Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Leo Tolstoy

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels and novellas of Leo Tolstoy in the chronological order of their original publication.- Childhood- Boyhood- Youth- Family Happiness- The Cossacks- War and Peace- Anna Karenina- The Death of Ivan Ilyich- The Kreutzer Sonata- Resurrection- The Forged Coupon- Hadji Murad

Leseprobe

Leo Tolstoy

THE COMPLETE NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

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Table of Contents

Leo Tolstoy — An Extensive Biography

Childhood

Boyhood

Youth

Family Happiness

The Cossacks

War and Peace

Anna Karenina

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The Kreutzer Sonata

Resurrection

The Forged Coupon

Hadji Murad

Leo Tolstoy — An Extensive Biography

by Romain Rolland

Chapter 1 — Childhood

Chapter 2 — Boyhood and Youth

Chapter 3 — Youth: The Army

Chapter 4 — Early Work: Tales of the Caucasus

Chapter 5 — Sebastopol: War and Religion

Chapter 6 — St. Petersburg

Chapter 7 — “Family Happiness”

Chapter 8 — Marriage

Chapter 9 — “Anna Karenin”

Chapter 10 — The Crisis

Chapter 11 — Reality

Chapter 12 — Art and Conscience

Chapter 13 — Science and Art

Chapter 14 — Theories of Art: Music

Chapter 15 — “Resurrection”

Chapter 16 — Religion and Politics

Chapter 17 — Old Age

Chapter 18 — Conclusion

Chapter 1 — 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! 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, together with the notes furnished by M. Birukov,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; 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.”

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.” 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. 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, self-centred, 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.Nikolas, the eldest, the favourite brother, had inherited his mother’s gift of imagination, her power of telling stories; 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, 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!”

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 memoryand 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.”

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.

Chapter 2 — Boyhood and Youth

He studied at Kazan. He was not a notable student. It used to be said of the three brothers: “Sergius wants to, and can; Dmitri wants to, and can’t; Leo can’t, and doesn’t want to.”

He passed through the period which he terms “the desert of adolescence”; a desert of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the burning winds of folly. The pages of Boyhood, and in especial those of Youth, are rich in intimate confessions relating to these years.

He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition of perpetual fever. For a year he was completely at sea; he roamed from one system of philosophy to another. As a Stoic, he indulged in self-inflicted physical tortures. As an Epicurean he debauched himself. Then came a faith in metempsychosis. Finally he fell into a condition of nihilism not far removed from insanity; he used to feel that if only he could turn round with sufficient rapidity he would find himself face to face with nothingness... He analysed himself continually:

“I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it.”

This perpetual self-analysis, this mechanism of reason turning in the void, remained to him as a dangerous habit, which was “often,” in his own words, “to be detrimental to me in life”; but by which his art has profited inexpressibly.

As another result of self-analysis, he had lost all his religious convictions; or such was his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to pray; he went to church no longer; but his faith was not extinguished; it was only smouldering.

“Nevertheless, I did believe — in something. But in what? I could not say. I still believed in God; or rather I did not deny Him. But in what God? I did not know. Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I could not have said precisely what that doctrine was.”

From time to time he was obsessed by dreams of goodness. He wished to sell his carriage and give the money to the poor: to give them the tenth part of his fortune; to live without the help of servants, “for they were men like himself.” During an illness he wrote certain “Rules of Life.” He naively assigned himself the duty of “studying everything, of mastering all subjects: law, medicine, languages, agriculture, history, geography, and mathematics; to attain the highest degree of perfection in music and painting,” and so forth. He had “the conviction that the destiny of man was a process of incessant self-perfection.”

Insensibly, under the stress of a boy’s passions, of a violent sensuality and a stupendous pride of self, this faith in perfection went astray, losing its disinterested quality, becoming material and practical. If he still wished to perfect his will, his body, and his mind, it was in order to conquer the world and to enforce its love. He wished to please.

To please: it was not an easy ambition. He was then of a simian ugliness: the face was long, heavy, brutish; the hair was cropped close, growing low upon the forehead; the eyes were small, with a hard, forbidding glance, deeply sunken in shadowy orbits; the nose was large, the lips were thick and protruding, and the ears were enormous. Unable to alter this ugliness, which even as a child had subjected him to fits of despair, he pretended to a realisation of the ideal man of the world, I’homme comme il faut. This ideal led him to do as did other “men of the world”: to gamble, run foolishly into debt, and to live a completely dissipated existence.

One quality always came to his salvation: his absolute sincerity.

“Do you know why I like you better than the others?” says Nekhludov to his friend. “You have a precious and surprising quality: candour.”

“Yes, I am always saying things which I am ashamed to own even to myself.”

In his wildest moments he judges himself with a pitiless insight.

“I am living an utterly bestial life,” he writes in his Journal. “I am as low as one can fall.” Then, with his mania for analysis, he notes minutely the causes of his errors:

“1. Indecision or lack of energy. 2. Self-deception. 3. Insolence. 4. False modesty. 5. Ill-temper. 6. Licentiousness. 7. Spirit of imitation. 8. Versatility. 9. Lack of reflection.”

While still a student he was applying this independence of judgment to the criticism of social conventions and intellectual superstitions. He scoffed at the official science of the University; denied the least importance to historical studies, and was put under arrest for his audacity of thought. At this period he discovered Rousseau, reading his Confessions and Émile. The discovery affected him like a mental thunderbolt.

“I made him an object of religious worship. I wore a medallion portrait of him hung round my neck, as though it were a holy image.”

His first essays in philosophy took the form of commentaries on Rousseau (1846-47).

In the end, however, disgusted with the University and with “smartness,” he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, to bury himself in the country (1847-51); where he once more came into touch with the people. He professed to come to their assistance, as their benefactor and their teacher. His experiences of this period have been related in one of his earliest books, A Russian Proprietor (A Landlord’sMorning) (1852); a remarkable novel, whose hero, Prince Nekhludov, is Tolstoy in disguise.

Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left the University to devote himself to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the course of a visit to the village we see him striving against jeering indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his “idea that love and goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the only truth possible in this world.” He feels himself defeated. He is weary and ashamed.

“Seated before the piano, his hand unconsciously moved upon the keys. A chord sounded; then a second, then a third... He began to play. The chords were not always perfect in rhythm; they were often obvious to the point of banality; they did not reveal any talent for music; but they gave him a melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. At each change of key he awaited, with a flutter of the heart, for what was about to follow; his imagination vaguely supplementing the deficiencies of the actual sound. He heard a choir, an orchestra... and his keenest pleasure arose from the enforced activity of his imagination, which brought before him, without logical connection, but with astonishing clearness, the most varied scenes and images of the past and the future...

Once more he sees the moujiks — vicious, distrustful, lying, idle, obstinate, contrary, with whom he has lately been speaking; but this time he sees them with all their good qualities and without their vices; he sees into their hearts with the intuition of love; he sees therein their patience, their resignation to the fate which is crushing them; their forgiveness of wrongs, their family affection, and the causes of their pious, mechanical attachment to the past. He recalls their days of honest labour, healthy and fatiguing...

“‘It is beautiful,’ he murmurs... ‘Why am I not one of these?’”

The entire Tolstoy is already contained in the hero of this first novel; his piercing vision and his persistent illusions. He observes men and women with an impeccable realism; but no sooner does he close his eyes than his dreams resume their sway; his dreams and his love of mankind.

Chapter 3 — Youth: The Army

Tolstoy,in the year 1850, was not as patient as Nekhludov. Yasnaya Polyana had disillusioned and disappointed him. He was as weary of the people as he was of the world of fashion; his attitude as benefactor wearied him; he could bear it no more. Moreover, he was harassed by creditors. In 1851 he escaped to the Caucasus; to the army in which his brother Nikolas was already an officer.

He had hardly arrived, hardly tasted the quiet of the mountains, before he was once more master of himself; before he had recovered his God.

“Last night I hardly slept. I began to pray to God. I cannot possibly express the sweetness of the feeling that came to me when I prayed. I recited the customary prayers; but I went on praying for a long time. I felt the desire of something very great, very beautiful... What? I cannot say what. I wanted to be one with the Infinite Being: to be dissolved, comprehended, in Him. I begged Him to forgive me my trespasses...

But no, I did not beg Him; I felt that He did pardon me, since He granted me that moment of wonderful joy. I was praying, yet at the same time I felt that I could not, dared not pray. I thanked Him, not in words, but in thought... Scarcely an hour had passed, and I was listening to the voice of vice. I fell asleep dreaming of glory, of women: it was stronger than I. Never mind! I thank God for that moment of happiness: for showing me my pettiness and my greatness. I want to pray, but I do not know how; I want to understand, but I dare not. I abandon myself to Thy will!”

The flesh was not conquered; not then, nor ever; the struggle between God and the passions of man continued in the silence of his heart. Tolstoy speaks in his Journal of the three demons which were devouring him:

1. The passion for gambling. Possible struggle.

2. Sensuality. Struggle very difficult.

3. Vanity. The most terrible of all.

At the very moment when he was dreaming of living for others and of sacrificing himself, voluptuous or futile thoughts would assail him: the image of some Cossack woman, or “the despair he would feel if his moustache were higher on one side than the other.” — “No matter!” God was there; He would not forsake him. Even the effervescence of the struggle was fruitful: all the forces of life were exalted thereby.

“I think the idea of making a journey to the Caucasus, however frivolous at the time of conception, was inspired in me from above. God’s hand has guided me. I never cease to thank Him. I feel that I have become better here; and I am firmly convinced that whatever happens to me can only be for my good, since it is God Himself who has wished it...”

It is the song of gratitude of the earth in spring. Earth covers herself with flowers; all is well, all is beautiful. In 1852 the genius of Tolstoy produces its earliest flowers: Childhood, The Russian Proprietor, The Invasion, Boyhood; and he thanks the Spirit of life who has made him fruitful.

Chapter 4 — Early Work: Tales of the Caucasus

The Story of my Childhood was commenced in the autumn of 1851, at Tiflis; it was finished at Piatigorsk in the Caucasus, on the 2nd of July, 1852. It is curious to note that while in the midst of that nature by which he was so intoxicated, while leading a life absolutely novel, in the midst of the stirring risks of warfare, occupied in the discovery of a world of unfamiliar characters and passions, Tolstoy should have returned, in this his first work, to the memories of his past life. But Childhood was written during a period of illness, when his military activity was suddenly arrested. During the long leisure of a convalescence, while alone and suffering, his state of mind inclined to the sentimental; the past unrolled itself before his eyes at a time when he felt for it a certain tenderness. After the exhausting tension of the last few unprofitable years, it was comforting to live again in thought the “marvellous, innocent, joyous, poetic period” of early childhood; to reconstruct for himself “the heart of a child, good, sensitive, and capable of love.” With the ardour of youth and its illimitable projects, with the cyclic character of his poetic imagination, which rarely conceived an isolated subject, and whose great romances are only the links in a long historic chain, the fragments of enormous conceptions which he was never able to execute, Tolstoy at this moment regarded his narrative of Childhood as merely the opening chapters of a History of Four Periods, which was to include his life in the Caucasus, and was in all probability to have terminated in the revelation of God by Nature.

In later years Tolstoy spoke with great severity of his Childhood, to which he owed some part of his popularity.

“It is so bad,” he remarked to M. Birukov: “it is written with so little literary conscience!... There is nothing to be got from it.”

He was alone in this opinion. The manuscript was sent, without the author’s name, to the great Russian review, the Sovremennik (Contemporary); it was published immediately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a general success; a success confirmed by the public of every country in Europe. Yet in spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of touch and emotion, we can understand that it may have displeased the Tolstoy of later years.

It displeased him for the very reasons by which it pleased others. We must admit it frankly: except in the recording of certain provincial types, and in a restricted number of passages which are remarkable for their religious feeling or for the realistic treatment of emotion, the personality of Tolstoy is barely in evidence.

A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails from cover to cover; a quality which was always afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and one which he sedulously excluded from his other romances. We recognise it; these tears, this sentimentality came from Dickens, who was one of Tolstoy’s favourite authors between his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tolstoy notes in his Journal: “Dickens: David Copperfield. Influence considerable.” He read the book again in the Caucasus.

Two other influences, to which he himself confesses, were Sterne and Toppfer. “I was then,” he says, “under their inspiration.”

Who would have thought that the Nouvelles Genevoises would be the first model of the author of War and Peace? Yet knowing this to be a fact, we discern in Tolstoy’s Childhood the same bantering, affected geniality, transplanted to the soil of a more aristocratic nature. So we see that the readers of his earliest efforts found the writer’s countenance familiar. It was not long, however, before his own personality found self-expression. His Boyhood {Adolescence), though less pure and less perfect than Childhood, exhibits a more original power of psychology, a keen feeling for nature, and a mind full of distress and conflict, which Dickens or Toppfer would have been at a loss to express. In the Russian Proprietor (October, 1852) Tolstoy’s character appeared sharply defined, marked by his fearless sincerity and his faith in love. Among the remarkable portraits of peasants which he has painted in this novel, we find an early sketch of one of the finest conceptions of his Popular Tales: the old man with the beehives; the little old man under the birch-tree, his hands outstretched, his eyes raised, his bald head shining in the sun, and all around him the bees, touched with gold, never stinging him, forming a halo... But the truly typical works of this period are those which directly register his present emotions: namely, the novels of the Caucasus. The first, The Invasion (finished in December, 1852), impresses the reader deeply by the magnificence of its landscapes: a sunrise amidst the mountains, on the bank of a river; a wonderful night-piece, with sounds and shadows noted with a striking intensity; and the return in the evening, while the distant snowy peaks disappear in the violet haze, and the clear voices of the regimental singers rise and fall in the transparent air. Many of the types of War and Peace are here drawn to the life: Captain Khlopoff, the true hero, who by no means fights because he likes fighting, but because it is his duty; a man with “one of those truly Russian faces, placid and simple, and eyes into which it is easy and agreeable to gaze.”

Heavy, awkward, a trifle ridiculous, indifferent to his surroundings, he alone is unchanged in battle, where all the rest are changed; “he is exactly as we have seen him always: with the same quiet movements, the same level voice, the same expression of simplicity on his heavy, simple face.” Next comes the lieutenant who imitates the heroes of Lermontov; a most kindly, affectionate boy, who professes the utmost ferocity. Then comes the poor little subaltern, delighted at the idea of his first action, brimming over with affection, ready to fall on his comrade’s neck; a laughable, adorable boy, who, like Petia Rostoff, contrives to get stupidly killed. In the centre of the picture is the figure of Tolstoy, the observer, who is mentally aloof from his comrades, and already utters his cry of protest against warfare:

“Is it impossible, then, for men to live in peace, in this world so full of beauty, under this immeasurable starry sky? How is it they are able, here, to retain their feelings of hostility and vengeance, and the lust of destroying their fellows? All there is of evil in the human heart ought to disappear at the touch of nature, that most immediate expression of the beautiful and the good.”

Other tales of the Caucasus were to follow which were observed at this time, though not written until a later period. In 1854-55. The Woodcutters was written; a book notable for its exact and rather frigid realism; full of curious records of Russian soldier-psychology — notes to be made use of in the future. In 1856 appeared A Brush with the Enemy, in which there is a man of the world, a degraded non-commissioned officer, a wreck, a coward, a drunkard and a liar, who cannot support the idea of being slaughtered like one of the common soldiers he despises, the least of whom is worth a hundred of himself.

Above all these works, as the summit, so to speak, of this first mountain range, rises one of the most beautiful lyric romances that ever fell from Tolstoy’s pen: the song of his youth, the poem of the Caucasus, The Cossacks. The splendour of the snowy mountains displaying their noble lines against the luminous sky fills the whole work with its music. The book is unique, for it belongs to the flowering-time of genius, “the omnipotent god of youth,” as Tolstoy says, “that rapture which never returns.” What a spring-tide torrent! What an overflow of love!

“‘I love — I love so much!... How brave!How good!’ he repeated: and he felt as though he must weep. Why? Who was brave, and whom did he love? That he did not precisely know.”

This intoxication of the heart flows on, unchecked. Olenin, the hero, who has come to the Caucasus, as Tolstoy came, to steep himself in nature, in the life of adventure, becomes enamoured of a young Cossack girl, and abandons himself to the medley of his contradictory aspirations. At one moment he believes that “happiness is to live for others, to sacrifice oneself,” at another, that “self-sacrifice is only stupidity”; finally he is inclined to believe, with Erochta, the old Cossack, that “everything is precious. God has made everything for the delight of man. Nothing is a sin. To amuse oneself with a handsome girl is not a sin: it is only health.” But what need to think at all? It is enough to live. Life is all good, all happiness; life is all-powerful and universal; life is God. An ardent naturalism uplifts and consumes his soul. Lost in the forest, amidst “the wildness of the woods, the multitude of birds and animals, the clouds of midges in the dusky green, in the warm, fragrant air, amidst the little runlets of water which trickle everywhere beneath the boughs”; a few paces from the ambushes of the enemy, Olenin is “seized suddenly by such a sense of causeless happiness that in obedience to childish habit he crossed himself and began to give thanks to somebody.” Like a Hindu fakir, he rejoices to tell himself that he is alone and lost in this maelstrom of aspiring life: that myriads of invisible beings, hidden on every hand, are that moment hunting him to death; that these thousands of little insects humming around him are calling:

“‘Here, brothers, here! Here is some one to bite!’”

And it became obvious to him that he was no longer a Russian gentleman, in Moscow society, but simply a creature like the midge, the pheasant, the stag: like those which were living and prowling about him at that moment.

“Like them, I shall live, I shall die. And the grass will grow above me...”

And his heart is full of happiness.

Tolstoy lives through this hour of youth in a delirium of vitality and the love of life. He embraces Nature, and sinks himself in her being. To her he pours forth and exalts his griefs, his joys, and his loves; in her he lulls them to sleep. Yet this romantic intoxication never veils the lucidity of his perceptions. Nowhere has he painted landscape with a greater power than in this fervent poem; nowhere has he depicted the type with greater truth. The contrast of nature with the world of men, which forms the basis of the book; and which through all Tolstoy’s life is to prove one of his favourite themes, and an article of his Credo, has already inspired him, the better to castigate the world, with something of the bitterness to be heard in the Kreutzer Sonata. But for those who love him he is no less truly himself; and the creatures of nature, the beautiful Cossack girl and her friends, are seen under a searching light, with their egoism, their cupidity, their venality, and all their vices.

An exceptional occasion was about to offer itself for the exercise of this heroic veracity.

Chapter 5 — Sebastopol: War and Religion

InNovember, 1853, war was declared upon Turkey. Tolstoy obtained an appointment to the army of Roumania; he was transferred to the army of the Crimea, and on November 7, 1854, he arrived in Sebastopol. He was burning with enthusiasm and patriotic faith. He went about his duties courageously, and was often in danger, in especial throughout the April and May of 1855, when he served on every alternate day in the battery of the 4th bastion.

Living for months in a perpetual tremor and exaltation, face to face with death, his religious mysticism revived. He became familiar with God. In April, 1855, he noted in his diary a prayer to God, thanking Him for His protection in danger and beseeching Him to continue it, “so that I may achieve the glorious and eternal end of life, of which I am still ignorant, although I feel a presentiment of it.” Already this object of his life was not art, but religion. On March 5, 1855, he wrote:

“I have been led to conceive a great idea, to whose realisation I feel capable of devoting my whole life. This idea is the foundation of a new religion; the religion of the Christ, but purified of dogmas and mysteries... To act with a clear conscience, in order to unite men by means of religion.”

This was to be the programme of his old age.

However, to distract himself from the spectacles which surrounded him, he began once more to write. How could he, amidst that hail of lead, find the necessary freedom of mind for the writing of the third part of his memories: Youth?The book is chaotic; and we may attribute to the conditions of its production a quality of disorder, and at times a certain dryness of abstract analysis, which is increased by divisions and subdivisions after the manner of Stendhal. Yet we admire his calm penetration of the mist of dreams and inchoate ideas which crowd a young brain. His work is extraordinarily true to itself, and at moments what poetic freshness! — as in the vivid picture of springtime in the city, or the tale of the confession, and the journey to the convent, on account of the forgotten sin! An impassioned pantheism lends to certain pages a lyric beauty, whose accents recall the tales of the Caucasus. For example, this description of an evening in the spring:

“The calm splendour of the shining crescent; the gleaming fish-pond; the ancient birch-trees, whose long-tressed boughs were on one side silvered by the moonlight, while on the other they covered the path and the bushes with their black shadows; the cry of a quail beyond the pond; the barely perceptible sound of two ancient trees which grazed one another; the humming of the mosquitoes; the fall of an apple on the dry leaves; and the frogs leaping up to the steps of the terrace, their backs gleaming greenish under a ray of moonlight... The moon is mounting; suspended in the limpid sky, she fills all space with her light; the splendour of the moonlit water grows yet more brilliant, the shadows grow blacker, the light more transparent... And to me, an obscure and earthy creature, already soiled with every human passion, but endowed with all the stupendous power of love, it seemed at that moment that all nature, the moon, and I myself were one and the same.”

But the present reality, potent and imperious, spoke more loudly than the dreams of the past. Youth remained unfinished; and Captain Count Tolstoy, behind the plating of his bastion, amid the rumbling of the bombardment, or in the midst of his company, observed the dying and the living, and recorded their miseries and his own, in his unforgettable narratives of Sebastopol.

These three narratives — Sebastopol in December, 1854, Sebastopol in May, 1855, Sebastopol in August, 1855 — are generally confounded with one another; but in reality they present many points of difference. The second in particular, in point both of feeling and of art, is greatly superior to the others. The others are dominated by patriotism; the second is charged with implacable truth.

It is said that after reading the first narrativethe Tsarina wept, and the Tsar, moved by admiration, commanded that the story should be translated into French, and the author sent out of danger. We can readily believe it. Nothing in these pages but exalts warfare and the fatherland. Tolstoy had just arrived; his enthusiasm was intact; he was afloat on a tide of heroism. As yet he could see in the defenders of Sebastopol neither ambition nor vanity, nor any unworthy feeling. For him the war was a sublime epic; its heroes were “worthy of Greece.” On the other hand, these notes exhibit no effort of the imagination, no attempt at objective representation. The writer strolls through the city; he sees with the utmost lucidity, but relates what he sees in a form which is wanting in freedom: “You see... you enter... you notice...” This is first-class reporting; rich in admirable impressions.

Very different is the second scene: Sebastopol in May, 1855. In the opening lines we read:

“Here the self-love, the vanity of thousands of human beings is in conflict, or appeased in death...”

And further on:

“And as there were many men, so also were there many forms of vanity... Vanity, vanity, everywhere vanity, even at the door of the tomb! It is the peculiar malady of our century... Why do the Homers and Shakespeares speak of love, of glory, and of suffering, and why is the literature of our century nothing but the interminable history of snobs and egotists?”

The narrative, which is no longer a simple narrative on the part of the author, but one which sets before us men and their passions, reveals that which is concealed by the mask of heroism. Tolstoy’s clear, disillusioned gaze plumbs to the depths the hearts of his companions in arms; in them, as in himself, he reads pride, fear, and the comedy of those who continue to play at life though rubbing shoulders with death. Fear especially is avowed, stripped of its veils, and shown in all its nakedness. These nervous crises, this obsession of death, are analysed with a terrible sincerity that knows neither shame nor pity. It was at Sebastopol that Tolstoy learned to eschew sentimentalism, “that vague, feminine, whimpering passion,” as he came disdainfully to term it; and his genius for analysis, the instinct for which awoke, as we saw, in the later years of his boyhood, and which was at times to assume a quality almost morbid, never attained to a more hypnotic and poignant intensity than in the narrative of the death of Praskhoukhin. Two whole pages are devoted to the description of all that passed in the mind of the unhappy man during the second following upon the fall of the shell, while the fuse was hissing towards explosion; and one page deals with all that passed before him after it exploded, when “he was killed on the spot by a fragment which struck him full in the chest.”

As in the intervals of a drama we hear the occasional music of the orchestra, so these scenes of battle are interrupted by wide glimpses of nature; deep perspectives of light; the symphony of the day dawning upon the splendid landscape, in the midst of which thousands are agonising. Tolstoy the Christian, forgetting the patriotism of his first narrative, curses this impious war:

“And these men, Christians, who profess the same great law of love and of sacrifice, do not, when they perceive what they have done, fall upon their knees repentant, before Him who in giving them life set within the heart of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and the beautiful. They do not embrace as brothers, with tears of joy and happiness!”

As he was completing this novel — a work that has a quality of bitterness which, hitherto, none of his work had betrayed — Tolstoy was seized with doubt. Had he done wrong to speak?

“A painful doubt assails me. Perhaps these things should not have been said. Perhaps what I am telling is one of those mischievous truths which, unconsciously hidden in the mind of each one of us, should not be expressed lest they become harmful, like the lees that we must not stir lest we spoil the wine. If so, when is the expression of evil to be avoided? When is the expression of goodness to be imitated? Who is the malefactor and who is the hero? All are good and all are evil...”

But he proudly regains his poise: “The protagonist of my novel, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I try to present in all her beauty, who always was, is, and shall be beautiful, is Truth.”

After reading these pages Nekrasov, the editor of the review Sovremennik, wrote to Tolstoy:

“That is precisely what Russian society needs to-day: the truth, the truth, of which, since the death of Gogol, so little has remained in Russian letters... This truth which you bring to our art is something quite novel with us. I have only one fear: lest the times, and the cowardice of life, the deafness and dumbness of all that surrounds us, may make of you what it has made of most of us — lest it may kill the energy in you.”

Nothing of the kind was to be feared. The times, which waste the energies of ordinary men, only tempered those of Tolstoy. Yet for a moment the trials of his country and the capture of Sebastopol aroused a feeling of regret for his perhaps too unfeeling frankness, together with a feeling of sorrowful affection.

In his third narrative — Sebastopol in August, 1855 — while describing a group of officers playing cards and quarrelling, he interrupts himself to say:

“But let us drop the curtain quickly over this picture. To-morrow — perhaps to-day — each of these men will go cheerfully to meet his death. In the depths of the soul of each there smoulders the spark of nobility which will make him a hero.”

Although this shame detracts in no wise from the forcefulness and realism of the narrative, the choice of characters shows plainly enough where lie the sympathies of the writer. The epic of Malakoff and its heroic fall is told as affecting two rare and touching figures: two brothers, of whom the elder, Kozeltoff, has some of the characteristics of Tolstoy. Who can forget the younger, the ensign Volodya, timid and enthusiastic, with his feverish monologues, his dreams, his tears? — tears that rise to his eyes for a mere nothing; tears of tenderness, tears of humiliation — his fear during the first hours passed in the bastion (the poor boy is still afraid of the dark, and covers his head with his cloak when he goes to bed); the oppression caused by the feeling of his own solitude and the indifference of others; then, when the hour arrives, his joy in danger. He belongs to the group of poetic figures of youth (of whom are Petia in War and Peace, and the sub-lieutenant in The Invasion), who, their hearts full of affection, make war with laughter on their lips, and are broken suddenly, uncomprehending, on the wheel of death. The two brothers fall wounded, both on the same day — the last day of the defence. The novel ends with these lines, in which we hear the muttering of a patriotic anger:

“The army was leaving the town; and each soldier, as he looked upon deserted Sebastopol, sighed, with an inexpressible bitterness in his heart, and shook his fist in the direction of the enemy.”

Chapter 6 — St. Petersburg

When, once issued from this hell, where for a year he had touched the extreme of the passions, vanities, and sorrows of humanity, Tolstoy found himself, in November, 1855, amidst the men of letters of St. Petersburg, they inspired him with a feeling of disdain and disillusion. They seemed to him entirely mean, ill-natured, and untruthful. These men, who appeared in the distance to wear the halo of art — even Tourgenev, whom he had admired, and to whom he had but lately dedicated The Woodcutters — even he, seen close at hand, had bitterly disappointed him. A portrait of 1856 represents him in the midst of them: Tourgenev, Gontcharov, Ostrovsky, Grigorovitch, Droujinine. He strikes one, in the free-and-easy atmosphere of the others, by reason of his hard, ascetic air, his bony head, his lined cheeks, his rigidly folded arms. Standing upright, in uniform, behind these men of letters, he has the appearance, as Suares has wittily said, “rather of mounting guard over these gentry than of making one of their company; as though he were ready to march them back to gaol.”

Yet they all gathered about their young colleague, who came to them with the twofold glory of the writer and the hero of Sebastopol. Tourgenev, who had “wept and shouted ‘Hurrah!’” while reading the pages of Sebastopol, held out a brotherly hand. But the two men could not understand one another. Although both saw the world with the same clear vision, they mingled with that vision the hues of their inimical minds; the one, ironic, resonant, amorous, disillusioned, a devotee of beauty; the other proud, violent tormented with moral ideas, pregnant with a hidden God.

What Tolstoy could never forgive in these literary men was that they believed themselves an elect, superior caste; the crown of humanity. Into his antipathy for them there entered a good deal of the pride of the great noble and the officer who condescendingly mingles with liberal and middle-class scribblers. It was also a characteristic of his — he himself knew it — to “oppose instinctively all trains of reasoning, all conclusions, which were generally admitted.” A distrust of mankind, a latent contempt for human reason, made him always on the alert to discover deception in himself or others.

“He never believed in the sincerity of any one. All moral exhilaration seemed false to him; and he had a way of fixing, with that extraordinarily piercing gaze of his, the man whom he suspected was not telling the truth.” “How he used to listen! How he used to gaze at those who spoke to him, from the very depths of his grey eyes, deeply sunken in their orbits! With what irony his lips were pressed together!”

“Tourgenev used to say that he had never experienced anything more painful than this piercing gaze, which, together with two or three words of envenomed observation, was capable of infuriating anybody.”

At their first meetings violent scenes occurred between Tolstoy and Tourgenev. When at a distance they cooled down and tried to do one another justice. But as time went on Tolstoy’s dislike of his literary surroundings grew deeper. He could not forgive these artists for the combination of their depraved life and their moral pretensions.

“I acquired the conviction that nearly all were immoral men, unsound, without character, greatly inferior to those I had met in my Bohemian military life. And they were sure of themselves and self-content, as men might be who were absolutely sound. They disgusted me.”

He parted from them. But he did not at once lose their interested faith in art. His pride was flattered thereby. It was a faith which was richly rewarded; it brought him “women, money, fame.”

“Of this religion I was one of the pontiffs; an agreeable and highly profitable situation.”

The better to consecrate himself to this religion, he sent in his resignation from the army (November, 1856).

But a man of his temper could not close his eyes for long. He believed, he was eager to believe, in progress. It seemed to him “that this word signified something.” A journey abroad, which lasted from the end of January to the end of July of 1857, during which period he visited France, Switzerland, and Germany, resulted in the destruction of this faith. In Paris, on the 6th of April, 1857, the spectacle of a public execution “showed him the emptiness of the superstition of progress.”

“When I saw the head part from the body and fall into the basket I understood in every recess of my being that no theory as to the reason of the present order of things could justify such an act. Even though all the men in the world, supported by this or that theory, were to find it necessary, I myself should know that it was wrong; for it is not what men say or do that decides what is good or bad, but my own heart.”

In the month of July the sight of a little perambulating singer at Lucerne, to whom the wealthy English visitors at the Schweizerhof were refusing alms, made him express in the Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov his contempt for all the illusions dear to Liberals, and for those “who trace imaginary lines upon the sea of good and evil.”

“For them civilisation is good; barbarism is bad; liberty is good; slavery is bad. And this imaginary knowledge destroys the instinctive, primordial cravings, which are the best. Who will define them for me — liberty, despotism, civilisation, barbarism? Where does not good co-exist with evil? There is within us only one infallible guide: the universal Spirit which whispers to us to draw closer to one another.”

On his return to Russia and Yasnaya he once more busied himself about the peasants. Not that he had any illusions left concerning them. He writes:

“The apologists of the people and its good sense speak to no purpose; the crowd is perhaps the union of worthy folk; but if so they unite only on their bestial and contemptible side, a side which expresses nothing but the weakness and cruelty of human nature.”

Thus he does not address himself to the crowd, but to the individual conscience of each man, each child of the people. For there light is to be found. He founded schools, without precisely knowing what he would teach. In order to learn, he undertook another journey abroad, which lasted from the 3rd of July, 1860, to the 23rd of April, 1861.

He studied the various pedagogic systems of the time. Need we say that he rejected one and all? Two visits to Marseilles taught him that the true education of the people is effected outside the schools (which he considered absurd), by means of the journals, the museums, the libraries, the street, and everyday life, which he termed “the spontaneous school.” The spontaneous school, in opposition to the obligatory school, which he considered silly and harmful; this was what he wished and attempted to institute upon his return to Yasnaya Polyana. Liberty was his principle. He would not admit that an elect class, “the privileged Liberal circle,” should impose its knowledge and its errors upon “the people, to whom it is a stranger.” It had no right to do so. This method of forced education had never succeeded in producing, at the University, “the men of whom humanity has need; but men of whom a depraved society has need; officials, official professors, official literary men, or men torn aimlessly from their old surroundings, whose youth has been spoiled and wasted, and who can find no plan in life: irritable, puny Liberals.” Go to the people to learn what they want! If they do not value “the art of reading and writing which the intellectuals force upon them,” they have their reasons for that; they have other spiritual needs, more pressing and more legitimate. Try to understand those needs, and help them to satisfy them!

These theories, those of a revolutionary Conservative, as Tolstoy always was, he attempted to put into practice at Yasnaya, where he was rather the fellow-disciple than the master of his pupils. At the same time, he endeavoured to introduce a new human spirit into agricultural exploitation. Appointed in 1861 territorial arbitrator for the district of Krapiona, he was the people’s champion against the abuses of power on the part of the landowners and the State.

We must not suppose that this social activity satisfied him, or entirely filled his life. He continued to be the prey of contending passions. Although he had suffered from the world, he always loved it and felt the need of it. Pleasure resumed him at intervals, or else the love of action. He would risk his life in hunting the bear. He played for heavy stakes. He would even fall under the influence of the literary circles of St. Petersburg, for which he felt such contempt. After these aberrations came crises of disgust. Such of his writings as belong to this period bear unfortunate traces of this artistic and moral uncertainty. The Two Hussars (1856) has a quality of pretentiousness and elegance, a snobbish worldly flavour, which shocks one as coming from Tolstoy. Albert, written at Dijon in 1857, is weak and eccentric, with no trace of. the writer’s habitual depth or precision. The Diary of a Sportsman (1856), a more striking though hasty piece of work, seems to betray the disillusionment which Tolstoy inspired in himself. Prince Nekhludov, hisDoppelgänger, his double, kills himself in a gaming-house.

“He had everything: wealth, a name, intellect, and high ambitions; he had committed no crime; but he had done still worse: he had killed his courage, his youth; he was lost, without even the excuse of a violent passion; merely from a lack of will.”

The approach of death itself does not alter him:

“The same strange inconsequence, the same hesitation, the same frivolity of thought...”

Death!... At this period it began to haunt his mind. Three Deaths (1858-59) already foreshadowed the gloomy analysis of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch; the solitude of the dying man, his hatred of the living, his desperate query — “Why?” The triptych of the three deaths — that of the wealthy woman, that of the old consumptive postilion, and that of the slaughtered dog — is not without majesty; the portraits are well drawn, the images are striking, although the whole work, which has been too highly praised, is somewhat loosely constructed, while the death of the dog lacks the poetic precision to be found in the writer’s beautiful landscapes. Taking it as a whole, we hardly know how far it is intended as a work of art for the sake of art, or whether it has a moral intention.

Tolstoy himself did not know. On the 4th of February, 1858, when he read his essay of admittance before the Muscovite Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, he chose for his subject the defence of art for art’s sake. It was the president of the Society, Khomiakov, who, after saluting in Tolstoy “the representative of purely artistic literature,” took up the defence of social and moral art.

A year later the death of his dearly-loved brother, Nikolas, who succumbed to phthisis at Hyères, on the 19th of September, 1860, completely overcame Tolstoy; shook him to the point of “crushing his faith in goodness, in everything,” and made him deny even his art:

“Truth is horrible... Doubless, so long as the desire to know and to speak the truth exists men will try to know and to speak it. This is the only remnant left me of my moral concepts. It is the only thing I shall do; but not in the form of art, your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie.”

Less than six months later, however, he returned to the “beautiful lie” with Poliktishka, which of all his works is perhaps most devoid of moral intention, if we except the latent malediction upon money and its powers for evil; a work written purely for art’s sake; a masterpiece, moreover, whose only flaws are a possibly excessive wealth of observation, an abundance of material which would have sufficed for a great novel, and the contrast, which is too severe, a little too cruel, between the humorous opening and the atrocious climax.

Chapter 7 — “Family Happiness”

Fromthis period of transition, during which the genius of the man was feeling its way blindly, doubtful of itself and apparently exhausted, “devoid of strong passion, without a directing will,” like Nekhludov in the Diary of a Sportsman — from this period issued a work unique in its tenderness and charm: Family Happiness (1859). This was the miracle of love.

For many years Tolstoy had been on friendly terms with the Bers family. He had fallen in love with the mother and the three daughters in succession. His final choice fell upon the second, but he dared not confess it. Sophie Andreyevna Bers was still a child; she was seventeen years old, while Tolstoy was over thirty; he regarded himself as an old man, who had not the right to associate his soiled and vitiated life with that of an innocent young girl. He held out for three years. Afterwards, in Anna Karenin, he related how his declaration to Sophie Bers was effected, and how she replied to it: both of them tracing with one finger, under a table, the initials of words they dared not say.

Like Levine in Anna Karenin, he was so cruelly honest as to place his intimate journal in the hands of his betrothed, in order that she should be unaware of none of his past transgressions; and Sophie, like Kitty in Anna Karenin, was bitterly hurt by its perusal. They were married on the 23rd of September, 1862.

In the artist’s imagination this marriage was consummated three years earlier, when Family Happiness was written. For these years he had been living in the future; through the ineffable days of love that does not as yet know itself: through the delirious days of love that has attained self-knowledge, and the hour in which the divine, anticipated words are whispered; when the tears arise “of a happiness which departs for ever and will never return again“; and the triumphant reality of the early days of marriage; the egoism of lovers, “the incessant, causeless joy,” then the approaching weariness, the vague discontent, the boredom of a monotonous life, the two souls which softly disengage themselves and grow further and further away from one another; the dangerous attraction of the world for the young wife — flirtations, jealousies, fatal misunderstandings; — love dissimulated, love lost; and at length the sad and tender autumn of the heart; the face of love which reappears, paler, older, but more touching by reason of tears and the marks of time; the memory of troubles, the regret for the ill things done and the years that are lost; the calm of the evening; the august passage from love to friendship, and the romance of the passion of maternity... All that was to come, all this Tolstoy had dreamed of, tasted in advance; and in order to live through those days more vividly he lived in the well-beloved. For the first time — perhaps the only time in all his writings — the story passes in the heart of a woman, and is told by her; and with what exquisite delicacy, what spiritual beauty! — the beauty of a soul withdrawn behind a veil of the truest modesty. For once the analysis of the writer is deprived of its cruder lights; there is no feverish struggle to present the naked truth. The secrets of the inward life are divined rather than spoken. The art and the heart of the artist are both touched and softened; there is a harmonious balance of thought and form. Family Happiness has the perfection of a work of Racine.

Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy presented with so limpid a profundity, was to be his salvation. He was tired, unwell, disgusted with himself and his efforts. The brilliant success which had crowned his earlier works had given way to the absolute silence of the critics and the indifference of the public. He pretended, haughtily, to be not ill-pleased.

“My reputation has greatly diminished in popularity; a fact which was saddening me. Now I am content; I know that I have to say something, and that I have the power to speak it with no feeble voice. As for the public, let it think what it will!”

But he was boasting: he himself was not sure of his art. Certainly he was the master of his literary instrument; but he did not know what to do with it, as he said in respect of Polikuskha: “it was a matter of chattering about the first subject that came to hand, by a man who knows how to hold his pen.” His social work was abortive. In 1862 he resigned his appointment as territorial arbitrator. The same year the police made a search at Yasnaya Polyana, turned everything topsy-turvy, and closed, the school. Tolstoy was absent at the time, suffering from overwork; fearing that he was attacked by phthisis.