Tolstoy (69 page)

Tolstoy had more or less built an entire artistic and religious edifice on the foundation of one aspect of Christianity (the Sermon on the Mount), and although he can be forgiven for not reading Wagner's ponderous aesthetic writings, here was a classic case of him wilfully refusing to consider all the dimensions of a structure in his path that did not conform to his specifications in the rush to tear it down. Although Wagner and Tolstoy were in certain important respects poles apart (the composer's bombast and love of luxury spring to mind), there are also some intriguing parallels between them. Under the influence of Schopenhauer both formulated a religious vision based on a highly idiosyncratic theology of redemptive love which had little in common with traditional Christianity.
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Redemption can be attained only by renouncing
eros
and practising compassion or
agape,
the word for love used in the New Testament: such are the lessons of Wagner's last work
Parsifal
and all of Tolstoy's late works from
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
onwards. Only love can redeem mankind and bring about a state where human beings can be at peace with themselves and with each other. Thomas Mann was quite correct when he wrote in 1933 that the pattern of Tolstoy's artistic career was identical to that of Wagner, for in both cases, everything in their later oeuvre was prefigured in their earlier works.
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For all its enthralling narrative, for example,
War and Peace
is ultimately about sin (separation from God, and the absence of human relatedness) and redemption (the restoration of love), as can be seen by following Natasha Rostova's spiritual journey.

Mann's comparison of the consistency of Wagner's artistic evolution with that of Tolstoy is instructive, for both Wagner and Tolstoy came to distinguish the simple religion of love and compassion for the poor and oppressed that Jesus Christ had founded from the deforming edifice of the Christian church (it is striking that they both made a serious study of Renan's
Life of Jesus
in 1878). They both wished to revive the spiritual essence of Christianity by removing its superstitious elements and the Old Testament notion of a vengeful God in order to create a purer and more practical religion. And the pacifism and vegetarianism both espoused in their final years went hand in hand with their views on the regeneration of society and a corresponding desire to simplify their aesthetic style. Before he died in 1883, Wagner came to see vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists as the harbingers of cultural renewal, and, ever the Romantic idealist, he hoped that through the medium of religious art (specifically music, his kind of music) a culture of compassion would replace the contemporary 'civilisation' of power and aggression. Tolstoy came to the same conclusions, but naturally the religious art he had in mind was primarily of the verbal kind. Both Wagner and Tolstoy were anxious for the rest of the world to gain insight into Jesus' radical idea that responding to violence with more violence can only lead to the further desecration of nature.

Tolstoy's deliberations in
What is Art?
were the fruit of long reflection and characteristically intense study, but were not at all objective, and out of step with the age in which he lived. As the age of modernism dawned, Tolstoy himself was now an anomaly as an artist. It was in 1896, after all, that Chekhov's
Seagull
was first performed, a play which Tolstoy thought was complete rubbish. In his pointed comparison of 'new' and 'old' art in the play, Chekhov offers subtle comments of his own on the question of 'What is art?', but typically refuses to be partisan. Like his stories, his great plays stand on the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility, indebted on the one hand to the legacy of Tolstoy's generation, but also heralding things to come. Tolstoy was still alive as Russian artists began to become leaders of the European avant-garde, and he died only three years before the Futurists declared in their manifesto
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste
that they wished to throw 'Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. etc.' overboard from the ship of modernity.

Tolstoy's chaotic publishing habits had not improved over the course of his career; indeed, they became more chaotic in his last years when different versions of his works appeared in Russia and England. Apart from the problems with negotiating censors, Tolstoy continually revised his manuscripts, and then his proofs, and he also continually changed his mind about where and how he wanted his works to appear in print. This did not make it easy for his editors and translators, and that was certainly the case with
What is Art?,
the first English edition of which was prepared by Aylmer Maude, an important figure in anglophone Tolstoy studies. Maude was the son of an Ipswich vicar and a Quaker mother, and had moved to Moscow in the early 1870s when he was sixteen years old. While he was working as a manager of the Russian Carpet Company, he married Louise Shanks, who was also English but born in Russia, and later they pooled their considerable linguistic resources to become distinguished translators of Tolstoy's writings. Maude had fallen under Tolstoy's spell after first meeting him in 1888, and their conversations in the 1890s led him to the conclusion that he could not spend his life selling carpets. In 1897, when the Maudes moved back to London, they stayed first at the Brotherhood Church in Croydon, as Chertkov's family had done earlier that year, and then followed them to Purleigh, near Maldon in Essex, where the first English Tolstoyan colony had been set up the year before.

In 1896 the colony consisted of just three men, all anxious to chase the utopian dream of living off the plot of land that had been bought by the more affluent members of the Brotherhood Church, but their number had already risen to fifteen by the end of 1897, and there were a further thirty-five or so like-minded people living nearby. The Maudes contributed generously by donating two cows, providing meals and holding concerts at their farmhouse. It was in Essex that Aylmer Maude completed his translation of
What is Art?,
which was no small feat, as he himself has described in the biography of Tolstoy he started publishing in 1908:

As proof followed proof, each covered with fresh alterations, excisions, and additions, often very illegibly written, it required the closest attention to keep the text correct and to discriminate between changes made voluntarily, and changes made for the Censor which I was to disregard [for the English edition].
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Maude sent Tolstoy twenty-three long letters with detailed queries as he worked his way painstakingly through the text, which was finally published in full in 1898. The socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, a didactic writer like Tolstoy who would enter into correspondence with him in his last years, was almost the only critic to write an enthusiastic review in England. There was a certain degree of mutual admiration between the two, but Tolstoy later chided Shaw for a lack of seriousness.
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In Russia most people shared the view about
What is Art?
expressed by the artist Isaak Levitan, who described it in a letter to his friend Chekhov in Nice as brilliant and ridiculous at the same time. Five thousand copies were sold in the first week.
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Tolstoy was glad to get aesthetics out of the way, as his major project in 1898 was to help persecuted sectarians. In 1897 some Molokans came from Samara to ask for his help and advice: police had raided their villages late at night and taken away their children in order to bring them up in the Orthodox faith at an orphanage. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy letter to Nicholas II, and then a few months later wrote again when there was no response. His second letter was also greeted with silence, as was the letter he published in the
St Petersburg Gazette
that October. The Molokan children were returned to their parents only after Tolstoy's daughter Tanya succeeded in gaining an audience with Pobedonostsev in January 1898.
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That left Tolstoy free to concentrate all his energies on the mission to help the Dukhobors, who finally learned that month that they were going to be allowed to settle abroad. Tolstoy had been tinkering since 1889 with a new novel, and this news gave him the impetus to finish it. He now decided he would make an exception and sell the rights, so that he could raise money to help pay for the Dukhobors to emigrate. As it turned out later, the funds would go to pay their passage to Canada, the country which expressed a willingness to receive them.

Resurrection,
as the novel came to be called, drew on a story Tolstoy had heard from a lawyer friend. A nobleman appointed as a jury member had recognised a defendant on trial for theft as a poor woman he had once seduced, and been overcome with remorse. When she was sentenced to exile in Siberia, he offered to marry her, but she had died before he could atone for his sins. Hearing the story aroused guilty feelings in Tolstoy, who could not help but remember having taken advantage of his sister's servant girl Gasha Trubetskaya when he was a young man. He now combined the story he had heard from his lawyer friend with that of his own spiritual journey. Accordingly, the central character Prince Nekhlyudov breaks with his former life once he recognises in court his aunt's former peasant girl Katyusha Maslova, whom he once callously seduced. After she is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia through a miscarriage of justice, Nekhlyudov gives his land away to his peasants and follows her to Siberia in the hope of expiating his sins. Sonya had found it hard enough to deal with her husband's sanctimonious advocacy of chastity in
The Kreutzer Sonata
back in 1889, while still being forced to satisfy his apparently unquenchable sexual appetite. A decade later, when it was finally beginning to subside (when Masha had married in 1897, Sonya had moved into her bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana),
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she read with distaste her husband's sensual description of the ravishing of Katyusha Maslova. But
Resurrection
was more than a love story and Bildungsroman, as Tolstoy suppressed the dictates of his artistic conscience to exploit another opportunity for lambasting all his favourite targets, namely the government, the Church and the judicial system, as well as private property and upper-class mores. Not all his readers would find the resulting mixture of intense lyricism, biting satire and moralising demagoguery terribly appealing, even if it was a compulsively readable narrative, like everything else that Tolstoy wrote, with flashes of brilliance.

Tolstoy worked on
Resurrection
throughout 1898, even on 28 August, his seventieth birthday. The government had forbidden the press from publishing any celebratory articles, but he received over a hundred congratulatory telegrams, and his picture appeared in shop windows in cities and towns all over Russia.
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By autumn, Tolstoy was ready to negotiate a contract for the publication of
Resurrection,
and in October he signed a record-breaking deal with Adolf Marx, a publishing magnate based in Petersburg. Marx was proprietor of the weekly illustrated family magazine
The Cornfield,
which was enormously popular. Tolstoy had been paid 500 roubles per printer's sheet for his last novel,
Anna Karenina,
which appeared in an elite literary journal with a readership of a few thousand. For
Resurrection,
published in instalments in
The Cornfield,
which had 200,000 subscribers, Tolstoy received twice that, and a 12,000-rouble advance. The novel appeared throughout 1899, illustrated by Leonid Pasternak, and was a runaway success, being the first novel by Russia's most famous writer in over twenty years. It was an exhausting year for Tolstoy, since it entailed checking weekly sets of proofs, dealing with savage cuts made by the censor and being in constant communication with Chertkov in England.

Since arriving in England in the spring of 1897, Chertkov's main interest had been in propagandising Tolstoy's works throughout the world. He had begun by collaborating with John Kenworthy's Brotherhood Publishing Company, but very soon had set up his own Russian-language publishing operation which took up most of his time. The goal of the Free Word Press, which was established near to the house with the apple orchard he had rented for his family near Purleigh, was to publish everything by Tolstoy that was banned in Russia, as well as articles he and other Tolstoyans had written. These writings were primarily destined for readers in Russia.
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There were nine publications in 1897 alone, one of which was Tolstoy's afterword to the earlier Tolstoyan brochure 'Help! A Public Appeal Regarding the Caucasian Dukhobors'.
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Chertkov now expanded his activities to act as Tolstoy's literary agent by orchestrating the publication of
Resurrection
abroad, both in Russian and in translation. His authorised edition of the novel for the Free Word Press was also the only unexpurgated Russian version printed, and it was published in book form at the end of 1899 at the same time as the first separate edition issued by Adolf Marx in St Petersburg. The novel was reprinted five times in 1900,
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and was smuggled into Russia in enormous quantities. Chertkov also coordinated the British and American publication of Louise Maude's English translation by the Brotherhood Publishing Company in 1900. The success of
Resurrection
was phenomenal and unprecedented. Once it had appeared in
The Cornfield,
all rights were waived, and there were soon forty different editions in print in Russia, while fifteen different editions appeared in France in 1900.
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The novel was read by literally hundreds of thousands of readers in the first few years of its publication. The Slovak translation was produced by Albert Skarvan, whom Chertkov had invited to Russia, and taken to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy back in 1896.
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