Three tempestuous relationships
Piers Paul Read
TOLSTOY by A. N. Wilson Hamith Hamilton, (16.95, pp.572
In this new biography of Tolstoy A. N. Wilson describes how the young English
writer Desmond MacCarthy went to visit the great man at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy himself showed MacCarthy to his bedroom and asked him politely to empty his own chamberpot because he did not think it right to leave it to the servants. MacCarthy of course agreed but no sooner had Tolstoy left him than Countess Tolstoy came to his room to countermand her husband's re- quest. 'Always he tells the guests this nonsense. Our lazy servants, what do we pay them for if they do no work? I must ask you most strictly, Mr MacCarthy, not to empty your own chamberpot. It really is too humiliating that my husband should have asked you such a question!'
It was to such bathetic conflicts that this genius was reduced at the end of his life and the story of how this came about is perennially fascinating, for not only was Tolstoy a great novelist whose life was the source for his art, and a figure of some political significance who led the moral opposition to the Tsarist regime, he was also 'profoundly self-obsessed', keeping a diary in which he recorded every detail of his public and private life. His wife too kept a diary to put her point of view and these two journals provide the source material for domestic melodrama on a grand scale.
Wilson, quite rightly, does not attempt to rival Henri Troyat's excellent biography which made much use of this material; indeed he rebukes Troyat for devoting over 100 pages to 'Tolstoy's pathetic last days, leaving us with the impression that the most interesting thing about Tolstoy was not his literary genius but his acrimo- nious relations and hangers-on'. His own book is about Tolstoy as writer and thinker — 'The history of a great genius whose art grew out of his three uneasy and irresolv- able relationships: his relationship with God, his relationship with women and his relationship with Russia'.
All three were tempestuous and prob- lematic — affected, as Wilson makes clear, by Tolstoy's lack of a proper childhood. His mother died when he was two; his father when he was nine; and he was brought up he various aunts until, at the age of 19, he came into his inheritance of land and serfs which were the currency of the Russian upper class and financed the debauchery of his youth.
His talent as a writer was recognised from the start, and he was readily admitted to the literary circle around Nekrasov, Goncharov and Turgenev. It was only after marrying Sofya Bers in his mid-thirties that he settled down to write the two major works which established his genius, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After Anna Karenina, however, he was distracted from art by religion. Whether the preacher drove out the muse or merely filled the vacuum left by his muse's absence it is hard to say. The evidence suggests that having reached the summit of creative achieve- ment he became bored and so set out to scale Mount Sinai and talk to God. His
appearance and demeanour became that of an Old Testament prophet who knew better than the Orthodox bishops how to interpret the teaching of Christ. This led to pacifism, vegetarianism and the preaching of a celibacy which he found he could not practice. He became, as Wilson puts it, 'the denouncer of obvious evils in an obvious way' as well as the proponent of absurd opinions — 'that Shakespeare was no good; that Jesus wasn't a Christian; that folk songs were better than Beethoven and that property is theft ...'.
He also came to see his wife Sofya as the embodiment of the World and the Flesh if not the Devil — an ageing Eve tempting him not just to copulate but to make money from his writing and employ ser- vants to empty chamberpots. Sofya in her turn was scathing in her mockery of his inconsistencies — the landowner who de- nounced property, the hermit who was served at table by servants wearing gloves. His moral posturing was only made possi- ble by her management of his estates. She also did what she could to keep on the right side of the government, petitioning the Tsar for permission to publish his work while he denounced the evils of despotism and the support it received from the Orthodox Church.
Thus, despite his religiosity, as Wilson makes clear, he was 'a fellow traveller with those who wanted to bring the system down' and so part of that tradition which ran from the Decembrists (of whom his uncle Volkonsky was one) through Herzen (whom he visited in London) to Lenin's putsch of 1917 which was described in the Western press as a `Tolstoyan revolution'. That he preferred Christ to Marx did not really make him a Christian. 'He lets the Gospels say what they say when it is what he would be saying anyway'.
From the evidence presented by Wilson it is hard to share his belief that 'for all his inability to be, either within himself or in his domestic life, a good man, he was in love with goodness and yearned to do good deeds'. Humility is an essential component of goodness and Tolstoy had none. Nor is it a sign of true conversion to Christ that he should have boasted to Chekhov and Gor- ky that in his youth he had been an 'indefatigable f—er' of whores. When he went to visit a holy man, Starets Joseph, shortly before his death, he was told that he had too much pride of intellect, but Tolstoy would not bend. He died unrepen- tant and 'his was the first public burial since the conversion of Saint Vladimir which was not attended by the rites of the Church'.
If Troyat's biography remains the best straightforward account of Tolstoy's life, this book by Wilson is still valuable for its emphasis on Tolstoy's writing and thought. He is quite right to insist that Tolstoy's spiritual struggles are more significant than his marital squabbles, and he is skilled in relating them not just to the history of the period but also to issues that still perplex us today. He can empathise with Tolstoy perhaps because he shares many of Tol- stoy's obsessions — with God, with sex and even with Russia since he has taken the trouble to learn the language. His talent as a novelist may not quite equal Tolstoy's but he has something of Tolstoy's prodi- gious energy and, one gathers, a wife as dedicated as Sofya Andreyevna to her husband's literary career.
Like Tolstoy's, too, however, he has 'an abiding capacity to irritate his readers', with blithe generalisations, a chatty, jour- nalistic style and a know-all tone of voice. This is particularly annoying because he sometimes gets things wrong. I was mysti- fied by his reference to 'the Kirchenkampf of the 1930s': does he mean the Kultur- kampf of the 1870s? He also tells us that 'Herzen seduced his first wife from her Muscovite husband' when Herzen himself describes in his memoirs how he eloped with his unmarried cousin who lived as the companion to her aunt. Such errors are small in themselves but they undermine the reader's confidence in the accuracy of everything else.
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