Tolstoy
Wilson, A. N.
his hero Dickens lecture, visited schools and executions and prize fights; courted in Moscow the three lively, passionate, and rather bohemian Bers sisters and married the 18-year-old Sofya, who...
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...But Tolstoy's epiphanies, though infectious and uplifting, are never more than vague suffusions of the idea that God is everywhere, that life is infinitely precious, or that all men ought to be brothers...
...The battle of Borodino and the burning of Mos-cow, Napoleon's invasion and his subsequent defeat by Kutuzov, are not, we are to understand, events planned and executed by men so much as they are the headlong and ineluctable prod-ucts of the larger movement of necessi-ty, to which the will of emperors and generals is no more instrumental than is the condition of the digestive tract of the puniest foot soldier...
...But Wilson also takes no nonsense, casting a cool eye when Tolstoy plays the saint, keeping aloof from his rancorous marital bat-tles, and refusing to dwell at length on his nasty senility...
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...or the scene in War and Peace when the coun-trified Natasha goes to her first opera and sees to her shame and bewilder-ment only a fat man in tights and a fat lady in a petticoat waving their arms in front of a cloth stretched over boards...
...Anna Karenina, the too-vital enchan-tress who flouts a society that permits flings but outlaws passion in order to live in sin with her lover, finds herself instead in a situation so artificial it drives her to suicide...
...Contemporary fiction tends instead to ply a realism of downward adjustment, both in its characters' accommodation to a more narrowly circumscribed life and in its authors' reduced expectations of what a novel can do...
...Our best writers today have many of Tolstoy's more feminine virtues— his forgiving sympathy, his eye for tell-ing detail, his relish for the homely, comic, and commonplace, his attentive-ness to character, his ability to suspend moral judgment of those he loves, his utter clarity of expression—yet none of his masculine strengths: his moments of exultant transcendence, his ambi-tious all-inclusiveness, his glorious starry heavens, his big and struggled-with ideas, his almost diagrammatic delineation of political and social structure...
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...Although these theoretical por-tions of War and Peace are provocative, Tolstoy in service to them suspends or subverts his God-given capacity to understand human nature from within just when it is most needed—in por-traying the character of Napoleon himself...
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...He enlisted his ghastly school of disciples, headed by the sinister Chertkov, in a war of nerves against his "unspiritual" wife and children...
...Upon the death of this national hero and ill-tolerated gadfly of the czarist regime, riots broke out...
...For the last thirty years of his life the count made his own shoes and walked in them—or almost walked in them...
...Tolstoy is breath-taking at conveying—through the half-envious, half-pitying eyes of Anna's kind and naive sister-in-law Dolly—the nightmarishness of the gilded cage in which Anna is trapped...
...as Wilson records, Tolstoy tromped off on a pil-grimage in his homemade boots, only to take the train home on account of blisters...
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...Intriguingly linked to this ex-pansive drama of Levin, an appealing if rather bumbling hero struggling to be happy and good, is the story of a married woman's fatal liaison with an officer...
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...In Dostoevsky's work we feel constantly in the presence of the super-natural, whether infernal or divine...
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...For another, in contrast to the cur-rent spate of bestselling "pathograph-ies" that scant career and work to lan-guish over dipsomania and wife-beat-ing, Wilson reveres Tolstoy's literary gifts and is superb at discussing both in-dividual works and his development as a novelist and thinker...
...The result is a brisk, witty, and skeptical book which, while not pretending to exhaustiveness, will remain a clear-sighted guide to a titanic and contradictory soul...
...Dostoevsky's novels, like the Gospels, are cryptic, urgent, apocalyptic, single-minded, haunted by temptations of the devil and prospects of purity and redemp-tion, dwelling in paradox, mystery, heart-rendingly simple parable, and forged at a heat hotter than mortals can bear...
...The reader of Dostoevsky slinks about, half deranged, beside himself, unfit for human company, con-versing with angels and feeling hell's fires licking at his feet...
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...Never mind that Dostoevsky violently rejects this thesis...
...He churned out polemics against govern-ments, armies, meat, tobacco, alcohol, ownership of property, the Orthodox church (which excommunicated him), sex, and Shakespeare...
...By the time of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy had come to consider sex even between hus-band and wife an abomination...
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...The reader of Tolstoy feels as if he has lived ten lives consecutively, and met a wonderful new set of friends, and that the ones to which he must return are less real or dear to him...
...Just as in'the Hebrew Bible we see things from everyone's point of view, from the God who unleashes floods and fires and worries about His children down to Balaam's reproachful ass, so too does Tolstoy give the impres sion of omniscient apprehension...
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...Wilson finds Anna Karenina a digressive mass, awash in Tolstoy's own ex tended ramblings on rural economy, • representative government, and univer-sal education...
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...with Chertkov's collusion he secretly cut them out of his will, and finally, trailed by news cameras, ran away from home to die at a railway sta-tion...
...In 1863, at the age of thirty-five, Tolstoy began writing War and Peace...
...Tolstoy, then, is this-worldly...
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...Dostoevsky, by contrast, knows noth-ing of drawing rooms and war coun-cils and boar hunts, but he begins where Tolstoy leaves off, just when the pressure of revelation threatens to be-come unbearable, to crush one's skull or rib cage...
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...It is inevitable that subsequent liter-ature, beginning with Tolstoy's friends Chekhov and Gorky, should have taken the Tolstoyan and not the Dostoevskian way...
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...It is a token of the brevity and in-tensity of Russia's literary flowering that War and Peace should have been published in alternating issues of the same magazine as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment...
...Such flaws do nothing, however, to mar the power of a work so superabun-dantly vital, so alight with ennobling truths, and so broad in its concerns that Wilson tells of soldiers reading War and Peace on the •battlefields of World War II and finding that "the descriptions of Schiin Graben and Borodino were more 'real' for them than the actual explosions and maim-ings and death going on around them," while civilian readers know the pettier experience of rushing irritably through their own dinner parties so as to gallop home to Tolstoy's truer and more mov-ing ones...
...Tolstoy's new regimen might be de-scribed as teetotalitarian...
...withdrew to his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, which he man-aged himself, supervising and working the fields, forests, dairy yard, vegetable gardens, beehives, and hogs, and teach-ing his own school...
...Having decid-ed implicitly that he was in fact the greatest literary genius in the world," Wilson writes, "it was not like him to rest on his laurels...
...But for Tolstoy, to whom woman's sole purpose lies in childbearing and to whom the love affair remains an unas-similably foreign and uncomfortable concept, the notion of living as perpetually childless lovers is an artifice inimical to life, so unnatural an evasion of fruitful, redeeming, ordinary respon-sibility that it must strain beyond en-durance the love it is designed to preserve and, hence, for Anna, lead only to madness and death...
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...Tolstoy in these later years became increasingly blocked as a fic= EUPRAXOPHY Living Without Religion by Paul Kurtz Can a person lead a meaningful life with-Einuanr out a formal identifi-cation with religion...
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...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989 stoy let loose his own more "Dostoev-skian" impulses, producing such black and savage works as "The Kreutzer Sonata," a madman's vindication of wife-murder, and Resurrection, in which a nobleman who ends up on a jury at the murder trial of a girl he once seduced follows her to Siberia to atone for his sin...
...Tolstoy professed himself indifferent to Dostoevsky...
...He lived off rice cutlets served by lackeys in white gloves, and opened soup kitchens for famine victims...
...As War and Peace progresses, this theory is reasserted and developed every hundred pages or so...
...courted in Moscow the three lively, passionate, and rather bohemian Bers sisters and married the 18-year-old Sofya, who was to bear him thirteen children in quick succession...
...Wilson contrasts this awakening quite scath-ingly to those of other, more genuine, religious thinkers, deeming Tolstoy's more an act of a perverse and tyran-nical will than of faith...
...After that novel, however, such restraint became intolerable to Tolstoy, and he could no longer bear to let his characters live free...
...He singles out a discus-sion on birth control between Dolly and Anna to prove the book "a great, open thing in which almost any modern preoccupation might find relevance" Yet this scene, in which Anna tells her astonished sister-in-law, saddled with too many children and a faithless and spendthrift husband, how it is possible to have no more babies, revealingly sym-bolizes the nature of Anna's impasse...
...6 6 xi-ovelists," A. N. Wilson 1 N writes, "are frequently men and women who have been compelled, by some inner disaster, to rewrite the past...
...The difference is one not only of scale but of movement and am-bition: Tolstoy's characters unfold and grow (sometimes to their own undo-ing), and their author is one who believes it possible through his depic-tion of this process to solve in fiction the question of why we are on earth...
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...T n seeking to understand the nature 1 of Tolstoy's greatness as an artist one inevitably ends up contrasting him with Dostoevsky...
...To everyone since, it has seemed impossi-ble that these two men should simul-taneously inhabit the same earth, let alone the same magazine...
...So saying— and saying—and saying—Tolstoy also derides with increasingly sarcastic pedantry the diverse schools of histori-ans besotted enough to think that char-acter or ideas play a leading role in history...
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...The conflict in Anna Karenina is not between war and peace, but between living in nature and living artificially...
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...With the completion of Anna Karen-ina, and the darkening of the clouds over Tolstoy's starry skies, he converted to "Tolstoyanism," seeking both to enact by himself and to impose on others his crabbed and ornery inter-pretation of Christ's teachings...
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...Tolstoy is attuned equally to the stupid, the mediocre, the canny, the glorious, so that the moment in Anna Karenina when Levin is mortified to catch himself repeating the same joke to the disdainful Countess Nordston...
...All Dostoev-sky's hard thinking and hard under-standing is done about God, evil, re-demption, the devil...
...Wilson makes much of this strange convergence Both novels, whose chap-ters were being printed serially in mid-composition, hinge on Napoleon...
...In his own stridently anti-Napoleonic novel, Tol-stoy insists to the contrary that far from shaping history, great men—bandits, in his opinion—are helpless pawns of unknowable and predestined forces...
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...It is a tribute to Tolstoy's irrepressible veracity as a novelist that he depicts with such pride and tender pity the progress of a heroine whose conduct he as a moralist regards as anathema...
...For Tolstoy, who grew up under the reactionary Nicholas I, deprived in earliest childhood at once of.mother and father and of their con-nections to the liberal aristocratic world that had spawned Pushkin and the De-cembrists, and feeling himself, like many young writers, to have been "born too late," the fictional act of reclamation was at once personal and national in scale From Childhood Boyhood Youth, a memoir begun at the age of twenty-three whose recollec-tions Wilson claims Tolstoy cribbed from David Copperfield, through War and Peace, with its placement of mother, father, aunt, grandfather, and Bers in-laws at the time of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, as well as in two later abandoned novels about Peter the Great and the Decembrists, the ques-tions that dominate Tolstoy's work are: How did I and Russia come to be where we are today...
...with Resurrection he is said to have gone through fifty draft descrip-tions of his heroine's eyes...
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...At the risk of absurd-ity or blasphemy, the contrast might al-most be likened to the differences— that is, the literary differences—be-tween the Hebrew Bible and the Chris-tian Gospels...
...If anyone to-day wrote a novel called War and Peace, it would be a joke...
...or when Kutuzov on the eve of Borodino listens to the plans of his of-ficers "just as he might have sat through a service in church" both be-cause being old and having seen too much of life he knows that wars are won not by cleverness but by patience, and because what he really wants to know is what he is having for dinner—such scenes offer insights into human nature every bit as thrilling as the moment when Prince Andrei, lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, stares up at the infinitely lofty sky and under-stands for the first time that God's ma-jesty arches above us and that all human activity and hopes and ambi-tions are in comparison wonderfully insignificant...
...Tolstoy's great novels and stories, like the Pentateuch or the Books of Sam uel, are family chronicles and national histories whose protagonists are of mixed character, • and stubbornly un heroic...
...Tolstoy portrays the world in all its variety and grandeur, and our pleasure in him is at encountering people whom we know but don't understand and hence don't love half so well as he, until he shows us how...
...T n Anna Karenina, begun in 1873, it 1 is not the nation's collective past that is being recast but Tolstoy's own immediate experiences as a landowner tending to his mowing, hunting snipe, trying to farm humanely and produc-tively, quarreling with his wife, enter-taining his in-laws, wondering what to live for...
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...And as in the Bible, this true universality, this unerring grasp for the flood of conflicting emotions and motives that assail the most diverse creatures whether going to war or going to bed, this intimate and inward feel for the way armies, governments, lynchmobs, and households move—all this combines in Tolstoy with an achieved longing for the soaring epiphany, the breakthrough of revelation...
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...A. N. Wilson's Tolstoy is an unusual biography...
...Ac-cording to Wilson, Tolstoy in War and Peace was reacting against Dostoev-sky's treatment in Crime and Punish-ment of the proposition that the "man of destiny" is permitted to live above the law...
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Vol. 22 • May 1989 • No. 5
