A simple story of Tolstoy’s life goes something like this: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian aristocrat and eminent novelist who led a risqué early life, drinking and gambling, and visiting brothels. In midlife he converted to Christianity, put the writing of novels behind him for the most part, devoting his life to God-centred activity, which included a kind of social activism. He became, in effect, a prophet, espousing Christian values, pacifism, vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, even sex. He became a champion of the poor as well, and his ideas about land reform and wealth distribution were considered radical at the time.
Needless to say, this portrait is simplistic and misleading. Tolstoy’s life, as a whole, was much more complex than this easy portrait suggests. It was also much more integrated.
As for his early behaviour, one must recall that gambling and whoring were common vices among his peers. In any case, he indulged heavily in both. He grew up on his family estate in Tula as well as in Moscow, where the family moved so that the children could be educated. He later attended, but never graduated from, Kazan University, where he studied languages and law. Soon after this, he joined an artillery brigade in the Caucasus, hoping to broaden his experience. He commanded an army unit during the Crimean War, where he witnessed the infamous siege of Sevastopol (1854–5). His observations of battle informed Sevastopol Sketches – a remarkable volume of stories that confirmed his position as a writer of major talent. He had already published Childhood (1852) as well as Boyhood (1854) and would soon follow with Youth (1857) – an autobiographical trilogy that stands among the treasures of Russian literature.
As anyone who glances at the vast shelf of books he left behind will know, Tolstoy was immensely prolific, writing stories and novels, plays, sketches, essays, diaries and letters throughout his long life. The novels, of course, made him a luminous figure in the literary world. War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) remain among the centrepieces of Western literature, on a par with the best of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Dickens. But – as suggested above – Tolstoy was not content to think of himself as simply a novelist. He wanted more, for himself and his readers.
He married the nineteen-year-old Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862, when he was thirty-four. They had thirteen children, and life at the ancestral home – Yasnaya Polyana – seemed good, at least to any observer from outside. But Tolstoy was not happy. All happy families, as he famously observed, are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways. In his case, Tolstoy felt a spiritual longing that could not be satisfied in conventional ways. His noble rank upset him, as he wondered why he should live in luxury when millions suffered in hideous, degrading poverty. He came to dislike the State, ruled by a despotic tsar and his secret police. He also grew hostile to the Orthodox Church, which linked itself inexorably with the State, supporting its oppression of the people – at least in Tolstoy’s view.
A turn in his career came with A Confession (1882), where he concluded that God did indeed exist. He wrote: ‘ “He exists,” said I to myself. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being.’ This seminal book was soon followed by others, including The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) – a thoughtful work of self-examination and religious meditation. Tolstoy began a systematic study of the Gospels, which resulted in various books, such as A Critique of Dogmatic Theology (1880) and What I Believe (1882). There were other works in this vein, too, most of them repetitive, all of them putting forward a version of Christian anarchism. In the 1890s, Tolstoy translated and ‘harmonized’ the four Gospels, taking out the supernatural elements (not unlike Thomas Jefferson had done before him in the Jefferson Bible, as it is called – a compilation not published until many years after Jefferson’s death, as it cast Jesus as a great teacher without divine attributes). Two late works on religion are excerpted here: What Is Religion, and Wherein Lies Its Essence? (1902) and The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908). These are powerful tracts, and they show Tolstoy in full flower as a spiritual guide.
With typical single-mindedness, Tolstoy hurled himself into these religious and philosophical studies, writing numerous letters on religious or social topics to friends and followers, some of them the self-proclaimed ‘Tolstoyans’ who gathered around him or supported him from afar. In effect, Tolstoy became a prophet, putting forward a view of Christianity that stripped Jesus of his supernatural status and focused on his social vision. The key to Christianity, for Tolstoy, was the idea of non-resistance to evil, as formulated in several of the works included in this collection, such as the famous ‘Letter on Non-Resistance to Ernest Howard Crosby’ (1896) or ‘ “Thou Shalt Not Kill” ‘ (1900). Love was all that mattered, as Tolstoy explained in a vigorous essay published as ‘An Appeal to the Clergy’ (1902).
Tolstoy refused to accede to traditional Christian beliefs, which he regarded as ‘meaningless and contradictory assertions’ that had been put forward as religious truth. For him, all that one had to do was connect to one’s original sense of God: ‘Every man comes into the world with a consciousness of his dependence on a mysterious, all-powerful Source which has given him life, and a consciousness of his equality with all men, the equality of all men with one another, a desire to love and be loved, and a consciousness of the need of striving toward perfection.’ He urged the clergy, in his avid ‘appeal’, to resist the notion that this Source is really ‘an angry, unjust God, who executes and tortures people’. This God was not Tolstoy’s God.
Overall, Tolstoy’s religious vision was encompassing, affecting his views on society and politics, war and peace, and extending to personal behaviour as well. Rather famously, he argued for a vegetarian diet – as seen in The First Step (1891), excerpted here. In another development, he became increasingly puritanical about sex. In a strange, late novella called The Kreutzer Sonata (1890), he actually argued for sexual abstinence within marriage, noting that the physical attraction between men and women often led to tragedy. Yet even this bizarre work has its champions, including Anton Chekhov, who wrote in praise of it: ‘You will scarcely find anything as powerful in seriousness of conception and beauty of execution.’
The political implications of Tolstoy’s Christianity evolved as he moved through his last three decades. In general, he opposed violent revolution as a way to end the violence of governments. As he said, history had shown that one did not overthrow a government without violent consequences. In this, he had learned a good deal from his reading of Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. He understood the principle of karma, and he understood that violence only led to further violence. One had somehow to break this destructive cycle. It was this kind of thinking that brought him into alignment with the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi. Indeed, he corresponded with the young Gandhi, as seen in a letter, included in this volume, from September 1910, written not long before Tolstoy died.
Tolstoy seems to have been by nature depressive, even self-loathing. In his diaries he reflected this struggle, from early to later years. In January 1903, for instance, he wrote as follows:
At present I suffer the torments of hell itself. I remember vividly the horrors, the sins, of my earlier life, and these recollections do not just fade; they circulate as poison in my blood. I hear that people often feel sorry about the fact that, after death, all sense of individual consciousness dies as well. I’m delighted that it does not! It would anguish me if I could recall after death all the evil I’d done in my earlier life; indeed, all of that remains painful to my conscience. What a good thing that death obliterates these recollections, that what survives is consciousness alone.
Of course one might well ask what ‘consciousness’ means if the term excludes memory; but Tolstoy probably wants to suggest that, after death, a kind of eternal present occurs. In any case, what apparently prompted this outburst of self-recrimination was a letter from Paul Biryukov, a friend and disciple, asking for help in writing his biography. Tolstoy apparently could not face his own past, even though he had done so in various novels.
As seen above, it is convenient to think about two Tolstoys, but such thinking distorts the reality. In truth, Tolstoy had a powerful sense of guilt from early in his life, an exquisitely afflicted conscience, as well as a powerful wish to focus on spiritual matters. At the age of twenty-seven, for example, he wrote in his diary about a conversation he had had with a young friend on the ideas of divinity and faith. This dialogue, he said, ‘had summoned a tremendous idea, whose realization is something to which I could be persuaded to devote my whole life’. In a sense, he did just that.
From the outset in his novels one finds an acute sense of moral obligation. This enhances the work, making it distinctly ‘Tolstoyan’. And, of course, Tolstoy continued to labour in the vineyards of fiction into his last decades. The Death of Ivan Ilych appeared in 1886, and it counts among his best work, a superb novella that centres on the consciousness of death. The story interrogates in blunt ways the realities of our petty preoccupations with wealth and power. Tolstoy was using fiction here to explore the delights and agonies of human consciousness.
Only a few years before he died he wrote two novels: Resurrection (1899) and Hadji Murat (written between 1896 and 1904 and published soon after his death). The former is focused on Prince Nekhlyudov, a wealthy, lazy man who experiences shame when called to jury duty; in the courtroom he realizes that the girl on trial is someone he once seduced. That seduction ruined her, as she fell into prostitution, having been rejected by her family and friends. Now she is accused of a murder, although (as even the jury notes) she never meant to hurt anyone and never did. She is nevertheless found guilty through a legal error – even the legal system fails the Russian people. The idle prince experiences a change of heart, and this ‘resurrection’ affects his life profoundly, although Tolstoy seems unwilling to grant any supernatural workings of the Holy Spirit here. It is just a change of attitude that Nekhlyudov experiences. As he would, Tolstoy uses the novel to attack the Orthodox Church, although these attacks are some of its weakest parts. In all, the novel reflects Tolstoy’s ongoing efforts at self-examination, self-reformation, and it fits well with his overall philosophy, which by this time had become thoroughly defined.
Hadji Murat is a very different sort of book. Here Tolstoy revisits the theatre of war. While not on a par with War and Peace (which it resembles at points), this final adventure in historical fiction is a tale of betrayal that, like the early Sevastopol Sketches, underscores the pointless horror of war. In the light of Tolstoy’s later writing, it may be seen as a meditation on the way violence cannot be easily suppressed once it becomes a way of life, a means for solving problems. As with his earlier writing on war, the author draws on his deep reservoir of personal recollections; in this case he returns to his early days in the Caucasus, when he first heard about this legendary rebel commander caught up in the struggles between Russians and Chechens. There is also a note of defiance here: Murat was like the thistle Tolstoy alludes to at the outset of the novel: a survivor against all odds.
There is a touching simplicity about Tolstoy’s later writings, especially in the genre of folk-tale, which appealed to him greatly. Some of his strongest later stories, such as ‘Master and Man’ (1895), fall into this category, being didactic, almost childlike in their affect and approach. As he would write in an article called ‘Truth in Art’ (1887),
there are fairy tales, parables, and legends in which amazing things are described that didn’t really happen and could never have happened; but these tales are nevertheless true, in part because they reveal that God’s will has always been, is, and will be for ever. In short, they reveal the truth of the kingdom of heaven.
As late as 1905, Tolstoy was writing stories such as ‘Alyosha Gorshok’, a portrait of a simple peasant who found peace in a life devoted to the service of others – a peace that Tolstoy himself sought in his later years, without much luck. This story is included here with a few other late examples, such as ‘Where Love Is, God Is’ (1885), a striking piece of fiction.
As a supreme artist himself, Tolstoy was always interested in aesthetics, and his strong opinions are often on display in his writing. Two of his final statements on these topics will be found in What Is Art? (1896) and Shakespeare and the Drama (1906). Both reflect the author’s preoccupation with morality as a criterion for judging the value of art. He believed that many writers and critics had excluded moral considerations from their criteria for ‘good’ art, and he decried this development – the idea of art for art’s sake was anathema to him. He famously denounced Shakespeare, arguing that much in his plays was morally suspect, even reprehensible, and that the Elizabethan author had put his characters ‘in tragic circumstances which are impossible’. We cannot, of course, agree with him that ‘Shakespeare may be whatever you wish but he was not an artist.’ Nevertheless, he had read through the plays carefully, and his ideas – however easily dismissed as eccentric – are consistent with his aesthetic views.
Some of Tolstoy’s letters became well known and were translated into many languages and passed around among a circle of admirers. A few of these are included here as stand-alone essays, such as the ‘Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer’ (1899) and two letters on the American political economist Henry George (1839–97), known for his original ideas about land taxes. (George published Progress and Poverty in 1879 – a book about social inequality that plunged into theories of economic cycles.) For the most part, Tolstoy’s highly distinctive style of letter-writing is on display in the selection of late letters included here.
The same preoccupations occur in the letters and diaries, which are among the finest by any Western author. Tolstoy had a huge correspondence, with several thousand letters still extant. One can learn a great deal about the life and times from these letters, which range widely from love letters to reports on his experiences in the Caucasus and the Crimean War. In early letters, he describes his travels in Europe, and he sometimes discusses his theories on education – always a major preoccupation, as seen in the late ‘Letter on Education’ (1902), included in this volume. He frequently corresponded with fellow authors, including foreign ones, such as George Bernard Shaw. The letters of his last decades are preoccupied with religious and social questions; he often wrote, of course, to ‘Tolstoyans’ like Vladimir Chertkov, his chief disciple, who became the dogged enemy of his wife, Sofya – as they both struggled towards the end to push Tolstoy one way or another. These late letters also reveal, with extraordinary honesty, Tolstoy’s torment as he attempted (without much luck) to put his ideals into practice.
Tolstoy was not, in fact, alone in keeping diaries. Especially in the final year, everyone around him – his wife and children, his secretary, his doctor and his disciples – all furiously wrote in their journals about the crisis at hand: Tolstoy pulled one way by his wife and another way by Chertkov and the Tolstoyans, who wanted him to abandon his bourgeois life, to give up the copyright to his works (putting them into the public domain, so that nobody would profit from them). The tension between them grew increasingly toxic, and Tolstoy was finally moved to abandon the house where he was born, Yasnaya Polyana, and to take to the road as a kind of wandering saint. The journey did not last long, as he fell ill within weeks and died in a railway station at Astapovo, surrounded by his closest allies. Sofya chased after him, but she was not allowed into the stationmaster’s cottage where he lay dying, and where he expired.
This operatic drama is the subject of my novel, The Last Station, which has been turned into a film with Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren as the Tolstoys. Paul Giamatti plays Chertkov, while James McAvoy plays Tolstoy’s young secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, who arrives in the final year at Yasnaya Polyana to assist the master in his work and, by chance, to observe the final debacle. The tragedy of the Tolstoys remains a vivid instance of powerful but conflicting values, centred on a great writer, in whose heart the terrible clash must play out and end, of course, as it will – in the throes and ecstasies of death, in the beautiful, hard expanse of memory as it gathers in those who follow.
Jay Parini