Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

details- the ugliness of faces around her, conversation overheard by chance in the train compartment, intractable memories-that, in Tolstoy's next novel, touches off Anna Karenina's decision to kill herself.)

Still another great change in Andrei Bolkonsky's internal world: mortally wounded in the battle of Borodino, he lies on an operating table in a military encampment and is suddenly filled with a strange sense of peace and reconciliation, a sense of happiness, which will stay with him; this state of happiness is all the stranger (and all the more beautiful) for the enormous harshness of the scene, which is full of the hideously precise details of surgery in a time before anesthesia; and strangest of all about this strange state: it is provoked by an unexpected and illogical memory: when the doctors assistant removed his clothes, 'Andrei recalled his earliest, most remote childhood.' And some lines farther on: 'After the agony he had been enduring, Prince Andrei enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially those of early childhood-when he had been undressed and put to bed, and when his nurse had sung him lullabies and he had buried his head in the pillow and felt happy just to be alive-rose to his mind, not as something past, but as a present reality' Only later does Andrei recognize, on a nearby operating table, his rival, Anatol, Natasha's seducer, whose leg has just been cut off by a doctor.

The usual reading of this scene: Wounded, Andrei sees his rival with his leg amputated; the sight fills him with immense pity for the man and for man in general. But Tolstov knew that these sudden revelations are not due to causes so obvious and so logical. It was a curious fleeting image (the early-childhood memory of being undressed in the same way as the doctors assistant was doing it) that touched everything off-his new metamorphosis, his new vision of things. A few seconds later, this miraculous detail has certainly been forgotten by Andrei himself just as it has probably been immediately forgotten by the majority of readers, who read novels as inattentively and badly as they 'read' their own lives.

And another great change, this time Pierre Bezukhov's decision to kill Napoleon, a decision preceded by this episode: He learns from his Freemason friends that in Chapter 13 of the Apocalypse, Napoleon is identified as the Antichrist: 'Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.' When the French alphabet is given numerical values, the letters in 'I'empereur Napoleon' add up to the number 666.

'This prophecy greatly surprised Pierre, and he often asked himself what exactly would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried, by the same system of turning letters into numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question that engrossed him. He wrote the words l'empereur Alexandre and la nation russe and added up their numbers. But the sums were either more or less than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in French, comte Pierre Besouhoff; the sum was far from right. He changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and adding de and the article le, still without obtaining the desired result. Then it occurred to him that if the answer to the question were contained in his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote le Russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much; five was represented by e, the very letter elided from the article le before the word empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought: l'Russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery greatly excited him.'

Tolstoy's meticulousness in describing all the spelling changes Pierre works on his own name so as to get to the number 666 is irresistibly comic: l'Russe is a marvelous orthographic gag. Can grave and courageous decisions of an unquestionably intelligent and likable man be rooted in some foolish idea?

And what are your thoughts on man? What are your thoughts on yourself?

Change of Opinion as Adjustment to the Spirit of the Time

One day, with a radiant face, a woman declares to me: 'So, there's no more Leningrad! We're back to good old Saint Petersburg!' It never did thrill me, cities and streets being rechristened. I am about to tell her this, but at the last moment I control myself: in her gaze,

bedazzled by the fascinating march of history, I foresee disagreement, and I have no desire to argue, especially because just then I recall an episode she has certainly forgotten. This same woman came from abroad to visit my wife and me in Prague after the Russian invasion, in 1970 or 1971, when we were in the painful situation of being under ban. She was showing her solidarity with us, and we wanted to pay her back by trying to entertain her. My wife told her the funny story (it was oddly prophetic besides) of an American moneybags staying in a Moscow hotel. Someone asks him: 'Have you been to see Lenin in the mausoleum?' And he replies: 'For ten dollars I had him brought over to the hotel.' Our visitors face tensed. A leftist (she still is), she saw the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as a betrayal of ideals she cherished, and felt it unacceptable that victims with whom she meant to sympathize should mock those same betrayed ideals. 'I don't find that funny,' she said coldly, and only our status as persecuted people saved us from a break with her.

I can tell lots of stories of this kind. Such changes of opinion involve not only politics but also attitudes generally-feminism first on the rise and then in decline, admiration followed by scorn for the 'nouveau roman,' revolutionary puritanism supplanted by libertarian pornography, the idea of Europe denigrated as reactionary and neocolonialist by people who later unfurled it as a banner of Progress, and so on. And I wonder: do they or do they not recall their earlier attitudes? Do they retain any memory of the history of their changes? Not that it angers me to see people change their opinions. Bezukhov, formerly an admirer of Napoleon, becomes his potential assassin, and I like

him just as much in the one role as in the other. Doesn't a woman who worshiped Lenin in 1971 have the right to rejoice in 1991 that Leningrad is no longer Leningrad? She certainly does. Her change, however, is different from Bezukhov's.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself.

By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindi- viduality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.

Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow. I remember my youth in Czechoslovakia.

Having emerged from our initial enchantment with Communism, we felt each small step against official doctrine to be a courageous act. We protested the persecution of religious believers, stood up for banned modern art, argued against the stupidity of propaganda, criticized the country's dependence on Russia, and so on. In doing so, we were taking some risk-not much, but still some-and that (little) danger gave us a pleasant moral satisfaction. One day a hideous thought came to me: what if our rebellions were dictated not by internal freedom, by courage, but by the desire to please the other tribunal that was already preparing, in the shadows, to sit in judgment?