The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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voice of a Gogolian narrator. Dostoevsky the novelist remained a newspaper man.

Tolstoy’s temperament and experiences were different. So was the “break” in his life. It was triggered by observation and moral outrage rather than by punitive acts against his person, and was coerced, as it were, from the inside. Tolstoy’s long life (1828–1910) also became the stuff of myth – but not because of its events. On the surface, it was the privileged high-born biography of its time. Born a wealthy count on the large Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, he lost his mother at age two (probably the definitive shock of his life). He droppedoutof aprovincialuniversityat ageeighteen,caroused,gambled,wom-anized, compulsively recorded these lapses in his diary and vowed to reform, joined the army and saw action at Sevastopol during the Crimean War (spring 1855), visited Petersburg, toured Western Europe (to pay homage to his beloved Rousseau), caroused, gambled, womanized, all the while reading voraciously in four languages. In 1851, Tolstoy began to write up quasi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood, his wanderings abroad, and his military experiences. In 1862, at age thirty-four, he married, settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, started a family, and began to write in earnest. Like Dostoevsky, he was blessed with a devoted wife who became his indispensable secretary and household manager. Unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy turned away from his wife after his spiritual conversion: she came to represent for him the vanity of fame as well as the persistence of the “animal principle,” and he resented his continuing desire for both. For forty-eight years, Tolstoy lived and worked at Yasnaya Polyana. Five of the couple’s thirteen children died in infancy or early childhood. But overall his was a secure, prosperous, healthy, fertile, productive life. Nothing punitive was imposed on it from the outside; it was a life without sacrificial events or material want. A natural aristocrat and patriarch, Tolstoy did what he wanted to do. He appeared to take for granted the pleasures and pitfalls of abundance: an excess of vigor, wealth, appetite, children, freedom, words. This man to whom everything had been given created an event by taking something away.

Indeed, taking away and giving up could bring only positive gains. To Tolstoy’s uncompromisingly logical mind with its belief in Rousseau’s doctrine of natural good, evil was acquired, unnatural, a byproduct of bad contracts or bad habits. Evil might well disappear once we shed the habits and material burdens that sustain it. As always, Tolstoy began with himself. His own formal “break” with the world of privilege came in 1880, at age fifty-one, at the peak of his fame. He marked it by a highly publicized Confession in which he discredited, one by one, each of the earlier phases in his quest for the meaning of life: self-perfection, pedagogy,fame, family, belief in progress, science, faith through

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the Church. The break was not as severe as it seemed, however. Tolstoy’s gift had always been for a radical estrangement from what others claimed to live by. He had never been comfortable with his era, his rank, his society, his self, and the pleasure he received from writing had always struck him as illicit. Renouncing both War and Peace and Anna Karenina as “counterfeit art,” he declared the mission of his final thirty years to be moral philosophy – of a thunderous sort. Beginning in the early 1880s, treatises went forth from Yasnaya Polyana attacking the major institutions of imperial Russia: state, military, Church, the aristocracy as a class, the Table of Ranks, private property, schools, Western ideas of progress. Tolstoy became a pacifist and vegetarian. His ideal was “Christian anarchism,” into which he eventually incorporated some Buddhist precepts: non-participation in evil, the cultivation of loving habits toward all living things, a restraint of appetites, a simple life of manual labor close to the soil, and no obligations except to one’s own conscience. Tolstoy distrusted the idea of “news” – which, in his view, was merely a distraction from one’s own spiritual growth – and he disliked the fadmongery of “current events.” He was pursuing the eternal. Tolstoy was not a newspaper man.

Yet by some curious twist of fate, Tolstoy’s quest to simplify human nature and return us to nature coincided with the worldwide graphic revolution. Dos-toevsky (d. 1881) had been his own agent and handler. The printed word was his medium. Tolstoy, living three decades longer, became the world’s first multimedia celebrity – and he was handled by others. Not only photographers but car-toonistsand newspaper columnists pursuedhim, orbetterstalked him, through telegraph, wax cylinder, color photo, newsreel, film. The “wealthy Count dressing up as a peasant” was mercilessly satirized in the public domain.6 But the media assisted Tolstoy too. Even while parodying his image, it spread his word. This mattered, because Tolstoy did not like to travel or to speak publicly from podiums, as Dostoevsky had loved to do; he preferred to receive guests at home, one on one. As Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage for “Tolstoyans” from around the world, access to the great man was increasingly controlled by his wife, children, and domestic staff. Some Tolstoyans were arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs; others were exiled. Beyond his excommunication by the Church in 1901, however, Tolstoy, to his anguish, was not touched by the arm of the state. For the final twenty-five years of his life Tolstoy was kept under police surveillance, but neither Tsar Alexander III (r. 1881–94) nor Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) was foolish enough to add a martyr’s crown to his glory.

At century’s end, Maksim Gorky (1868–1937) came to know both the aging Tolstoy and the ailing Chekhov in the Crimea. In a complex tribute to the older writer composed after Tolstoy’s flight from Yasnaya Polyana and final illness, Gorky wrote: “I have always been repelled by that stubborn and despotic urge of his to turn the life of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy into the saintly Life of our

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BlessedboyarLev.”7 Itwould havesanctifiedhis wisdom andmadeit irresistible, equal to those leg-iron scars that lent such authority to Dostoevsky’s word. But as a radical activist devoted to social reform, Gorky saw only part of the truth. Dostoevsky had been tied to his time; his scars were historically determined and thus inevitably dated. Tolstoy’s relatively “empty,” unpersecuted life freed him up to become a carrier for ideas valid for all people of all times. And this is what Tolstoy craved. The one section of The Brothers Karamazov that Tolstoy admired (his bedside reading during the last month of his life) was Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” Alyosha’s compilation of peak life-moments and homilies from his mentor, the Elder Zosima.

The two men chose never to meet, but much lore circulated about their opinions of each other. Dostoevsky deplored Tolstoy’s tendency to write “landlord novels” set in an historical period irrelevant to the teeming present. Gorky recalls Tolstoy saying that Dostoevsky lacked the courage to create healthy heroes; indeed, he “didn’t like healthy people. He was convinced that since he himself was sick, the whole world must be sick.” “It’s odd that so many people read him,” Tolstoy later remarked. “I can’t understand why. It’s difficult and futile – all those Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs, and the rest, things aren’t like that, it’s all much simpler, more understandable.”8 After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy wept. But nevertheless he wrote soon after to their common friend, Nikolai Strakhov: “one cannot place on a pedestal for the instruction of posterity a man who was all struggle.”9 These two biographical trajectories – Dostoevsky’s labor-camp martyrdom and return to life, and Tolstoy’s pure trans-historical moral outrage – are the most influential literary variants of a “righteous person” [pravednik] in the Russian literary canon.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), with one-half Tolstoy’s life span to work with, matured as a writer in the all- but-blinding aura of both great novelists. Although he had a marked “Tolstoyan period,” Chekhov took a different path. For him, bigness of form and excessive energy in articulating an idea – or in carrying out an idea – already bordered on the fraudulent. Bodies, voices, ideas, and intentions in Chekhov’s world are more quickly exhausted. Pretensions to pan-humanity (Tolstoy) or to messianic struggle (Dostoevsky) were to him equally flawed. In Chekhov’s life, the most important extra-literary events were training as a doctor, traveling to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island north of Japan in 1890, and dying, for fifteen years, of tuberculosis. An urbane, confident, ironical man, he remarked in 1894, in a letter to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, that he had cooled toward Tolstoy: “Reason and justice tell me that there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat.”10 Chekhov did not seek to propagate a Word. But no writer could ignore the legacy of Russia’s two massive novelists.