Ten Novels And Their Authors (40 page)

For such a man as Tolstoy the next step was obvious: he decided to rid himself of everything he owned; but
here he came into violent conflict with his wife, who had no wish to beggar herself or to leave her children penniless. She threatened to appeal to the courts to have him declared incompetent to manage his affairs, and after heaven only knows how much acrimonious argument he offered to turn his property over to her. This she refused, and in the end he divided it among her and the children. On more than one occasion during the year this dispute lasted he left home to live among the peasants, but before he had gone far was drawn back by the pain he was causing his wife. He continued to live at Yasnaya Polyana and, though mortified by the luxury, luxury on a very modest scale, that surrounded him, none the less profited by it. The friction continued. He disapproved of the conventional education the Countess was giving their children, and he could not forgive her for having prevented him from disposing of his property as he wished.

In this brief sketch of Tolstoy’s life I have been constrained to omit much that is of interest, and I must deal even more summarily with the thirty years that followed his conversion. He became a public figure, recognised as the greatest writer in Russia, and with an immense reputation throughout the world as a novelist, a teacher and a moralist. Colonies were founded by people who wished to lead their lives according to his views. They came to grief when they tried to put his principles into practice, and the story of their misadventures is both instructive and comic. Owing to Tolstoy’s suspicious nature, his harsh argumentativeness, his intolerance and his unconcealed conviction that if others disagreed with him it was from unworthy motives, he retained few friends; but, with his increasing fame, a host of students, pilgrims visiting the holy places of Russia, journalists, sightseers, admirers and disciples, rich and poor, nobles and commoners, came to Yasnaya Polyana.

Sonya Tolstoy was, as I have said, jealous and possessive; she had always wanted to monopolise her husband,
and she resented the invasion of her house by strangers. Her patience was sorely tried: ‘While describing and relating to people all his fine feelings, he has lived as always, loving sweet food, a bicycle, riding and lust.’ And on another occasion she wrote in her diary: ‘I cannot help complaining because all these things he practises for the happiness of people complicate life so much that it becomes more and more difficult for me to live … His sermons on love and the good have resulted in indifference to his family and the intrusion of all kinds of rabble into our circle.’

Among the first persons to share Tolstoy’s views was a young man called Chertkov. He was wealthy, and had been a captain in the Guards, but, when he came to entertain a belief in the principle of non-resistance, he resigned his commission. He was an honest man, an idealist and an enthusiast, but of a domineering temper, with a singular capacity for enforcing his will on others; and Aylmer Maude states that everybody connected with him became his instrument, quarrelled with him or had to escape. An attachment sprang up between him and Tolstoy which lasted till the latter’s death, and he acquired an influence over him which bitterly incensed the Countess.

While to most of Tolstoy’s few friends his views seemed extreme, Chertkov constantly urged him to go further and apply them more rigidly. Tolstoy had been so occupied with his spiritual development that he had neglected his estates, with the result that, though they were worth something like sixty thousand pounds, they brought in no more than five hundred a year. It was evidently not enough to keep the household going and educate a swarm of children. Sonya persuaded her husband to give her the publishing rights to everything he had written before 1881, and on borrowed money started a business of her own to publish books. It prospered so well that she was able to meet her commitments. But it
was obviously incompatible with Tolstoy’s conviction that property was immoral to retain rights on his literary productions and, when Chertkov gained this ascendancy over him, he induced him to declare that everything he had written since 1881 was in the public domain and could be published by anyone. This was enough to enrage the Countess, but Tolstoy did more than that: he asked her to surrender her rights over the earlier books, including of course the very popular novels, and this she absolutely refused to do. Her livelihood, and that of her family, depended upon them. Disputes, acrimonious and protracted, ensued. Sonya and Chertkov gave him no peace. He was torn between conflicting claims, neither of which he felt it right to repudiate.

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In 1896 Tolstoy was sixty-eight. He had been married for thirty-four years, most of his children were grown up, his second daughter was going to be married; and his wife, at the age of fifty-two, fell ignominiously in love with a man many years younger than herself, a composer called Tanayev. Tolstoy was shocked, ashamed and indignant. Here is a letter he wrote to her: ‘Your intimacy with Tanayev disgusts me and I cannot tolerate it calmly. If I go on living with you on these terms, I shall only be shortening and poisoning my life. For a year now I have not been living at all. You know this. I have told it you in exasperation and with prayers. Lately I have tried silence. I have tried everything and nothing is of use. The intimacy goes on and I can see that it may well go on like this to the end. I cannot stand it any longer. It is obvious that you cannot give it up, only one thing remains – to part. I have firmly made up my mind to do this. But I must consider the best way of doing it. I think the very best thing would be for me to go abroad. We
shall think out what would be for the best. One thing is certain – we cannot go on like this.’

But they did not part; they continued to make life intolerable to one another. The Countess pursued the composer with the fury of an ageing woman in love, and though at first he may have been flattered, he soon grew tired of a passion which he could not reciprocate and which made him ridiculous. She realised at last that he was avoiding her, and finally he put a public affront on her. She was deeply mortified, and shortly afterwards came to the conclusion that Tanayev was ‘thick-skinned and gross both in body and spirit.’ The undignified affair came to an end.

The disagreement between husband and wife was by then common knowledge, and it was a source of bitterness to Sonya that his disciples, now his only friends, sided with him and, because she prevented him from acting as they thought he should, regarded her with hostility. His conversion had brought him little happiness; it had lost him friends, created discord in his family, and caused dissension between his wife and himself. His followers reproached him because he continued to lead a life of ease, and, indeed, he felt himself to blame. He wrote in his diary: ‘So I, who am now entering upon my seventieth year, long with all the strength of my spirit for tranquility and solitude, and though not perfect accord, still something better than this crying disharmony between my life and my beliefs and conscience.’

His health gave way. During the next ten years he had several illnesses, one so serious that he nearly died of it. Gorky, who knew him during this period, describes him as very lean, small and grey, but with eyes keener than ever and a glance more piercing. His face was deeply lined, and he had a long, unkempt white beard. He was an old man. He was eighty. A year passed, and another. He was eighty-two. He was failing rapidly, and it was evident that he had only a few more months to live.
They were embittered by sordid quarrels. Chertkov, who apparently did not altogether share Tolstoy’s notion that property was immoral, had built himself at considerable cost a large house near Yasnaya Polyana, and though Tolstoy deplored the expenditure of money, the propinquity naturally facilitated intercourse between the two men. He now pressed Tolstoy to carry into effect his desire that on his death all his works should go into the public domain. The Countess was outraged that she should be deprived of control over the novels that Tolstoy had handed over to her twenty-five years before. The enmity that had long existed between Chertkov and herself burst into open warfare. The children, with the exception of Alexandra, Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, who was completely under Chertkov’s domination, sided with their mother; they had no wish to lead the sort of life their father wanted them to lead and, though he had divided his estates among them, saw no reason why they should be deprived of the large income his writings brought in. So far as I know, none of them had been brought up to earn his own living. But notwithstanding the pressure his family brought upon him, Tolstoy made a will in which he bequeathed all his works to the public and declared that the manuscripts extant at the time of his death should be handed to Chertkov, so that he might make them freely accessible to all who might want to publish them. But this apparently was not legal, and Chertkov urged Tolstoy to have another will drawn up. Witnesses were smuggled into the house so that the Countess should not know what was going on, and Tolstoy copied the document in his own handwriting behind the locked doors of his study. In this will the copyrights were given to his daughter Alexandra, whom Chertkov had suggested as a nominee, for, as he wrote with some understatement: ‘I feel certain that Tolstoy’s wife and children would not like to see someone not a member of the family made the official legatee.’ As the will deprived them of their
chief means of subsistence that is credible. But this will again did not satisfy Chertkov, and he drew up another himself, which Tolstoy copied, sitting on the stump of a tree in the forest near Chertkov’s house. This left Chertkov in full control of the manuscripts.

The most important of these were Tolstoy’s later diaries. Both husband and wife had long been in the habit of keeping diaries, and it was an understood thing that each should have access to the other’s. It was an unfortunate arrangement, since the complaints each made of the other, when read over, gave rise to bitter recriminations. The earlier diaries were in Sonya’s hands, but those of the last ten years Tolstoy had delivered to Chertkov. She was determined to get them, partly because they could eventually be published at a profit, but especially because Tolstoy had been very frank in his account of their disagreements and she did not want these passages to be made public. She sent a message to Chertkov demanding their return. He refused. Upon this she threatened to poison or drown herself if they were not given back, and Tolstoy, shattered by the scene she made, took them away from Chertkov; but instead of letting Sonya have them, he put them in the bank. Chertkov wrote him a letter on which Tolstoy in his diary commented as follows: ‘I have received a letter from Chertkov full of reproaches and accusations. They tear me to pieces. Sometimes the idea occurs to me to go far away from them all.’

From an early age, Tolstoy from time to time had had the desire to leave the world, with its turmoil and trouble, and retire to some place where he could devote himself in solitude to self-perfection; and, like many another author, he lent his own longing to the two characters in his novels, Pierre in
War and Peace
and Levin in
Anna Karenina
, for whom he had a peculiar predilection. The circumstances of his life at this time combined to give this desire almost the force of an obsession. His wife, his children, tormented him. He was harassed by the
disapproval of his friends, who felt that he should at last carry his principles into complete effect. Many of them were pained because he did not practise what he preached. Every day he received wounding letters, accusing him of hypocrisy. One eager disciple wrote to beg him to abandon his estate, give his property to his relations and the poor, leave himself without a kopek, and go as a mendicant from town to town. Tolstoy wrote in reply: ‘Your letter has profoundly moved me. What you advise has been my sacred dream, but up to this time I have been unable to do it. There are many reasons … but the chief reason is that my doing this must not affect others.’ As we know, people often thrust into the background of their unconscious the real reason for their conduct, and in this case I think the real reason why Tolstoy did not act as both his conscience and his followers urged him to do was simply that he didn’t quite enough want to do it. There is a point in the writer’s psychology that I have never seen mentioned, though it must be obvious to anyone who has studied the lives of authors. Every creative writer’s work is, to some extent at least, a sublimation of instincts, desires, day-dreams, call them what you like, which for one cause or another he had repressed, and by giving them literary expression he is freed of the compulsion to give them the further release of action. But it is not a complete satisfaction. He is left with a feeling of inadequacy. That is the source of the man of letters’ glorification of the man of action, and the unwilling, envious admiration with which he regards him. It is possible that Tolstoy would have found in himself the strength to do what he sincerely thought right, for of his sincerity there can be no doubt, if he had not by writing his books blunted the edge of his determination.

He was a born writer, and it was his instinct to put matters in the most effective and interesting way he could. I suggest that in his didactic works, to make his points more telling, he let his pen run away with him,
and put his theories in a more uncompromising fashion than he would have done if he had stopped to think what consequences they entailed. On one occasion he did allow that compromise, inadmissible in theory, was inevitable in practice. But there, surely, he gave his whole position away; for if compromise is inevitable in practice, which means only that the practice is impracticable, then something must be wrong with the theory. But, unfortunately for Tolstoy, the friends, the disciples, who came to Yasnaya Polyana in adoring droves could not reconcile themselves to the notion that their idol should condescend to compromise. There is, indeed, something brutal in the persistence with which they pressed the old man to sacrifice himself to their sense of dramatic propriety. He was the prisoner of his message. His writings and the effect they had on so many, for not a few a disastrous effect, since some were exiled and others went to jail, the devotion, the love he inspired, the reverence in which he was held, had forced him into a position from which there was only one way out. He could not bring himself to take it.