THE PEASANT COUNT
We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist
that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the
greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all
mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been
translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the
cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven
years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would
have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that,
just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on
the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with
shaping it.
Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man,
therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were
ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his
life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were
high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he
pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police
system which strangled the life of Russia.
He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of
his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even
in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He
decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery
officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical
story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the
Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict,
“Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer.
He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; but still his conscience
troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at
Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who
tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort.
Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and
closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and
not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he
was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the
first one who entered the house.
Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife
was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts
many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote
“War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of
the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of
characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long
Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called
different names by different groups of persons--to say nothing of
diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these
characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I
failed.
Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of
“The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way
to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a
young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a
polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new
love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi
drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the
critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an
ax.”
There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal
triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and
still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you
make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a
married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her
duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with
most of the “heavy” novelists, that there is nothing for the various
characters to do but to die horrid deaths.
Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual
conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element
in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress
their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When
people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to
be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that,
because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down.
It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more
obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to
sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and
conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a
doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his
control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross
man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was
unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can
conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the
sex relationship.
If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would
have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than
that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes,
who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and
knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of
the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his
landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he
had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large
family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The
Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he
was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a
prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to
look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their
father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion.
Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes
and spent his time cobbling shoes. He gave up his copyrights, but he
could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow
rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his
life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could
stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property,
like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his
home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he
was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of
the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his
death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the
time.
Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition
and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the
church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to
get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If
they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about
it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many
other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in
the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the
bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of
vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and
telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great
soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to
sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the
Russian people were accustomed.
Tolstoi had met some of the revolutionists of his time, but had been
cold to them; he was not interested in politics, only in religious and
moral questions. His conversion first took the form of absolute
non-resistance to evil. Later on he came to modify it to the doctrine
which Gandhi is now spreading throughout all Asia, “non-violent
resistance.” You shall not use physical force against your enemy, but
you oppose him by word and teaching, by your power of endurance and of
moral conviction; so you shame him, or rouse the moral forces of the
whole world to rebuke him.
Tolstoi applied that treatment to the state church and to the police. Of
course, if he had been a peasant or a workingman, or even a poor
student or literary man, he would have been beaten to death with the
knout, or shipped off to Siberia to perish in a convict camp. But he was
a member of the nobility, and his family influence protected him, until
he had become so famous throughout the world that he was greater than
the Tsardom itself. In his last years he lived as a majestic symbol of
the protest of the Russian people; he poured out arguments against war,
against government cruelty, against landlordism, against priestcraft;
and all the powers of darkness in Russia did not dare to lay a finger
upon him.
In his later years he wrote several novels, one of which I personally
consider his greatest. This is “Resurrection,” which tells the story of
a young Russian nobleman who seduces a peasant girl, and later on in
life discovers her as a prostitute. He becomes conscience-stricken
because of what he has done, and sets out to redeem her, follows her to
Siberia and saves her, and in the end they live that life of brotherly
and sisterly love which Tolstoi had come to preach. This story contains
frightful pictures of the whole Russian system; it was translated into
an immense number of languages, and it probably did more than any other
one book to undermine the Tsardom.
Tolstoi published a work of criticism, and some people think that I got
my ideas from it. Therefore, let me say that if you want to find the
germ of “Mammonart,” you will do better to consult Walt Whitman’s
“Democratic Vistas,” published a generation before Tolstoi’s work.
The thesis of Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” resembles mine in just one
particular; that is, we both believe that art has to do with moral
questions--a belief which we share with Aeschylus and Sophocles and
Euripedes and Aristophanes and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and
Moliere and Victor Hugo and Dostoievski and Tennyson and Ibsen--and so
on through a long list of persons still to be considered.
But from what point of view shall the artist approach morality? Tolstoi
answers as one who distrusts the intellect, distrusts science, and has
no use for or belief in progress, whether social or political or
intellectual. He believes that the one basis of hope for human beings is
in a return to the primitive, elemental forms of life; he wants art to
confine itself to those simple emotions which can be understood by the
uneducated peasant. I should say that the easiest way to make plain his
thesis would be to change his title from “What Is Art?” to “What Is
Children’s Art?”
Whatever faults the critic may have to find with “Mammonart,” I beg him
to realize that its author is not a primitive Christian, but a
scientific Socialist; one who welcomes the achievements of the human
intellect, and looks forward to a complex social order, and to social
art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of
comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and
fastidious individualist culture of our time.