TOLSTOY
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
AUTHOR OF "JEAN CHRISTOPHE"
TRANSLATED BY
BERNARD MIALL
T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
1911
PREFACE
To those of my own generation, the light that has but lately failed
was the purest that illumined their youth. In the gloomy twilight of
the later nineteenth century it shone as a star of consolation, whose
radiance attracted and appeased our awakening spirits. As one of the
many--for there are many in France--to whom Tolstoy was very much more
than an admired artist: for whom he was a friend, the best of friends,
the one true friend in the whole of European art--I wish to lay before
this sacred memory my tribute of gratitude and of love.
The days when I learned to know him are days that I shall never
forget. It was in 1886. After some years of silent germination the
marvellous flowers of Russian art began to blossom on the soil of
France. Translations of Tolstoy and of Dostoyevsky were being issued in
feverish haste by all the publishing houses of Paris. Between the years
'85 and '87 came _War and Peace_, _Anna Karenin, Childhood and Youth,
Polikushka, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,_ the novels of the Caucasus, and
the _Tales for the People_. In the space of a few months, almost of a
few weeks, there was revealed to our eager eyes the presentment of a
vast, unfamiliar life, in which was reflected a new people, a new world.
I had but newly entered the Normal College. My fellow-scholars were of
widely divergent opinions. In our little world were such realistic and
ironical spirits as the philosopher Georges Dumas; poets, like Suarès,
burning with love of the Italian Renaissance; faithful disciples of
classic tradition; Stendhalians, Wagnerians, atheists and mystics. It
was a world of plentiful discussion, plentiful disagreement; but for
a period of some months we were nearly all united by a common love
of Tolstoy. It is true that each loved him for different reasons,
for each discovered in him himself; but this love was a love that
opened the door to a revelation of life; to the wide world itself. On
every side--in our families, in our country homes--this mighty voice,
which spoke from the confines of Europe, awakened the same emotions,
unexpected as they often were. I remember my amazement upon hearing
some middle-class people of Nivernais, my native province--people
who felt no interest whatever in art, people who read practically
nothing--speak with the most intense feeling of _The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_.
I have read, in the writings of distinguished critics, the theory
that Tolstoy owed the best of his ideas to the French romantics: to
George Sand, to Victor Hugo. We may ignore the absurdity of supposing
that Tolstoy, who could not endure her, could ever have been subject
to the influence of George Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Stendhal; nevertheless, we belittle the
greatness of Tolstoy, and the power of his fascination, if we attribute
them to his ideas. The circle of ideas in which art moves and has its
being is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that his might resides,
but in his expression of them; in the personal accent, the imprint of
the artist, the colour and savour of his life.
Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not borrowed--a matter to be
presently considered--never yet had a voice like to his resounded
throughout Europe. How else can we explain the thrill of emotion which
we all of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, that harmony for
which we had so long waited, and of which we felt the need? In our
opinion the style counted for nothing. Most of us, myself included,
made the acquaintance of Melchior de Vogüé's work on the subject of
the Russian novel[1] after we had read the novels of Tolstoy; and his
admiration of our hero seemed, after ours, a pallid thing. M. de Vogüé
spoke essentially as a man of letters pure and simple. But for our part
it was not enough to admire the presentation of life: we lived it; it
was our own. Ours it was by its ardent love of life, by its quality of
youth; ours by its irony, its disillusion, its pitiless discernment,
and its haunting sense of mortality. Ours by its dreams of brotherly
love, of peace among men; ours by its terrible accusation of the lies
of civilisation; ours by its realism; by its mysticism ours; by its
savour of nature, its sense of invisible forces, its vertigo in the
face of the infinite.
To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were what _Werther_ was to an
earlier generation: the wonderful mirror of our passions, our strength,
our weaknesses, of our hopes, our terrors, our discouragement. We were
in no wise anxious to reconcile these many contradictions; still less
did we concern ourselves to imprison this complex, multiple mind,
full of echoes of the whole wide world, within the narrow limits of
religious or political categories, as have the greater number of
those who have written of Tolstoy in these latter years: incapable
of extricating themselves from the conflict of parties, dragging him
into the arena of their own passions, measuring him by the standards
of their socialistic or clerical coteries. As if our coteries could be
the measure of a genius? What is it to me if Tolstoy is or is not of my
party? Shall I ask of what party Shakespeare was, or Dante, before I
breathe the atmosphere of his magic or steep myself in its light?
We did not say, as do the critics of to-day, that there were two
Tolstoys: the Tolstoy of the period before the crisis and he of the
period after the crisis; that the one was the great artist, while the
other was not an artist at all. For us there was only one Tolstoy, and
we loved the whole of him; for we felt, instinctively, that in such
souls as his all things are bound together and each has its integral
place.
[1] _Le Roman russe._
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. CHILDHOOD
II. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
III. YOUTH: THE ARMY
IV. EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS
V. SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION
VI. ST. PETERSBURG
VII. "FAMILY HAPPINESS"
VIII. MARRIAGE
IX. "ANNA KARENIN"
X. THE CRISIS
XI. REALITY
XII. ART AND CONSCIENCE
XIII. SCIENCE AND ART
XIV. THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC
XV. "RESURRECTION"
XVI. RELIGION AND POLITICS
XVII. OLD AGE
XVIII. CONCLUSION
INDEX
TOLSTOY
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Our instinct was conscious then of that which reason must prove
to-day. The task is possible now, for the long life has attained its
term; revealing itself, unveiled, to the eyes of all, with unequalled
candour, unexampled sincerity. To-day we are at once arrested by the
degree in which that life has always remained the same, from the
beginning to the end, in spite of all the barriers which critics have
sought to erect here and there along its course; in spite of Tolstoy
himself, who, like every impassioned mind, was inclined to the belief,
when he loved, or conceived a faith, that he loved or believed for the
first time; that the commencement of his true life dated from that
moment. Commencement--recommencement!' How often his mind was the
theatre of the same struggles, the same crises I We cannot speak of
the unity of his ideas, for no such unity existed; we can only speak
of the persistence among them of the same diverse elements; sometimes
allied, sometimes inimical; more often enemies than allies. Unity is
to be found neither in the spirit nor the mind of a Tolstoy; it exists
only in the internal conflict of his passions, in the tragedy of his
art and his life.
In him life and art are one. Never was work more intimately mingled
with the artist's life; it has, almost constantly, the value of
autobiography; it enables us to follow the writer, step by step, from
the time when he was twenty-five years of age, throughout all the
contradictory experiences of his adventurous career. His _Journal_,
which he commenced before the completion of his twentieth year, and
continued until his death,[1] together with the notes furnished by M.
Birukov,[2] completes this knowledge, and enable us not only to read
almost day by day in the history of Tolstoy's conscience, but also to
reconstitute the world in which his genius struck root, and the minds
from which his own drew sustenance.
His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys were very
ancient families, of the greater nobility, claiming descent from
Rurik; numbering among their ancestors companions of Peter the Great,
generals of the Seven Years' War, heroes of the Napoleonic struggle,
Decembrists, and political exiles. This inheritance included family
traditions; old memories to which Tolstoy was indebted for some of the
most original types in his _War and Peace;_ there was the old Prince
Bolkonsky, his maternal grandfather, Voltairian, despotic, a belated
representative of the aristocracy of the days of Catherine II.; Prince
Nikolas Grigorovitch Volkonsky, a cousin of his mother, who was wounded
at Austerlitz, and, like Prince Andrei, was carried off the field of
battle under the eyes of Napoleon; his father, who had some of the
characteristics of Nicolas Rostoff;[3] and his mother, the Princess
Marie, the ugly, charming woman with the beautiful eyes, whose goodness
illumines the pages of _War and Peace._
He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, _Childhood_
and _Youth_, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer's
mother died when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was
unable to recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff
evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face with a luminous smile, which
radiated gladness....
"Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not
know what sorrow is."[4]
Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her
indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of
her own invention.
His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet
ironical spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an
independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost
him. His death caused him "for the first time to understand the bitter
truth, and filled his soul with despair."[5] Here was the child's
earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion
of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion
to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are
marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his
_Childhood_, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the
death and burial of his mother.
Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana.[6]
There Leo Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and
there, eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the
five was a girl: that Marie who in later years became a religious;
it was with her that Tolstoy took refuge in dying, when he fled from
home and family. Of the four sons, Sergius was charming and selfish,
"sincere to a degree that I have never known equalled"; Dmitri was
passionate, selfcentred, introspective, and in later years, as a
student, abandoned himself eagerly to the practices of religion; caring
nothing for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the poor, sheltering
the infirm; suddenly, with the same quality of violence, plunging into
debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ransoming a girl whom he had
known in a public brothel, and receiving her into his home; finally
dying of phthisis at the age of twenty-nine.[7] Nikolas, the eldest,
the favourite brother, had inherited his mother's gift of imagination,
her power of telling stories;[8] ironical, nervous, and refined; in
later years an officer in the Caucasus, where he formed the habit of a
drunkard; a man, like his brother, full of Christian kindness, living
in hovels, and sharing with the poor all that he possessed. Tourgenev
said of him "that he put into practice that humble attitude towards
life which his brother Leo was content to develop in theory."
The orphans were cared for by two great-hearted women, one was their
Aunt Tatiana,[9] of whom Tolstoy said that "she had two virtues:
serenity and love." Her whole life was love; a devotion that never
failed. "She made me understand the moral pleasure of loving."
The other was their Aunt Alexandra, who was for ever serving others,
herself avoiding service, dispensing with the help of servants. Her
favourite occupation was reading the lives of the Saints, or conversing
with pilgrims or the feeble-minded. Of these "innocents" there were
several, men and women, who lived in the house. One, an old woman, a
pilgrim, was the godmother of Tolstoy's sister. Another, the idiot
Gricha, knew only how to weep and pray....
"Gricha, notable Christian! So mighty was your faith that you felt the
approach of God; so ardent was your love that words rushed from your
lips, words that your reason could not control. And how you used to
celebrate His splendour, when speech failed you, when, all tears, you
lay prostrated on the ground!"[10]
Who can fail to understand the influence, in the shaping of Tolstoy,
of all these humble souls? In some of them we seem to see an outline,
a prophecy, of the Tolstoy of later years. Their prayers and their
affection must have sown the seeds of faith in the child's mind; seeds
of which the aged man was to reap the harvest.
With the exception of the idiot Gricha, Tolstoy does not speak, in his
narrative of _Childhood_, of these humble helpers who assisted in the
work of building up his mind. But then how clearly we see it through
the medium of the book--this soul of a little child; "this pure, loving
heart, a ray of clear light, which always discovered in others the best
of their qualities"--this more than common tenderness! Being happy, he
ponders on the only creature he knows to be unhappy; he cries at the
thought, and longs to devote himself to his good. He hugs and kisses
an ancient horse, begging his pardon, because he has hurt him. He is
happy in loving, even if he is not loved. Already we can see the germs
of his future genius; his imagination, so vivid that he cries over
his own stories; his brain, always busy, always trying to discover
of what other people think; his precocious powers of memory[11] and
observation; the attentive eyes, which even in the midst of his sorrow
scrutinise the faces about him, and the authenticity of their sorrow.
He tells us that at five years of age he felt for the first time "that
life is not a time of amusement, but a very heavy task."[12]
Happily he forgot the discovery. In those days he used to soothe
his mind with popular tales; those mythical and legendary dreams
known in Russia as _bylines;_ stories from the Bible; above all the
sublime _History of Joseph,_ which he cited in his old age as a model
of narrative art: and, finally, the Arabian Nights, which at his
grandmother's house were recited every evening, from the vantage of the
window-seat, by a blind story-teller.
[1] With the exception of a few interruptions: one especially of
considerable length, between 1865 and 1878.
[2] For his remarkable biography of _Léon Tolstoï, Vie et Oeuvre,
Mémoires, Souvenirs, Lettres, Extraits du Journal intime, Notes et
Documents biographiques, réunis, coordonnés et annotés par P. Birukov,_
revised by Leo Tolstoy, translated into French from the MS. by J. W.
Bienstock.
[3] He also fought in the Napoleonic campaigns, and was a prisoner in
France during the years 1814-15.
[4] _Childhood_, chap. ii.
[5] _Childhood_, chap, xxvii.
[6] Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies "the open glade"
(literally, the "light glade"), is a little village to the south of
Moscow, at a distance of some leagues from Toula, in one of the most
thoroughly Russian of the provinces. "Here the two great regions of
Russia," says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, "the region of the forests and the
agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. In the surrounding
country we meet with no Finns, Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians.
The district of Toula lies at the very heart of Russia."
[7] Tolstoy has depicted him in _Anna Karenin,_ as the brother of
Levine.
[8] He wrote the _Diary of a Hunter._
[9] In reality she was a distant relative. She had loved Tolstoy's
father, and was loved by him; but effaced herself, like Sonia in _War
and Peace_.
[10] _Childhood_, chap. xii.
[11] He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated 1878), to be
able to recall the sensations of being swaddled as a baby, and of being
bathed in a tub. See _First Memories._
[12] _First Memories._