contain a life of himself for those who know how to read it. There is
little difficulty in reading Tolstoi’s; moreover, it is very copious,
and possesses the additional advantage of being written from at
least two distinct points of view. It is seldom necessary to consult
any other authority for the essential facts of his life and growth.
“Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” the earliest of his large books, and
one of the most attractive, tells us all that we need to know of his
early life. An English critic has remarked that, if Tolstoi has here
described his boyhood, he must have been a very commonplace child. The
early life of men of genius is rarely a record of precocities. The
boy here described so minutely, with his abnormal sensitiveness, his
shy awkwardness and profound admiration of the _comme il faut_, his
perpetual self-analysis, his brooding dreams, his amusing self-conceit,
bears in him the germs of a great artist much more certainly than
any small monster of perfection. It is scarcely necessary to say that
the autobiography here is not one of incident, as some persons have
foolishly supposed; it is neither complete nor historically accurate.
Tolstoi uses his material as an artist, but the material is himself.
The artist craves to express the inward experiences of his past life,
of which he can scarcely speak. He invents certain imaginary events, or
rearranges actual events as a frame into which he fits his own inward
experiences. Whatever is most poignant and vivid in the novelist’s art
is so produced; and you say to him, “This is so real; you are narrating
your own history.” He will be able to reply laughingly, “Oh, no! my
life is not at all like that.” Imagination is a poor substitute for
experience. There is sufficient external evidence extant, even if it
were possible to doubt the internal, that Tolstoi is here throughout
drawing on his own youthful experiences. Like Irteneff, young Tolstoi
followed Franklin’s injunctions as to the use of “Rules of Life;” his
favourite books are the same; like him, also, he early developed a
love of metaphysics, owing to which, young Irteneff says, “I lost one
after the other the convictions which, for the happiness of my own
life, I never should have dared to touch.” All the slight indications
in the “Confessions” of young Tolstoi’s spiritual experiences agree
with young Irteneff’s. Even the plain face, “exactly like that of a
common peasant,” the small grey eyes and thick lips and wide nose, that
caused the boy of the story to look at himself in the glass with such
sorrow and aversion, to pray so fervently to God to be made handsome,
correspond exactly to those of the real hero. No sign of the boy’s
early development is left untouched. We feel that this book, in which
the artist is first fully revealed, was the outcome of an overmastering
impulse to give expression to the accumulated experiences of an intense
and sensitive childhood, now receding for ever into the past.
Descended from a well-known minister and friend of Peter the Great,
and belonging to a family that has been eminent for two hundred years
in war, diplomacy, literature, and art, Lyof Tolstoi was born in 1828,
the youngest of four sons; his mother, the Princess Marie Volkonsky,
was the daughter of a general in Catherine’s time, and, according to
friends of the novelist’s family, she resembled the Marie Bolkonsky of
“War and Peace.” Both parents were, he says, in the general esteem,
“good, cultivated, gentle, and devout.” He was early left an orphan,
his mother dying when he was not yet two years of age, his father when
he was nine. At the age of fifteen he went to the University of Kazan;
he left it suddenly to settle on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana which
had fallen to him. In 1851, at the age of twenty-three, he became
a yunker (the usual position of a nobleman entering the army, doing
the work of a common soldier and associating with the officers) in
the artillery at the Caucasus; he was stationed on the Terek. This
expedition to the Caucasus was a memorable event in young Tolstoi’s
life. It determined finally his artistic vocation. A centre of military
activity on the most interesting frontier of the empire, it is a land
of wonderful scenery and strange primitive customs, hallowed with
association with Poushkin and Gogol. Tolstoi’s elder and most loved
brother Nikolai had just come home on leave from the Caucasus; it was
natural that young Lyof, who had never yet left the neighbourhood of
Moscow, should be attracted to a land which held for him a fascination
so manifold. Under the influence of this strange and new environment he
became, almost at once, a great artist, and “Childhood, Boyhood, and
Youth” was written in 1852.
Tolstoi’s critics have sometimes regretted that he never continued
this story. The only possible continuation of “Childhood, Boyhood,
and Youth” is “The Cossacks.” The young Irteneff of the end of the
former book corresponds as closely as possible with the Olyenin who
is analyzed at the beginning of the latter. A few years only have
intervened. These years he long after summed up briefly and too sternly
in the “Confessions”: “I cannot think of those years without horror,
disgust, and pain of heart. There was no vice or crime that in those
days I would not have committed. Lying, theft, pleasure of all sorts,
intemperance, violence, murder--I have committed all. I lived on my
estate, I consumed in drink or at cards what the labour of the peasants
had produced. I punished them, and sold them, and deceived them; and
for all that I was praised.” Tolstoi condemns himself without mercy,
as Bunyan condemned himself in his “Grace Abounding;” even in the
“Confessions” he admits that at this time his aspirations after good
were the central element in his nature, and it was out of desire to
benefit his peasants that he left the university prematurely to settle
on his estate.
Tolstoi’s spiritual autobiography is carried on as accurately as
anyone need desire in “The Cossacks.” It was in the Caucasus that he
first powerfully realized what nature is, and natural life; he was,
for the first time, forced to consider his own relation to such life.
Lukashka, the healthy, coarse young Cossack soldier, Maryana, the
beautiful robust Cossack girl, and the delightful figure of Uncle
Jeroshka, the old hunter, display their vivid and active life before
Olyenin, the child of civilization. He lives constantly in the presence
of the “eternal and inaccessible mountain snows and a majestic woman
endowed with the primitive beauty of the first woman;” he feels the
contrast between this and the life of cities: “happiness is to be with
Nature, to see her, to hold converse with her;” and he longs to mingle
himself with the life of Maryana. In vain. “Now if I could only become
a Cossack like Lukashka, steal horses, get tipsy on red wine, shout
ribald songs, shoot men down, and then while drunk creep in through
the window where she was, without a thought of what I was doing or why
I did it, that would be another thing, then we should understand one
another, then I might be happy.... She fails to understand me, not
because she is beneath me, not at all; it would be out of the nature
of things for her to understand me. She is light-hearted; she is like
Nature, calm, tranquil, sufficient to herself. But I, an incomplete
feeble creature, wish her to understand my ugliness and my anguish.”
The book is full of strongly-drawn pictures of the beauty of natural
strength and health; sometimes recalling Whitman at his best. They are
strange, these resemblances between three great typical artists of
to-day, so far apart, so little known to each other, Millet, Whitman,
and Tolstoi. In “The Cossacks” Tolstoi gives his first statement of
that problem of man’s natural function in life which he has been
seeking to solve ever since. Here he has no sort of solution to offer;
“some voice seemed to bid him wait, not decide hastily.”
In 1854 Tolstoi was transferred at his own request to the Crimea,
to obtain command of a mountain battery, doing good service at the
battle of the Tchernaya. At this period also he wrote his “Sketches of
Sebastopol.” By this time he had attracted considerable attention as a
writer, and by command of the Emperor, who said that “the life of that
young man must be looked after,” he was, much to his own annoyance,
removed to a place of comparative safety.
When peace was made, Tolstoi, then twenty-six years of age, left the
army and settled in St. Petersburg, where he was warmly received by
the chief literary circle of the capital, then including Tourgueneff,
Gregorovitch, and Ostroffsky; the first, who was a comparatively
near neighbour at Yasnaya Polyana, becoming one of his most intimate
friends. During the following ten years he wrote little, but travelled
in Germany, France, and Italy, and devoted himself to the education
of the serfs on his estate, marrying in 1862 the young and beautiful
daughter of a German military doctor at Tula. Although he wrote little,
he was enlarging his conception of art and studying literature. He
admired English novels, both for their art and naturalism, and among
French novelists he preferred Dumas and Paul de Kock, whom he called
the French Dickens. Schopenhauer was a favourite writer at this
period. He found his chief recreations in that love of sport in all
its forms which has left such vivid and delightful traces throughout
his work. In his portraits he appears with a shaggy bearded face,
with large prominent irregular features, and rather a stern fixed and
reserved expression; the deep eyes are watchful yet sympathetic, and
at the same time melancholy, and the thick lips are sensitive. His
acquaintances described him as not easy to approach, very shy and
rather wild (_très-farouche et très-sauvage_), but those who approached
him found him “extremely amiable.” In his later “Confessions” he thus
summarizes his view of things, and that of the group to which he
belonged, during this literary period of his life, more especially with
reference to the earlier part of it. “The view of life of my literary
comrades lay in the opinion that in general life developed itself; that
in this development we, the men of intellect, took the chief part,
and among the men of intellect we, artists and poets, stood first.
Our vocation was to instruct people. The very natural question, ‘What
do I know and what can I teach,’ was unnecessary, for, according to
the theory, one needed to know nothing. The artist, the poet, taught
unconsciously. I held myself for a wonderful artist and poet, and very
naturally appropriated this theory. I was paid for it, I had excellent
food, a good habitation, women, society; I was famous.... When I look
back to that time, to my state of mind then, and to that of the people
I lived with (there are thousands of them, even now), it seems to me
melancholy, horrible, ludicrous; I feel as one feels in a lunatic
asylum. We were all then convinced that we must talk, talk, write and
print as quickly as possible and as much as possible; because it was
necessary for the good of humanity.” This is by no means a satisfactory
or final account of the matter.
“War and Peace,” Tolstoi’s longest and most ambitious work, which began
to appear in 1865, is from the present point of view of comparatively
slight interest. His art had now become more complex, and this was a
serious attempt to give life to various aspects of a great historical
period. Much of himself, certainly, we find scattered through the
work, especially in Pierre Besoukhoff, though it is unnecessary to say
that a very large part of Pierre’s experiences had no counterpart in
Tolstoi’s; the not very life-like or interesting Masonic episode, for
instance, has clearly been read up. Pierre, however, appears before us,
from first to last, as Tolstoi appears before us, a seeker.
“Anna Karenina” is full of biographic material of intense interest. In
Vronsky, doubtless much of his earlier experience, and in Levine, his
own inner history at that time, are written clearly enough. From this
standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man
whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all
that he ever wrote, still groping, but now more restlessly and eagerly,
with growing desperation. The nets are drawn tight around him, and when
we close the book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which he is
still unconscious.
I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a large northern town. All
day long, it seemed to me, the hearses were trundling along their dead
to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I walked out I met men
carrying coffins, and if I glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name
of the child I saw two days ago in his mother’s lap; or I was greeted
by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along
to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home,
thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at
last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the
whole of life, a road full of the noise of the preparation of death.
How daintily soever we danced along, each person, laughing so merrily
or in such downright earnest, was merely a corpse, screwed down in
an invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as might be to the
grave-edge.--It was at such a point of view that Tolstoi arrived in
his fiftieth year.
“When I had ended my book ‘Anna Karenina,’” he wrote in his
“Confessions,” “my despair reached such a height that I could do
nothing but think, think, of the horrible condition in which I
found myself.... Questions never ceased multiplying and pressing
for answers, and like lines converging all to one point, so these
unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. And with horror and
a consciousness of my weakness, I remained standing before this spot.
I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought
me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to
this, that I--a healthy and happy man--felt that I could no longer
live.... Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as well as a peasant.
Mentally, I could work for eighteen hours at a time without feeling any
ill consequence. And yet I had come to this, that I could no longer
live.... I only saw one thing--Death. Everything else was a lie.”
The greater part of the “Confessions” is occupied with the analysis of
this mental condition, and with the earlier stages of his deliverance,
for when he wrote the book he was scarcely yet quite free. The
direction in which light was to break in upon him is very clear even
to the reader of “Anna Karenina.” It seemed to him at length that
the awful questions which had oppressed him so long had been solved
for thousands of years by millions upon millions of persons who had
never reasoned about them at all. “From the time when men first began
to live anywhere,” he says in the “Confessions,” “they already knew
the meaning of life, and they carried on this life so that it reached
me. Everything in me and around me, corporeal and incorporeal, is the
fruit of their experiences of life; even the means by which I judge
and condemn life, all this is not mine, but brought forth by them. I
myself have been born, bred, grown up, thanks to them. They have dug
out the iron, have tamed cattle and horses, have taught how to till the
ground, and how to live together and to order life; they have taught me
to think and to reason. And I, their production, receiving my meat and
drink from them, instructed by their thoughts and words, have proved
to them they are an absurdity!... It is clear that I have only called
absurd what I do not understand.”
When he had made this great discovery the rest followed, slowly, but
simply and naturally. First, he understood the meaning of God. He had
all his life been seeking God. Now, one day in early spring, he was in
the wood, trying to catch among the tones of the forest the cry of the
snipe, listening and waiting, and thinking of the things he had been
thinking of for the last three years, especially of this question of
God. There was no God--that he knew was an intellectual truth. But is
the knowledge of God an intellectual matter? And it seemed to him that
he realized that God is life, and that to live is to know God. “And
from that moment the consciousness of God, as known by living, has
remained with me.”
Following up this clue, he proceeded to attend church regularly,
and to fulfil all the orthodox ceremonies. This, however, was a
failure. He could not get rid of the consciousness that these things
were--“bosh.” He turned from the church to the Gospels. At this point
the “Confessions” end. In the year 1879, in which he wrote that book,
he heard of, and met, Soutaieff.
One evening a beggar woman had knocked at Soutaieff’s door, asking
shelter for the night. She was given food and a place of rest. Next
morning all the family went to work in the field. The woman took the
opportunity of collecting all the valuables she could lay her hands
on, and fled. Some peasants at work saw her, stopped her, examined
her bundle, and having bound her hands, led her before the local
authorities. Soutaieff heard of this, and soon arrived. “Why have you
arrested her?” he asked. “She is a thief; she must be punished,” they
cried. “Judge not, and you will not be judged,” he said solemnly; “we
are all guilty at some point. What is the good of condemning her?
She will be put in prison, and what advantage will that be? It would
be much better to give her something to eat, and to let her go in
the grace of God.” Such curiously Christ-like stories as this of the
peasant-teacher reached Tolstoi, and made a deep impression on him.
They were in the line of his mental development, and threw light on his
own experiences. The influence of Soutaieff appears in “What then must
we do?”--a further chapter in the history of Tolstoi’s development, and
perhaps the most memorable of his attempts at the solution of social
questions.
What then must we do? It was the question the people asked of John
the Baptist, and we know his brief and practical answer. It was the
question that pressed itself for solution on Tolstoi when he began to
investigate the misery of Moscow, and to start philanthropic plans for
its amelioration. He tells us in this narrative, which has a dramatic
vividness of its own that will not bear abbreviation, how he was
gradually forced, by his own well-meaning attempts and mistakes, to
abandon his philanthropic projects, and to realize that he himself and
all other respectable and well-to-do people were the direct causes of
the misery of poverty.
He investigated the worst parts of the city, finding more comfort and
happiness amidst rags than he had expected, and only discovering one
hopelessly useless class--the class of those who had seen better days,
who had been brought up in the notions that he himself had been brought
up in as to the relative position of those who are workers and those
who are not workers.
He met with a prostitute who stayed at home nursing the child of a
dying woman. He asked her if she would not like to change her life--to
become, he suggested at random, a cook. She laughed: “A cook? I cannot
even bake bread;” but he detected in her face an expression of contempt
for the occupation of a cook. “This woman, who, like the widow of the
Gospel, had in the simplest way sacrificed all that she possessed for
a dying person, thought, like her companions, that work was low and
contemptible. Therein was her misfortune. But who of us, man or woman,
can save her from this false view of life? Where among us are the
people who are convinced that a life of labour is more honourable than
one of idleness, who live according to such a conviction, and value and
respect men accordingly?” He came across another prostitute who had
brought up her daughter of thirteen to the same trade. He determined to
save the child, to put her in the hands of some compassionate ladies,
but it was impossible to persuade the woman that she had not done the
best for the daughter whom she had cared for all her life and brought
up to the same occupation as herself; and he realized that it was the
mother herself who had to be saved from a false view of life, according
to which it was right to live without bearing children and without
working, in the service of sensuality. “When I had considered this,
I understood that the majority of ladies whom I would have called on
to save this girl, not only themselves live without bearing children
and without working, but also bring up their daughters to live such
a life; the one mother sends her daughter to the public-house, the
other to the ball. But both mothers possess the same view of life,
namely, that a woman must be fed, clothed, and taken care of, to
satisfy the wantonness of a man. How, then, could our ladies improve
this woman and her daughter?” He was anxious to befriend a bright boy
of twelve, and took him into his own house among the servants, pending
some better arrangement to give him work. At the end of a week this
ungrateful little boy ran away, and was subsequently found at the
circus, acting as conductor to an elephant, for thirty kopecks a day.
“To make him happy and to improve him I had taken him into my house,
where he saw--what? My children--older, younger, and the same age as
himself--who not only did not work for themselves, but in every way
gave work to others: they spoiled everything they came in contact with,
over-ate themselves with sweets and delicacies, broke crockery, and
threw to the dogs what to this boy would seem dainties.... I ought to
have understood how foolish it was on my part--I who brought up my
children in luxury to do nothing--to try to improve other people and
their children, who lived in what I called ‘dens,’ but three-fourths
of whom worked for themselves and for others.” His experience was the
same throughout, and he brings his usual keen insight to the analysis
of his mental attitude when he gave money in charity, and to the mental
attitude of the recipients of his charity. He found also that, even if
his charity were to rival that of the poor, he would have to give 3,000
roubles to make a gift proportioned to the three kopecks bestowed by a
peasant, or to sacrifice his whole living for days at a time, like the
prostitute who nursed the dying woman’s child.
It seemed to him that he was like a man trying to draw another man out
of a swamp, while he himself was standing on the same shifting and
treacherous ground; every effort only served to show the character of
the ground that he stood upon himself. When he was at the Night Shelter
at Moscow, and looked at the wretched crowd who sought admission, he
recalled his impression when he had seen a man guillotined at Paris
thirty years previously, and with his whole being had understood
that murder would always be murder, and that he had his share in
the guilt. “So, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of
thousands of men, I understood, not with my reason, but with my heart
and my whole being, that the existence of ten thousand such men in
Moscow, while I and other thousands eat daintily, clothe our horses
and cover our floors--let the learned say as much as they will that
it is inevitable--is a crime, committed not once but constantly, and
that I with my luxury do not merely permit the crime, but take a direct
part in it. The difference in the two impressions consisted only in
this--that before the guillotine all I could have done would have been
to cry out to the murderers that they were doing evil, and to try to
prevent them. Even then I should have known beforehand that the deed
would not have been prevented. But here I could have given, not merely
a warm drink or the little money that I had about me, but I could have
given the coat from my body, and all that I had in my house. I did not
do so, and therefore I felt, and still feel, and shall never cease to
feel, that I am a partaker in that never-ceasing crime, so long as I
have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I have two coats
and another has none.”