verbal art more honest. In August 1908,
on his eightieth birthday, he was interviewed about the cinema. Of course this new technology will be exploited by businessmen – “where are there not businessmen?”, Tolstoy remarked – but films were wonderful: responsive, infectious, and so much more flexible to write for than the stage, which was “a halter choking the throat of the dramatist.” “You will see that this little clicking contraption with its revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,” he insisted. “The cinema has divined the mystery of motion, and that is greatness.”27 At the end of his life, the world’s most famous word-smith and enemy of technology contemplated writing a screenplay. He foresaw in the art of (still silent) film a chance for images to live forever, sacrificing none of their wholeness, visibility, or mobility: one answer, perhaps, to the insult of death. Significantly, it was capturing the motion that mattered. Tolstoy leapt at the possibility of communication that reduced the need for uttered words.
For just because a writer is a superb craftsman with his chosen material – in this case, words – does not mean that he need trust or respect the morality of his medium. Tolstoy often found himself in this dilemma. His despair was not that of the Romantic or Symbolist poet who lamented that inspiration was always so divine and execution so tedious. Tolstoy was just as suspicious of poetic inspiration (in his view, a markedly indulgent form of intoxication) as he eventually became of meat, liquor, grand opera, and sexual arousal. What appalled Tolstoy was second-hand experience, and from that perspective his relation to books is fascinating. One of the best read and most learned men of his age, Tolstoy detected falsehood in almost all formal systems of education. He was a compulsive diarist and a superb letter-writer. But early on, Tolstoy wished to express what he felt to be true more directly, from the point of view of nature itself.
His major challenge in this matter of uncovering life’s truth was not competition with earlier worldly writers (Gogol or Pushkin) but the very fact, or indignity, of having to pass human experience through the word at all. Language was too convention-driven, the act of writing too prideful, the act of reading too passive. Dostoevsky worked variations (and at times vicious parodies) on earlier writers or plots to whom he was indebted. Chekhov in the early 1880s wrote dozens of slight but amusing parodies of earlier literary styles from Karamzin to Gogol to Turgenev. Tolstoy, however, rarely took on other writers in his fiction. Why add another obfuscating layer of words? In Chapter 10 of his 1852 tale “The Raid,” he remarks on the relationship between Russian courage and French phrase-making on the battlefield. When a man “feels within himself the capacity to perform a great deed, no talk of any kind is needed.”28 Tolstoy had always been eager to shock us out of being a mere audience: not only to other writers, but equally to the products of his own writing self.
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A startling example comes in Tolstoy’s 1855 Crimean War story, “Sevastopol in December,” designed as a “tour” addressed to the reader-“tourist” in the second person.29 Here you see a pile of coal, over there frozen manure, the carcass of a horse, now notice this whizzing cannonball, a cart full of corpses, a gorgeous sunrise, an amputation clinic, and although your first impression is disagreeable, look more closely, for “the truth is altogether different.” But of course looking more closely into his story will never equal being there. Gradually this truth (a complex one) becomes clear to the reader, as we are drawn in to the suffering and heroism of the scene. Once drawn in, we begin to feel guilty for being mere observers via the printed word, whereas the war is being fought by participants whose bodies are dying. It is testimony to Tolstoy’s art in these Sevastopol sketches that the tsar wept at the courage and patriotism he saw displayed there, whereas other readers consider them among the most damning anti-war literature ever written. Later, in a famous episode in
Chekhov will use the same second-person ethical “wake-up” device of the guided tour in his grim parable “Ward Number Six” (1892), in order to introduce his reader to the lunatic wing – or prison – of a corrupt provincial hospital. “If you do not mind being stung by nettles,” suggests the narrator, “let us go along the narrow path . . .” The inmate Ivan Gromov (who suffers from persecution mania) and Doctor Ragin (the good-natured but slothful medical man who negligently committed Gromov to the ward years earlier) are intellectual opponents of Dostoevskian intensity. Both incline toward philosophy. Quite by accident, the doctor rediscovers his patient and begins visiting him, for he is “the most interesting person in town.” Citing the Cynic Diogenes, Ragin rationalizes his inability to intervene against evil deeds. Gromov, disgusted, responds with a defense of activism. The story ends as it must: Ragin’s medical staff diagnoses him as ill (that is, imprisons him in the ward) together with his patient; Ragin dies of a stroke on the first evening spent locked inside a reality thathehad not botheredtoregisterorresist whilehewasfree. Both Gromovand Ragin had been passionate readers of books. And remarkable about both the bookish Pierre Bezukhov and the bookish Doctor Ragin – healthy, thoughtful, free men – is the extreme slowness of their waking-up to the difference between reading a book, and being there. “Ward Number Six” is often taken as Chekhov’s criticism of Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-violent resistance to evil.
Doubtless it is that – but it also sounds a chord of recurrent Tolstoyan concern. How can reading, as a habit of the body and mind, be made less pleasant, less easy, more a goad to action?
It is characteristic of this “Tolstoyan” story of Chekhov’s, and of Tolstoy himself, that the very process of reading is targeted for attention rather than the content of the work being read or witnessed. Dostoevsky tells you straight out that Devushkin is reading Pushkin and Gogol (and precisely which stories); immediately a dialogue starts up between works of literature. But Tolstoy scholars are still debating the identity of the unnamed English novel that Anna Karenina is reading on the train back to St. Petersburg after meeting Vronsky in Moscow, and also – to shift to the performing arts – the identity of the unnamed opera that Natasha watches in
The finest example of this concern is Tolstoy’s late story “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889). Not music itself, but remembering how his wife had created such music with the violinist “for no practical reason” is what enflames the jealous husband Pozdnyshev, both against his wife and against Beethoven. Pozdnyshev considers himself a “madman,” and the courtroom that tried him for murdering his wife concurred with the criminal, bestowing a verdict of temporary insanity. But as with all of Tolstoy’s fools and social outcasts – quite distinct from the Gogol– Dostoevsky line of madmen, who are not used in this way – a truth is transmitted through them that is intended to wake up the rest of comfortable humanity. Tolstoy stood behind many of Pozdnyshev’s maddest views. The powerful art of music, like the powerful art of the word, should be deployed only in the service of brotherhood. At the very least, it must not draw attention to itself as art, and whatever emotions it arouses must be usefully discharged, attached to a desired action. If a funeral, then a lament; if a battle, then fife and drum. Since the salon provides no proper moral conduit for channeling the energy released by art – just small talk and sherbet – how could there not be infidelity, jealousy, murder?
Best of all is to show people doing without words altogether. Responsive glances from a loving face will do the necessary work. The most famous of these word-free scenes in Tolstoy, the courtship between Kitty and Levin in
