BOOKS OF THE DAY
Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy. By Ernest J. Simmons. (John Lehmann. 25s.) Tolstoy as I Knew Him. By Tatyana A. Kuzminskaya. Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons. (Macmillan. 25s.) Essays from Tula. By Leo Tolstoy. Introduction by Nicolas Berdyaev. (Sheppard Press. 12s. 6d.)
TOLSTOY'S figure presents at first sight a deceptively grand and simple appearance, and only on closer acquaintance reveals itself as composed of a multiplicity of contradictions. These books will assist effectively towards such acquaintance. Mr. Simmons's work performs the great service of displaying Tolstoy entire. Probably everything we need to know about him is given, without bias and with the minimum of interpretation even, in a monumental volume which will surely become the standard biography of Tolstoy in English. As personal reminiscence, Mme. Kuzminskaya's contribution is in a different category. Mr. Simmons calls it " a veritable treasure- trove of biographical material," but, as he has ransacked it in making his own book, once its facts are discounted little remains but a charming enough, though insufficiently objectified, impression of pro- vincial Russian life in the eighteen-sixties. Mme. Kuzminskaya was both sister to Tolstoy's wife and the model for Natasha Rostova in War and Peace. Tolstoy admired this gay young person somewhat effusively, and his admiration had a reflective effect. Myself as Tolstoy Knew Me would have indicated more aptly the substance of an account which covers the period of Tolstoy's earlier married life and breaks off about 1868. Essays from Tula is a useful collec- tion of some of the scarcer religio-political tracts of Tolstoy's final phase, including Bethink Yourselves !, The Slavery of Our Times and The End of an Age.
" The most truth-loving writer in Russian literature " is how Nicolas Berdyaev describes Tolstoy ; and he is right. " All are writing my biography," Tolstoy confided to his diary in 1908, " and in my whole biography there will be nothing about my connection with the 7th Commandment. Nor will there be all the terrible filth of masturbation and worse, from my 13th, 14th year to the 15th, 16th (I do not remember when I began my debauchery in the brothels). And so up to my union with the peasant girl Aksinya- she is alive. Then marriage, in which once more, though I never betrayed my wife, there was lust in my relations with her—nasty and criminal lust." This reproach of omission cannot be levelled against Mr. Simmons who, following Tolstoy's own retrospective account of the four phases of his history, divides his narrative into four parts. " Innocent, joyous, poetic childhood " is followed by the phase of early manhood, in the service of ambition, vanity, and above all, of lust—a period brought to a close by Tolstoy's marriage. in 1862 at the mature age of thirty-four. The third period, " in which I lived a correct, honourable family life," saw the creation of the two great novels and dissolved in the religious unrest which marked the onset of middle age. The fourth period is marked equally and at once by Tolstoy's private and public efforts towards reform and by the acute marital discord which rent his later years and drove him at last away from home to die in the station-master's cottage at Astapovo.
With such an arrangement of material as we are given in this book, the usual fast distinction between Tolstoy's early period of proud worldliness and his later amended life becomes less clear, and the truth emerges that the opposed principles of " the flesh " on the one hand and " the spirit " on the other were continuously at war within him, a torment to the last, only the balance shifting as he grew older. For instance, it appears from a diary entry of 1855—when he was on active service in the Crimea, that is—that the non-dogmatic Christianity of his later years was enthusiastically conceived as early as his twenty-seventh year.
It is interesting to learn from Mme. Kuzminskaya that Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina after a daughter of Pushkin, Marya Aleksandrovna Hartung—" not after her personality, nor her life, but after her external appearance." That is characteristic. As a vigorous and dashing young man, Tolstoy boasted that he lived by instinct—like an animal. As Mr. Simmons rightly says concerning Tolstoy's animality, "Neither in his life nor in his art is there a suggestion of joyous profligacy or sniggering indecency "; the im- portant point is that the early surrender to natural physical passion, which led him into a rapid succession of casual sexual contacts with women on a lower social plane than himself—that is to say, into a series of intimate encounters in which the egoistic and impersonal factors predominated powerfully over the personal—had the effect of confirming him in a pronounced bias towards impersonality. With this impersonality are connected nearly all his marked limitations as man and writer, all of which are perhaps summed up in the revealing confession: " I do not understand or like poetry ; it is a kind of riddle for which elucidation is always required."
All these qualities enter into Tolstoy's relations with his wife, a theme which naturally occupies much space in both Mr. Simmons's and Mme. Kuzminskaya's books. " It became clear to me," writes the latter of the Tolstoys' early years together, " that both were mor- bidly jealous, that this was poisoning their life and spoiling their fine, loving relationship." Now jealousy is a symptom of uncertainty ; it expresses anxious insecurity and the demand for reassurance. Sonya has generally been blamed for her struggles with her reformed husband over the property which he wished to renounce ; but her position*, if hard to defend, is easy to understand. Married at eighteen to a husband whose general enchantment by the prospective joys of family life overshadowed his devotion to her as a particular beloved person, she had irrevocably staked her whole happiness on Tolstoy's love. His religious conversion began from a revulsion from all the circumstances of the material happiness which now seemed to him to have fallen under the corrupting shadow of death.
As one looks into it, it becomes apparent that the element of lust in his relations with his wife for which he afterwards reproved himself led him implicitly to relegate Sonya herself, together with the family to which she was biologically connected and the property to which in turn that was economically bound, to the inclusive cate- gory of " the flesh," which had to be repudiated before " the spirit " could come into its own. Inwardly, he withdrew further from Sonya, and consequently the more Sonya felt her sole pillar receding, the more desperately she clung for support to the contrary tangible realities of family, property, position. At the end the deranged Sonya was literally to vex the life out of him in her hysterical demands for evidences of a love in which she could no longer make herself believe. For his part, Tolstoy was forced at last to the reluctant confession in his secret diary of 1910, " Today, remembering my wedding, I thought that it was a fatal step. I was never even in love. But I could not avoid marrying."
Strange though the parallel may seem at first, there was much in Tolstoy's situation which reduplicates that of Kierkegaard: the early profligacy, the attraction towards the roseate haven of the married state, the vacillations at the point of marriage, the final exaltation of celibacy, and even the symptomatic division of his work into the " aesthetical " and the " religious " productions. Like Kierkegaard's career, though with a wider scope and with greater pith and point, Tolstoy's career culminated in a bitter attack upon established institutions, as a reward for which he expected and desired a martyrdom which would have set him forcibly free from the painful inner contradictions out of which he was powerless to liberate himself other than verbally. As a novelist he has an imperishable name ; as prophet and reformer he raised questions which are still emphatically present to trouble the mind
Previous page
