Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich

TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH. - Russian writer, b. at Yasnaya Polyana on 26 Aug. 1828, d. at Astapovo on 7 Nov. 1910. Left an orphan, he was entrusted to the care of a relative, F. A. Ergolskaya, who had a notable influence on the formation of his character.

He spent his childhood between Yasnaya and Moscow, where he completed his first studies; in 1844 he enrolled at the University of Kazan but, distracted by a brilliant social life, he followed the courses with scant interest and abandoned them entirely in 1847 when, having divided the inheritance with his brothers and received Yasnaya as his share, he returned to settle there. Still an adolescent he had drifted away from the faith, "learned from his nurse," in the conviction that "religious doctrine does not partake of life... it is professed far from life and independently of it" (Confession), and he had replaced it with a principle of moral, intellectual and physical self-perfection, tending to attain the socially exemplary condition, according to his own definition, of a comme il faut man. The Diary (begun at the age of 19 and kept almost uninterruptedly until his death) attests to the vast program of work he set himself as a daily discipline, in order to reach such perfection. His favorite readings were the Bible and the works of J. J. Rousseau, and to them, perhaps more than to the democratic currents of the time, must be attributed the attempt to free his peasants from serfdom, which was a failure because of the negative attitude taken by the latter (cf. A Landowner's Morning, 1852). An ideal autobiography of the first twenty years of his life is found in the novels Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), Youth (1857), in whose protagonist, Irtenev, T. shadowed forth himself, and in Irtenev and Nechlyudov the ambitious principles of the comme il faut man. But he realized that beneath them, rather than "the desire to be better before oneself or before God," was concealed the vanity of being better "before other men." And very soon the tendency to be better before others changed into the desire to be... "more glorious, more influential, more wealthy" (Confession). In 1851, accepting the advice of his brother Nicholas, he enlisted and set off for the Caucasus. It was then that he began by writing the novel Childhood, which was published for him by the journal Sovremennik ("The Contemporary"), and with a series of tales drawn from his war experiences: The Wood-Felling, The Raid, etc. Promoted to ensign in Jan. 1854, he was then transferred to Sevastopol, where he fought during the siege and drew the impressions that dictated to him the trilogy Sevastopol in Dec. 1854, Sevastopol in May 1855 and Sevastopol in Aug. 1855. Discharged in 1856 with the rank of lieutenant, he settled in St. Petersburg where, because of his social position and his fame as a writer, the doors of literary and fashionable circles were opened to him; but after less than a year, weary of everything, he left for abroad with a profound faith in the social and individual evolution of humanity, in "progress": "At that time it seemed to me that this word expressed something" (Confession). But on 6 Apr. 1857, after witnessing a capital execution in Paris, this new conviction of his also collapsed: "I understood not with reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the rationality of progress could justify that act" (ibid.). Western Europe he found anything but an admirer in himself: the impression he derived from it was, on the whole, negative. From his stay abroad (1857 and 1860-61) he nevertheless took advantage to study certain pedagogical systems, thanks to which (his method, however, was to have no method and to follow the principle of "free education") he organized a popular school at Yasnaya Polyana, and made himself its teacher. From 1862 T. began to publish a pedagogical journal, Yasnaya Polyana, where, besides theoretical articles, he began to print stories and fables for children. A very important article, in that it prepares and justifies T.'s future abandonment of the so-called artistic style for a popularizing style, is Who Should Learn to Write from Whom: the Peasant Children from Us, or We from the Peasant Children?, in which he shows his admiration for the compositions of his pupils. In 1862 T. married Sófija A. Behrs, and for some years conjugal happiness absorbed him completely; to this period belongs War and Peace (1864-69), a novel brought to completion with extraordinary rapidity if one considers its breadth and the extraordinary accuracy with which T. worked (of some chapters there are as many as 7 drafts). From 1873 to 1877 he wrote Anna Karenina, a work which, for its perfect architecture, the constant tension of its style and psychological investigation, should be considered his masterpiece even in comparison with War and Peace, of genius in conception but of uneven poetic vigor, and of faulty and plethoric construction. The central theme of the two novels is the search for the purpose of human existence, which T. identifies in living "according to God" and in love of neighbor, though in both novels this is formal but of unclear content. Having lost faith in "progress," T. had set himself the religious problem anew: "Through an intellectual torment of two years I discovered an old and simple truth... that immortality exists, that love exists, and that one must live for others if one wishes to be eternally happy. These discoveries surprised me for their analogy with the Christian religion... I began to seek them in the Gospel, but I found little. I found neither God, nor the Redeemer, nor the mysteries: nothing" (letter to A. Tolstaya, 3 May 1859). Some time later, at Hyères, in 1860, he had witnessed the agony of his brother Nicholas, and had asked himself what purpose life itself had: either it had a reason, a meaning that escaped him, or, if its only end was annihilation, it was an evil, and in that case it was not worth "deceiving oneself: death is preferable to life — one must free oneself from the latter" (Confession; cf. in Anna Karenina Levin's suicidal thoughts). Tolstoyan pessimism (of a Schopenhauerian tinge) is characteristic of the first period, when T. attempts to reach God through reason, with the artist) inclines, on the contrary, toward a pagan conception of the world. Religious anxiety originates in T. from two impulses: the one from the fear of death, as annihilation of the self; the other from the love of life; and while the first drives him to seek a hidden meaning in the transience of existence, the second finds the fullness of being, and its immortality, in the almost physical and nirvanic attainment of a harmony with created things, through a panicky perception of the world. Particularly significant in this regard is the story The Cossacks (1852-63), where this panicky perception of the world dominates in Olénin during the hunt, and in the deer's lair (olén), while the yearning for self-sacrifice, for love of neighbor, begins to manifest itself in him as soon as, having realized he is lost, he is seized by the fear of death. The theme of self-sacrifice and love of neighbor, of redemption from egoism through such love, and of redemption from sin through that sacrifice, is at the basis of the novel Resurrection (completed in 1899). But, rich in merits in its details, and in individual parts, it is as a whole a failed work; which moreover ideologically concludes in a negative manner with the practical uselessness of sacrifice. Resurrection represented a return of T. to literature after a period during which he had abandoned it, considering it, on a par with every form of art, a means of seduction of the senses. During his last years his activity as a writer takes on an ever more markedly moralistic accent, and is aimed at the preaching of love and of non-resistance to evil (What I Believe, Critique of Dogmatic Theology, What Is Art?, etc.). The growth of his fame and of the ascendancy exercised by his doctrine (Jásnaja Poljána had become, toward the end of the century, almost a goal of pilgrimages) worried the political and religious authorities. But while Alexander III did not dare take any measure, for fear of the unfavorable worldwide resonance it would have had, the Holy Synod in 1901 excommunicated T. At the end of that same year, following a serious attack of pneumonia, T. moved for some time to the Crimea, where he often had occasion to meet with Chekhov and Gorky. Having returned to Jásnaja, he resided there uninterruptedly until the day when, no longer able to bear the conflict between the principles he professed and the life he led, he resolved to abandon family and home. Death surprised him at the station of Astápovo, during that flight, on November 7, 1910.

It is difficult to resign oneself to explaining the diversity of style that runs between Tolstoy's works with T.'s own words: «I know that every great artist must also create his own means of expression. If the content of works of art can be infinitely varied, such can also be their means of expression». It is nonetheless evident that if he writes his first three novels with a style of exquisite literary ambition that will find no counterpart in any other of his works, he writes at the same time the Sevastopol stories where a restrained liberality guides the choice of expressive means, and where alongside greater terseness there corresponds a lesser vigilance. Thus, again, after a novel like War and Peace, in which the lack of a continuous mastery of form causes perfect pages to alternate with others that are angular, and even of chancery writing (as Šklovskij happened to note), Anna Karenina transports us into a stylistic climate in which simplicity, the apparent terseness and almost schematic quality of expression acquire a flavor of immediacy and genuine miracle. Later (e.g., in the story What Men Live By, 1881) T. will move equally at ease among the cadences of folk narration, availing himself without affectation or effort of the humble materials of everyday speech, of a bare and elementary syntax, succeeding in transforming that manner of presenting, just as the people do, into a manner and world of poetry. This protean aspect of his writing is nevertheless a phenomenon far more of surface than of substance. The unity of Tolstoy's style resides in a unity of temperament rather than of taste; in a particular disposition to accept things, rather than to change them and recreate them to his own measure and image. T. did not remake the universe in his own likeness, he limited it to those aspects that most resembled him, and in them he mirrored himself from every angle of incidence. But what diverted him from crystallizing his sensibility into a verbal style was also a preconceived aversion that he had for every «literary» aspect of literature; since he never considered the latter as something that satisfied and was satisfied in itself, but as a means to communicate an inner problematic of his, in the face of whose gravity every stylistic decorum appeared to him frivolity. Because of the interest in that problematic of his, T. can be considered an essentially autobiographical writer and one of content, while removing from this assertion whatever premeditated and programmatic quality it might suggest to the detriment of art; for he almost never had theses already resolved to exemplify, but problems in a state of drama. The very formulas of «living according to God» and of «self-sacrifice» for love of neighbor, which seem to represent points of arrival, solutions to the question posed, even judging by the insistence with which he returned to propose them anew in each new work of his, reveal themselves to be of a partial conviction, and far more rational than profound and absolute. But it was precisely this impossibility of catharsis, and the consequent persistence of his problems in an emotional state, that prevented him from declining into a programmatic and thesis-driven literature; just as, at the same time, it was precisely contentism that conditioned for him the detachment from the modes of the traditional art novel, understood as the biography of a hero. The true plot of each of his works is never, in fact, or very rarely, a human vicissitude, but an inner current of thought that moves the whole action. A typical example is Anna Karenina, where Lévin's story ends up acquiring a preponderance, even spatial, over the biography of the eponymous heroine.

In Lévin and Anna is adumbrated the same problem (which is then the one in which all Tolstoyan ideology is summed up) of the search for happiness; but, in the face of T.'s true interest, Anna's negative experience, returned toward an egoistic solution, ended up taking second place with respect to that of Lévin, who reached the true key to the solution: existence "according to God." The particular nature of Tolstoyan novels, substantially different both from biographical novels and from novels with a thesis; the fact that their real plot is never disclosed, but goes on articulating itself through as many secret channels as there are destinies of the characters — principal and secondary — who inhabit them, have been the cause of an erroneous judgment concerning their construction, found to be defective, or even nonexistent. Yet another factor barred T. from the paths of the biographical novel: his philosophy did not conceive of the "hero." He knew that life has its own reason, but that this reason is its law; and, whether or not he arrived at discovering it, man remained equally enslaved to it. The discovery redeemed him from his condition of "brute," enlightening his consciousness, but did not lead him to freedom. This is why in War and Peace (and certainly not because of any extravagant attitude of his toward history) he regarded men who, like Napoleon, consider themselves agents of destiny, "heroes," as simply instruments of a will that transcends their own. For T. man is not only not the creator of destinies, but within certain limits not even of his own destiny; thus, every time he attempts to exercise his free will, the "law" (or, as some have said with regard to Anna Karenina, "fate") hastens to strike him. It is perhaps from this conception of human non-heroism that the modes of Tolstoyan psychology derive their origin, never intended to weave an epos of feelings, to organize them into a solar system around which the world revolves and from which things draw their light; their history never unfolds consequentially, ordered along a continuous thread, for T. communicates to us the soul of a character not through the results of his psychological process, already settled and clarified, but through the process itself in its raw state, in its discontinuous, chaotic becoming. This bold realism, which brings the passions back from a sublimated and novelistic aura to an everyday truth, constitutes one of the greatest innovations introduced by T. into the modern novel. Profoundly realist T. also proved himself in his descriptions of nature, which represent one of the most characteristic aspects of his work. T. never romanticized the landscape, nor does he ever make it anthropomorphic, even if at times he makes it a mirror of a pathos, or, conversely, uses it as a stimulus to provoke one. In nature he perceives a primordial goodness in which man rediscovers and renews his own innocence, harmony with all created things, and direct communion with God. He perceives it as something mysteriously alive, animated, consonant with himself and spiritually and physically fused with him. All the adjectives he uses in such descriptions, rather than defining the object represented, mediate an almost sensual adherence to it. And it is in these descriptions that T., more than elsewhere, betrays his fundamentally, instinctively pagan nature; it is in them, moreover, that his style invariably recovers and preserves a register and a lexicon perfectly constant.

Bari 1938; A. Bounine, La délivrance de T., Paris 1939; E. Gasparini, L'esordio di T., Milan 1942; id., Il vigore di T., ibid. 1943; N. Gourfinkel, T. sans tolstolisme, Paris 1946; E. I. Simmons, L. T., London 1946; L. Derrick, T. la vita e le opere, Milan 1947; B. Gabba, Dottrine religiose e sociali del conte L. N. T., ibid. n.d.; L. Šestov, Le rivelazioni della morte, Florence 1948; M. Gorki, Colloqui con L. Andreieff e L. T., Milan 1949; F. Porché, Portrait psychologique de T., Paris 1949; P. Boyer, Chez T., ibid. 1950; B. Metzel, T., ibid. 1950; L. Šestov, La filosofia della tragedia, Naples 1950.

THE RELIGION OF TOLSTOY

T. did not create a new religious system; his religion is a mixture of the Gospel, especially of the Sermon on the Mount, with strong doses of agnosticism, fideism, rationalism and most often of pantheism. He was not, however, a pantheist consistent with himself, one who pushed the practical applications to their extreme consequences; nor could he be otherwise, because his rationalism, when it came to saying something positive in religious matters, went hand in hand with a profound aversion to logic.

Here are the principal aphorisms of his religious beliefs: true religion is the relation of the soul with the universal life, in which it is immersed, with God who is life and infinite and impersonal goodness. Man has the duty to awaken the divinity within himself. One must become conscious of this fact, that earthly life is but a moment in the infinite series of lives. To assert that God is the creator of the world is a blasphemy; it is equivalent to denying that God is infinite love, of which I am a part. One must love everything: "the dog, the grass, your mother." The purpose of life is to drown one's own will in that of God. What matters in religion is morality, conduct, relations with one's neighbor, conformable to the precepts of the Gospel. Christian doctrine and the dogmas are to be repudiated; the historical personality of Jesus Christ himself matters very little, the Christological dogmas are absurdities; the moral doctrine set forth in the Gospel suffices for everything. All men are equal; therefore no one has the right to punish his neighbor. It is not fitting to resist evil with violence. The Church, every Church is harmful; the same must be said of everything it offers: dogmatic definitions, sacraments, rites. No one can intrude between man and God. The worship of images and relics is immoral. Priests serve only their own interests. Authority in religious matters is absolutely inadmissible.

The capital error of T. consists in this, that he confuses the abuses of historical Christianity with the Church and does not reflect that what repels him - and rightly so - is not the Church, but rather the infidelities toward it. His tragedy is the same as that of all dissidents: by undermining the supernatural basis of Christianity T. has rendered a great service to Soviet atheism, which, while showing itself grateful to him, ironizes his moral doctrine.