Tolstoy E-Book

A.N. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 1056

Beschreibung

A. N. Wilson's Tolstoy is a highly intelligent and accessible biography of the most famous writer in the Russian canon.In this biography of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, A.N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life, and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia. He also recreates the world that shaped the great novelist's life and art - the turmoil of ideas and politics in 19th-century Russia and the literary renaissance that made Tolstoy's work possible.Magisterial... Wilson has an advantage over a mere biographer, looking not to judge his subject but to fully understand the inspirations behind his great works - Daily Express

Leseprobe

Tolstoy

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First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd, an imprint of The Penguin Group.

A reissue was first published in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. A paperback edition was published in 2013.

This e-book edition was published in 2015.

Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 1988, 2012

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 091 6E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 532 4

Typeset by Ellipsis Digital Limited, GlasgowPrinted in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

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To my wife and daughters

Contents

Acknowledgements

A note on Dates and Transliterations

Preface to the 2012 Edition

Foreword

1

Origins

2

Joseph and his Brethren

3

The History of Yesterday

4

Kinderszenen in the Caucasus

5

Crimea

6

Bronchitis is a Metel

7

Travels

8

Marriage

9

Alchemy

10

War and Peace

11

The Shadow of Death

12

Anna Karenina

13

The Holy Man

14

Real Christianity

15

The Kreutzer Sonata

16

Terrible Questions

17

Resurrection

18

Sad Steps

19

Last Battles

20

Escape

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This book began in 1967 when I heard R. V. Sampson talking about Tolstoy. His lecture started with a Jewish proverb: ‘If God came to live on earth, people would smash his windows.’ Professor Sampson went on to say that people had been smashing Tolstoy’s windows ever since he had enunciated his great principles of life. I was amazed that anyone could speak of a novelist as if he were divine, but pretty quickly became excited by the Tolstoyan ideals which Professor Sampson expounded. That excitement, and that amazement, continue to this hour. I have never got over Professor Sampson’s lecture. He will certainly regard the present book as an exercise in window-smashing, but I feel that I owe him a great debt.

If it is true that I should never have begun the book without R. V. Sampson, I should never have finished it without several wonderful pieces of good fortune. One of these was going to New College, Oxford, and having as my tutor the man who has written the best critical study of Tolstoy in English, John Bayley. Another of these was finding myself, rather later, living within a stone’s throw of the Slavonic branch of the Taylorian Library. The staff there have been unfailingly kind and helpful, as have the staffs of the Bodleian Library and the London Library.

Another piece of luck was finding in Jennifer Baines a teacher who was patient enough to devote hours of her time to helping me achieve a reading knowledge of Russian. The benefits of this far outstretch even the broad confines of Tolstoy. But I could certainly not have contemplated writing this study without her.

Thanks, too, for conversational help from Marina Stepanovna Douglas, and for the kindness of those who showed me Yasnaya Polyana and the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.

I am grateful to Michael Holman of Leeds University for his help with a number of the illustrations; to Susan Rose-Smith for her skilful picture research; to James Woodall, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and Star Lawrence for all their editorial help; and to Douglas Matthews for compiling the index.

I am, finally, fortunate in having Virginia Llewellyn Smith as a critic and near-neighbour, who overcame her lively detestation of my old hero to read the typescript and who made many invaluable suggestions. The dedicatees of this book will know whether I am any easier to live with than its subject; they have the supreme virtue of being totally unlike any of the women of Yasnaya Polyana.

Oxford, October 27, 1987

A Note on Dates and Transliterations

The dates in this book are given in the ‘old style’. That is to say, they follow the Julian Calendar, which was used in Russia until 1917. The Julian Calendar was twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days behind in the twentieth century. There are some inevitable inconsistencies, however, caused by the fact that Tolstoy did not always remain within the territories where the Julian Calendar was operative. Thus, when he visits London, or Switzerland, or takes part in battles against Englishmen or Frenchmen, the occasional Gregorian date slips in.

I have attempted to follow the system of transliteration from Cyrillic to Roman script recommended by the Slavonic and East European Review, but I have departed from those guidelines in a number of particulars. This is largely in the area of proper names, where a literal transliteration looks merely odd to an English eye. So, we read here of Alexander, not Aleksandr. I have rendered the name of Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, rather than Sof’ya. In general, I have not transliterated ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ signs. Initial or inter-vocalic e I have rendered Ye (Dostoyevsky, Yevgeny) but in other positions, e is rendered e (Onegin). I have spelt the ending of proper names with a y, whether in Cyrillic script this corresponds to и or й or ий. Not everyone will agree with my Nikolay for Nikolai, Dmitry for Dmitri or Tolstoy for Tolstoi but there are no fixed rules for transliteration, and though I am guilty of inconsistencies, I hope that all my transliterations are intelligible. My aim has been to make things easy for the eye of a reader who has no Russian.

Preface to the 2012 Edition

This book was written over a quarter of a century ago. Since it was published, in 1988, prodigious changes have come upon the land of Tolstoy’s birth. I researched the book in the Soviet Union. In the Communist state, tourists stayed in specially assigned hotels, ate in their own restaurants, and, if they moved from town to town, they were obliged to notify the authorities of their dates and plans, and to arrive at their destinations with their papers in order. It was in such a world that I first visited Yasnaya Polyana and went to the glade where Tolstoy is buried. Now – what changes! The Russian Federation has supplanted the Soviet Union. ‘Oligarchs’, bubbling with money (where did it come from?) have replaced the sinister trilby-hatted Politburo, and western shops in all the Russian cities tempt shoppers, just as they do in Paris and New York. More astonishing still, the churches and monasteries have been reopened and are seemingly more popular than ever. From the Bright Glade where Tolstoy is buried, I seem to hear a growl from beneath the earth.

As a child, Tolstoy had been told by his elder brother, Nikolenka, that there in the glade was a green stick, on which had been inscribed the secret of happiness. Here was hidden ‘the way for all men to cease suffering from any misfortune, to leave off quarrelling and being angry. . . .’ Here, too, Tolstoy is buried. The atmosphere of the place is both calm and extraordinarily powerful. Here they brought the body of an old man who had had more than his share of quarrels – both domestic and public – and they came in their enormous crowds. Tolstoy was the greatest of all Russian dissidents, and has been the inspiration for peaceful dissent the world over, since he died. Without Tolstoy there would have been no Solzhenitsyn. Without Tolstoy there would have been no Gandhi, no Archbishop Tutu, no Nelson Mandela.

How well I can remember my own introduction to the genius of Tolstoy. I had read War and Peace as a teenager, and been overwhelmed by its greatness, as surely every reader of that masterpiece must be. As is often said, you do not read War and Peace, you LIVE it. I knew that I had encountered a writer like no other, but at the same time, the implications of the book, and of Tolstoy, had not really dawned on me. I was not ready to ask myself what it was that made this writer so supremely great. Perhaps none of us are ever completely ready for the searchlight of truth.

For of course, although the truth is only illuminated for us in shadows and ambiguities, the truth itself is not shadowy. It is blindingly clear. And this became obvious to me when a Tolstoyan scholar, and an influential Tolstoyan anarchist, Professor Ronald Sampson, came to our school to give a talk. That talk totally changed my vision of Tolstoy and I suppose it changed my life – even though I have never yet been able to follow the austere and demanding Tolstoyan code for living. I mention Sampson’s talk in the acknowledgements to this book. The passage of time has made me think that my biography of Tolstoy is flawed – flawed by its failure to see how true are Tolstoy’s later writings.

What Sampson revealed to me was that Tolstoy’s eye of truth – a God-like eye – saw that the world was completely out of joint. Almost everything we are told about the world – by teachers, by politicians, by journalists – is the opposite of the truth. This truth is hard to bear. Remember Plato’s image of the cave-dweller, who can bear to look at the fire in the back of the cave but then, blinking, turns and sees the sunlight outside.

Tolstoy questioned the legitimacy of human government. Beginning as a critic of the Tsars, he left his questions like time-bombs in history. They are just as relevant today as when he asked them. If we think it is somehow irrational to base our lives on the ethical system of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, maybe we should look again at the world which we have created by ignoring those precepts.

Since this biography was first published, the world has seen yet more catastrophic attempts to solve human problems by acts of war – in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, in the Congo, in Eritrea and Somalia, and in the Balkans. Tolstoy’s views on the futility of war are burningly relevant.

Since this biography was published, we have seen first the collapse of Marxist materialist states across Eastern Europe; and then, a decade or so on, we have seen profound crises in world capitalism. A few crooked bankers have shaken not merely our pension funds but the stability of our entire political system; the fabric of our supposed civilization. Again, Tolstoy’s views on the accumulation of wealth come to mind.

Tolstoy organised two enormous programmes of famine relief in his lifetime. They exposed not only the cruelty but the pathetic inefficiency of the Tsarist regime to deal with such crises. He showed the human race what we still have not learned: that disparities between the hungry and the over-bloated are not accidental. They come about as a result of our own rotten value-systems. Tolstoy would not be surprised that, a hundred years after his death, we find ourselves living on a planet in which the majority remain on the breadline and the rest suffer from obesity. Nor would it surprise this hater of cities that our pursuit of economic growth and industrial progress is literally destroying the planet on which we live, its trees, its birds, its wild animals. A rereading of Tolstoy would convince us, if we did not know the fact already, that we were being governed by lunatics. Perhaps we might be strong enough to make the Tolstoyan leap and come to the realisation that it was better not to be governed at all. Organised religion, as in Tolstoy’s day, aids and abets the status quo. Organised Christianity in our own day is palpably putrescent, with its foolish quarrels about human sexuality, and its disgusting abuse of children. We might think that the so-called anarchy to be found in the pages of the Gospel, and as repeated by Tolstoy in his writings, was saner than any party manifesto or Church doctrine.

As for those who think that Tolstoy the prophet was so different from Tolstoy the novelist, I’d ask them to consider our world, and then look at his works. One of his earliest works of fiction, The Cossacks, is an account of Russian soldiers fighting a war against so-called Muslim terrorists and realising, not only the utter futility of the war, but wondering whether the so-called infidel did not have something to teach us. At the very end of his life, he wrote what is one of his very finest short stories, Hadji Murat, in which, once again, the superior wisdom of the Muslim over the western secularist is emphasised.

I return in my mind to Yasnaya Polyana, the beautiful place where Tolstoy the novelist would spend most of his life, and where, after a tempestuous life, he was buried. He had been excommunicated by the Orthodox Church. He was regarded as a dangerous anarchist by the Tsarist autocracy which still (in 1910) ruled Russia. So he was never going to be allowed burial in consecrated ground – ground, that is, which had been blessed by a church which he had come to despise. Far more blessed to him, and in the true sense more consecrated, was that spot in the wood in which his beloved elder brother had buried the green stick. It was there that they carried his coffin, a huge crowd who – in spite of his infidel status – instinctively burst forth with the traditional Russian funeral hymn ‘Eternal Memory’. Although the authorities tried to prevent it, thousands came down on trains from Moscow to witness the coffin, on a cart drawn by village peasants, being led to the spot where the green stick is buried. The crowds fell to their knees as the coffin was lowered into the grave. They shouted at the sixty or so soldiers and the state police who had come down to supervise the occasion, telling them to kneel, too. It was the archetypical demonstration of the power of the Russian writer-dissident challenging the power of autocracy. It anticipates for us, perhaps, the extraordinary phenomenon of a state even more repressive than that of the Tsar’s – Stalin’s with its millions killed and its millions imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago – being unravelled simply because it was based on lies; being unravelled in large measure by the writings of an obscure provincial physics teacher named Alexander Solzhenitsyn who doggedly, secretly and unstoppably wrote down the truth.

For, of course, the secret written on the green stick did not remain a secret after Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy had grown up. He became, first and foremost, the greatest novelist in the history of literature. His fame, and his noble birth, made it difficult for the Tsarist government to silence him when he had also become the world’s greatest prophet of pacifist-anarchism.

Tolstoy’s death in 1910 still challenges us to the deepest political and personal questions. It is hard to think of any of the great public questions facing the world today which Tolstoy did not anticipate and to which he does not even now provide the most disturbing of – well, if not answers – further questions.

Tolstoy, in his life, work and death, so redefined the significance of what it meant to be a writer in Russia, that literature no longer had parameters. He is the first of the great modern dissidents. Shortly before his death Turgenev wrote a now famous letter to Tolstoy, imploring his old friend to return to ‘literature’ and to give up his obsession with reinventing the Christian religion for rationalists. We all know what Turgenev meant by writing. Does it not go without saying that the Tolstoy we most admire is the author of War and Peace and of Anna Karenina, more than the furious rebel who penned such works as The Kingdom of God is Within You and Peace Essays?

As I read this biography again after so many years, and thought of its relaunch into the world, I found myself compelled to rethink this simple dichotomy – between the ‘literary’ Tolstoy, and Tolstoy the dissident/rebel/holy-fool. There were not two Tolstoys, the novelist and the sectarian anarchist; there was one. Warand Peace is not just a great national and family saga; it is a novel about personal and national regeneration. It asks profound questions, as does its successor Anna Karenina. They are questions which Tolstoy was going to answer in the second half of his writing life, sometimes in fictional form, but more often in those works of unforgettable and imperishable moral clarion calls. He asked such deceptively simple questions as: ‘How should we live?’ The answers he gave caused Tsars, and secret police, and Church Inquisitors to shake in their souls. By the end, literally millions of people throughout the world hung on his words.

We too, like the crowds, sing ‘Eternal Memory’. Eternal his memory is. Of the thousands who followed his coffin to its unconsecrated woodland grave, few had read War and Peace. They saw him as a great prophet of peace, and as a great exposer of the hypocrisy not only of the Russian government but of all governments; not just of the Russian army, but of the whole militaristic outlook.

Four years after the death of the Apostle of Peace, the war broke out which led to the whole cycle of mass slaughter and power-brokerage with which we are still living. Tolstoy’s simplicities could be denounced as simplifications. After the calamity of the First World War and the subsequent economic crises of the western world, came the inevitable growth of mass tyrannies – of Stalin’s Soviet Union, of Hitler’s Germany. Against such forces as these, could it not be said that Tolstoy’s pacifism is simply silly – that it has nothing to say?

I would understand why anyone could believe that. But what have we to say in reply to Tolstoy as we sit in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, or the ruins of Baghdad in 2010 – that war is a dirty business? That you can’t make an omelette without torturing and maiming millions of your fellow human beings? That such and such a tyrant was so evil that it was worth killing millions of people in order to replace him with tyrannies just as horrible?

In the autumn of 1880, a young Moscow University graduate named Ivan Ivakin arrived at Tolstoy’s country house, Yasnaya Polyana, to help him with his latest craze – learning Greek. Tolstoy rivalled Toad of Toad Hall in the enthusiasm with which he took up his crazes – whether it was hunting, agriculture, dairy farming, or, in old age, riding a bicycle. He was fluent in Russian, Turkish, French and could speak good German and passable English. Languages were a passion with him, and when he began to learn Greek, he romped through Homer, Herodotus and Xenophon. But the Greek text on which he had really fixed his penetrating eyes was that of the New Testament.

Ivakin’s account of Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for Greek shows the great man to have been boundlessly energetic but not too punctilious when it came to the finer points of vocabulary or grammatical accuracy. ‘Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?’ he would say. ‘Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what I should do and how I should live!’

Ivakin was startled when they sat down to attempt a rendition of the celebrated proem to the Fourth Gospel – En te arche . . . – ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’ The subsequent phrase, ‘and the Word was with God’, has baffled many translators and commentators. The word – Logos – Tolstoy rendered as ‘reasoning’. ‘And the Word was with God . . .’ His translation became, ‘And reasoning replaced God’.

Tolstoy was both a child of the Enlightenment and deeply religious in a distinctly Russian way. His message to the planet was that, far from being against reason, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – that manifesto of pacifist anarchism – was the most reasonable utterance ever made. Do not resist evil with violence. Do not think that happiness, either personal or collective, is enhanced by the pursuit of wealth, and power. Do not hide from yourself the fact that all so-called civilizations and all so-called good governments are underpinned by violence.

It is easy to point to the flaws in the Tolstoyan anarchist creed. The man who came closest to making Tolstoy his guide for life, Mahatma Gandhi, died by an assassin’s hand, having seen Hindus and Muslims massacre one another in their hundreds of thousands. Yet do we see Gandhi as a failure? Did not his imperfectly realised passive resistance to the British Empire eventually succeed? The Empire ended and the British had to learn that their dream of one small island dominating the planet had been a crazy one.

In South Africa, where Gandhi had first put Tolstoy’s ideas into practice, the memory lingered. Everyone said that you could not bring Apartheid to an end without a bloodbath. Archbishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela showed that this was not true. Their Truth and Reconciliation Committee was an example of Tolstoyanism in effective action.

Tolstoy was buried, but his memory is eternal. The green stick, which was buried in the same place, contains a message which we all know in our innermost consciences to be true. Of course we shrink from the light and prefer to blind ourselves, by consumerism, by alcohol, by carnal indulgence and by the pathetic indulgences of nationalism and party politics. But when we read Tolstoy we are refreshed by the simplicity and sanity of truth itself. As an Enlightenment man, he knew that the power to change – to change ourselves and to change the world – lies within us. Conscience is a reliable guide, not the enemy of reason. Enlightenment came to Tolstoy’s heroes, such as Pierre in War and Peace and Levin at the end of Anna Karenina. Levin acknowledged his imperfections and his inability to focus fully on the truth. ‘But’ – thought he – ‘my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is, every moment of it, no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.’

Foreword

The first thing to strike any foreigner about Russia is its immensity. We all know from our schoolbooks that the modern Soviet Union, like the Empire of Catherine the Great, occupies roughly one sixth of the world’s surface. Comparatively few, however, make this knowledge real by attempting to travel across its surface. Even to retrace, in a train or a car, the journey of Napoleon from Warsaw to Moscow is to cover a huge distance – a seemingly interminable journey across flat, unvarying countryside. To have reached Moscow, as a glance at the map shows us, is to have covered only the tiniest part of this extraordinary land mass which, for various historical reasons, speaks of itself as a single political entity.

Peter the Great is rightly deemed the father of modern Russia. But it was really the German Princess Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, who was responsible for what Russia became in the following century. Catherine had the foreigner’s view that Russia was too big, paradoxically combined with the monomaniac’s desire to make it even bigger. She annexed Poland, she extended its territories southward to the Black Sea. She created the map of Russia more or less as we know it today. At the same time, she had a fear of it being unmanageably large, a fear based on ignorance. ‘What interest . . . could the young German princess take in that magnum ignotum, that people, inarticulate, poor, semi-barbarous, which concealed itself in villages, behind the snow, behind bad roads, and only appeared in the streets of St. Petersburg like a foreign outcast, with its persecuted beard, and prohibited dress – tolerated only through contempt?’ The question was Alexander Herzen’s, the first truly great Russian radical, perhaps the greatest, to fall foul of the bureaucracy which Peter had created, which Catherine had sustained, and extended, and which was to grow like a self-perpetuating monster throughout the nineteenth century.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, liberty and self-government became the political ideals of the West. The United States came into being, having thrown off the monarchical and colonial principles of the British Crown. The French bourgeoisie established, by violent revolution, its right to overthrow the outmoded hierarchy of monarch and aristocrat. Catherine, who had flirted with the ideas and the authors of the Enlightenment, left a legacy in Russia which was violently opposed to it. With systematic thoroughness, she managed to build up a system – precisely because of the enormous size of her Empire – which was almost incapable of reform.

Apart from her expansion of the borders of Russia, two hugely important measures, both of which had a tremendous bearing on the future, should be mentioned.

The first was her extension of serfdom throughout the Empire. In the Ukraine, for example, where the peasantry had hitherto been free, Catherine enacted a system of laws which forbade peasants to leave an estate without their landlord’s permission. The landlord became their owner. Estimates vary, but it is thought that by the end of her reign well over half the population of the Russian Empire had become a slave class, every bit as subjugated as the Negro slaves of America.

The other reform, which went hand in hand with this extension of slavery, was a strengthening and ossifying of the gentry. In other European countries, aristocratic status, initially reflecting a position of political power, was to evolve into an inchoate position, difficult to define in terms of strength or importance. In England, for example, a duke at the beginning of the nineteenth century would certainly be rich, but he would not necessarily exercise any political power. And, by the middle of the Victorian age, his power would be yet more questionable. As for the members of the lesser gentry in England, their titles were no more than mementoes of favour granted to an ancestor by the Sovereign.

Such an evolution was impossible in Russia, since Catherine established a strict hierarchical system of government in which only members of the aristocracy could exercise power. Membership of the aristocracy was a discernible political status. Not only was the highly organized system of local government entirely in the hands of the local gentry. They were given certain privileges which made them different in kind from their non-gentry neighbours. Not merely were they exempt from tax, and certain legal penalties, such as corporal punishment, but also, they alone could receive a full University education. They alone could aspire to occupy senior bureaucratic positions in central Government. To be deprived of ‘gentry’ status was, therefore, the equivalent of being disenfranchised.

Between the gentry and the serfs, Catherine also established the town merchants as a separate estate with fixed, recognised privileges and social duties.

When she died in 1796, she left an Empire which was completely top-heavy in terms of its powerbase. The Crown, and the bureaucracy with which it was surrounded, had the means to exercise an absolute control over every citizen and every institution within its dominion. Once the system got going, with bureaucrats multiplying bureaucrats, as in the comedies of Gogol, it was hard to see how it could be reformed without being destroyed altogether. And this explains why the monarchy, again and again, throughout the nineteenth century, resisted reform for fear that even quite minor changes would bring down the whole system.

Curiously enough, considering the fact that Catherine and perhaps most of the leading aristocrats of her day were privately ‘modern’ in their religious views, her reforms had the effect of making Russia into a theocracy, whose levels of tolerance would make the Spanish Inquisition look like a Democratic Party convention. This was because, in her Germanic thoroughness, she had totally secularised the power of the Church, bringing even that within the power of the state. She had not only taken possession of Church lands. She had confirmed that the Church, as a religious body, should actually be run by the state. Not only the appointment of bishops but even the propagation of doctrine were brought into the jurisdiction of the secular civil service. The Procurator of the Holy Synod was a layman, entitled to lay down the law about liturgy, worship and theology to the Patriarch of Moscow himself.

It was a strange paradox that Catherine, with no ounce of Russian blood, should have enacted policies which led to an increase in Russian isolationism from the rest of the world. With such an inheritance, many Russians had no chance of travelling about within the boundaries of the Empire, let alone travelling outside it, or reading foreign books.

Nevertheless, there were changes in the wind. Some of them came about, fortuitously, by virtue of the Napoleonic Wars. With Russian troops moving about in Poland, Germany, France and Austria, there was no possibility of the state exercising the power of their minds which it was able to do in the stable conditions of peacetime. The Emperor at the time of Napoleon, Alexander I, was in any case a liberal. But, even if he had not been on the side of moderate reform, he would have been unable to stop the Russian soldiers meeting foreigners and seeing the way that things were done abroad. Their French prisoners of war, after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, would have been able to tell them of a republic, where each citizen was regarded as the equal of the next. Englishmen could tell them of their own political compromises, and the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, with an elected legislative chamber. In all the farms and fields through which the armies of Alexander I marched, they were able to meet farmers and their wives and children who may not have been rich, but who were not owned by anyone, and who would have regarded serfdom as the most appalling throwback to the Middle Ages.

Self-conscious Russians, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, would have felt, in addition to shame at their political backwardness, an acute awareness of cultural inadequacy. Throughout the Continent of Europe, in the first two decades of the last century, there was an extraordinary abundance of genius. These were the years that produced the finest plays and lyrics of Schiller, some of Goethe’s best poetry, the Méditations poétiques of Lamartine, the best operas of Rossini, the novels of Scott, the poems of Byron and Shelley: but nothing comparable in Russia. It looked as though Russia was doomed to be a backwater, as far as the history of literature was concerned.

The appearance of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century is something only paralleled in the history of literature by the emergence of English poets during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Nothing prepares us for it. Suddenly, there they are – Lermontov, Gogol, Belinsky, Griboyedov. Above all, there, for the tragically brief period of 1799–1837, is Alexander Pushkin, perhaps the most varied and intelligent poet in the world, a genius of world class, after whom Russia – not just Russian literature – would never be the same again. Pushkin showed that it was not necessary, as almost all the educated class in Russia did, to speak in French in order to be clever, moving, witty, inventive. Pushkin also showed that it was possible to be authentically Russian, while being totally opposed to all the cruelties and absurdities of the Russian system of government.

Pushkin, even more than Goethe or Scott, was remarkable for the ease with which he moved from one literary form to the next and effortlessly transformed them all. He is the closest thing that literature has to Mozart. A tender lyricist, a flippant satirist, a great dramatist, a master of the short-story form, he also, in his long poem Yevgeny Onegin, effectively invented the Russian novel. Thereafter, whatever magnificent things the Russians did with that most fluid of literary forms, they trod, willy-nilly, in Pushkin’s footsteps. He was killed in a duel in 1837. Perhaps it is the greatest single tragedy in the history of literature. There is no knowing what masterpieces we have lost by that death.

After Pushkin, there were to be many magnificent Russian poets, and a long line of great Russian novelists. Among these novelists, there is one who stands out, for most Russians, as the greatest of them all. In terms of sheer volume and monumental size he is, if anything, a larger figure even than Pushkin himself. Ninety volumes of his work fill the shelves of the Russian library. His name was Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

Tolstoy was peculiarly the product of the Russia which we have been describing. He could not have written or lived as he did had he not been born in a particular time and place and situation. He was born on August 28, 1828, and he died on November 7, 1910. Though most Russian writers of the nineteenth century were technically of the gentry class – how else could they have had the education or the leisure to practise their craft? – Tolstoy was alone, among great writers, in being born into the very highest social rank. On both his parents’ sides he was not merely an aristocrat, he was a member of the old seigneurial class, the sort who did not just rule over local government, but who had a place at Court, and the ear of princes.

By the accident of his parents’ poverty and early death, however, Tolstoy never exercised his rights as a grand courtier or a diplomat or a senior army officer. The only thing which his high aristocratic status conferred upon him was the sort of freedom which might have been enjoyed by any writer born at the same time in, let us say, France or the United States.

To be a free man in a country where everyone else is in bondage conveys a strange unreality of status. Tolstoy never fully appreciated his luck. Nor, perhaps, did he ever realise how much he was cut off from the experience of other writers, let alone of the merchant class or of the enslaved peasantry. Yet it was in the company of peasants that he spent the greater part of his life. His sorties into the outside world were brief. He served as a soldier in the Crimean War. He made two short visits to Europe, seeing Italy, France, Germany and England. But, even within Russia, his experience of travel was limited. He came to hate the intellectuals of St. Petersburg as much as he despised the rich houses of Moscow. Until his late middle age, he had very few friends outside his own family circle, and most of his time was spent on his country estate, some one hundred and thirty miles from Moscow.

His isolation, and the privilege of his birth, partly explain why, in the second half of his career, Tolstoy managed to get away with being such a trenchant and violent opponent of the Government. At various points in the last two decades of his life, it seriously began to look as though Tolstoy’s was the only voice which the Russian Government did not dare to muzzle. The socialist revolutionaries had very largely been locked up, or killed, or sent into exile. Many of the religious dissidents were breaking salt in the mines of Siberia, or silently cowering before the censor. Tolstoy, with a simplicity which seems almost childish, mysteriously got away with denouncing the cruelty of the army – indeed, the unlawfulness of war itself – the inequality of the social hierarchy, the squalor and oppression of the urban poor, the destitution of the starving, the criminality of the censor. He got censored. But, as will inevitably happen unless a government actually takes the step of killing a writer, his hand went on steadily moving across the page. Even though the solutions which he preached to the problems of the nineteenth century were ones which only a small proportion espoused – pacifism, vegetarianism, reading the Gospels and knitting your own clothes – he stood for something much bigger and more important than just himself or his ideas. So long as he was there, huge numbers of Russians felt that it was not quite impossible to believe in the prospect of individual liberty, the survival of individual dignity in the face of a cruel, faceless, bureaucratic tyranny. It was for this reason that, when he died, there were demonstrations all over Russia. Students rioted. Anarchists were rounded up by the police. Thousands of people followed his coffin to its place of burial. And, after the death of Tolstoy, Russia looked for more desperate solutions to its difficulties.

But the chief reason why the Government had left him alone is to be found in the reverence which the Russians feel for literary genius. With the reverence, there goes, on behalf of governments, suspicion and fear. The word has power in Russia, which is why its greatest exponents have nearly always ended up behind bars or dying in exile.

In Tolstoy, successive Tsars and their advisers recognised that they had a literary monument too large to dislodge. He had begun his career gently, with a few semi-autobiographical scenes from childhood, with short stories based on his experience in the army, and with sketches of the suffering at the siege of Sebastopol. His fellow writers, such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Fet and Nekrasov, recognised that a great practitioner had arrived in their midst. But nothing was to prepare the world for his two greatest achievements, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the latter novel, he wrote one of the great love stories of the world. But, in War and Peace, there was something much grander. The novel in fact evolved out of Tolstoy’s purely private preoccupations and fantasies with his own family. But its first episodes had no sooner appeared than his readers knew that he had done something much more. He had created a national epic to which all Russians could respond. In telling the story of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Moscow, Tolstoy had become a national institution. It was a story to which every patriotic Russian could and does respond. In the accuracy of its portraiture, in all its emotional faithfulness, in its abundant vivacity, it is also one of the great works of literature of the world.

The life of this author is full of contradictions and puzzles. The paradoxes of Tolstoy are numberless. For instance, this most Russian of novelists was almost entirely influenced not by Russians but by English and French writers. His vision of Christianity owes much more to American Quakers and French rationalists than it does to Russian Orthodox spirituality. And yet he believed himself to be speaking, for much of the time, with the authentic voice of the Russian peasant. There have been many who have turned from Tolstoy’s later work – his advocacy of political anarchism, for example, or his condemnation of Shakespeare – with something like hatred. Others, inspired by the Christian simplicity of his later writings, have been disillusioned to discover, upon reading about his life, that the great prophet of peace lived in an atmosphere of domestic hatred perhaps unrivalled in the history of matrimony.

And yet, for all these contradictions and paradoxes, the sheer stature of Tolstoy is never diminished. The Russian painter who has left us the largest number of portraits of Tolstoy was Ilya Repin. He has also left us various unforgettable prose portraits of the novelist, as well as those which he put on canvas. He spoke of Tolstoy’s towering moral presence, and hypnotic spiritual aura. ‘Often a day or two after a conversation with him when your own mind begins to function independently, you find that you cannot agree with his views, that some of his thoughts, which seemed at the time incontrovertible, now appear improbable. . . .’ For all that, what remained for Repin was the sense of Tolstoy as a giant. Once, when riding with Tolstoy through the woods near his house, Repin saw him with a vision of particular clarity, ‘like Raphael’s God in the vision of Ezekiel, with forking beard and a kind of special grace and agility characteristic of a warrior or a Circassian, manoeuvring among the branches, now pushing aside the twigs with his hand’. What arrested the painter was not just the speed, but a vivacity which was almost divine. Some such awe is only fitting when approaching such a figure. If the portrait which follows is less flattering than a canvas by Repin, it is painted, nevertheless, with no small sense of the subject’s grandeur.

Chapter One

Origins

1828 – 1841

Бывало, нами дорожили,Бывало . . .

[There was a time when we were highly esteemed; there was a time. . . .]

Pushkin, My Genealogy

‘And on they went, singing “Eternal Memory”. . . .’ Tolstoy’s story begins, like Doctor Zhivago’s, with a woman’s funeral. Only, when Tolstoy’s mother died on August 4, 1830, he was too young to remember her. Born on August 28, 1828, he lost his mother when he was barely two. He could never remember her face, and no portrait of her survives. Both facts are of profound significance in the story of Tolstoy’s inner life.1

His mother’s name was Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya – that is, Mary, the daughter of Nicholas Volkonsky. She was born in 1790, the only child of an eccentric, choleric prince who, at the time of her birth, was eminent in the service of the Empress Catherine the Great. The Volkonskys were an ancient family, who traced their grand descent back to Prince Ryurik. They considered themselves grander than the Romanovs, and Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich had added the distinction of military achievement to that of a noble inheritance. He first rose to prominence in the Turkish campaign of 1780, and in 1793 a successful career in the army was rewarded with the gentler life of the diplomat. He was Russian Ambassador to Berlin in 1793. Prince Nikolay was an outspoken man, and nobody could call him sycophantic in relation to his royal patrons. When Catherine suggested to him that he should marry the ‘niece’ (and mistress) of her stern favourite Potemkin, Volkonsky had replied, ‘What made him think I should marry his whore?’ With the death of Catherine the Great in 1796, his career came to an end.

Catherine was succeeded by the mad Emperor, Paul, who dismissed Prince Volkonsky from the army for failing to appear at a review.

Conscious that all his Court were plotting against him, Paul had the classic paranoid tendency to develop particular hatreds for old friends and favourites, whether at Court or in the field of foreign diplomacy. An example of Paul’s military wisdom is his idea, in January 1801, that twenty thousand Cossacks should march from Orenburg to India in order to defeat the British there. A few months after Paul had proposed this scheme, he was strangled by a group of senior army officers and replaced by Alexander I. By then Prince Nikolay Volkonsky had already, for a number of years, been leading a life of retirement, like Yevgeny Onegin’s uncle, quarrelling with the servants, gazing through the windowpanes and squashing flies.

Tolstoy’s mother had lost her mother when she was two. When he left the army and retired to his country estate one hundred and thirty miles south of Moscow, Prince Volkonsky devoted himself to his young daughter’s education. By then she was seven. A true follower of Catherine the Great, and a son of the Enlightenment, Prince Volkonsky, unlike his grandson, believed both in the education of women and in the superiority of European culture over Russian. They spoke to one another in French, the father and his child. He ensured that she knew German and Italian, and that she had a good grounding in music and history. They read Rousseau together, and works of the French Encyclopaedists. As befitted a former ambassador, who had been given the rank of General by the Emperor Paul before his dismissal, Prince Volkonsky was entitled to keep two armed sentinels. They stood guard, more like toy soldiers, or something in the fantasies of Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, at the towers which flanked the entrance to the estate of Yasnaya Polyana. (The name means ‘Bright Glade’.) Life in the great house became more and more isolated from the world, and from the current of public events. In all observable aspects, Yasnaya Polyana remained in the eighteenth century throughout Prince Nikolay’s days.

Yasnaya Polyana is a place of great beauty, as the modern tourist can discover. Indeed, as one of Tolstoy’s kinsmen has observed in a recent book, ‘not a little of the attraction of Yasnaya Polyana, at least for its Russian visitors, lies in the solitary physical evocation in the Soviet state of the old manorial way of life, preserved through the chance of Tolstoy’s being not only a great writer, but also the inheritor of an aristocratic demesne’.

The modern visitor sees a low-lying range of white buildings not dissimilar from the colonial style of architecture to be encountered in Carolina or Virginia. It is set in well-planted, gently undulating countryside. The village still survives, where Tolstoy’s peasants struggled to maintain their existence. Even today, dressed up as a show-place for trippers, it feels remote and primitive, though it is not much more than a hundred miles from Moscow and close to the main road.

As a crow would measure, these shabby houses and hutments are less than a mile from their master’s house, across fields which are still cultivated, and across the abundant orchards. Spiritually, the distance seems almost infinite between these humble abodes and the house, filled as it is with Tolstoy’s extensive library, with a grand piano and portraits of ancestors painted in the western manner. Though by the standards of a European aristocratic house, Yasnaya Polyana is austere, it remains most distinctly the house of a European aristocrat. And yet we do not feel, as we might when visiting a castle on the Loire or the Rhine, that this is part of the landscape it inhabits. Even in the days when Russia was full of manorial estates and rich houses, they must have seemed like islands in an alien sea.

All around the Europeanised house (which is only a wing of the mansion inhabited by Tolstoy’s grandfather Volkonsky) stretches the land which was to exercise so strong a hold on the novelist. Here are the abundant birchwoods which in spring and summer have a feathery, delicate green against which the house looks particularly splendid. In winter, everything seems white – the barks of the trees, the house itself, the snow-covered fields and paths, the frozen ponds and lakes. You feel something more than just the close physical proximity of nature in this place. More, there is this sense of displacement, of incompatibility between house and land, as though the pretensions and claims of civilised man would inevitably, in the face of nature, break down. Who could be said to own these trees, these pieces of ice, these fields? These were questions which were to haunt the young heir of Yasnaya Polyana, Lev Tolstoy.

For any reader of War and Peace, however, the place has an instantly recognisable quality as well. We feel as much at home as in any place which a writer has encapsulated in imaginative form. Just as it might be impossible to travel through certain bits of Civil War country without being reminded of Faulkner’s The Unvanquisbed, so at Yasnaya Polyana we are instantaneously transported to the ‘Bald Hills’ of Tolstoy’s greatest novel.

It was here, at Yasnaya Polyana, that Tolstoy’s grandfather pursued the legendarily bad-tempered existence which Tolstoy was to mythologize in War and Peace. Tolstoy changed just one letter of his grandfather’s name – a V to a B – when ‘inventing’ the figure of Prince Bolkonsky. In his early appearances in that novel there is something very grand about Prince Bolkonsky: ‘Everyone sitting in the ante-chamber experienced the same feeling of respect and even terror when the enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather small old man, with powdered wig, little withered hands, and bushy grey eyebrows which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his clever, youthfully glittering eyes.’2

Much of the Bald Hills drama, in the initial stages of War and Peace, revolves around the Mr. Woodhouseish question of whether a selfish old man can spare his daughter’s hand in matrimony. ‘Life without Princess Marya, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. “And why should she marry?” he thought. “To be unhappy for sure. . . .”’3 All this has small enough importance in terms of the book’s plot, but the personal significance for Tolstoy is obvious. In depicting her in his novel, he changed one letter in his mother’s surname, and left her Christian name unaltered. What he was contemplating, in the grand military sweep of his epic, were huge questions such as the causes of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the past of Europe, the future of Russia. But, as he reconstructed Prince Bolkonsky’s selfish reflection, Tolstoy was contemplating the (to him) no less important historical mystery of his own birth.

Tolstoy never saw his Volkonsky grandfather. The old man died in 1821, leaving his daughter a spinster – by now thirty-one years old and unmarried. Worried about the inheritance, she suggested, in a general sort of way, to the rest of the family that she might marry a cousin, Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich Volkonsky. Nothing came of this idea. Prince Mikhail got married to someone else in Moscow that April, and Princess Marya attended the ceremony. There she met a less eligible bachelor, Prince Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy, five years her junior, and the two families immediately entered into discussions with their lawyers. A marriage was arranged and shortly took place. If Princess Marya intended to have heirs, there was some element of hurry. They were married on July 9, 1822. Her dowry was eight hundred male ‘souls’, serfs in the Tula and Oryol districts, and the estate of Yasnaya Polyana.

Count Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy was an ex-army officer. His father was the governor of Kazan, a town four hundred miles to the east of Moscow, and the old man’s financial affairs were so chaotic that Nikolay had felt obliged to leave the army, lest at any point he might be shamed into admitting that he was too poor to buy himself further promotion. (He was a lieutenant-colonel when he resigned his commission.) Marriage to a rich woman was the obvious answer to his difficulties and, since the Tolstoys were also an ancient and highly esteemed Russian family,4 the Volkonskys agreed to the match.

The Tolstoys had five children: Nikolay, Sergey, Dmitry, Lev and lastly a daughter, Marya, who was born in March 1830. Princess Marya never really recovered from this confinement, and died five months later.

Tolstoy died seven years before the revolution of the proletariat; he was born three years after the revolution of the nobility. It is almost as if he was cocooned between the two revolutions, that of December 1825 and that of October 1917. There had been assassinations and palace revolutions in plenty throughout the history of the Romanov royal house, but the uprising on December 14, 1825 was different in kind. It has been called ‘the first truly political movement ever to be directed against the established system’ in Russia.5 It was a political movement with wide adherence, and a history dating back a decade. The first formal structure taken by the would-be reformers was the foundation in 1816 of the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. This was a group of Guards officers, inspired by the ideas and events of the previous thirty years in Europe, who dreamed of converting the absolutist autocracy of the Russian Emperor into an enlightened constitutional monarchy, advised by assemblies. The dreamers, or conspirators, were wildly different in their views and aims, which was one reason for their failure. Some looked to England as an ideal model, to a country really governed by an aristocratic oligarchy, but retaining the ancient forms of monarchy and religion. Others looked to France, its Revolution, its commitment to a republic. Some were Freemasons, or dabblers in the new and cranky creeds which from time to time caught the imagination of the St. Petersburg salons. Some of the conspirators wanted to emancipate the serfs, though they were not all agreed on what terms. But their movement seems by the standards of later revolutionary movements amateurish and dilettante. Their plots were, as Pushkin said, hatched between claret and champagne to the accompaniment of satirical songs and friendly arguments.

Their opportunity for action was given to them upon the death of Alexander I in Taganrog on November 19, 1825. The questions arose: should he be succeeded by the second Imperial brother, Constantine, at that moment in Warsaw, or by the third, the Grand Duke Nicholas? Alexander I had, in 1822, declared Nicholas (who had a son, and who was loyal to Orthodoxy) to be his heir rather than Constantine. This was because Constantine, after a long exile, was imagined by friends and enemies alike to have a number of ‘liberal’ views that in all probability he never possessed. The Northern and Southern Societies of conspirators, whose activities were of course known to the Imperial police, declared themselves in favour of Constantine’s succession, but they had less than a month in which to popularise their point of view in the ranks of the army. The military was the chief source of their strength; not only were the majority of them officers, but the Grand Duke Nicholas was in any case unpopular with the army. On December 14, the Grand Duke was declared Tsar Nicholas I, and the army reviewed on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The day was a war of nerves between the new Emperor and his army. It seemed as though some three thousand troops had come out in favour of revolution, leaving about nine thousand loyal to the new regime. There were exciting moments, as when old Alexander Yakubovich, a veteran of the Caucasus, paraded in front of the mutinying troops and cried, ‘Constantine and a Constitution!’; but, when the orders were given for the Moscow regiment to load, the old hero developed a violent headache and was nowhere to be found. The Governor-General of St. Petersburg was sent out to reason with the mutineers and was shot dead. Then followed the Metropolitan Serafim, splendid in cope and the crown-like mitre of the Eastern Church. The rebels told him to go back into the cathedral and pray for their souls. Finally, the Grand Duke Michael tried to plead with them, and they told him to return to the Winter Palace since he was endangering his life. But, by the end of the day, Nicholas I’s patience had run out. He ordered his troops to fire on the rebels, and they fled without putting up any resistance. For the next thirty years, the Russian Empire was to be dominated by this huge and ferocious despot, who devoted himself to a confident and calculated policy of reaction against the faintly liberalising trends of Alexander I.

As for the Decembrists,6 as the conspirators of December 1825 came to be called, they were rounded up. About six hundred were questioned, a hundred and twenty-one were put on trial: five were condemned to death, thirty-one were exiled to Siberia for life, and eighty-five for a shorter term. Of the Siberian exiles, few were more romantically attractive than Tolstoy’s second cousin, Major-General Prince Sergey Grigoryevich Volkonsky,7 who was stripped of lands, titles and estates before being dragged in chains in front of the Tsar, who shouted at him, ‘You are a fool, Major-General Prince Volkonsky! You should be ashamed of yourself!’ But his young wife did not think so. Abandoning their little son, she followed her husband into exile, and stayed with him for the next thirty years before spoiling things and running off with another man. She had been originally wooed by Pushkin, who wrote a poem about her heroic exile:

Bo rлyбинe cибиpcкиx pyдXpaнитe ropдoe тepпeньe,He пpoпaдeт вaш cкopбный тpyдИ дyм выcoкoe cтpeмлeньe . . .

[In the depths of the Siberian minesMaintain your proud patience,Your sorrowful labour will not be wasted,Nor your high aspiration of mind. . . .]8

When Nicholas I died in 1855, there was every reason for Russian dissidents and malcontents to rejoice. But Volkonsky, hearing the news in Siberia, wept. He wept because his Emperor was dead, and he wept for Russia, because thirty years of exile (a shorter spell was to teach similar lessons to Dostoyevsky) had made him wonder what alternatives there were to the repressive and reactionary form of government which, as a young man, he had so vigorously opposed. He wrote:

And when will our national consciousness be rid of this fatal confusion between power and national welfare, that has brought so much falsehood into every sphere of national life, falsehood which has coloured our politics, our religious and social thought, our education? Falsehood has been the principal ailment of Russian politics, along with its usual companions, hypocrisy and cynicism. They run through our whole history. Yet surely life’s goal must not be just to exist, but to exist with dignity. And if we want to be frank with ourselves, then we must admit that if Russia cannot exist otherwise than she did in the past, then she does not deserve to survive. And as of now, we have had no proof that the country can be run along different lines.9