Lectures on Russian literature

Wingfield introduced in England in 1873. It was an

immediate success and was played in Russia and in this

country as early as 1875. In England, tennis is often called

lawn tennis because at first it was played on croquet lawns,

hard or turfy, and also in order to distinguish it from the

ancient game of tennis, played in special tennis halls and

called sometimes court-tennis. Court-tennis is mentioned

both by Shakespeare and Cervantes. Ancient kings played

it, stamping and panting in resounding halls. But this (lawn

tennis), I repeat, is our modern game. You will notice

Tolstoy's neat description: the players divided into two

teams of two stood on opposite sides of a tightly drawn net

with gilt poles (I like the gilt—an echo of the game's royal

origin and genteel resurrection) on the nicely rolled

croquet-ground. The various personal tricks of playing are

described. Vronski and his partner Sviazhski played a good

game and played it very earnestly: keeping a sharp eye on

the ball as it came their way and without haste or delay

Nabokov's drawing of a tennis costume such as Anna wore in

her game with Vronski

they ran nimbly up to it, waited for the rebound, and neatly

hit it back—most of the shots were more or less lobs I'm

afraid. Anna's partner, a young man called Veslovski, whom Lyovin had thrown out of his house a couple of weeks before, played worse than the others. Now comes a nice detail: the men with the ladies' permission took their coats off and played in their shirt sleeves. Dolly found the whole performance unnatural—grown-up people running after a ball like children.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

Vronski is a great admirer of English ways and fads, and the tennis illustrates this. Incidentally, the game was much tamer in the seventies than it is today. A man's service was a stiff pat, with the racquet held vertically at eye level; a lady's sevice was a feeble underhand stroke.

No. 106 A special note on the question of religion

The people in the book belong to the Russian church, the so-called Greek Orthodox—or more correctly Greek Catholic—

Church, which separated from the Roman communion a thousand years ago. When we first meet one of the minor characters in the book, Countess Lidia, she is interested in the union of the two churches and so is the pietist lady Madame Stahl affecting Christian devotion, whose influence Kitty soon gets rid of at Soden. But as I say, the main faith in the book is the Greek Catholic creed. The Shcherbatskis, Dolly, Kitty, their parents, are shown combining the traditional ritual with a kind of natural, old-fashioned, easy-going faith which Tolstoy approved of, for in the seventies when Tolstoy was writing this novel he had not evolved yet his fierce contempt for church ritual. The marriage ceremony for Kitty and Lyovin, and the priests, are described sympathetically. It is at his marriage that Lyovin, who had not gone to church for years and had considered himself an atheist, feels the first pangs of faith birth, then doubt again—but at the end of the book we leave him in a state of bewildered grace, with Tolstoy gently pushing him into the Tolstoyan sect.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1884-1886)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces : the longing for privacy and the urge to go places : introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values. To take a simple example: the university scholar—and by scholar I mean professors and students alike—the university scholar may present sometimes both sides. He may be a bookworm and he may be what is called a joiner—and the bookworm and the joiner may fight within one man. A student who gets or wishes to get prizes for acquired knowledge may also desire, or be expected to desire, prizes for what is called leadership. Different temperaments make different decisions, of course, and there are minds in which the inner world persistently triumphs over the outer one, and vice versa. But we must take into account the very fact of a struggle going on or liable to go on between the two versions of man in one man — introversion and extroversion. I have known students who in the pursuit of the inner life, in the ardent pursuit of knowledge, of a favorite subject had to clap their hands to their ears in order to shut out the booming surf of dormitory life; but at the same time they would be full of a gregarious desire to join in the fun, to go to the party or to the meeting, to give up the book for the band.

From this state of affairs there is really not a very far cry to the problems of writers like Tolstoy in whom the artist struggled with the preacher; the great introvert with the robust extrovert. Tolstoy surely realized that in him as in many writers there did go on the personal struggle between creative solitude and the urge to associate with all mankind — the battle between the book and band. In Tolstoyan terms, in the symbols of Tolstoyan later philosopy after he finished Anna Karenin, creative solitude became synonymous with sin: it was egoism, it was the pampering of one's self and therefore a sin. Conversely, the idea of all mankind was in Tolstoyan terms the idea of God : God is in men and God is universal love.

And Tolstoy advocated the loss of one's personality in this universal God-Love. He suggested, in other words, that in the personal struggle between the godless artist and the godly man the latter should better win if the synthetic man wishes to be happy.

We must retain a lucid vision of these spiritual facts in order to appreciate the philosophy of the story 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich.' Ivan is of course the Russian for John, and John in Hebrew means God is Good, God is Gracious. I know it's not easy for non-Russian-speaking people to pronounce the patronymic Ilych, which of course means the son of Ilya, the Russian version of the name Elias or Elijah, which incidentally means in Hebrew, Jehovah is God. Ilya is a very common Russian name, pronounced very much like the French il y a; and Ilyich is pronounced Ill-Itch—the ills and itches of mortal life.

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Now comes my first point : this is really the story not of Ivan's Death but the story of Ivan's Life. The physical death described in the story is part of mortal Life, it is merely the last phase of mortality. According to Tolstoy, mortal man, personal man, individual man, physical man, goes his physical way to nature's garbage can; according to Tolstoy, spiritual man returns to the cloudless region of universal God-Love, an abode of neutral bliss so dear to Oriental mystics. The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since a bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into new Life—Life with a capital L.

My second point is that this story was written in March 1886, at a time when Tolstoy was nearly sixty and had firmly established the Tolstoyan fact that writing masterpieces of fiction was a sin. He had firmly made up his mind that if he would write anything, after the great sins of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenin, it would be only in the way of simple tales for the people, for peasants, for school children, pious educational fables, moralistic fairy tales, that kind of thing. Here and there in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' there is a half-hearted attempt to proceed with this trend, and we shall find samples of a pseudo-fable style here and there in the story. But on the whole it is the artist who takes over. This story is Tolstoy's most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement.

Thanks to the fact that Guerney has so admirably translated the thing I shall have the opportunity at last to discuss Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's style is a marvelously complicated, ponderous instrument.

You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—