Tolstoy

Ernest Joseph Simmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317668886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Tolstoy's fame as one of the world's greatest novelists has never been in doubt, but the importance of his views on the social, moral and religious issues of his time is not so widely recognised. This study, first published in 1973, presents an introduction to the historical and cultural background of Tolstoy's lifetime, then going on to consider the major events of his developing personality as a writer and reformer.

As well as considering the famous novels and literary criticism, Simmons treats his educational theories and practice, famine relief work, spiritual crises and religious, social and moral beliefs, as reflected in controversial writings such as What I Believe, What Then Must We Do? and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He also investigates Tolstoy's involvement in government, war and revolution, and the relevance of his reformist views in the contemporary world.

I

Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth

I

They agreed in the household that as a child Leo Tolstoy seemed to feel everything more intensely than others. His hair-trigger emotions, high spirits, and keen enjoyment of everything set him apart. His sister recalled that he was like a ray of light. He would dash into the room with a happy smile, as if he wished to tell everyone about a new discovery he had just made. If he were petted, tears of joy filled his eyes, and they nicknamed him ‘cry-baby Leo.’ He often expressed his uncommon sensibility in spontaneous outpourings of love and in eager efforts to win affection. In a sense, this acute sensibility defined the man and the literary artist.

Yasnaya Polyana, the family country estate where Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828,^* was an ideal playground for a boy. It is 130 miles south of Moscow and about 10 miles from the city of Tula. In front of the spacious manor house was an elaborate flower garden and beyond stretched a large park of ancient lime tree alleys, and clumps of hazel and birch. Extensive cultivated fields bounded the estate and beyond were the thick Zakaz woods cut by the Voronka River.

The Tolstoy line was an old one in Russia, belonging to the nobility, and through intermarriage of male and female branches was related to many of the most distinguished families. Some of its members had served in notable positions in the government, and in the eighteenth century Peter the Great conferred the title of Count on the family. Leo’s paternal grandfather, the Governor of Kazan, had so depleted the family fortune that his son, Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, an army officer during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, found it expedient to reject his inheritance because it was so encumbered with debts. He took the usual way out, repairing his fortune by marrying, in 1822, a wealthy heiress, Marya Nikolayevna Volkonsky, only daughter of a celebrated relic of the age of Catherine II who later was to serve as prototype of Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace. She was five years older than her husband and rather unattractive, but she brought him the rich estate of Yasnaya Polyana with its 800 serfs inherited upon her father’s death in 1821.

Leo was the youngest of four sons – Nikolai, Sergei, and Dmitri. Then, shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Marya (Masha), his mother died in 1830. Though Leo was not quite two at the time and could hardly have remembered his mother, from the impressive things he learned about her from members of the family, old servants, and her letters, he revered her memory throughout his life. If genius is an accident of nature and has no ancestors or descendants, it is nevertheless subject, especially in childhood, to all the factors that influence ordinary mortals. The deep moral and spiritual image of his mother appears to have influenced the impressionable Leo, and the idealized memory of her that his vivid imagination evoked emerged years later in the brilliant characterization of Princess Marya in War and Peace.

So did the more real memory of his father in the creation of Nikolai Rostov in the same novel. Though this portrait is devoid of the spiritual, Nikolai Rostov, like Tolstoy’s father, emerges in his maturity as a sensible, pragmatic man, kind but firm with his children and serfs, and zealous for the development of his estate, Bald Hills (Yasnaya Polyana). Tolstoy’s father, having resigned from the army and become disillusioned with the reactionary regime of Nicholas I, eschewed further government service and settled down to the comfortable existence of a well-to-do landowner. Tolstoy wrote with admiration of his father’s bright, happy demeanor, his kindness, and his dignified bearing before all, no matter what their social position. The son grew up with a still greater consciousness of his own worth and with the same unwillingness to humble himself, least of all to government officials.

Yasnaya Polyana was a palace of pleasure for the growing family of children. There little Leo was first introduced to the wonders of nature of which he became such an acute and sensitive observer. Endless games, many horses and dogs, hunting, swimming in the Voronka River, and various winter sports – all absorbed the children. Some thirty servants drawn from village serfs took care of their every need. They were on terms of intimacy and affection with the family, a position not unlike that of black servant-slaves in kindly Southern homes, although this was by no means the general rule on estates of Russian gentry or on those in the United States. Tolstoy preserved the happiest of memories of some of these house-serfs in his reminiscences of childhood, and charming images of them survive in his fiction. After his mother’s death he was also surrounded at Yasnaya Polyana by the tender care of female relatives – a grandmother, aunts, and especially his beloved ‘Auntie’ Tatyana, a distant relative who played an important part in his rearing and was enshrined in the lovely portrayal of Sonya in War and Peace, ‘I saw and felt how she enjoyed and I understood the joy of love,’ he wrote of Auntie Tatyana in Recollections. ‘That was the first thing. And the second thing was that she taught me the charm of an unhurried tranquil life.’¹

Though Tolstoy’s father did not particularly cultivate the society of neighboring estate owners, such visitors, along with relatives, were not infrequent at Yasnaya Polyana. Often a score or more people, family and guests, sat down to the main meal with a footman to serve behind each chair. On such occasions the host kept the company lively with his anecdotes and jokes.

Lessons did not interfere too much with the children’s fun. At this early age, education, as was usual on landed estates, was provided by foreign tutors, largely as a device for beginning the study of languages early. Educationally they were often deficient in everything but their native tongue. In Childhood Tolstoy has left a memorable picture of his old German instructor at this time, a kindly man from Saxony whose reading, besides his German exercise book, seems to have been limited to a pamphlet on the manuring of cabbage patches, an odd volume on the history of the Seven Years’ War, and a treatise on hydrostatics. But he did encourage in him, Tolstoy noted, virtuous precepts of tolerance and kindness to all the poor and unfortunate of life, among whom he included himself. From Auntie Tatyana he learned well the elements of French, the correct use of which had become a hallmark of social distinction among upper levels of Russian nobility. Yasnaya Polyana also contained a substantial library, built up by Grandfather Volkonsky, a cultural embellishment rather unusual among rural gentry. It may be assumed that little Leo pieced out the imperfections of his initial formal education by dipping into some of these books. For when he was about eight his father once asked him to read some Pushkin to the assembled company. Leo’s selection of poems, which is on record, suggests a certain degree of artistic taste and understanding at this early age.

However, it was the rough-and-tumble child’s world of Yasnaya Polyana that most occupied him, the ‘wonderful period of innocent, joyful, poetic childhood’² as he mentioned in his Recollections. How impatiently the children waited for the hallowed period between Christmas and New Year when family, relatives, servants, and guests swarmed into the house, dressed in outlandish costumes (little Leo was got up as a majestic Turk with burnt-cork mustaches), prancing to the lively music, and excitedly opening gifts that the host distributed. But of all the games of childhood the one that Tolstoy recalled with most enjoyment and deep feeling was an invention of his older brother Nikolai. He had discovered, he told them, a remarkable secret which, when known, would make all men happy; there would be no more disease, no human misery, and no anger. All would love one another and become ‘Ant Brothers.’ (Moravskiye bratya – ‘Moravian Brothers’ – the religious sect about which young Nikolai had no doubt read or heard, was mistakenly transformed by the children into Muraveinye bratya – ‘Ant Brothers’ – which is phonetically somewhat similar.) The children adopted the idea with enthusiasm, and under chairs covered with shawls they cuddled together in the dark, waiting for the revelation which, Nikolai informed them, was written on a little green stick buried in a special place by the road in the Zakaz forest. Towards the end of his life Tolstoy wrote:

The ideal of the Ant Brothers clinging lovingly to one another, only not under two armchairs curtained by shawls, but of all the people of the world under the wide dome of heaven, has remained unaltered for me. As I then believed that there was a little green stick whereon was written something which would destroy all evil in men and give them great blessings, so I now believe that such truth exists among people and will be revealed to them and will give them what it promises.³

II

In the winter of 1837, when Tolstoy was not yet nine, the family moved to a large rented house in Moscow. The time had come to take the children’s education more seriously, especially that of the two older sons who would soon be preparing for the university. This first venture into the great world outside Yasnaya Polyana was exciting and also disillusioning for the irrepressible Leo. He found it hard to get used to all these strange people who did not know him and did not seem to care about him.

In the following summer his father, on a business trip to Tula, fell dead in the street. And several months later Leo’s grandmother also died. This first conscious experience with death of those close to him depressed and puzzled the boy. But he recognized later that his expression of grief over the loss was in imitation of that of the grown-ups, and it pleased him to hear them sadly exclaim that the Tolstoy children were now ‘complete orphans.’

Saintlike Aunt Alexandra became the children’s guardian, the property was placed in trust, and expenses had to be sharply cut. Results of the domestic changes impressed young Leo only when the family was obliged to move to much smaller Moscow living quarters and the Tolstoy children were given cheap presents at a Christmas party to which they were invited whereas their rich Gorchakov cousins received expensive gifts.

Despite altered circumstances, the new educational program continued. A bright young Frenchman, Prosper Saint-Thomas, had been employed to direct their studies, and occasionally teachers from Moscow University were obtained for tutoring in special subjects. Leo quickly fell afoul of the Frenchman’s strict regimen and for the first time in his life he was threatened with a whipping. The experience made an ineffaceable impression on him, for seventy years later he told his Russian biographer:

I now do not remember the reason for it, but I thought it was a most undeserved punishment for Saint-Thomas first to lock me up in a room, and then to threaten me with the rod. I experienced a terrible feeling of indignation, revolt, and aversion not only to Saint-Thomas, but towards that violence which he wished to exercise on me. This occasion was perhaps one reason for the horror and aversion for every kind of violence which I have felt throughout my whole life.⁴

Tolstoy never fitted easily into the mold of conventional education. If stimulated by a teacher or by curiosity, he was capable of amazing spurts of energy in the learning process and was aided in performance by uncommon assimilative powers and an excellent memory. Otherwise he shirked lessons and appears to have made little impression on his teachers from the age of nine to thirteen. The few extant schoolboy exercises reveal nothing more than the usual cliches of observation, mistakes in spelling, and a few examples of simplicity in expression.

Self-education appealed to him more. Sometimes it took the odd form of seeking answers to puzzling questions he concocted through the means of experimentation. For example, he wondered if the answer to achieving real happiness did not rest on the ability to learn to endure suffering, and he would hold out at arm’s length a large, heavy dictionary until the operation became unbearable, or he would lash his bare back until the tears came. On another occasion he wondered whether it would not be possible to fly by sitting down on his heels, clasping his arms firmly about his knees, and jumping into space. (It may be remembered that in War and Peace Natasha Rostov, in enchanting circumstances, has exactly the same notion.) He tried it one day from the upstairs window of the study room and fortunately suffered only a slight concussion from a drop of some eighteen feet. Preoccupation with abstract problems, such as whether man existed somewhere else before he was born, surprised and amused his older brothers. In turn, they appealed to their fledgeling ‘philosopher’ to settle the familiar schoolboy conundrum: Did God exist? and Leo appears to have decided that He did not.

No doubt, the bid for originality and his exhibitionism, which included shaving his eyebrows so they would grow in thicker and shaving half his head for no apparent reason at all, had some compensatory connection with his harassed position as the baby-brother of the family. He had to struggle for acceptance as an equal and against the added disadvantage of an acute self-consciousness about his appearance: broad nose, thick lips, small grey eyes, and tufted hair. Although adults complimented him on his pleasant smile and clever face, when he looked at it in the mirror he had to confess to himself that he would have given anything in the world for a handsome face.

Young Leo competed with his brothers and their friends for the attention of the girls they met at parties. When he was asked, as an old man, about his early ‘loves,’ he said that the first and most intense was for pretty little Sonya Koloshin. In Childhood he tells how Nikolai (Leo) imagines a rapturous conversation with her one night in the dark of his bedroom. Unable to keep the secret, he wakes his brother to tell him of his love. And he rejoices to learn that he also loves her (Nikolai wanted all to love Sonya). But when the older brother describes in detail how he would like to kiss her body all over, Nikolai is outraged by this sensual touch and weeps bitterly over the defilement of his pure image. With this boyhood incident still green in his memory at the age of sixty-two, Tolstoy jotted down in his diary: ‘I have been thinking of writing a novel of love – chaste love as with Sonya Koloshin – in which a transition to sensuality is impossible and which serves as the best protection against sensuality.’⁵ Wisely, perhaps, he never attempted this work.

By the time he had reached thirteen Leo was regarded in the family as an original youngster but erratic and impulsive. When criticized for flights of bizarre behavior, his natural outgoing, affectionate nature turned shy; he grew introspective, shunned his playmates, and retreated to a heroic world of his own creation.

The family returned to Yasnaya Polyana from Moscow during the summer months, and when the two older brothers became involved in advanced studies, Leo, Dmitri, and Masha remained with Auntie Tatyana in the country. In August 1841 still another death struck the family – Aunt Alexandra died. The guardianship of the children was assumed by her younger sister Pelegeya Yushkov who lived in Kazan, and her immediate decision was that they should all move there.

III

With its mixed Russian and Tartar population striving to assume metropolitan airs, Kazan was a far cry from Moscow. As the grandchildren of a former governor of the town, whose daughter was their sponsor the Tolstoy young people won immediate social acceptance. And the indulgent Yushkovs, with their large comfortable house, saw to it that their wards enjoyed the advantages of Kazan’s high society.

The town boasted a respectable university which was able to attract distinguished foreign scholars to its staff. The oldest Tolstoy brother, Nikolai, transferred to its Philosophy Faculty from that of Moscow University, and two years later (1843), Sergei and Dmitri matriculated in the same division. Perhaps because of its reputed difficulty, the younger Leo contemplated a diplomatic career which required him to enter the Faculty of Oriental Languages. But he had to undergo extensive preparation which involved special teachers and courses in Arabic and Turko-Tartar in the local Gymnasium. Not until 1844 was he ready for his entrance examinations. He passed well all subjects in which he was interested but flunked history, geography, and statistics and was denied admission. His self-esteem deflated but still anxious to follow his brothers into the university with its special student privileges, striking uniform, and gay social life, he applied himself to the failed subjects, passed them on a re-examination, and en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
• 2 The Caucasus
• 3 War, Travel, and Self-Definition
• 4 Educator
• 5 War and Peace
• 6 Anna Karenina
• 7 Spiritual Crisis and Religious Faith
• 8 What Then Must We Do?
• 9 Back to Art
• 10 The Kingdom of God Is Within You
• 11 What Is Art?
• 12 Resurrection
• 13 Government – War – Revolution – Land Question – Death
• 14 International Recognition
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index