duets on the piano. After dinner he would settle down to this, usually
with his wife’s sister. When he was in difficulties he would say things
to make her laugh, so that she had to play slower, and sometimes, if
this did not succeed, he would stop and take off one of his boots,
saying, “Now it will go all right.”
Tolstoy was as young as anybody in his love of fun and games, the more
nonsensical the better; and his laughter was most infectious, beginning
on a high note, and his whole body would shake.
People ought to know about this amusing side of Tolstoy’s character,
in order to get out of their heads that he was a painfully serious man
without a sense of humor, who asked impossibilities of people. He had
many sides to his character, as we shall see, and that is what makes
him so intensely interesting.
Tolstoy was a deeply affectionate man, loving above all things his
home, his wife, and his children. If ever he had to leave them for a
time, even if it were only on a hunting expedition, he would always as
he approached his home say, “If only all is well at home!” Whatever
he did, he did with his whole heart and soul. He was an enthusiastic
schoolmaster, a keen sportsman and farmer, and an excellent gardener
and beekeeper. He looked into everything on his estate and insisted
upon having all his pigs washed, and there were as many as three
hundred!
So Tolstoy’s life was as full as it possibly could be. For the first
ten years of his married life he was so much occupied with the cares of
family life, and the life of a country gentleman, that he had less time
for thought and did not worry himself quite so much about the reasons
of life. He was also absorbed in his writing, and being a perfect
giant for work, was able during this period—in spite of his numberless
activities—to write two very great novels, besides many shorter stories
and primers for children.
“War and Peace,” an historical novel of the time of Napoleon, and
requiring an immense amount of research, and “Anna Karenina” are as
great as any novels that have been written in any country. Tolstoy’s
extraordinary powers of observation and his acute, almost uncanny,
understanding of human nature, make his characters so living and human
that, having read about them, they become as people you have known, and
you can never forget them.
Also, Tolstoy’s experience of life was wide and varied, and everything
he wrote about he had himself known and seen. War in the Crimea,
fashionable life in St. Petersburg, life with gipsies in the Caucasus,
with peasants in the country, the joys and sorrows of intimate family
life with children and animals—nothing escaped his notice, and his
books are simply life seen through the medium of his wonderful and
penetrating mind; there is nothing like them.
So there he was, the most brilliant and successful writer of the day,
with a happy domestic life, money, a delightful property, and devoted
servants and tenants. If any one ought to have been contented, it might
be said it was Tolstoy. And yet he became dissatisfied and began again,
as he had in earlier days, to find fault with himself and with his own
life. He was fifty when the change in him began to take place; and yet
it was no change really, he had always been the same; and the people
who amuse themselves by finding inconsistencies in his character are
wrong when they accuse him of being changeable: he merely returned now
to his earliest ideals, which had been there all the time, though his
intense enjoyment of life and his many occupations had prevented his
thinking quite so much of working out his theories. It will be seen
that Tolstoy had an extraordinary tenacity of purpose, and during his
life carried through nearly all he had dreamed of doing. About the big
and important things of life he remained always the same, though at
times his high spirits made it appear as though he had forgotten about
the problems that had worried him. But now, once more the question
of how to lead the best life, and what is meant by religion, became
uppermost in his mind, and a great disgust seized him of the life he
and his family were leading. Everything he had enjoyed he now despised.
He hated the luxury of his life, the fact of having servants to wait
on him, his daughters in muslin dresses drinking tea: “The life of
our circle of society,” he said, “not only repelled me, but lost all
meaning.”
Yet there was nothing grossly luxurious or selfish about the life
led by the Tolstoy family: according to most aristocratic ideas of
luxury their life was simple. Nothing could be plainer than the house
at Yasnaya, solidly built as it was, with double windows to keep out
the cold and large Dutch stoves. The rooms were very bare and the
floors mostly uncarpeted, the furniture faded and old-fashioned. But
the family fed well, and kept a great many servants, which seemed
necessary, as the Tolstoys, like many Russians, had hosts of poor
relations living with them, besides tutors, governesses, and old
servants; they were also a very large family in themselves.
But now life appeared to Tolstoy as dust and ashes. His wife and
children, the praise of men, art—he turned from it all. His family at
first could not understand why he should be in such despair; it was
difficult to feel sympathy with his sufferings. To them he appeared to
possess everything that most people considered good and desirable, and
the life he was leading excellent and blameless. So they could not help
him, and he had to suffer alone.
Tolstoy’s second son, who has written his recollections of his father,
says he began to notice a change in his habits about this time. He left
off hunting and shooting and riding, and took instead long walks on
the road, where he could meet pilgrims and beggars and have talks with
them. At dinner he would tell his family about them. He became gloomy
and irritable, and quarreled with his wife over trifles. He no longer
played with his children. When they were enjoying themselves acting or
playing croquet he would walk in and spoil it all by a word or even a
look.
He did not want to spoil their fun, but for all that he did. He had
often not said anything, but he had thought it. “We all knew what he
had thought, and that was what made us so uncomfortable,” his son says.
It was trying for the children to lose their jolly, delightful
companion, who had brought such zest into their games and whose gaiety
had been so infectious. Now they rather dreaded the appearance of this
stern man who disapproved of them.
He did nothing but blame the useless lives led by ladies and gentlemen,
their laziness, greed, and the way they made other people work for them.
This is the sort of thing he said:
Here we sit in our well-heated rooms, and this very day a man was
found frozen to death on the high-road. He was frozen to death
because no one would give him a night’s lodging.
We stuff ourselves with cutlets and pastry while people are dying by
thousands from famine.
The children understood what he said, but it spoiled all their childish
amusements and broke up their happy life.
Tolstoy was very unhappy for a period of four or five years and could
see no meaning in existence. But at last he discovered a purpose in
life and a religion to help him. It was really Christianity, and
Christ’s Sermon on the Mount became his gospel. The life of a Russian
peasant he was convinced was the example of how to live. Man, he
thought, should be simple, hardworking, and kind; he should give more
than he received and he should rejoice in serving others. Tolstoy saw
it was no good preaching without practising, and so he tried to live
like a Russian peasant. He ate very little and lived principally upon
vegetables. He dressed like a peasant too, in summer in a smock and in
the winter in a sheepskin coat and cap and high boots. He refused to
have any one to wait on him, and did his own room. This was not easy
to him, as, though he had always hated luxury, as an aristocrat he had
taken certain things for granted, such as the fact that his clothes
would always be folded and brushed and put away by a servant. By nature
he was very untidy, and it was really an effort to him to pick up his
things and keep them in order. In earlier days, when he had dressed
and undressed, he let all his clothes tumble on to the floor, and
there they would lie in different parts of the room until they were
picked up. To see him pack his portmanteau for a journey was said to
be an unforgettable sight, the confusion and disorder was something so
hopeless. But now he tried to turn over a new leaf so as not to give
people trouble.
Tolstoy saw the utter uselessness of preaching what you never intend to
practise. He was quite determined to carry out all he asked others to
do. After all it is more by the life you lead and example rather than
by words that you persuade people, and Tolstoy tells a true story in
this connection. It is as follows:
The Tolstoy family took into their house a dirty, homeless little boy,
to teach him and to benefit him generally. “What,” asks Tolstoy, “did
the boy see and learn?”
He saw Tolstoy’s own children, older than himself and of his own
age, dirtying and spoiling things, breaking and spilling things, and
throwing food to the dogs which seemed to the boy delicacies, expecting
other people to wait on them and never doing any work themselves.
Tolstoy understood then, he says, how absurd it was to take poor people
into your house and educate them, when you were yourselves leading such
idle, useless lives.
Tolstoy says his one desire was to hide their life from the boy;
everything that he told him or tried to teach him he felt was destroyed
by the example they were all setting him.
So Tolstoy tried hard to live according to his ideals, and became
something like a monk but without a monk’s narrow views and
superstitious beliefs. He dropped his title quite naturally, and when
a peasant called him “Your Excellency,” Tolstoy replied, “I am called
simply Leo Nikolayevitch,” and went on to speak of the matter in hand.
Manual labor, which had always been a pleasure to him, now became a
sort of religion. Every day he worked for hours at hay-making, plowing,
reaping or wood-cutting as the case might be. Nothing absorbed him like
mowing, and he would stand among the peasants in his smock listening
with perfect happiness to the sound of scythes. Country life, labor,
healthy appetite and sound sleep was his idea of a happy life.
In the winter evenings Tolstoy learned to make boots. He engaged a
black-bearded shoemaker to come and teach him, and side by side they
sat on two stools in a little room near Tolstoy’s study.
Tolstoy was never satisfied until he had done the job exactly as the
shoemaker did it. Groaning with the effort of threading a waxed thread,
he would refuse the assistance of the bearded man. “I’ll do it!—No,
no—I’ll do it myself, it’s the only way to learn,” he would say.
As to the boots which Tolstoy made, a man to whom he had given a pair
and who had worn them, was asked whether they were well made. “Couldn’t
be worse,” was his reply.
Now for a time the whole Tolstoy family and their friends were filled
with this enthusiasm for outdoor work. They rose early, and in company
with the peasants the Tolstoy children and their mother, in a Russian
dress, uncles, aunts, and even grandmothers, mowed the grass and strove
to outdo the other. They had no theories about it, but simply found it
a change and a pleasant satisfactory way of taking exercise.
All sorts of people now made pilgrimages to Yasnaya, to learn how to
live, for Tolstoy’s fame as a teacher had begun to go about the land.
Rich aristocrats wanted to throw away their gold and do the housework,
and a governess of the Tolstoys, who has written rather malicious
though amusing accounts of Tolstoy’s life at this time, describes
enthusiastic ladies who came to Yasnaya and manured the fields in white
dressing jackets! Tolstoy suffered from the silliness of some of his
followers, and once sadly said he supposed he should be known through
them and their eccentricities. There is a good deal of truth in the
saying that a man’s admirers are sometimes his worst enemies.
Tolstoy gave up writing novels, and wrote only one more,
“Resurrection,” quite at the end of his life. This was written with a
great moral purpose, and is a serious and terrible book. His earlier
novels he now referred to as “wordy rubbish”; he hated them, as he felt
they were frivolous and could only be interesting to the upper classes.
He wrote, however, a great many books on life, conduct, and religion,
and children’s stories. They were printed very cheaply and taken round
by pedlars. The peasants read and loved these books, and they seemed to
penetrate right into the heart of Russia. They were written simply, and
the peasants understood them. Tolstoy was very happy that he had been
able to help and please the poor people.
Now, preaching as Tolstoy did against property and the extraordinarily
unfair system which allows one man to have a thousand acres and another
not even a foot, he could not satisfy himself until he had got rid
of his own property; so difficulties arose with his family. His wife
would not have felt so strongly about it, no doubt, if she had had only
herself to think of; but it is difficult for a mother to believe that
her children will be happier and better without money and possessions;
she did not want to see her children impoverished. Tolstoy thought a
mother’s love was selfish, and often writes about it in this sense.
Countess Tolstoy had been upset when her husband gave up writing
novels, for they brought in a lot of money; and now, with their largely
increased family, their income, instead of becoming more, became less.
Tolstoy, in a letter to his wife on this subject, says:
... but I cannot help repeating that our happiness or unhappiness
cannot in the least depend on whether we lose or acquire something,
but only what we ourselves are. Now if we left Kostenka (one of their
children) a million, would he be happier?... What our life together
is, with our joys and sorrows, will appear to our children real life,
but neither languages, nor diplomas, nor society, and still less
money, make our happiness or unhappiness, and therefore the question
how much our income shrinks cannot occupy me.
Tolstoy finally satisfied himself by giving up his estates to his
family. The house itself he left to the youngest, Ivan. This was a
tradition in the family, Tolstoy, as his mother’s youngest son, having
inherited Yasnaya Polyana.
This little boy, who was born when Tolstoy was quite old, promised
to be very remarkable, and his father took more interest in him than
any of his other children. The child Ivan understood things just as
his father did. When one day his mother said to him, “Ivan, Yasnaya
is yours,” he was very angry and stamped his foot passionately,
crying “Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! everything is everyone
else’s.” The child died when he was seven, and it was a most bitter
grief to Tolstoy. But Masha, his second daughter, was a comfort to him;
she took her father’s side when she was only fifteen, and though she
was very delicate, she used all the strength she had in working for the
poor, looking after the peasants’ wives and doing their work for them
when they were ill, minding the children and cleaning and cooking.
Many people blame Countess Tolstoy for not seeing eye to eye with her
husband, but I think it would have been a very great deal to expect of
any woman, that she should discard all the habits of a lifetime and
renounce everything she had been accustomed to, to change her way of
living and of bringing up her children. She describes her feelings very
well in a letter to her sister, saying that her husband is a leader,
one who goes ahead of the crowd pointing the way men should go. “But
I am the crowd,” she says; “I live in its current, and see the light
of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I
acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by
the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.”
Countess Tolstoy also felt that her husband was wasting himself; he had
a genius for writing novels, and he deliberately gave up writing them
and occupied himself instead with log-splitting, reaping, and making
boots which anybody could do, and do better. It was tiresome of him to
play at being “Robinson Crusoe,” as Countess Tolstoy expressed it.
No doubt he was provoking, but though Tolstoy and his wife sometimes
quarreled, they were devoted to one another all the same, as may be
seen by the very delightful quotation out of a letter of Countess
Tolstoy’s to her husband.
All at once I pictured you vividly to myself, and a sudden flood
of tenderness rose in me. There is something in you so wise, kind,
naïve, and obstinate, and it is all lit up by that tender interest
for every one natural to you alone, and by your look that reaches to
people’s souls.
Sometimes Tolstoy had to accompany his family to Moscow. This became
the regular arrangement in the winter, when his daughter Tanya grew up
and began to go to balls and parties. Countess Tolstoy was always very
energetic, arranging their flat and calling upon people who would ask
her daughter to parties.
Tolstoy, after living in the country, found the artificiality of town
life almost unbearable, and the luxury of the circle they lived in
was to him torture. He had to occupy himself in order to bear it. One
winter he spent his time taking a census of people in the poorest part
of Moscow.
He was so horrified at the appalling misery he came across that he
wanted to run away. He knew poverty in the country, but he had never
seen anything like the poverty he came across in the town. Writing
about it, he says:
I could not look at our own or anybody else’s drawing-room, or a
clean, well-spread dining-table, or a carriage with well-fed coachman
and horses, or shops or theaters without a feeling of profound
irritation.
It was because he had seen the other side of the picture. And
unfortunately there always is another side to the picture.
He saw this side by side with the wretched lodging-houses he had been
visiting, filled with cold, hungry, dreadful people, and one he felt
was the result of the other.
His son says the look of suffering on his father’s face at that time he
shall never forget.
He was simply overcome with pity and with shame and indignation
that our civilization can permit such things. So he went back to
Yasnaya alone, and feeling ill with despair; he took things to heart
in an extraordinary way. But gradually the peace and loneliness of
the country comforted him, and he set to work on a book about his
experiences with the poor in Moscow, and called it “What Then Must We
Do?” He simply wrote down what he had seen and heard, and asked what
we were to do to destroy what is in truth slavery—starving people
struggling to live and driven to crime by their miserable conditions,
while others have riches and luxury, even throwing their superfluous
food to the dogs and enjoying the fruit of other people’s labor.
It was impossible for Tolstoy to have any respect for civilization
as such, unless it really helped men. He judged it fairly by what it
did and found it wanting. He longed to see real progress, not merely
mechanical progress. He did not call progress making battleships,
inventing flying machines, or electricity, or explosives if people’s
hearts remained hard. He wanted to see a spiritual progress, people
being kind and helpful to one another.
The root of all the evil lay in man’s selfishness, he thought, and the
corruption of Governments: these he considered existed only for the
benefit of the rich. We must remember that the Russian Government at
that time was one of the most backward of so-called civilized Powers,
and what we call representative government did not exist at all, but a
government by a few for the few.
Tolstoy also set himself to the great work he had dreamt of doing as a
young man, that of separating the true from the false in the teachings
of the Church. The Greek or the Russian Church does not differ
fundamentally in its doctrines from the Roman Catholic or Protestant
churches.
Tolstoy saw that man needed some religion or chart to guide him through
life, and being himself profoundly religious by nature, he did not,
like Voltaire, merely scoff and destroy, but tried also to build up and
to construct something really tangible and helpful to human beings.
The truth he believed lay in the teaching of Christ. “If you wish to
understand the truth,” Tolstoy said, “read the Gospels”; and the book
he wrote on the Gospels is an explanation of Christ’s teaching. He
asked himself, were the things that children and ignorant people taught
true? and if they were not they should be exposed publicly. Every
honest man should speak out. But people he saw were so confused in
their minds about religion that they thought it must be supernatural,
senseless, and incomprehensible, or it wasn’t religion.
Tolstoy wanted to make it a real and living force. He told the peasants
in his books that God was not the cruel, revengeful, punishing Person
they had been taught to believe Him; that He did not go about hardening
people’s hearts and directing them to murder, and that they would not
go to Hell for being unbaptized. On the contrary, he told them that
God was good and that every human being, as the son of God, was good
too, and could increase, by loving goodness, the divine in himself, by
loving others as himself and by acting toward everybody as you would
they should act toward you. But to kill another or abuse him, or to
profit at the expense of any man, this was what made misery in the
world. Tolstoy preached that all men are equal, as Christ had, and
that nothing can be done by force or by violence, but only by love.
The Church in Russia was able to exercise a sort of inquisition,
employing people to spy on suspected free-thinkers all over the
country. There existed at the time, about a hundred miles from Moscow,
a Bastille, or fortress, where persons objected to or suspected by the
Russian Church, were shut up. In its dark and damp dungeons innocent
people would be left for many years, sometimes forgotten altogether.
Tolstoy would most certainly have been arrested and probably sent
there, if he had not been an aristocrat with an aunt at court who
pleaded for him with the Czar. As it was, he was excommunicated by the
Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Church.
Tolstoy was proving dangerous, his influence was beginning to be
felt; he was undermining the power of the Church and State by showing
the poor people that they have a right to live and that all men are
equal; that Christ had said so, and that the Church has no right to
misrepresent His words.
Tolstoy’s books were no longer allowed in libraries; newspapers were
forbidden to mention any meetings held in his favor. Telegraph offices
actually refused to take messages of sympathy sent him, though abusive
telegrams arrived quite punctually.
During a terrible famine in Russia, when Tolstoy and his family worked
night and day and gave all they possessed to the starving peasants,
the priests tried to frighten them and preached against Tolstoy, saying
he was Antichrist and they should not eat his food.
But the excommunication of Tolstoy had really quite the opposite effect
to what was intended. It shocked the whole world, and Tolstoy’s name
was received with more and more sympathy.
The views he expressed and the books he wrote had greater influence
than ever before. The Russian people themselves seemed to realize
that they possessed one of the greatest moral teachers in the world.
But as the people of Russia became freer in their views and less
subservient to authority, so in proportion the Government became harder
and tightened its hold upon them. Tolstoy had not hitherto written
on political life, but the cruel repression of all forms of liberty
by violence roused him at the end of his life to write against the
Government of his country a tragic letter which he published in the
European papers, entitled: “I can keep silent no longer.” He said his
life was made unendurable by the suffering of his people, and he begs
all to cease from hatred and revenge.