘There is no point in trying to escape death. You will die anyway.’ ‘If the peasants had land, we should not have those idiotic flowerbeds.’ ‘It would be a much better world if women were less talkative…It is a kind of naive egoism, a desire to put themselves forward.’ ‘In Shanghai the Chinese quarter gets along very nicely without police.’ ‘Children need no education whatsoever…It is my conviction that the more learned a man is, the stupider.’ ‘The French are a most sympathetic people.’ ‘Without religion there will always be debauchery, frippery and vodka.’ ‘That is how one should live, working for the common cause. It’s the way birds live, and blades of grass.’ ‘The worse it is, the better.’52
Trapped at the centre of this prophet’s court were Tolstoy’s family. Since their father chose to live his life in public, they too were scorched by the glare of publicity. They were forced to share in the drama he created and bore its scars. I have already quoted his son Ilya on the dangers of being ‘special’ people. Another son, Andrei, suffered from nervous collapses, deserted his wife and family and joined the anti-Semitic Black Hundred. The daughters felt the force of their father’s growing detestation of sex. Like Marx, he did not approve of them having followers and disliked the men they chose. In 1897 Tanya, already thirty-three, fell for a widower with six children; he was, it seems, a decent man but he was a liberal and Tolstoy was furious. He gave Tanya a hair-raising lecture on the evils of marriage. Masha, who also fell in love and wanted to marry, got the same treatment. The youngest daughter, Alexandra, was more inclined to be one of his disciples, because she got on badly with her mother.
It was Sonya who had to bear the brunt of Tolstoy’s moral cataclysms. For a quarter of a century he forced his sexual demands on her and subjected her to repeated pregnancies. Then he suddenly insisted they should both renounce sex and live ‘as brother and sister’. She objected to what she saw as an insult to her status as his wife, especially since he was bound to talk and write about it, being incapable of privacy. She did not want the world peering into her bedroom. He demanded that they sleep in separate rooms. She insisted on a double bed, as a symbol of their continuing marriage. At the same time he showed himself jealous, for no reason. He produced a sinister story, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’ about the murder of a wife by an insanely jealous husband who resents her relationship with a violinist. She copied it (as she copied all his writings) with growing distaste and alarm, realizing that people might think it was about her. Publication was held up by the censors, but the story circulated in manuscript and rumours spread. She then felt obliged to demand publication, thinking her attitude would convince people she was not the subject of the story. As a counterpoint to this quasi-public dispute there were gruesome quarrels behind the scenes arising from Tolstoy’s inability to stick to his vow of chastity and his periodic sexual assaults upon his wife. At the end of 1888 his diary records: ‘The Devil fell upon me…The next day, the morning of the 30th, I slept badly. It was so loathsome as after a crime.’ A few days later: ‘Still more powerfully possessed, I fell.’ As late as 1898 he was telling Aylmer Maude: ‘I was myself a husband last night, but that is no reason for abandoning the struggle. God may grant me not to be so again.’53
The fact that Tolstoy could so discuss his marital sex life with an outsider is an indication of the extent to which Sonya felt her most intimate secrets were being exposed to the world’s gaze. It was during these years of rising tension that the folly of Tolstoy’s policy of glasnost became apparent. She did not like reading his diaries at first-no normal, sensible person would-but got used to it. In fact, as his handwriting was so bad, she developed the habit of copying out his diaries in fair, the old ones and the current one. But it is a habit of intellectuals, who write everything with an eye to future publication, to use their diaries as pièces justificatives, instruments of propaganda, defensive and offensive weapons against potential critics, not least their loved ones. Tolstoy was a prime example of this tendency. As his relations with Sonya deteriorated, his diaries became more critical of her and he, accordingly, less anxious for her to see them. As early as 1890 she noted: ‘It is beginning to worry him that I have been copying his diaries…He would like to destroy his old diaries and appear before his children and the public only in his patriarchal robes. His vanity is immense!’54 Soon he began to conceal his current diary. So the policy of glasnost collapsed and was succeeded by furtiveness on both sides. He used his diary-by now, as he thought, private-to record, for instance, the row with Sonya over ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ blow by blow. ‘Lyova has broken off all relations with me…I read his diaries secretly, and tried to see what I could bring into our life which would unite us again. But his diaries only deepened my despair. He evidently discovered I had been reading them for he hid them away.’ Again: ‘In the old days he gave me the job to copy out what he wrote. Now he keeps giving it to his daughters [she does not say ‘our’] and carefully hides it from me. He makes me frantic with his way of systematically excluding me from his personal life, and it is unbearably painful.’ As the final twist to his abandoned policy of openness, Tolstoy began to keep a ‘secret’ diary, which he hid in one of his riding boots. She, finding nothing in his usual diary, began to suspect the existence of the secret one, searched for it and eventually found it, bearing it away in triumph for her own secret perusal. She then pasted a sheet of paper over it on which she had written: ‘With an aching heart I have copied this lamentable diary of my husband’s. How much of what he says about me, and even about his marriage, is unjust, cruel and-God and Levochka forgive me-untrue, distorted and fabricated.’
The background to this nightmarish battle of the diaries was Tolstoy’s growing conviction that his wife was preventing his spiritual fulfilment by insisting on a ‘normal’ way of life he now found morally abhorrent. Sonya was not, as he made out, a gross materialist; she did not deny the moral truth of much of what he preached. As she wrote to him: ‘Together with the crowd I see the light of the lantern. I acknowledge it to be the light, but I cannot go faster, I am held back by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.’ But Tolstoy, as he grew older, became more impatient and more repelled by the luxury of a life which he associated with Sonya. Thus: ‘We sit outside and eat ten dishes. Ice cream, lackeys, silver service-and beggars pass.’ To her he wrote: ‘The way you live is the very way that I have just been saved from, as from a terrible horror, almost leading me to suicide. I cannot return to the way I lived, in which I found destruction…Between us there is a struggle to the death.’
The tragic and pitiful climax to this struggle began in June 1910. It was precipitated by the return from exile of Chertkov, whom she had learned to hate, and who clearly regarded her as a rival to his power over the prophet. We have an intimate and to a great extent objective record of what happened, as Tolstoy’s new secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, kept a diary. It is an indication of the obsession with diaries in Tolstoy’s circle that Bulgakov was originally ordered by Chertkov to send a copy of his daily entries to Chertkov’s secretary. However, Bulgakov relates, when Chertkov returned from exile and ‘appeared on the Yasnaya Polyana scene and the events taking place in the Tolstoy family assumed a dramatic character, I realized how restricted I was by this “censorship” and on various pretexts ceased sending [Chertkov] copies of my diary, his demands notwithstanding.’ He says he arrived with a bias against the Countess, being ‘warned’ that she was ‘thoroughly unsympathetic, not to say hostile’. In fact he found her ‘gracious and hospitable’; ‘I liked the direct look of her sparkling brown eyes, I liked her simplicity, affability and intelligence.’55 His diary entries indicate that he slowly began to see she was more sinned against than sinning; Tolstoy, his idol, began to topple over.
Chertkov’s return was first marked by his taking possession of Tolstoy’s diaries. Unknown to Tolstoy, he secretly took photographs of them. On 1 July Sonya insisted that ‘objectionable passages’ be struck out, so they could not be published. There was a scene. Later she rode in the carriage with Bulgakov, imploring him to persuade Chertkov to return the diaries: ‘she wept the whole way and was exceedingly pitiful…I could not look at this weeping, unfortunate woman without feelings of deep compassion.’ When he spoke to Chertkov about the diaries, he became ‘exceedingly agitated’, accused Bulgakov of telling the Countess where they were hidden and ‘to my utter amazement…made a hideous grimace and stuck out his tongue at me’. He clearly complained to Tolstoy, who wrote Sonya a letter (14 July) insisting that ‘your disposition in recent years has become more and more irritable, despotic and lacking in self-control’; they both now had ‘an absolutely contrary understanding of the meaning and purpose of life’. To resolve the dispute the diaries were put under seal and locked in the bank.56
A week later, on 22 July, Tolstoy observed: ‘Love is the joining of souls separated from each other by the body.’ But the same day he went secretly to a nearby village, Grumont, in order to sign a new will, leaving all his copyrights to his youngest daughter, with Chertkov as administrator. Chertkov arranged all this and drew up the instrument himself, and Bulgakov was kept out of the business because it was felt he might tell Sonya. He complained he was not sure Tolstoy knew what he was signing. ‘And so an act has been committed which [she] had dreaded above everything: the family, whose material interests she had so jealously guarded, was deprived of the literary rights to Tolstoy’s works after his death.’ He added that Sonya felt instinctively ‘that something awful and irreparable had just happened’. On 3 August there were ‘nightmarish scenes’ during which Sonya apparently accused Chertkov of having a homosexual relationship with her husband. Tolstoy was ‘frozen with indignation’.57 On 14 September there was another terrible scene, Chertkov saying to Tolstoy in her presence: ‘If I had a wife like yours I would shoot myself.’ Chertkov said to her: ‘If I had wanted to, I could have dragged your family through the mud, but I haven’t done it.’ A week later, Tolstoy discovered Sonya had found his secret diary in the boot and read it. The next day, contrary to a previous agreement, he rehung Chertkov’s photograph in his study. While he was out riding, she tore it up and flushed it down the lavatory. Then she fired off a toy pistol and ran into the park. These rows frequently involved the youngest, Alexandra, also; she formed a habit of striking a boxing posture, goading her mother to say, ‘Is that a well-bred young lady or is it a coachman?’-referring, doubtless, to dark family secrets.58
On the night of 27-28 October Tolstoy discovered Sonya, at midnight, going through his papers, apparently looking for the secret will. He woke Alexandra and announced: ‘I am leaving at once-for good.’ He caught a train that night. The next morning, Bulgakov was told the news, by a triumphant Chertkov: ‘His face expressed joy and excitement,’ When Sonya was informed, she threw herself into the pond, and there were further, though unconvincing, suicide attempts. By 1 November Tolstoy, having become ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, had to leave the train and was put to bed at Astapovo Station on the Ryazan-Ural line. Sonya and the family went to join him by special train two days later. On the 7th came the news of the prophet’s death. What makes the last months of his life so heartbreaking, especially to those who admire his fiction, is that they were marked, not by any ennobling debate over the great issues the quarrel in theory embodied, but by jealousy, spite, revenge, furtiveness, treachery, bad temper, hysteria and petty meanness. It was a family dispute of the most degrading kind, envenomed by an interfering and self-interested outsider and ending in total disaster. Tolstoy’s admirers later tried to make a scene of Biblical tragedy from the deathbed at Astapovo Station, but the truth is his long and stormy life ended not with a bang but a whine.
Tolstoy’s case is another example of what happens when an intellectual pursues abstract ideas at the expense of people. The historian is tempted to see it as a prolegomenon, on a small, personal scale, of the infinitely greater national catastrophe which was soon to engulf Russia as a whole. Tolstoy destroyed his family, and killed himself, by trying to bring about the total moral transformation he felt imperative. But he also yearned for and predicted-and by his writings greatly encouraged-a millenarian transformation of Russia herself, not by gradual and painstaking reforms of the kind he despised, but in one volcanic convulsion. It finally came in 1917, as a result of events he could not foresee and in ways he would have shuddered to contemplate. It made nonsense of all he wrote about the regeneration of society. The Holy Russia he loved was destroyed, seemingly for ever. By a hateful irony, the principal victims of the New Jerusalem thus brought about were his beloved peasants, twenty million of whom were led to mass slaughter on the sacrificial altar of ideas.