Ten Novels And Their Authors (39 page)

About this time he had an affair with the wife of one of his serfs, and a son was born. It was something more than a passing fancy, and in his diary he wrote: ‘I’m in love as never before.’ In later years the bastard, Timothy by name, served as coachman to one of Tolstoy’s younger sons. The biographers have found it quaint that Tolstoy’s father also had an illegitimate son who also served as coachman to a member of the family. To me it points to a certain moral obtuseness. I should have thought that Tolstoy, with his troublesome conscience, with his earnest desire to raise the serfs from their degraded state, to educate them and teach them to be clean, decent and self-respecting, would have done at least something for the boy. Turgenev too had an illegitimate child, a daughter, but he took care of her, had governesses to teach her and was deeply concerned with her welfare. Did it cause Tolstoy no embarrassment when he saw the peasant who was his natural son on the box of his legitimate son’s carriage?

One of the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s temper was that he could embark on a new undertaking with all the enthusiasm in the world, but sooner or later grew bored with it. He somewhat lacked the solid virtue of perseverance. So, after conducting the school for two years, finding the results of his activity disappointing, he closed it. He was tired, dissatisfied with himself, and in poor health. He wrote later that he might have despaired had
there not been one side of life which lay still unexplored and which promised happiness. This was marriage.

He decided to make the experiment. After considering a number of eligible young women and discarding them for one reason or another, he married Sonya, a girl of eighteen and the second daughter of a Dr. Bers, who was a fashionable physician in Moscow and an old friend of his family’s. Tolstoy was thirty-four. The couple settled down at Yasnaya Polyana. During the first eleven years of their marriage the Countess had eight children, and during the next fifteen five more. Tolstoy liked horses and rode well, and he was passionately fond of shooting. He improved his property and bought new estates east of the Volga, so that in the end he owned some sixteen thousand acres. His life followed a familiar pattern. There were in Russia scores of noblemen who gambled, got drunk and wenched in their youth, who married and had a flock of children, who settled down on their estates, looked after their property, rode and shot; and there were not a few who shared Tolstoy’s liberal principles and, distressed at the ignorance of the peasants, sought to ameliorate their lot. The only thing that distinguished him from all of them was that during this time he wrote two of the world’s greatest novels,
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
.

(3)

Sonya Tolstoy as a young woman seems to have been attractive. She had a graceful figure, fine eyes, a rather fleshy nose and dark lustrous hair. She had vitality, high spirits and a beautiful speaking voice. Tolstoy had long kept a diary in which he recorded not only his hopes and thoughts, his prayers and self-reproachings, but also the faults, sexual and otherwise, of which he was guilty. On their engagement, in his desire to conceal nothing from his future wife, he gave her his diary to read. She was
deeply shocked, but after a sleepless night, passed in tears, returned it and forgave. She forgave; she did not forget. They were both violently emotional and had what is known as a lot of character. This generally means that the person thus endowed has some very unpleasant traits. The Countess was exacting, possessive and jealous; Tolstoy was harsh, dogmatic and intolerant. He insisted on her nursing her children, which she was glad to do; but when, on the birth of one of them, her breasts were so sore that she had to give the child to a wet nurse, he was unreasonably angry with her. They quarrelled now and then, but made it up. They were very much in love with one another and, on the whole, their marriage for many years was a happy one. Tolstoy worked hard, and wrote assiduously. His handwriting was often difficult to read, but the Countess, who copied his manuscripts as each portion was written, grew very skilful in deciphering it, and was even able to guess the meaning of his hasty jottings and incomplete sentences. She is said to have copied
War and Peace
seven times.

In writing this essay I have quoted largely from Aylmer Maude’s
Life of Tolstoy
, and I have used his translation of
A Confession
. Maude had the advantage of knowing Tolstoy and his family, and his narrative is very readable. It is unfortunate that he should have thought fit to tell more about himself and his opinions than most people can want to know. I am deeply indebted to Professor E. J. Simmons’s full, detailed and convincing biography. He gives many interesting facts which Aylmer Maude, presumably from discretion, omitted. It must long remain the standard biography in English.

Professor Simmons has thus described Tolstoy’s day: ‘All the family assembled at breakfast, and the master’s quips and jokes rendered the conversation gay and lively. Finally he would get up with the words, “It’s time to work now,” and he would disappear into his study, usually carrying a glass of strong tea with him. No one
dared disturb him. When he emerged in the early afternoon it was to take his exercise, usually a walk or ride. At five he returned for dinner, ate voraciously, and when he had satisfied his hunger he would amuse all present by vivid accounts of any experience he had had on his walk. After dinner he retired to his study to read, and at eight would join the family and any visitors in the living-room for tea. Often there was music, reading aloud or games for the children.’

It was a busy, useful and contented life, and there seemed no reason why it should not run in the pleasant groove for many years to come, with Sonya bearing children, looking after them and the house, helping her husband in his work, and with Tolstoy riding and shooting, superintending his estates and writing books. He was approaching his fiftieth year. That is a dangerous period for men. Youth is past and, looking back, they are apt to ask themselves what their life amounts to; looking forward, with old age looming ahead, they are apt to find the prospect chilling. And there was one fear that had haunted Tolstoy all his life – the fear of death. Death comes to all men, and most are sensible enough, except in moments of peril or grave illness, not to think of it. This is how in
A Confession
he describes his state of mind at that time: ‘Five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, as though I did not know how to live or what to do; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity recurred oftener and oftener and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to? I felt that what I had been standing on had broken down and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and I had nothing else to live on. My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things,
but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable.

‘And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased … I was praised by people, and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous … I enjoyed a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met among men of my kind: physically I could keep pace with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for eight to ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such exertion.

‘My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: My life is a stupid and spiteful joke that someone has played on me.’

The drunkenness of youth had left him with a bad hangover. When still a boy, he had ceased to believe in God, but his loss of faith left him unhappy and dissatisfied, for he had no theory that enabled him to solve the riddle of life. He asked himself: ‘Why do I live and how ought I to live?’ He found no answer. Now he came once more to believe in God, but, strangely enough for a man of so emotional a temper, by a process of reasoning. ‘If I exist,’ he wrote, ‘there must be some cause of it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all is what men call God.’ For a while Tolstoy clung to the Russian Orthodox Church, but he was repelled by the fact that the lives of its learned men did not tally with their principles, and he found it impossible to believe all they required him to believe. He was prepared to accept only what was true in a plain and literal sense. He began to draw near to the believers among the poor and simple and unlettered; and the more he looked into their lives, the more convinced he became that, notwithstanding the darkness of their superstition, they had a real faith which was necessary
to them and, alone, by giving their life a meaning, made it possible for them to live.

It was years before he arrived at the final determination of his views, and they were years of anguish, meditation and study. It is difficult to summarise these views briefly, and I attempt to do so only with hesitation.

He came to believe that the truth was to be found only in the words of Jesus. He rejected as evident absurdities, and an insult to the human intelligence, the creeds in which the tenets of Christianity are set forth. He rejected the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. He rejected the sacraments, since they were based on nothing in Christ’s teaching and served only to obscure the truth. For a time he did not believe in life after death, but later, when he came to think that the Self was part of the Infinite, it seemed inconceivable to him that it should cease with the death of the body. In the end, shortly before his death, he declared that he did not believe in a God who created the world, but in One who lived in the consciousness of men. Such a god, one would have thought, is no less a figment of the imagination than the centaur or the unicorn. Tolstoy believed that the essence of Christ’s teaching lay in the precept ‘Resist not evil’; the commandment ‘Swear not at all’, he decided, applied not only to common expletives, but to oaths of any kind, those taken in the witness box or by soldiers being sworn in; while the charge ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you’, forbade men to fight their country’s enemies or to defend themselves when attacked. But to adopt opinions with Tolstoy was to act: if he had come to the conclusion that the substance of Christianity was love, humility, self-denial and the returning of good for evil, it was incumbent upon him, he felt, to renounce the pleasures of life, to humble himself, to suffer and be merciful.

Sonya Tolstoy, a pious member of the Orthodox Church, insisted on her children having religious instruction,
and in every way did her duty according to her lights. She was not a woman of great spirituality; indeed, what with having so many children, nursing them herself, seeing that they were properly educated and running a great household, she had little time for it. She neither understood nor sympathised with her husband’s altered outlook, but she accepted it tolerantly enough. When, however, this change of heart resulted in a change of behaviour, she was displeased, and did not hesitate to show it. Now that he thought it was his duty to consume as little as possible of the work of others, he heated his own stove, fetched water and attended to his clothes himself. With the idea of earning his bread with his own hands, he got a shoemaker to teach him to make boots. At Yasnaya Polyana he worked with the peasants, ploughing, carting hay and cutting wood; the Countess disapproved, for it seemed to her that from morning till evening he was doing unprofitable work which even among the peasants was done by young people.

‘Of course you will say,’ she wrote to him, ‘that to live so accords with your convictions and that you enjoy it. That is another matter and I can only say: enjoy yourself! But all the same I am annoyed that such mental strength should be lost at log-splitting, lighting samovars and making boots – which are all excellent as a rest or a change of occupation; but not as a special employment.’ Here she was talking good sense. It was a stupidity on Tolstoy’s part to suppose that manual labour is in any way nobler than mental labour. Nor is it more fatiguing. Every author knows that after writing for a few hours he is physically exhausted. There is nothing particularly commendable in work. One works in order to enjoy leisure. It is only stupid people who work because, when not working, they don’t know what to do with themselves. But even if Tolstoy thought that to write novels for idle people to read was wrong, one would have thought he could have found a more intelligent employment than to
make boots, which he made badly and which the people to whom he gave them could not wear. He took to dressing like a peasant, and became dirty and untidy. There is a story of how he came into dinner one day after loading manure, and the stench he brought with him was such that the windows had to be opened. He gave up shooting, to which he had been passionately addicted and, so that animals should not be killed for the table, became a vegetarian. For many years he had been a very moderate drinker; but now he became a total abstainer, and in the end, at the cost of a bitter struggle, left off smoking.

By this time the children were growing up, and for the sake of their education, and because Tanya, the eldest daughter, would be coming out, the Countess insisted that the family should go to Moscow in the winter. Tolstoy disliked city life, but yielded to his wife’s determination. In Moscow he was appalled by the contrast he saw between the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor. ‘I felt awful, and shall not cease to feel,’ he wrote, ‘that as long as I have superfluous food and some have none, and I have two coats and someone else has none, I share in a constantly repeated crime,’ It was in vain for people to tell him, as they continued to do, that there always had been rich and poor, and always would be; he felt it was not right; and after visiting a night lodging-house for the destitute, and seeing its horrors, he was ashamed to go home and sit down to a five-course dinner served by two men-servants in dress-clothes, white ties and white gloves. He tried giving money to the down-and-outs who appealed to him in their need, but came to the conclusion that the money they had wheedled out of him did more harm than good. ‘Money is an evil,’ he said. ‘And therefore he who gives money does evil.’ From this it was a short step to the conviction that property was immoral and to possess it sinful.