Tolstoy

Preface

To those of my own generation, the light that has but lately failed was the purest that illumined their youth. In the gloomy twilight of the later nineteenth century it shone as a star of consolation, whose radiance attracted and appeased our awakening spirits. As one of the many — for there are many in France — to whom Tolstoy was very much more than an admired artist: for whom he was a friend, the best of friends, the one true friend in the whole European art — I wish to lay before this sacred memory my tribute of gratitude and of love.

The days when I learned to know him are days that I shall never forget. It was in 1886. After some years of silent germination the marvellous flowers of Russian art began to blossom on the soil of France. Translations of Tolstoy and of Dostoyevsky were being issued in feverish haste by all the publishinghouses of Paris. Between the years '85 and '87 came War and Peace, Anna Karenin, Childhood and Youth, Polikushka, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, the novels of the Caucasus, and the Tales for the People. In the space of a few months, almost of a few weeks, there was revealed to our eager eyes the presentment of a vast, unfamiliar life, in which was reflected a new people, a new world.

I had but newly entered the Normal College. My fellow-scholars were of widely divergent opinions. In our little world were such realistic and ironical spirits as the philosopher Georges Dumas; poets, like Suares, burning with love of the Italian Renaissance; faithful disciples of classic tradition; Stendhalians, Wagnerians, atheists and mystics. It was a world of plentiful discussion, plentiful disagreement; but for a period of some months we were nearly all united by a common love of Tolstoy. It is true that each loved him for different reasons, for each discovered in him himself; but this love was a love that opened the door to a revelation of life; to the wide world itself. On every side — in our families, in our country homes — this mighty voice, which spoke from the confines of Europe, awakened the same emotions, unexpected as they often were. I remember my amazement upon hearing some middle-class people of Nivernais, my native province — people who felt no interest whatever in art, people who read practically nothing — speak with the most intense feeling of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch.

I have read, in the writings of distinguished critics, the theory that Tolstoy owed the best of his ideas to the French romantics: to George Sand, to Victor Hugo. We may ignore the absurdity of supposing that Tolstoy, who could not endure her, could ever have been subject to the influence of George Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Stendhal; nevertheless, we belittle the greatness of Tolstoy, and the power of his fascination, if we attribute to them his ideas. The circle of ideas in which art moves and has its being is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that his might resides, but in his expression of them; in the personal accent, the imprint of the artist, the colour and savour of his life.

Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not borrowed — a matter to be presently considered — never yet had a voice like to his resounded throughout Europe. How else can we explain the thrill of emotion which we all of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, that harmony for which we had so long waited, and of which we felt the need? In our opinion the style counted for nothing. Most of us, myself included, made the acquaintance of Melchior de Vogue's work on the subject of the Russian novel * after we had read the novels of Tolstoy; and his admiration of our hero seemed, after ours, a pallid thing. M. de Vogue spoke essentially as a man of letters pure and simple. But for our part it was not enough to admire the presentation of life: we lived it; it was our own. Ours it was by its ardent love of life, by its quality of youth; ours by its irony, its disillusion, its pitiless discernment, and its haunt- 1 Le Roman Russe.

ing sense of mortality. Ours by its dreams of brotherly love, of peace among men ; ours by its terrible accusation of the lies of civilisation ; ours by its realism ; by its mysticism ours ; by its savour of nature, its sense of invisible forces, its vertigo in the face of the infinite.

To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were what Werther was to an earlier generation: the wonderful mirror of our passions, our strength, our weaknesses, of our hopes, our terrors, our discouragement. We were in no wise anxious to reconcile these many contradictions; still less did we concern ourselves to imprison this complex, multiple mind, full of echoes of the whole wide world, within the narrow limits of religious or political categories, as have the greater number of those who have written of Tolstoy in these latter years: incapable of extricating themselves from the conflict of parties, dragging him into the arena of their own passions, measuring him by the standards of their socialistic or clerical coteries. As if our coteries could be the measure of a genius! What is it to me if Tolstoy is or is not of my party? Shall I ask of what party Shakespeare was, or Dante, before I breathe the atmosphere of his magic or steep myself in its light?

We did not say, as do the critics of to-day, that there were two Tolstoys: the Tolstoy of the period before the crisis and he of the period after the crisis; that the one was the great artist, while the other was not an artist at all. For us there was only one Tolstoy, and we loved the whole of him; for we felt, instinctively, that in such souls as his all things are bound together and each has its integral place.

Contents

PAGE

Preface i

CHAPTER

Chapter I Childhood Chapter I

OUR instinct was conscious then of that which reason must prove to-day. The task is possible now, for the long life has attained its term ; revealing itself, unveiled, to the eyes of all, with unequalled candour, unexampled sincerity. To-day we are at once arrested by the degree in which that life has always remained the same, from the beginning to the end, in spite of all the barriers which critics have sought to erect here and there along its course ; in spite of Tolstoy himself, who, like every impassioned mind, was inclined to the belief, when he loved, or conceived a faith, that he

loved or believed for the first time; that the commencement of his true life dated from that moment. Commencement — recommencement! How often his mind was the theatre of the same struggle, the same crises! We cannot speak of the unity of his ideas, for no such unity existed; we can only speak of the persistence among them of the same diverse elements; sometimes allied, sometimes inimical; more often enemies than allies. Unity is to be found neither in the spirit nor the mind of a Tolstoy; it exists only in the internal conflict of his passions, in the tragedy of his art and his life.

In him life and art are one. Never was work more intimately mingled with the artist's life; it has, almost constantly, the value of autobiography; it enables us to follow the writer, step by step, from the time when he was twenty-five years of age, throughout all the contradictory experiences of his adventurous career. His Journal, which he commenced before the completion of his twentieth year, and continued until his death, 1 together

1 With the exception of a few interruptions : one especially of considerable length, between 1865 and 1878.

with the notes furnished by M. Birukov, 2 completes this knowledge, and enables us not only to read almost day by day in the history of Tolstoy's conscience, but also to reconstitute the world in which his genius struck root, and the minds from which his own drew sustenance.

His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys were very ancient families, of the greater nobility, claiming descent from Rurik, numbering among their ancestors companions of Peter the Great, generals of the Seven Years' War, heroes of the Napoleonic struggle, Decembrists, and political exiles. This inheritance included family traditions; old memories to which Tolstoy was indebted for some of the most original types in his War and Peace; there was the old Prince Bolkonsky, his maternal grandfather, Voltairian, despotic, a belated representative of the aristoc-

2 For his remarkable biography of Leon Tolsto'i, Vie et CEuvre, Memoires, Souvenirs, Lettres, Extraits du Journal intime, Notes et Documents biographiques, reunis, coordonnes et annotes par P. Birukov, revised by Leo Tolstoy, translated into French from the MS. by J. W. Bienstock.

racy of the days of Catherine 11.; Prince Nikolas Grigorovitch Volkonsky, a cousin of his mother, who was wounded at Austerlitz, and, like Prince Andrei, was carried off the field of battle under the eyes of Napoleon; his father, who had some of the characteristics of Nicolas Rostoff, 3 and his mother, the Princess Marie, the ugly, charming woman with the beautiful eyes, whose goodness illumines the pages of War and Peace.

He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, Childhood and Youth, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer's mother died when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was unable to recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face with a luminous smile, which radiated gladness. . . .

"Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not know what sorrow is." 4

3 He also fought in the Napoleonic campaigns, and was a prisoner in France during the years 1 8 14-15.

4 Childhood, chap. ii.

Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of her own invention.

His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sadeyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death caused him "for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with despair." 5 Here was the child's earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his Childhood, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the death and burial of his mother.

Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana. 6 There Leo

8 Childhood, chap, xxvii.

8 Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies "the open glade" (literally, the "light glade"), is a little vil-

Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and there, eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the five was a girl: that Marie who in later years became a religious ; it was with her that Tolstoy took refuge in dying, when he fled from home and family. Of the four sons, Sergius was charming and selfish, "sincere to a degree that I have never known equalled"; Dmitri was passionate, self-centred, introspective, and in later years, as a student, abandoned himself eagerly to the practices of religion; caring nothing for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the poor, sheltering the infirm; suddenly, with the same quality of violence, plunging into debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ransoming a girl whom he had known in a public brothel, and receiving her into his home;

lage to the south of Moscow, at a distance of some leagues from Toula, in one of the most thoroughly Russian of the provinces. "Here the two great regions of Russia," says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, "the region of the forests and the agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. In the surrounding country we meet with no Finns, Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians. The district of Toula lies at the very heart of Russia."

finally dying of phthisis at the age of twentynine; 7 Nikolas, the eldest, the favourite brother, had inherited his mother's gift of imagination, her power of telling stories ; 8 ironical, nervous, and refined; in later years an officer in the Caucasus, where he formed the habit of a drunkard; a man, like his brother, full of Christian kindness, living in hovels, and sharing with the poor all that he possessed. Tourgenev said of him "that he put into practice that humble attitude towards life which his brother Leo was content to develop in theory."

The orphans were cared for by two greathearted women, one was their Aunt Tatiana, 9 of whom Tolstoy said that "she had two virtues: serenity and love." Her whole life was love; a devotion that never failed. "She made me understand the moral pleasure of loving."

7 Tolstoy has depicted him in Anna Karenin, as the brother of Levine.

8 He wrote the Diary of a Hunter.

9 In reality she was a distant relative. She had loved Tolstoy's father, and was loved by him; but effaced herself, like Sonia in War and Peace.

The other was their Aunt Alexandra, who was for ever serving others, herself avoiding service, dispensing with the help of servants. Her favourite occupation was reading the lives of the Saints, or conversing with pilgrims or the feeble-minded. Of these "innocents" there were several, men and women, who lived in the house. One, an old woman, a pilgrim, was the godmother of Tolstoy's sister. Another, the idiot Gricha, knew only how to weep and pray. . ...

" Gricha, notable Christian! So mighty was your faith that you felt the approach of God; so ardent was your love that words rushed from your lips, words that your reason could not control. And how you used to celebrate His splendour, when speech failed you, when, all tears, you lay prostrated on the ground!" 10

Who can fail to understand the influence, in the shaping of Tolstoy, of all these humble souls? In some of them we seem to see an outline, a prophecy, of the Tolstoy of later years. Their prayers and their affection must

10 Childhood, chap. xii.

have sown the seeds of faith in the child's mind; seeds of which the aged man was to reap the harvest.

With the exception of the idiot Gricha, Tolstoy does not speak, in his narrative of Childhood, of these humble helpers who assisted in the work of building up his mind. But then how clearly we see it through the medium of the book — this soul of a little child; "this pure, loving heart, a ray of clear light, which always discovered in others the best of their qualities" — this more than common tenderness! Being happy, he ponders on the only creature he knows to be unhappy; he cries at the thought, and longs to devote himself to his good. He hugs and kisses an ancient horse, begging his pardon, because he has hurt him. He is happy in loving, even if he is not loved. Already we can see the germs of his future genius; his imagination, so vivid that he cries over his own stories ; his brain, always busy, always trying to discover of what other people think; his precocious powers of memory 11 and observation; the at-

11 He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated

W TOLSTOY

tentive eyes, which even in the midst of his sorrow scrutinise the faces about him, and the authenticity of their sorrow. He tells us that at five years of age he felt for the first time "that life is not a time of amusement, but a very heavy task." 12

Happily he forgot the discovery. In those days he used to soothe his mind with popular tales; those mythical and legendary dreams known in Russia as bylines; stories from the Bible; above all the sublime History of Joseph, which he cited in his old age as a model of narrative art: and, finally, the Arabian Nights, which at his grandmother's house were recited every evening, from the vantage of the window-seat^ by a blind story-teller.

1878), to be able to recall the sensations of being swaddled as a baby, and of being bathed in a tub. See First Memories.

12 First Memories,

Chapter II Chapter II

He studied at Kazan. 1 He was not a notable student. It used to be said of the three brothers 2 : "Sergius wants to, and can ; Dmitri wants to, and can't; Leo can't and doesn't want to."

He passed through the period which he terms "the desert of adolescence"; a desert of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the

1 From 1842 to 1847. [Science was as yet unorganised; and its teachers, even in Western Europe, had not the courage of the facts they taught. Men still sought for an anchor in the philosophic systems of the ancients. The theory of evolution, put forward at the beginning of the century, had fallen into obscurity. Science was dry, dogmatic, uncoordinated, insignificant. Hence, perhaps, the contempt for science which distinguished Tolstoy throughout his life, and which made the later Tolstoy possible. — Trans.]

2 Nikolas, five years older than Leo, had completed his

studies in 1844.

burning winds of folly. The pages of Boyhood, and in especial those of Youth, 3 are rich in intimate confessions relating to these years.

He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition of perpetual fever. For a year he was completely at sea; he roamed from one system of philosophy to another. As a Stoic, he indulged in self-inflicted physical tortures. As an Epicurean he debauched himself. Then came a faith in metempsychosis. Finally he fell into a condition of nihilism not far removed from insanity; he used to feel that if only he could turn round with sufficient rapidity he would find himself face to face with nothingness. . . . He analysed himself continually:

"I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it." 4

This perpetual self-analysis, this mechanism of reason turning in the void, remained to him as a dangerous habit, which was

3 The English translation is entitled Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.

4 Youth, chap. xix.

"often," in his own words, " to be detrimental to me in life"; but by which his art has profited inexpressibly. 5

As another result of self-analysis, he had lost all his religious convictions; or such was his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to pray; he went to church no longer; 6 but his faith was not extinguished; it was only smouldering.

"Nevertheless, I did believe — in something. But in what? I could not say. I still believed in God; or rather I did not deny Him. But in what God? I did not know. Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I could not have said precisely what that doctrine was." 7

From time to time he was obsessed by dreams of goodness. He wished to sell his carriage and give the money to the poor: to give them the tenth part of his fortune; to

5 Notably in his first volumes — in the Tales of Sebastopol.

6 This was the time when he used to read Voltaire, and find pleasure in so doing.

7 Confessions, vol. I.

live without the help of servants, "for they were men like himself." During an illness 8 he wrote certain "Rules of Life." He naively assigned himself the duty of "studying everything, of mastering all subjects: law, medicine, languages, agriculture, history, geography, and mathematics; to attain the highest degree of perfection in music and painting," and so forth. He had "the conviction that the destiny of man was a process of incessant self-perfection."

Insensibly, under the stress of a boy's passions, of a violent sensuality and a stupendous pride of self, 9 this faith in perfection went astray, losing its disinterested quality, becoming material and practical. If he still wished to perfect his will, his body, and his mind, it was in order to conquer the world

8 In March and April, 1847.

9 "All that man does he does out of amour-propre" says Nekhludov, in Boyhood.

In 1853 Tolstoy writes, in his Journal: "My great failing: pride. A vast self-love, without justification. . . . I am so ambitious that if I had to choose between glory and virtue (which I love) I am sure I should choose the former."

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH W

and to enforce its love. 10 He wished to please. To please : it was not an easy ambition. He was then of a simian ugliness: the face was long, heavy, brutish; the hair was cropped close, growing low upon the forehead; the eyes were small, with a hard, forbidding glance, deeply sunken in shadowy orbits; the nose was large, the lips were thick and protruding, and the ears were enormous. 11 Unable to alter this ugliness, which even as a child had subjected him to fits of despair, 12 he pretended to a realisation of the ideal man of the world, Vhomme comme il faut. 1 * This ideal led him to do as did other "men of the

10 "I wanted to be known by all, loved by all. I wanted every one, at the mere sound of my name, to be struck with admiration and gratitude."

11 According to a portrait dated 1848, in which year he attained his twentieth year.

12 "I thought there would be no happiness on earth for any one who had so large a nose, so thick lips, and such small eyes."

13 "I divided humanity into three classes : the 'correct,' or 'smart,' who alone were worthy of esteem ; those who were not 'correct,' who deserved only contempt and hatred; and the people, the plebs, who simply did not exist." {Youth, chap, xxxi.)

world": to gamble, run foolishly into debt, and to live a completely dissipated existence. 14

One quality always came to his salvation: his absolute sincerity.

"Do you know why I like you better than the others?" says Nekhludov to his friend. "You have a precious and surprising quality: candour."

"Yes, I am always saying things which I am ashamed to own even to myself." 15

In his wildest moments he judges himself with a pitiless insight.

"I am living an utterly bestial life," he writes in his Journal. "I am as low as one can fall." Then, with his mania for analysis, he notes minutely the causes of his errors:

"i. Indecision or lack of energy. 2. Selfdeception. 3. Insolence. 4. False modesty. 5. Ill-temper. 6. Licentiousness. 7. Spirit of imitation. 8. Versatility. 9. Lack of reflection."

14 Especially during a period spent in St. Petersburg,

1847-48.

15 Boyhood.

While still a student he was applying this independence of judgment to the criticism of social conventions and intellectual superstitions. He scoffed at the official science of the University; denied the least importance to historical studies, and was put under arrest for his audacity of thought. At this period he discovered Rousseau, reading his Confessions and Emile. The discovery affected him like a mental thunderbolt.

"I made him an object of religious worship. I wore a medallion portrait of him hung around my neck, as though it were a holy image." 16

His first essays in philosophy took the form of commentaries on Rousseau (1846-47).

In the end, however, disgusted with the University and with "smartness," he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, to bury himself in the country (1847-51) ; where he once more came into touch with the people. He professed to come to their assistance, as their benefactor and their teacher. His experiences of this

16 Conversations with M. Paul Boyer (Le Temps), August 28, 1 901.

period have been related in one of his earliest books, A Russian Proprietor (A Landlord's Morning) (1852) ; a remarkable novel, whose hero, Prince Nekhludov, 17 is Tolstoy in disguise.

Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left the University to devote himself to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the course of a visit to the village, we see him striving against jeering indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his "idea that love and goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the only truth possible in

17 Nekhludov figures also in Boyhood and Youth (1854), i n A Brush with the Enemy (1856) ; the Diary of a Sportsman (1856) ; Lucerne (1857) J an d Resurrection (1899). We must remember that different characters appear under this one name. Tolstoy has not always given Nekhludov the same physical aspect; and the latter commits suicide at the end of the Diary of a Sportsman. These different Nekhludovs are various aspects of Tolstoy, endowed with his worst and his best characteristics.

this world." He feels himself defeated. He is weary and ashamed.

"Seated before the piano, his hand unconsciously moved upon the keys. A chord sounded ; then a second, then a third. . . . He began to play. The chords were not always perfect in rhythm; they were often obvious to the point of banality; they did not reveal any talent for music; but they gave him a melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. At each change of key he awaited, with a flutter of the heart, for what was about to follow; his imagination vaguely supplementing the deficiencies of the actual sound. He heard a choir, an orchestra . . . and his keenest pleasure arose from the enforced activity of his imagination, which brought before him, without logical connection, but with astonishing clearness, the most varied scenes and images of the past and the future. . . ."

Once more he sees the moujiks — vicious, distrustful, lying, idle, obstinate, contrary, with whom he has lately been speaking; but this time he sees them with all their good qualities and without their vices; he sees into their hearts with the intuition of love; he sees therein their patience, their resignation to the fate which is crushing them; their forgiveness of wrongs, their family affection, and the causes of their pious, mechanical attachment to the past. He recalls their days of honest labour, healthy and fatiguing. . . .

" 'It is beautiful,' he murmurs . . . 'Why am I not one of these?' " 18

The entire Tolstoy is already contained in the hero of this first novel ; 19 his piercing vision and his persistent illusions. He observes men and women with an impeccable realism ; but no sooner does he close his eyes than his dreams resume their sway; his dreams and his love of mankind.

38 A Russian Proprietor.

19 Contemporary with Childhood.

Chapter III

youth: the army

CHAPTER III youth: the army

TOLSTOY, in the year 1850, was not as patient as Nekhludov. Yasnaya Polyana had disillusioned and disappointed him. He was as weary of the people as he was of the world of fashion; his attitude as benefactor wearied him ; he could bear it no more. Moreover, he was harassed by creditors. In 1851 he escaped to the Caucasus ; to the army in which his brother Nikolas was already an officer.

He had hardly arrived, hardly tasted the quiet of the mountains, before he was once more master of himself; before he had recovered his God.

"Last night 1 I hardly slept. I began to pray to God. I cannot possibly express the sweetness of the feeling that came to me when

1 The nth of June, 185 1, in the fortified camp of Stari-Iourt, in the Caucasus.

I prayed. I recited the customary prayers; but I went on praying for a long time. I felt the desire of something very great, very beautiful. . . . What? I cannot say what. I wanted to be one with the Infinite Being: to be dissolved, comprehended, in Him. I begged Him to forgive me my trespasses. . . . But no, I did not beg Him ; I felt that He did pardon me, since He granted me that moment of wonderful joy. I was praying, yet at the same time I felt that I could not, dared not pray. I thanked Him, not in words, but in thought. . . . Scarcely an hour had passed, and I was listening to the voice of vice. I fell asleep dreaming of glory, of women: it was stronger than I. Never mind! I thank God for that moment of happiness: for showing me my pettiness and my greatness. I want to pray, but I do not know how ; I want to understand, but I dare not. I abandon myself to Thy will!" 2

The flesh was not conquered ; not then, nor ever; the struggle between God and the pas-

2 Journal.

YOUTH: THE ARMY S7

sions of man continued in the silence of his heart. Tolstoy speaks in his Journal of the three demons which were devouring him:

i. The passion for. gambling. Possible struggle.

2. Sensuality. Struggle very difficult.

3. Vanity. The most terrible of all.

At the very moment when he was dreaming of living for others and of sacrificing himself, voluptuous or futile thoughts would assail him: the image of some Cossack woman, or "the despair he would feel if his moustache were higher on one side than the other." — "No matter!" God was there; He would not forsake him. Even the effervescence of the struggle was fruitful: all the forces of life were exalted thereby.