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LITERATURE & HUMANITIES Leo Tolstoy: Sinner, Novelist, ProphetSimon Farrow BRLSI Member 18 January 2005 Introduction. Leo Tolstoy can attract very different reactions. For example, two modern British writers, Raymond Tallis and David Smail, are both medical professionals who have written on science and society and who share a belief in the importance of human individual experience in a modern culture which so often defines people in terms only of society, or biology, or language. Both Tallis and Smail refer to Leo Tolstoy in passing: for Tallis, Tolstoy descended in old age from a great artist to a selfish crank (1); whereas for Smail, Tolstoy had a deserved reputation as a moral thinker, unfortunately now largely forgotten (2). Tolstoy, widely known as the author of War and Peace, is the subject of many biographies, but is hardly a celebrity figure in mass modern consciousness. Beyond his image as the single-work author, he in fact had a turbulent and full life, which casts light on why, even when he attracts passing reference, he arouses such conflicting reactions.
Leo Tolstoy ‘the sinner’.As a young man in 1849
Leo Tolstoy ‘the novelist’
Leo Tolstoy ‘the prophet’ The Sinner.(3) Tolstoy was born in 1828 at the country estate of Yasnaya Polyana south of Moscow. He was inescapably a Russian aristocrat of the old regime, a fact which formed so much of his character and his views, in what he loved and what he hated with all of his rather forbidding personality. Until he was nine he lived on the estate with its house of thirty-four rooms and farmland dotted with woods and the river where he and his three brothers and sister could swim in the summer. By his own account it seems to have been a very happy childhood, even though his mother died when he was only two. After that it was his Aunt Tatiana who was a substitute mother, and he idealised her later in life as teaching him ‘the spiritual delights of love’. He was close to his brother Nicolai, who was five years older, and who said during their childhood games in the estates’ fields and forests that in a forest glade he had buried a green stick on which was carved the secret of the attainment of universal love among humanity. When Tolstoy was nine the family moved to Moscow, and soon after that his father died, and the children were placed under the guardianship of another aunt. In Moscow, Tolstoy had a new tutor who once tried to beat him, at which Tolstoy resisted. Tolstoy much later claimed that this incident was ‘one reason for that horror and aversion for every kind of violence, which I have felt throughout my whole life’. By age sixteen Tolstoy was retiring to his room to scourge himself to harden himself to physical pain, then remembering that life is short and so laying on his bed for three days enjoying reading and eating honey cakes. In 1844 Tolstoy went to the University of Kazan where he dragged out three years changing subjects; first oriental languages, with a view to being in the diplomatic service, then law, and then he dropped out altogether in 1847. During that time Tolstoy was continually making detailed resolutions and then not keeping them. In January 1847 there were six high-minded resolutions to structure his day and his work, then after he left the university in April another plan to study a range of subjects, which was not fulfilled. At this time he also started to keep a diary, which, with gaps, he was to keep for the remainder of his life, and in it we see his strangely divided, intense personality. A rather startling example was in June 1847 where he resolved to avoid the company of women due to their being the cause of many male vices, yet three months earlier his very first diary entry had referred laconically to treatment for gonorrhoea at a clinic, obtained, as he said, ‘from the customary source’- he had become a regular brothel visitor. In 1847 Tolstoy returned to the estate, which he was due to inherit as the family estates were soon to be divided after the death of a guardian aunt. There he tried his hand at being an "improving" landlord with a new steam-powered threshing machine which was a disaster because of the serfs’ conservative agricultural habits. He then went intermittently to Moscow over the next few years and there picked up gambling as another vice, a problem, which was to lead to parts of the estate being sold off. Between 1849 and 1851 his life then alternated between town and country, gambling and very frequently visiting brothels, and filling his diary with the usual high minded resolutions and failures. A photograph of him in 1849 gives an impression of a forbiddingly intense, and perhaps very troubled, young man. He had a dramatic break from this aimless life in 1851 when his brother Nicolai suggested that Tolstoy return with him and the army to the Caucasus. Tolstoy agreed, and there showed his physical strength and courage by hunting, and fighting with the Cossacks against ‘rebels’ like the Chechens. He also continued his whoring, drinking and gambling. After nine months Tolstoy changed from civilian camp-follower to soldier and from 1854 was a junior officer in the Crimea and was in Sebastopol when it fell to the British and French forces. Looking at Tolstoy’s character up to his mid-20s we can see what were to remain certain enduring features – primarily that he was anything but a "moderate" man. He is drawn to the story of the green stick and its secret of universal love, yet he has a very marked egoism; he speaks of abhorring all violence, yet comes alive when fighting with the Cossacks; he resolves to avoid women through chastity, yet this is the one way he fails to avoid them; most of all, he yearns for a consistent vision to commit himself to, yet he drifts. The story of the youthful self-flagellation followed by the three-day siesta shows the beginning of a lifelong tension between self-gratification and self-denial. Some critics have seen in all this just hypocrisy, but this is unfair because Tolstoy did also possess a ruthless sincerity. In this he had great similarities to the writer he most admired, Rousseau, whose Confessions are the same curious mixture of idealism and rather repellent behaviour. Tolstoy’s one possible route to personal integration was his writing, which had already begun during this turbulent period. As far back as 1840, when he was twelve, he had composed some verses on the nameday of his Aunt Tatiana, and from then he wrote in all sorts of genres until September 1852 when the autobiographical ‘Childhood’ appeared in a Petersburg magazine. This was followed by ‘Boyhood’ (1854) and ‘Youth’(1857), and over the three years soldiering from 1852 stories such as ‘The Raid’ and ‘The Cossacks’ inspired by the Caucasus, three ‘Sebastopol stories’, and other pieces. Tolstoy moved to Petersburg and to a civil service job after the Crimean War and mixed in literary circles which included the young Turgenev. Before the end of the war the repressive Tsar Nicholas I died and his son succeeded as Alexander II in 1855. There was a new hope among liberals for reform, especially the abolition of serfdom, and in literary circles there was vigorous debate between Westerners like Turgenev who looked to Western Europe as an example, and the Slavophiles who thought that the Russian ‘soul’ should remain uncontaminated by the West. Tolstoy thought that the Westerners were fools for wanting to copy the materialist west but that the Slavophiles were wrapped up in obscurantist mysteries. One of the Slavophiles wrote to Turgenev of the charismatic but abrupt and uncouth Tolstoy that he was a strange, immature and unsettled young man. And indeed he was still restless, and in 1857 decided to see Western Europe for himself and so went to Paris where he saw the sights, went to lectures at the Sorbonne, took lessons in Italian and English, and visited the brothels. He also witnessed the public execution of a criminal by guillotine and later wrote of his utter revulsion at state murder. In Switzerland, he stayed at a hotel where a wandering musician was ignored by the polite guests in his appeals for money and Tolstoy ran after him to take him back for champagne in the main lounge in a display of conspicuous altruism. After a second Western European trip in 1860-61 taking in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and England, Tolstoy returned to settle at Yasnaya, Polyana where he applied himself in earnest to improving landownership and to setting up a village school and teaching in it himself according to his educational theory, following Rousseau. Then in September 1862 he was married, to the eighteen year old Sonya Behrs, of a family of his acquaintance. Now he was the mature husband, but the auspices were not good - he had no teeth even though he was only thirty-four - and he insisted before marriage on showing his fiancée all his diaries, including all his sins, an act which perfectly captures his characteristics of compulsive sinning, compulsive confession, and rather egoistic self-condemnation. Nevertheless, soon after marriage he seems to have entered a period of creative flourishing. In October 1863 he wrote to a friend that he was absorbed in writing a novel- it was to become War and Peace six years later. The Novelist After six years of writing and re-writing, with Tolstoy’s new wife copying from his terrible handwriting into a readable hand, War and Peace was completed in 1869. The epic novel in the main spans the period from 1805, with Napoleon’s defeat of the Austro-Russian alliance at Austerlitz, through Napoleon’s uneasy peace with Russia in 1807 after he had come to dominate central Europe, to his invasion of Russia, the burning of Moscow and the retreat from Moscow in 1812. Tolstoy was able to write of war and the Russian army from personal experience, and about events, which were still relatively fresh in the Russian folk memory, within the lifetime of his parents. The novel is broadly divided into the three elements of the military, the philosophical overview, and the personal story of the interweaving of the lives and fortunes during the period of some Russian noble families, primarily the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, who were modelled respectively on Tolstoy’s wife’s family and Tolstoy’s Volkonsky relatives on his mother’s side. Natasha Rostova, who is a symbol in the novel of spontaneity and life, is modelled on Tolstoy’s wife’s younger sister. If there is a central character it is Pierre Bezukhov, who has elements of Tolstoy in his inherited wealth, his early debaucheries and his search for meaning. At first Pierre is an amiable dreamer, plump and with spectacles, who follows the wild aristocratic set but who also idolises Napoleon and dreams of an ideal, which he doesn’t yet know. After a disastrous marriage and a duel with his wife’s lover Pierre is reformed and joins the freemasons. But Tolstoy portrays the freemasons as rather stilted, their ideals springing from the head rather than the heart, and Pierre still remains deeply dissatisfied until his experiences in Moscow during the French occupation of 1812. He is nearly shot for incendiarism and during his confinement after pardon he meets the peasant Platon Karataev and is ‘enlightened’ as to the true meaning of life and death. The other central character, also with elements of Tolstoy perhaps in his more pessimistic and depressed mood, is Prince Andre Bolkonsky, who carries out his duties as staff officer with stoical resignation but is tormented with a sense of meaninglessness. He rediscovers a sense of life and meaning when he meets and is engaged to Natasha Rostova, but after the breaking of their engagement supposedly due to her ‘fall’, retreats again into himself and is mortally wounded at the Battle of Borodino before the French occupation of Moscow, and then as he dies is reunited with her and, as it were, discovers the power of forgiveness. The novel has a wonderful ‘architecture’ in the interaction between the grand scale of the European-wide events and the personal lives of its characters. Almost exactly half way through the novel, just before the invasion of 1812, there is a scene where Natasha is in despair over her broken engagement to Andre through her planned elopement with a worthless seducer, undertaken in a moment of loneliness and confusion caused by Andre’s long absence. Andre cannot forgive even though he loves her because extreme hurt makes him, and her family, though loving, temporarily frozen by concepts of female ‘virtue’. Then Pierre, so bumbling, so ineffective in the eyes of the world, suddenly rises to a great height when he meets her and treats her with unselfish compassion. As he walks outside afterwards he sees the comet of 1812 and feels a sense of the unity of all things in love, so much in contrast to the comet’s later reputation as a herald of invasion and disaster. As the chapter ends and is succeeded by another which reflects on the great movements of men and armies in 1812, Pierre can be seen as in touch with something supremely meaningful where Napoleon and his ambitions represent ultimate meaninglessness. What is that something that is supremely meaningful? As Andre, previously so cynical, dies, he reflects that love is life, and all that he understands, he understands only so far as he loves, that all is bound up in love alone. As a ‘particle of love’, he is to return to the universal and eternal source. The same type of insight is what Pierre gains from his time with the peasant Platon Karataev – that all the plans, schemes, desires, cravings which have tormented Pierre vanish in the face of Karataev’s calm and quiet love and acceptance of life and death. Tolstoy himself wrote a letter during the writing of War and Peace, to a fellow writer, saying that ‘the goal of the artist lies not in solving a question in an indisputable manner, but in making people love life in its infinite, eternally inexhaustible manifestations’(4). It would perhaps have been enough for Tolstoy to have left it at that, but he did also include some fairly extensive ‘philosophical’ chapters towards the end of the novel elaborating his central thoughts on the futility of grand historical plans and military ambitions, the content of ‘great men’ theories of history, by comparison with the hard-won insights of a Pierre or an Andre. Critics generally have tended to regard Tolstoy’s excursions into historical philosophy as a mistake, and thought that he should have been content with his genius for ‘realist’ fiction, but that is misleading as it fails to see how Tolstoy’s fiction is always united with his central vision, and also because he was not unfamiliar with, or unsophisticated in understanding of, more specifically philosophical thinking from his youth onward – Rousseau has already been mentioned. But in his amateur dabblings Tolstoy’s shared Rousseau’s rejection of a ‘professorial’ philosophy, which in Tolstoy’s age was a rather grandiose ‘world historical’ one based on the inevitable march of the historical process towards an ideal future, especially associated with Hegel, who Tolstoy regarded as ‘a trafficker in empty and pretentious phrases’ (5). But in a letter to a friend, while enthusiastically reading philosophy in the summer of 1869 after completing War and Peace, Tolstoy expressed his enthusiasm for Kant (6). The relation of the central vision of War and Peace to Tolstoy’s enthusiasm becomes apparent when one sees Kant as, in contrast to materialists or Hegelians, taking individual consciousness seriously, taking individual moral agency seriously, and taking the individual in relation to the eternal seriously. Kant spoke of two things which never failed to impress him with renewed astonishment, ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within’- exactly reminiscent for us of Pierre’s vision of the comet. Between 1869 and 1873 Tolstoy continued as landowner, husband and father, and for some time considered writing an epic study of the reign of Tsar Peter the Great, but was so repelled by the cruelty and emptiness of the supposed hero-Tsar that he could not pursue it. Eventually, it was an incident in the neighbourhood of Yasnaya Polyana, set him on a different course. An acquaintance had a mistress who, after a quarrel, threw herself under a train at a nearby railway station, leaving a note for her lover accusing him of being her murderer. In 1873 Tolstoy, intrigued by the story, began writing what was to become Anna Karenina. From the point of view of Tolstoy’s personal and spiritual history the character of Levin in the novel, whose story runs parallel with that of Anna and her unhappy marriage and her affair with the young officer Vronsky, is striking in his continual search for meaning, and his failure to find it in so many of the answers given by his contemporaries. In one scene early in the novel Levin visits his half-brother to find him in discussion with a professor of philosophy about the relation between mind and body, and Levin interjects to ask the professor whether any sense of self or ‘I’ can survive bodily death. The professor says dismissively, ‘we have not the requisite data’. The professor is representative of that type of ‘scientific’ materialism to be found in Russian society in the 1870’s as successor to Hegelianism in intellectual fashion. Levin is married, apparently happily, and tries his hand as ‘improving’ landowner and teacher in peasant schools, but all this external activity cannot distract him from fleeting feelings of meaninglessness to his life which recur more frequently until he has to hide a rope for fear of hanging himself and refrain from carrying a gun lest he shoot himself. Like Pierre in War and Peace, Levin comes to ‘enlightenment’ through conversation with the ‘wise’ peasant Theodore. Clearly there is much resemblance between Levin and Tolstoy in their status as landowner and family man. The ending of Anna Karenina, with Theodore as a rather pale replica of Pierre’s Platon Karataev, has struck many readers as formulaic and unconvincing, and Tolstoy’s contemporary Dostoevsky observed acutely that Levin would, had the novel continued, have inevitably torn him faith again on some mental nail of his own making (7). And indeed, by the late 1870s this is what was happening to Tolstoy as he turned fifty. Those passages which his wife had still dutifully copied out about Levin’s suicidal urges in the midst of family life must have been disturbing to her, and indeed after a relatively short period of calm her marriage to Tolstoy had descended into that saga of mutual suspicion, unhappiness and yet unbreakable bond which was to go on over the next forty years. Tolstoy was now famous through his two great novels, but increasingly alienated by marriage, fame and material wealth. The ‘existential’ conclusions of the two great novels were not enough for him. Tolstoy was a temperamentally restless man who would ruthlessly tear up his own peace of mind as well as that of those about him. In the light of this trait, it is interesting to know that prior to writing War and Peace Tolstoy had in fact planned a novel about the liberal Decembrist revolt of 1825 against the new Tsar Nicholas I, where the rebels were exiled to Siberia, so that the picture of Pierre’s happy family life in the early 1820s now at the end of War and Peace is overshadowed by a sense of a darker future for Pierre, as a liberal and critic of autocracy, in our knowledge of Tolstoy’s never-written other work. Also Prince Andre’s deathbed reflections are followed immediately by words about his doubt and confusion. The dramatic personal crisis which had thus developed in Tolstoy’s soul is described in ‘A Confession’ in 1879, an autobiographical piece of sixty or so pages where he writes of his youth and marriage, of the creeping moments of bewilderment, and of his increasing conviction that all his worldly achievements and possessions did nothing to allay these feelings. He wrote the same thing about himself as he had of Levin about hiding away the hunting gun and rope, and of how at one stage he felt that life is meaningless. He only emerged from this crisis by a process of reasoning that people of similar education and lifestyle as his class escaped from believing in the meaninglessness of existence by either not recognising the question yet; recognising it but adopting a resigned epicureanism; having the strength and energy to kill themselves; or, like him, being weak and inconsistent and going on living. Yet, thought Tolstoy, most of ‘the people’ continue to live without being troubled by such questions, so a fault must lie in the whole outlook of him and his class. So as Tolstoy emerged from his spiritual crisis his interest in what ‘the people’ believed led him to the study of Church Christianity, which he set about with his usual energy. In ‘A Confession’ he says how he was baptised and educated in the Orthodox faith but by age 18 no longer believed. Now, for two years between 1877 and 1879 he had observed the church’s rites and fasts, and visited the famous monastery at Optina Pustin and had long conversations with Father Ambrose who also had talked with Gogol and Dostoevsky. But even by the time he wrote A Confession Tolstoy was disillusioned. Though he rejected scientific materialism, Tolstoy was still always of a rationalist cast of mind with little interest in the supernatural or the miraculous, so he could not swallow church doctrine. He read the whole of the Old Testament in Hebrew for which he had lessons with the chief rabbi of Moscow, and eventually produced A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology in 1882 and in turn attacked all the doctrines of the church and in particular its central scheme of salvation through the fall and original sin, the divinity of Jesus and the atonement and resurrection, and the divine establishment of the church and the sacraments. The prophet By the early 1880s Tolstoy had landed on something more like solid ground in his spiritual searchings, and he began to express what he thought he had found with that non-fictional genre of writings, ranging from lengthy books to pamphlets, with which he came to be regarded by many as a moral teacher. One of the larger works which expressed his beliefs most eloquently was ‘On Life’, published in 1887, a sort of culmination of ten years of inner struggle. Tolstoy writes that there are two possibilities open to human beings, to live for gratification and material security, or to live for the needs of the soul. The two ways of life reflect two levels of consciousness – the animal, or personal consciousness, in which ones lives in order to drag from life what one imagines will make one happy; and what Tolstoy calls ‘reasonable consciousness’, in which one realises that in order to live fully one must serve the unified spirit of life. Tolstoy does not condemn the universal human impulse for happiness, but just sees compassionately that its pursuit through ‘having’ rather than ‘being’ is illusory. Running through the work one can see broadly Kantian influences – man as irreducible consciousness, the absorption of consciousness in the phenomena of the world, the moral impulse which cannot as such be derived from any of the phenomena of the world but which points beyond them to a higher level to be seen intuitively through the path of self-transcending love, by which one is in some mysterious way moved out of space-time and into the eternal. Tolstoy had rejected what one might call the ‘top-down’ teaching of the church, and was now describing a ‘bottom-up’ path of ascending from moral life to an insight into ultimate truth. This is more than just a humanistic ethics, but he still rejected the old supernaturalism as well as contemporary faith in scientific ‘progress’ – throughout ‘On Life’ he calls traditional Christians ‘Pharisees’ and worshippers of science ‘Scribes’. Tolstoy regarded the path which he is describing as the true teaching of Jesus as well as of all the ‘true teachers of life’ – the Brahmins, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Stoics. But still Tolstoy was not quite a ‘liberal Christian’ in the modern sense, as he emphasised more the denial of the snares of the world. One contemporary described him as having ‘a queer combination of the brain of an English chemist with the soul of an Indian Buddhist’(8). Tolstoy’s conversion did not, as it is sometimes claimed, lead him to abandon his talent as a novelist, though in ‘What is art?’ in 1898 he wrote that all art should aspire to be morally illuminating. This belief could lead him to wild eccentricities on the subject, as when in 1903 he spoke of the ‘repulsion and tedium’ he had always felt upon reading Shakespeare, and his conviction that Shakespeare’s reputation as a genius was a falsehood and an evil. But Tolstoy’s views on the role of art become clearer in his story ‘The freezing coachman’, where an aristocratic woman at the theatre weeps at an imaginary tragedy on stage while her old coachman waits outside for her and freezes. Tolstoy used fiction to point to his moral that fiction must have moral purposes to be good art. During the 1880s, therefore, Tolstoy continued to write fiction with the intention of spreading his ethical views. The death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886 describes the existential angst of a dying man at his conventional existence based on status and possessions and his sudden fear of a meaningless death, while in The Kreuzer Sonata in 1887 a man murders his wife after she commits adultery. The latter alienated both conservative churchmen and free-love radicals with its denunciation of marriage and apparent disgust with sexuality as such, and reflected also the continuing pain of Tolstoy’s marriage which had become further strained with his wife’s lack of sympathy for his attitude to money and the family possessions and his associations with local wandering pilgrims and peasants. Nevertheless, by the late 1880s Tolstoy had an international fame as something approaching a prophet in the eyes of many, which is reflected in a portrait painting of 1887 in which he is presented as the bearded sage. Through his non-fiction writings Tolstoy now involved himself in all sorts of issues, which flowed from his newfound moral mission. He wrote denouncing land-ownership, capital punishment, capitalist exploitation attendant upon Russia’s own industrial revolution, the law courts, the state of the prisons, the press, and the Eiffel Tower, among other things. Often his writing is powerful and stirring, and always a model of clarity, but sometimes it is just downright eccentric, as in ‘Why do men stupefy themselves?’ a pamphlet of 1890 denouncing addictive substances, in which Tolstoy answered the argument that tobacco smokers display high mental powers with the rejoinder that Kant, while among the greatest of philosophers, would not have written in such a curious and bad style had he smoked less. The non-fictional work to which Tolstoy’s name is most often attached, and which stated forcefully his own pacifism, was ‘The kingdom of God is within you’ of 1893, in which Tolstoy examined what he regarded as the great betrayal of the gospel of peace by the Christian churches since the time of Constantine, when they allied themselves with worldly power, and examined the arguments for war put forward by believers and unbelievers alike, concluding that Christian life had to be based on the principle of absolute non-violence. The twenty-five year old Gandhi, then in Natal, South Africa, obtained an English translation made in 1894 (the original having been immediately banned in Russia), and was deeply impressed by ‘the independent thinking, profound morality, and truthfulness of this book’. (9) With all his writings Tolstoy was also involved in practical work about the ideals he was preaching. From 1895 he campaigned for the Doukhobours, a small radical Christian and pacifist sect in the Caucasus who were persecuted by the Tsarist government for refusing military service. Tolstoy was involved in negotiations, which led to more than 7000 of the Doukhobours resettling in a remote area of Canada. One consequence of these events was that the Tsarist government, not being willing to act directly against Tolstoy due to his fame, expelled from Russia his younger protégée Vladimir Chertkov, who settled in Dorset, England, for ten years and established a small press ‘for the publication of Tolstoyan and kindred literature’ - an indication of the international reach of Tolstoy’s reputation. (10) The other offshoot of the Doukhobour campaign was Tolstoy’s third great novel, Resurrection, published in 1899 to raise money for the campaign. The novel is not generally regarded as highly as his other two great works, but it does encapsulate in fictional form Tolstoy’s later beliefs through the moral regeneration of Prince Nekhlyudov, based on a real story which Tolstoy heard from a lawyer friend, of a man who had seduced a young orphan living with one of his relatives. She had become pregnant and been turned out of the house, and then turned to prostitution and was arrested for theft. Then by extraordinary coincidence the original seducer found himself on the jury for her trial. Tolstoy’s caricatures of the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox religious service, and the reactionary procurator of the Holy Synod Pobedonostsev, might have been the last straw leading to Tolstoy’s formal excommunication from the church in 1901. The church as a branch of the state was clearly reflecting the reactions of the Tsarist regime. Bishop John of Krondstadt, the widely revered symbol of Orthodoxy and a contemporary of Tolstoy, even wrote a prayer for his death which was circulated in the reactionary press.(11) Tolstoy may not have advocated violence, but he could be pugnacious in writing, and he responded to the excommunication in a pamphlet, writing that church doctrine was a collection of the grossest superstitions and sorcery. In 2001 a request for the posthumous lifting of the excommunication by one of Tolstoy’s descendants was refused by the Russian Orthodox church.(12) Though Tolstoy was in his seventies, he continued with passionate denunciations of the government, as over its role in the anti-Jewish pogrom at Kishinev in Bessarabia in 1903 (13) and over the spirit of militarism during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. He was never, however, a critic of the Russian government only as he showed during that war when he denounced the Japanese Buddhist monk and army chaplain Shaku Soen who had used convoluted arguments to justify the killing of Russian soldiers.(14) Also after the failed Russian revolution of 1905 many who had invested hope in Tolstoy as a symbolic enemy of the Tsarist regime were disappointed when, not surprisingly, he gave no support to revolutionary violence. Showing his spirit at the age of eighty, Tolstoy wrote The Law of Love and the Law of Violence in 1908, in which he said of violent revolutionaries that their approach was like that of people who, in order to warm themselves, break down the walls of their house to chop them up for firewood. It is a tragic irony that, soon after writing of the perfect love which casts out fear, Tolstoy was leaving his house in the early morning of 28th October 1910 (Old style dates in Russia 13 days behind the West until 1917) having decided that he could no longer live with his wife of forty-eight years. He got no further than the small railway station at Astopovo where he was taken ill and put to bed in the stationmaster’s small hut. When it became known where he was, the station was surrounded by people including press and photographers and by his wife and family, his wife being at first refused admission and being photographed peering through the windows. She was eventually admitted as Tolstoy lay unconscious. He died on 7th November 1910. Conclusion What can one say of Tolstoy? Cases may be put both ‘for’ and ‘against’ both the content of his religious and moral message and the interaction of his personality with that message. Two encounters with Tolstoy, in person and in his writings, rather powerfully illustrate this point. In 1887 Tolstoy was visited at Yasnaya Polyana by Tomas Masaryk (15), much later to be President of Czechoslovakia after the WWI but then in his thirties. Masaryk saw the poverty of the estates peasants and talked with a young peasant who, under his ragged shirt, had the sores of venereal disease. Later Tolstoy told Masaryk that he would willingly drink from the same glass as a syphilitic, but said Masaryk later, ‘he did not think of ridding his own peasants of the infection’. Masaryk felt of Tolstoy in general that there was much affectation in his adoption of peasant ways, and the story, assuming it to be a fair account of Tolstoy’s actions and intentions, illustrates what might be called Tolstoy’s dualism. The later Tolstoy did share some of the attitudes of Russian radical sectarians such as the Doukhobours, in spite of his rationalist indifference to their rather bizarre cosmologies, in his increasing revulsion from the physical nature of humanity, almost as though he echoed their Manichean belief that spirit and matter were eternally in conflict and that the ‘animal nature’ could not be part of God’s creation. Because of his eventual condemnation of sexuality as such, and scepticism about modern scientific progress, Tolstoy ignores medical help for this peasant. His attitude to medicine goes to explain the reactions of the two modern British writers Raymond Tallis and David Smail, Tallis being a defender of modern medicine against its critics and Smail, in his own field, being rather more sceptical of the ‘scientific’ credentials of modern psychotherapy. Along with the dualism a dogmatically moralistic tendency runs through Tolstoy’s later thoughts and actions – absolute pacifism, rejection of all government and law, and division of women into the pure and the impure. Yet Tolstoy had power as a landowner, he had been a soldier and a sexual sinner. All that he rejected he himself had practiced and, while there is nothing wrong in that, it seems to represent a painful degree of division in him between the claims of the natural personality and the exacting demands of his own conscience. Ultimately, he rejected the claims of the natural ego while remaining in many respects an egotistical man. The other encounter, in this case with Tolstoy’s writings after his death, was of the twenty-five year old Ludwig Wittgenstein (16). In 1914 he was a soldier with the Austro-Hungarian army at the Eastern front in the first months of the Great War. Wittgenstein bought a copy of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief and kept it with him when under fire, such that the other soldiers called him ‘the one with the gospels’. Tolstoy’s philosophical understanding, early and late, has often been regarded as lightweight, not really worthy of the status of philosophy, yet Wittgenstein, whose name is a byeword for philosophical depth and seriousness, clearly thought otherwise. In his journals in 1916 he framed certain fundamental statements, which he thought then the essence of philosophy, which were no doubt influenced by his own wartime absorption in Tolstoy’s writings and which reflect the same passionate interest in truth which always informed Tolstoy: That I know that this world exists That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning That good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God To pray is to think about the meaning of life.(17) A central strand in Tolstoy’s life was the attempt, through his great novels of the 1860s and 1870s, to integrate his drives around a philosophy of accepting and celebrating life as a whole. This having failed for him, he was forced to embrace ideals at the other side of a conversion experience which divided him between the animal and ideal sides of his existence, a division which he never lived with successfully. Nevertheless, by living, with all his faults, in the light of a lifelong search for truth, it was supremely appropriate that he should have been buried in that forest glade where his brother had spoken of the buried green stick with its secret of universal love. References
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