Leo Tolstoy

simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life. There is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes in our Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of personality which glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen. His style is always natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, and the reader who prefers breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art, which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely figure. Theories, prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the daily enlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, the joy, the splendour of human destinies.

G. H. Perris.

TOLSTOY’S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably

must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern

Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of “Anna Karènina” and “War and Peace” has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of “Wilhelm Meister” and of “Resurrection” what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-day stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation’s routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the modern man is. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina,” those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing a whole nation’s life, to the worlds of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.

It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the

great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own progress. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty,

the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.

Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say that “‘Sebastopol’ gives us war under all aspects—war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of ‘Sebastopol’ by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, ‘I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all. ‘Sebastopol,’ therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply

relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in ‘Sebastopol’ we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man.”

Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvellously complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of to-day in contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for the modern soul’s alarm in contact with science. And just as science’s work after its first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel—this has been the great novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one truth—to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of life—never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man’s animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s realism in art is symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a study ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.

Edward Garnett.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana on August 28th (September 9th new style), 1828. His father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, was a member of the old Russian nobility. In 1813, after the siege of Erfurt, he was taken prisoner by the French and afterwards retired from the army holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Having assumed the burden of many family debts, he succeeded in paying his creditors in full, thus gaining a reputation for unfailing perseverance. Tolstoy has described his character in “Childhood and Youth.” “He was a man of the last century,” he wrote, “and, like all his contemporaries, he had in him something chivalrous, enterprising, self-possessed, amiable, a passion for pleasure.... His life was so full of all kinds of impulse that he had no time to think about convictions; and besides, he had been so happy all his life that he did not feel it necessary to do so.” His father died before Tolstoy reached the age of ten years, seven years after the death of his mother, of whom he wrote: “When I try to recall to mind my mother as she was then, only her brown eyes arise before me, always the same look of love and kindness in them. If during the most trying moments of my life I could have caught a glimpse of her smile, I should not have known what grief is.”

Tolstoy’s early years were passed in the country on the old-fashioned Russian estate, which resembled somewhat in patriarchal habits, aristocratic manners, democratic familiarity, shiftlessness, and superstition, a Southern Plantation in the days of slavery. After the death of his father in 1837 the family was taken charge of by an aunt, the Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, and three years later by relatives of his mother who lived at Kazan. In 1843 Tolstoy entered the University of Kazan, where “Impervious to the ambitions of scholarship and research, unimpressed by the provincial aristocracy, too nice to enjoy the rough revels of the students, and repelled alike from aristocrats, professors, and students by an unsocial and what, with our English emphasis on government, we should call an unregulated disposition, he seems to have had during these two or three years a thoroughly unhappy and unprofitable experience.”[1] Having left the University in 1846 without graduating he returned to the old country home. Yasnaya Polyana descended to Tolstoy from his mother. The estate, which covers an area of some 2,500 acres, partly arable and partly wooded, lies a hundred miles due south of Moscow. It was at one time Tolstoy’s intention to dispossess himself entirely of his property and live as a peasant. Instead of this, however, he has made over the whole of the land to his wife and children, and lives in the house nominally as a guest.

At the entrance to the park are two towers, medieval in style, which were erected by Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather. From them the road runs through the park, rising as it approaches the house, and becomes merged in a level avenue of birch trees. Glimpses of a pond are caught through the dense foliage and of a square smoothly rolled space used as a tennis-ground, the game being one in which Count Tolstoy participates with great enjoyment. It will be noticed that in the photograph on page 31 he is holding a tennis racket in his hand.

The house itself is a plain white rectangular two-storied building of stuccoed brick, and it would be hard to imagine a simpler and less pretentious place than the home in which Tolstoy has spent the greater part of his life. It boasts neither piazzas nor towers; indeed, no architectural ornaments of any kind, nor are vines or other creepers trained upon the flat walls to relieve their striking whiteness or soften their rectangular outlines. The house was not completed all at once, but was enlarged in proportion to the needs of the family. On one side, devoid of windows, there is a low porch, near which stands an old elm tree, called “The Tree of the Poor.” Close to its trunk is a bench on which the peasants sit to await the coming of Count Tolstoy. Here he listens with unwearying patience to many stories of distress and difficulty, and gives in return, not only sympathy and advice, but such material assistance as may lie at his command.

It was during the period following upon his University career that Tolstoy threw all his energies into the task of raising both the economical and moral standard of peasant life, and suffered much disappointment at the hands of the peasants, who refused to allow him to pull down their dilapidated hovels even that he might erect new and convenient ones at his own cost. The result was that Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1847, resolved to prosecute his studies with the intention of taking a degree in law. With this choice of a career, however, he was dissatisfied, and returned again to his estate in 1848.

For a few years he lived the ordinary life of the Russian nobleman, enlisting at the age of 23 as cadet in a regiment of artillery in which his elder brother Nicholas was captain. Discontented with the idle life he was leading and out of harmony with his gay surroundings, he decided to jot down his recollections of the homeland he loved so well, and it was at this time that he commenced writing “Childhood and Youth” (which, however, was not published in its complete form until six years later) and “The Cossacks.”

Subsequently Tolstoy was appointed to a post on Prince Gortchakoff’s staff in Turkey, and was present at Sevastopol in 1855, having attained the rank of divisional commander. His experiences during the war are pictured in his three sketches, “Sevastopol in December 1854,” “In May 1855,” and “In August 1855.” These were published the following year and at once made his literary reputation. At the end of the campaign he left the army and visited Western Europe, in order to study various school systems, and upon his return to Yasnaya Polyana he established several schools of his own.

In September 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, the daughter of a military doctor. He was at this time thirty-four years of age, his bride being sixteen years younger. Miss Behrs was not only beautiful, she was an exceedingly cultured girl, having passed various examinations at the Moscow University. According to her brother, the manner of their courtship was practically identical with that of Levin and Kitty in “Anna Karènina.” Countess Tolstoy at the age of forty-eight is described by Sergyeenko in “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” as having “An open, expressive countenance, with vivacious, fearless eyes, which she constantly brings near to the objects at which she is looking. At her very first words one feels her straightforward nature. In her manner there is not even a shadow of truckling to suit the tone of any one whomsoever; her own individual note is always audible.”

About the time of his marriage, Tolstoy was described as “a tall, wide-shouldered thin-waisted man, with a moustache, but without a beard, with a serious, even a gloomy expression of face, which, however, was softened by a gleam of kindliness whenever he smiled.”

Living at Yasnaya Polyana winter and summer, with but rare intervening visits to Moscow, Tolstoy interested himself in all the practical details of farming. Probably his own experiences of the physical labour of mowing are depicted as those of Levin in “Anna Karènina.” “The work went on and on. Levin absolutely lost all idea of time, and did not know whether it was early or late. Though the sweat stood on his face, and dropped from his nose, and all his back was wet as though he had been plunged in water, still he felt very well. His work now seemed to him full of pleasure. It was a state of unconsciousness: he did not know what he was doing, or how much he was doing, or how the hours and moments were flying, but only felt that at this time his work was good.”

Tolstoy was also an enthusiastic sportsman—a diversion which occasioned him two serious accidents—and, in addition to fulfilling the duties of a Justice of the Peace, he set himself to grapple with the novel conditions of land-owning, a complicated and arduous task to which he applied himself with characteristic energy and shrewdness. Indeed, his interests were manifold and exacting. Yet during this busy period he by no means neglected his literary work. The composition of his novel “War and Peace” began immediately after his marriage, and extended over a period of eight years. His wife copied out the manuscript of this work no less than seven times as he altered and improved it. “War and Peace” was followed by “Anna Karènina,” which was not completed until 1876.

In his method of working, Tolstoy may be likened to the old painters. Having settled upon a plan of work, and collected a large number of studies, he first makes a charcoal sketch, as it were, and writes rapidly without thinking of particulars. He then has a clean copy of the work made by his wife or one of his daughters, and this is again subjected to careful remodelling. It is still in the nature of a charcoal sketch. The MS. is speedily covered with erasures and interpolations. Whole sentences replace others. The work is then copied again, and some chapters Tolstoy writes more than ten times. He usually writes on quarto sheets of cheap plain paper in a large involved hand, and sometimes covers as many as twenty pages in one day. He regards the interval between nine o’clock and three as the best time for work.

His study at Yasnaya Polyana is a small room with an uncarpeted floor, a vaulted ceiling, and thick stone walls. Formerly it was a store-room, and on the ceiling are heavy black iron rings, on which hams used to hang and which were used later for gymnastic exercises. The study is very cool and quiet, and contains various implements of labour, such as a scythe, a saw, pincers, tiles, etc.

After his morning labours, Tolstoy generally goes out, often riding on horseback or on his bicycle, according to the state of the weather. He is strict vegetarian, eating only the simplest food and avoiding all stimulants. He long ago ceased to smoke. Attaching great importance to manual labour, he takes a share in the housework, lighting his own fire and carrying water. At one time he learned bootmaking, and it is wonderful what an amount of physical exertion he was able to undergo at the age of seventy in the way of heavy labour in the field, of riding scores of versts on his bicycle, or of playing for hours at lawn tennis.

Tolstoy has always dressed extremely simply, and when at home his costume consisted of a grey flannel blouse, which in summer he exchanged for a canvas one of a very original cut, as may be judged from the fact that there was in the whole district only one old woman who could make it according to his orders. In this blouse Tolstoy sat for his portrait to Kramsky and Répin, the painters. His over-dress was composed of a caftan and half-shouba, made of the simplest materials, and, like the blouse, eccentric in their cut, being made evidently not for show but to stand bad weather. The Hon. Ernest Howard Crosby has given an interesting description of Count Tolstoy’s appearance. “He is dressed like a peasant in a grey-white blouse of thin, coarse, canvas-like material, with a leather belt; but his toilet differs from a peasant’s in being scrupulously clean. His features are irregular and plain, and yet his figure is so strong and massive that the tout ensemble is striking and fine-looking. His little blue eyes peer out from under his bushy eyebrows with the kindliest of expressions.”

Count and Countess Tolstoy have had fifteen children of whom only seven survived. The system of their upbringing has been fully dealt with by M. C. A. Behrs in his “Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy.” Toys and playthings were rigorously banished from the nursery. With the first child the trial was made to dispense altogether with a nurse. But later it was thought well to yield to the requirements of their social position and to the habits of contemporary life, and the children were put under the care of nurses, bonnes, and governesses. The parents, however, exercised a strict and unremittent surveillance over both the children and those who had the care of them.

The greatest possible liberty was allowed to the children, and all put in authority over them were strictly forbidden to have resort under any pretext to violent or severe punishments.

Tolstoy believed that these principles were nowhere so generally accepted as in England, and, accordingly, from their third to their ninth year, the children were placed under the charge of young English governesses engaged directly from London.

Countess Tolstoy is an excellent housewife, attentive and hospitable. All the complicated and troublesome management of the housekeeping and direction of household affairs is under her charge. She is indefatigable, and brings her brisk energy, thriftiness, and activity to bear in every direction, and this she does without help. Her three eldest sons live apart, each occupied with his own business matters. Her daughters have their own interests and duties, which take up the greater part of their time.

Tolstoy’s eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, a girl of exceptional talent, in particular works very hard. In addition to copying much of her father’s manuscript, she conducts his vast correspondence, consisting of an almost incredible number of letters received in all languages from every part of the globe.

This is probably the most striking of all the portraits of Count Tolstoy, representing him when at the height of his popularity and power. In 1884 he was at work on the Popular Tales and Sketches which sold by millions throughout Russia, and from which we reproduce two or three illustrations—viz., one by H. R. Millar from the English edition of “What Men Live By,” written in 1881; another by the same artist from the English edition of “Where Love is there God is also,” and a third showing the cover of this tract, which was written in 1885, and issued in rough pamphlet form at the price of a few farthings.

During the last twenty years Tolstoy has written the following books:—“My Confession,” “A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology,” which has never been translated, “The Four Gospels, Harmonized and Translated,” “What I Believe,” “The Gospel in Brief,” “What to Do,” “On Life” (also called “Life”), “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” “The Christian Teaching,” “What is Art?” which in Tolstoy’s own opinion is the best constructed of his books, “Resurrection,” his last novel, begun about 1894, and then laid aside in favour of what seemed more important work to be completely rewritten and published in 1899 for the benefit of the Doukhabors, and latterly “What is Religion and what is Its Essence,” published in February 1902. The illustrations reproduced from “Resurrection” on pages 19, 29, and 34 are from the remarkable drawings by Pasternak. Concerning these pictures there is an interesting note in the preface of the French edition of the novel from which it may be gathered that the drawings tallied very closely with Tolstoy’s own conception of the appearance of his characters. It was the artist’s usual custom to submit each design on its completion to the eminent novelist for his opinion. Invariably Tolstoy showed his approval of the clever realisation of his ideas. But when it came to the sketch of Prince Nekhludov, Tolstoy went so far as to enquire of M. Pasternak whether he was acquainted with the person who had served him as a model. At this the artist showed extreme surprise—he had not even been aware that the character was copied from an original.