Tolstoy Read online

  Tolstoy

  Also by A. N. Wilson

  FICTION

  The Sweets of Pimlico

  Unguarded Hours

  Kindly Light

  The Healing Art

  Who Was Oswald Fish?

  Wise Virgin

  Scandal: Or Priscilla’s

  Kindness

  Gentlemen in England

  Love Unknown

  Stray

  The Vicar of Sorrows

  Dream Children

  My Name Is Legion

  A Jealous Ghost

  Winnie and Wolf

  The Potter’s Hand

  THE LAMPITT CHRONICLES

  Incline Our Hearts

  A Bottle in the Smoke

  Daughters of Albion

  Hearing Voices

  A Watch in the Night

  FICTION

  A Life of Sir Walter Scott: The Laird of Abbotsford:

  A Life of John Milton

  Hilaire Belloc: A Biography

  How Can We Know?

  Landscape in France

  Tolstoy

  Penfriends from Porlock: Essays And Reviews, 1977–1986

  Eminent Victorians

  C. S. Lewis: A Biography

  Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

  God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith And Doubt in Western Civilization

  The Victorians

  Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

  London: A Short History

  After the Victorians: The World Our Parents Knew

  Betjeman: A Life

  Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II

  Dante in Love

  The Elizabethans

  Hitler: A Short Biography

  Victoria: A Life

  First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd, an imprint of The Penguin Group.

  A reissue was first published in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. A paperback edition was published in 2013.

  This e-book edition was published in 2015.

  Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 1988, 2012

  The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 091 6

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 532 4

  Typeset by Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  To my wife and daughters

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  A note on Dates and Transliterations

  Preface to the 2012 Edition

  Foreword

  1

  Origins

  2

  Joseph and his Brethren

  3

  The History of Yesterday

  4

  Kinderszenen in the Caucasus

  5

  Crimea

  6

  Bronchitis is a Metel

  7

  Travels

  8

  Marriage

  9

  Alchemy

  10

  War and Peace

  11

  The Shadow of Death

  12

  Anna Karenina

  13

  The Holy Man

  14

  Real Christianity

  15

  The Kreutzer Sonata

  16

  Terrible Questions

  17

  Resurrection

  18

  Sad Steps

  19

  Last Battles

  20

  Escape

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  This book began in 1967 when I heard R. V. Sampson talking about Tolstoy. His lecture started with a Jewish proverb: ‘If God came to live on earth, people would smash his windows.’ Professor Sampson went on to say that people had been smashing Tolstoy’s windows ever since he had enunciated his great principles of life. I was amazed that anyone could speak of a novelist as if he were divine, but pretty quickly became excited by the Tolstoyan ideals which Professor Sampson expounded. That excitement, and that amazement, continue to this hour. I have never got over Professor Sampson’s lecture. He will certainly regard the present book as an exercise in window-smashing, but I feel that I owe him a great debt.

  If it is true that I should never have begun the book without R. V. Sampson, I should never have finished it without several wonderful pieces of good fortune. One of these was going to New College, Oxford, and having as my tutor the man who has written the best critical study of Tolstoy in English, John Bayley. Another of these was finding myself, rather later, living within a stone’s throw of the Slavonic branch of the Taylorian Library. The staff there have been unfailingly kind and helpful, as have the staffs of the Bodleian Library and the London Library.

  Another piece of luck was finding in Jennifer Baines a teacher who was patient enough to devote hours of her time to helping me achieve a reading knowledge of Russian. The benefits of this far outstretch even the broad confines of Tolstoy. But I could certainly not have contemplated writing this study without her.

  Thanks, too, for conversational help from Marina Stepanovna Douglas, and for the kindness of those who showed me Yasnaya Polyana and the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.

  I am grateful to Michael Holman of Leeds University for his help with a number of the illustrations; to Susan Rose-Smith for her skilful picture research; to James Woodall, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and Star Lawrence for all their editorial help; and to Douglas Matthews for compiling the index.

  I am, finally, fortunate in having Virginia Llewellyn Smith as a critic and near-neighbour, who overcame her lively detestation of my old hero to read the typescript and who made many invaluable suggestions. The dedicatees of this book will know whether I am any easier to live with than its subject; they have the supreme virtue of being totally unlike any of the women of Yasnaya Polyana.

  Oxford, October 27, 1987

  A Note on Dates and Transliterations

  The dates in this book are given in the ‘old style’. That is to say, they follow the Julian Calendar, which was used in Russia until 1917. The Julian Calendar was twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days behind in the twentieth century. There are some inevitable inconsistencies, however, caused by the fact that Tolstoy did not always remain within the territories where the Julian Calendar was operative. Thus, when he visits London, or Switzerland, or takes part in battles against Englishmen or Frenchmen, the occasional Gregorian date slips in.

  I have attempted to follow the system of transliteration from Cyrillic to Roman script recommended by the Slavonic and East European Review, but I have departed from those guidelines in a number of particulars. This is largely in the area of proper names, where a literal transliteration looks merely odd to an English eye. So,
we read here of Alexander, not Aleksandr. I have rendered the name of Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, rather than Sof’ya. In general, I have not transliterated ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ signs. Initial or inter-vocalic e I have rendered Ye (Dostoyevsky, Yevgeny) but in other positions, e is rendered e (Onegin). I have spelt the ending of proper names with a y, whether in Cyrillic script this corresponds to и or й or ий. Not everyone will agree with my Nikolay for Nikolai, Dmitry for Dmitri or Tolstoy for Tolstoi but there are no fixed rules for transliteration, and though I am guilty of inconsistencies, I hope that all my transliterations are intelligible. My aim has been to make things easy for the eye of a reader who has no Russian.

  Preface to the 2012 Edition

  This book was written over a quarter of a century ago. Since it was published, in 1988, prodigious changes have come upon the land of Tolstoy’s birth. I researched the book in the Soviet Union. In the Communist state, tourists stayed in specially assigned hotels, ate in their own restaurants, and, if they moved from town to town, they were obliged to notify the authorities of their dates and plans, and to arrive at their destinations with their papers in order. It was in such a world that I first visited Yasnaya Polyana and went to the glade where Tolstoy is buried. Now – what changes! The Russian Federation has supplanted the Soviet Union. ‘Oligarchs’, bubbling with money (where did it come from?) have replaced the sinister trilby-hatted Politburo, and western shops in all the Russian cities tempt shoppers, just as they do in Paris and New York. More astonishing still, the churches and monasteries have been reopened and are seemingly more popular than ever. From the Bright Glade where Tolstoy is buried, I seem to hear a growl from beneath the earth.

  As a child, Tolstoy had been told by his elder brother, Nikolenka, that there in the glade was a green stick, on which had been inscribed the secret of happiness. Here was hidden ‘the way for all men to cease suffering from any misfortune, to leave off quarrelling and being angry. . . .’ Here, too, Tolstoy is buried. The atmosphere of the place is both calm and extraordinarily powerful. Here they brought the body of an old man who had had more than his share of quarrels – both domestic and public – and they came in their enormous crowds. Tolstoy was the greatest of all Russian dissidents, and has been the inspiration for peaceful dissent the world over, since he died. Without Tolstoy there would have been no Solzhenitsyn. Without Tolstoy there would have been no Gandhi, no Archbishop Tutu, no Nelson Mandela.

  How well I can remember my own introduction to the genius of Tolstoy. I had read War and Peace as a teenager, and been overwhelmed by its greatness, as surely every reader of that masterpiece must be. As is often said, you do not read War and Peace, you LIVE it. I knew that I had encountered a writer like no other, but at the same time, the implications of the book, and of Tolstoy, had not really dawned on me. I was not ready to ask myself what it was that made this writer so supremely great. Perhaps none of us are ever completely ready for the searchlight of truth.

  For of course, although the truth is only illuminated for us in shadows and ambiguities, the truth itself is not shadowy. It is blindingly clear. And this became obvious to me when a Tolstoyan scholar, and an influential Tolstoyan anarchist, Professor Ronald Sampson, came to our school to give a talk. That talk totally changed my vision of Tolstoy and I suppose it changed my life – even though I have never yet been able to follow the austere and demanding Tolstoyan code for living. I mention Sampson’s talk in the acknowledgements to this book. The passage of time has made me think that my biography of Tolstoy is flawed – flawed by its failure to see how true are Tolstoy’s later writings.

  What Sampson revealed to me was that Tolstoy’s eye of truth – a God-like eye – saw that the world was completely out of joint. Almost everything we are told about the world – by teachers, by politicians, by journalists – is the opposite of the truth. This truth is hard to bear. Remember Plato’s image of the cave-dweller, who can bear to look at the fire in the back of the cave but then, blinking, turns and sees the sunlight outside.

  Tolstoy questioned the legitimacy of human government. Beginning as a critic of the Tsars, he left his questions like time-bombs in history. They are just as relevant today as when he asked them. If we think it is somehow irrational to base our lives on the ethical system of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, maybe we should look again at the world which we have created by ignoring those precepts.

  Since this biography was first published, the world has seen yet more catastrophic attempts to solve human problems by acts of war – in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, in the Congo, in Eritrea and Somalia, and in the Balkans. Tolstoy’s views on the futility of war are burningly relevant.

  Since this biography was published, we have seen first the collapse of Marxist materialist states across Eastern Europe; and then, a decade or so on, we have seen profound crises in world capitalism. A few crooked bankers have shaken not merely our pension funds but the stability of our entire political system; the fabric of our supposed civilization. Again, Tolstoy’s views on the accumulation of wealth come to mind.

  Tolstoy organised two enormous programmes of famine relief in his lifetime. They exposed not only the cruelty but the pathetic inefficiency of the Tsarist regime to deal with such crises. He showed the human race what we still have not learned: that disparities between the hungry and the over-bloated are not accidental. They come about as a result of our own rotten value-systems. Tolstoy would not be surprised that, a hundred years after his death, we find ourselves living on a planet in which the majority remain on the breadline and the rest suffer from obesity. Nor would it surprise this hater of cities that our pursuit of economic growth and industrial progress is literally destroying the planet on which we live, its trees, its birds, its wild animals. A rereading of Tolstoy would convince us, if we did not know the fact already, that we were being governed by lunatics. Perhaps we might be strong enough to make the Tolstoyan leap and come to the realisation that it was better not to be governed at all. Organised religion, as in Tolstoy’s day, aids and abets the status quo. Organised Christianity in our own day is palpably putrescent, with its foolish quarrels about human sexuality, and its disgusting abuse of children. We might think that the so-called anarchy to be found in the pages of the Gospel, and as repeated by Tolstoy in his writings, was saner than any party manifesto or Church doctrine.

  As for those who think that Tolstoy the prophet was so different from Tolstoy the novelist, I’d ask them to consider our world, and then look at his works. One of his earliest works of fiction, The Cossacks, is an account of Russian soldiers fighting a war against so-called Muslim terrorists and realising, not only the utter futility of the war, but wondering whether the so-called infidel did not have something to teach us. At the very end of his life, he wrote what is one of his very finest short stories, Hadji Murat, in which, once again, the superior wisdom of the Muslim over the western secularist is emphasised.

  I return in my mind to Yasnaya Polyana, the beautiful place where Tolstoy the novelist would spend most of his life, and where, after a tempestuous life, he was buried. He had been excommunicated by the Orthodox Church. He was regarded as a dangerous anarchist by the Tsarist autocracy which still (in 1910) ruled Russia. So he was never going to be allowed burial in consecrated ground – ground, that is, which had been blessed by a church which he had come to despise. Far more blessed to him, and in the true sense more consecrated, was that spot in the wood in which his beloved elder brother had buried the green stick. It was there that they carried his coffin, a huge crowd who – in spite of his infidel status – instinctively burst forth with the traditional Russian funeral hymn ‘Eternal Memory’. Although the authorities tried to prevent it, thousands came down on trains from Moscow to witness the coffin, on a cart drawn by village peasants, being led to the spot where the green stick is buried. The crowds fell to their knees as the coffin was lowered into the grave. They shouted at the sixty or so soldiers and the state police who had come down to supervise the occasion, telling
them to kneel, too. It was the archetypical demonstration of the power of the Russian writer-dissident challenging the power of autocracy. It anticipates for us, perhaps, the extraordinary phenomenon of a state even more repressive than that of the Tsar’s – Stalin’s with its millions killed and its millions imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago – being unravelled simply because it was based on lies; being unravelled in large measure by the writings of an obscure provincial physics teacher named Alexander Solzhenitsyn who doggedly, secretly and unstoppably wrote down the truth.

  For, of course, the secret written on the green stick did not remain a secret after Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy had grown up. He became, first and foremost, the greatest novelist in the history of literature. His fame, and his noble birth, made it difficult for the Tsarist government to silence him when he had also become the world’s greatest prophet of pacifist-anarchism.

  Tolstoy’s death in 1910 still challenges us to the deepest political and personal questions. It is hard to think of any of the great public questions facing the world today which Tolstoy did not anticipate and to which he does not even now provide the most disturbing of – well, if not answers – further questions.

  Tolstoy, in his life, work and death, so redefined the significance of what it meant to be a writer in Russia, that literature no longer had parameters. He is the first of the great modern dissidents. Shortly before his death Turgenev wrote a now famous letter to Tolstoy, imploring his old friend to return to ‘literature’ and to give up his obsession with reinventing the Christian religion for rationalists. We all know what Turgenev meant by writing. Does it not go without saying that the Tolstoy we most admire is the author of War and Peace and of Anna Karenina, more than the furious rebel who penned such works as The Kingdom of God is Within You and Peace Essays?