1848 One of the books on Tolstoy’s bedside table, frequently consulted, was the Intimate Journal of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81). A favourite book among late Victorians, selections of the journal were translated from the French and published by Mrs Humphry Ward in 1882. For her, Amiel was primarily a poet. It was the lyricism of his thought that distinguished the journal. For Tolstoy, it was ‘sincerity’ that marked the author of the Intimate Journal.
A Swiss, Amiel studied philosophy in Berlin and Paris. In April 1848 he returned to Geneva, just 28 years old, where he was regarded as a prodigy of intellect and sagacity. He was appointed professor of aesthetics at the University of Geneva and a few years later took up the chair of moral philosophy.
Amiel jubilated, lyrically, in his journal entry for the day of his triumphant homecoming to Switzerland:
GENEVA, April 20, 1848. It is six years to-day since I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have since then passed before me and in me! The last seven years have been the most important of my life: they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.
Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach-trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!
Amiel’s doctrine found little sympathy with some of the sterner British critics – notably Matthew Arnold, Mrs Ward’s uncle, who reviewed her translation, and its laudatory introduction, harshly. It was Amiel’s ‘Buddhist’ passivity that principally offended Arnold. It was not manly stoicism, but ‘feminine’ spinelessness. Amiel expresses the passivity that offended Arnold clearly enough, in an early entry of 3 May 1849:
I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living. Recognize your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in Him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit, be diligent in good works, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.
The sexual and personal loneliness, and the career disappointments, of Amiel’s life were sharpened by the horrific suffering of his last seven years. He wrote the final entries in his journal slowly suffocating. Critics see it as a prime example of ‘pathographesis’ – writing inspired by illness. Amiel’s last entry, for 19 April 1881, reads:
A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail me. ‘Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué.’
Dying, too, was difficult. Few, however, have recorded it as sensitively as Amiel – something that evidently appealed to the creator of Ivan Ilyich.