Russian literature

EDUCATIONAL WORK

In the years 1859-1862 the struggle between the “fathers” and the “sons” which called forth violent attacks against the young generation, even from such an “objective” writer as Gontcharóff—to say nothing of Písemskiy and several others,—was going on all over Russia. But we do not know which side had Tolstóy’s sympathy. It must be said, though, that most of this time he was abroad, with his elder brother Nicholas, who died of consumption in the south of France. All we know is that the failure of Western civilisation in attaining any approach to well-being and equality for the great masses of the people deeply struck Tolstóy; and we are told by Venguéroff that the only men of mark whom he went to see during this journey abroad were Auerbach, who wrote at that time his Schwartzwald stories from the life of the peasants and edited popular almanacks, and Proudhon, who was then in exile at Brussels. Tolstóy returned to Russia at the moment when the serfs were freed, accepted the position of a mirovóy posrédnik, or arbitrator of peace between the landlords and the freed serfs, and, settling at Yásnaya Polyána, began there his work of education of children. This he started on entirely independent lines,—that is, on purely anarchistic principles, totally free from the artificial methods of education which had been worked out by German pedagogists, and were then greatly admired in Russia. There was no sort of discipline in his school. Instead of working out programmes according to which the children are to be taught, the teacher, Tolstóy said, must learn from the children themselves what to teach them, and must adapt his teaching to the individual tastes and capacities of each child. Tolstóy carried this out with his pupils, and obtained excellent results. His methods, however, have as yet received but little attention; and only one great writer—another poet, William Morris,—has advocated (in News from Nowhere) the same freedom in education. But we may be sure that some day Tolstóy’s Yásnaya Polyána papers, studied by some gifted teacher, as Rousseau’s Emile was studied by Froebel, will become the starting point of an educational reform much deeper than the reforms of Pestalozzi and Froebel.

It is now known that a violent end to this educational experiment was put by the Russian Government. During Tolstóy’s absence from his estate a searching was made by the gendarmes, who not only frightened to death Tolstóy’s old aunt (she fell ill after that) but visited every corner of the house and read aloud, with cynical comments, the most intimate diary which the great writer had kept since his youth. More searchings were promised, so that Tolstóy intended to emigrate for ever to London, and warned Alexander II., through the Countess A. A. Tolstáya that he kept a loaded revolver by his side and would shoot down the first police officer who would dare to enter his house. The school had evidently to be closed.

WAR AND PEACE

In the year 1862 Tolstóy married the young daughter of a Moscow doctor, Bers; and, staying nearly without interruption on his Túla estate, he gave his time, for the next fifteen or sixteen years, to his great work, War and Peace, and next to Anna Karénina. His first intention was to write (probably utilising some family traditions and documents) a great historical novel, The Decembrists (see Chapter I.), and he finished in 1863 the first chapters of this novel (Vol. III. of his Works, in Russian; Moscow, 10th edition). But in trying to create the types of the Decembrists he must have been taken back in his thoughts to the great war of 1812. He had heard so much about it in the family traditions of the Tolstóys and Volkhónskys, and that war had so much in common with the Crimean war through which he himself had lived that he came to write this great epopee, War and Peace, which has no parallel in any literature.

A whole epoch, from 1805 to 1812, is reconstituted in these volumes, and its meaning appears—not from the conventional historian’s point of view, but as it was understood then by those who lived and acted in those years. All the Society of those times passes before the reader, from its highest spheres, with their heart-rending levity, conventional ways of thinking, and superficiality, down to the simplest soldier in the army, who bore the hardships of that terrible conflict as a sort of ordeal that was sent by a supreme power upon the Russians, and who forgot himself and his own sufferings in the life and sufferings of the nation. A fashionable drawing-room at St. Petersburg, the salon of a person who is admitted into the intimacy of the dowager-empress; the quarters of the Russian diplomatists in Austria and the Austrian Court; the thoughtless life of the Róstoff family at Moscow and on their estate; the austere house of the old general, Prince Bolkónskiy; then the camp life of the Russian General Staff and of Napoléon on the one hand, and on the other, the inner life of a simple regiment of the hussars or of a field-battery; then such world-battles as Schöngraben, the disaster of Austerlitz, Smolénsk, and Borodinó; the abandonment and the burning of Moscow; the life of those Russian prisoners who had been arrested pell-mell during the conflagration and were executed in batches; and finally the horrors of the retreat of Napoléon from Moscow, and the guerilla warfare—all this immense variety of scenes, events, and small episodes, interwoven with romance of the deepest interest, is unrolled before us as we read the pages of this epopee of Russia’s great conflict with Western Europe.

We make acquaintance with more than a hundred different persons, and each of them is so well depicted, each has his or her own human physiognomy so well determined, that each one appears with his or her own individuality, distinct amongst the scores of actors in the same great drama. It is not so easy to forget even the least important of these figures, be it one of the ministers of Alexander I. or any one of the ordinances of the calvary officers. Nay, every anonymous soldier of various rank—the infantryman, the hussar, or the artilleryman—has his own physiognomy; even the different chargers of Róstoff, or of Denísoff, stand out with individual features. When you think of the variety of human characters which pass under your eyes on these pages, you have the real sensation of a vast crowd—of historical events that you seem to have lived through—of a whole nation roused by a calamity; while the impression you retain of human beings whom you have loved in War and Peace, or for whom you have suffered when misfortune befell them, or when they themselves have wronged others (as for instance, the old countess Róstoff and Sónitchka)—the impression left by these persons, when they emerge in your memory from the crowd, gives to that crowd the same illusion of reality which little details give to the personality of a hero.

The great difficulty in an historical novel lies not so much in the representation of secondary figures as in painting the great historical personalities—the chief actors of the historical drama—so as to make of them real, living beings. But this is exactly where Tolstóy has succeeded most wonderfully. His Bagratión, his Alexander I., his Napoléon, and his Kutúzoff are living men, so realistically represented that one sees them and is tempted to seize the brush and paint them, or to imitate their movements and ways of talking.

The “philosophy of war” which Tolstóy had developed in War and Peace has provoked, as is well known, passionate discussion and bitter criticism; and yet its correctness cannot but be recognised. In fact, it is recognised by such as know war from within, or have witnessed human mass-actions. Of course, those who know war from newspaper reports, especially such officers as, after having recited many times over an “improved” report of a battle as they would have liked it to be, giving themselves a leading rôle—such men will not agree with Tolstóy’s ways of dealing with “heroes”; but it is sufficient to read, for instance, what Moltke and Bismarck wrote in their private letters about the war of 1870-71, or the plain, honest descriptions of some historical event with which we occasionally meet, to understand Tolstóy’s views of war and his conceptions of the extremely limited part played by “heroes” in historical events. Tolstóy did not invent the artillery officer Timókhin who had been forgotten by his superiors in the centre of the Schöngraben position, and who, continuing all day long to use his four guns with initiative and discernment, prevented the battle from ending in disaster for the Russian rearguard: he knew only too well of such Timókhins in Sebastopol. They compose the real vital force of every army in the world; and the success of an army depends infinitely more upon its number of Timókhins than upon the genius of its high commanders. This is where Tolstóy and Moltke are of one mind, and where they entirely disagree with the “war-correspondent” and with the General Staff historians.

In the hands of a writer possessed of less genius than Tolstóy, such a thesis might have failed to appear convincing; but in War and Peace it appears almost with the force of self-evidence. Tolstóy’s Kutúzoff is—as he was in reality—quite an ordinary man; but he was a great man for the precise reason, that, forseeing the unavoidable and almost fatal drift of events, instead of pretending that he directed them, he simply did his best to utilise the vital forces of his army in order to avoid still greater disasters.

It hardly need be said that War and Peace is a powerful indictment against war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the great Turkish war of 1877-78, when it was absolutely impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how “we have peppered the enemy with grape-shot,” or how “we shot them down like nine-pins.” If a man could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of savagery, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had grown totally different; and during the same war there came to the front such a novelist as Gárshin and such a painter as Vereschágin, with whom to combat war became a life work.

Everyone who has read War and Peace remembers, of course, the hard experiences of Pierre, and his friendship with the soldier Karatáeff. One feels that Tolstóy is full of admiration for the quiet philosophy of this man of the people,—a typical representative of the ordinary, common-sense Russian peasant. Some literary critics concluded that Tolstóy was preaching in Karatáeff a sort of Oriental fatalism. In the present writer’s opinion there is nothing of the sort. Karatáeff, who is a consistent pantheist, simply knows that there are natural calamities, which it is impossible to resist; and he knows that the miseries which befall him—his personal sufferings, and eventually the shooting of a number of prisoners among whom to-morrow he may or may not be included—are the unavoidable consequences of a much greater event: the armed conflict between nations, which, once it has begun, must unroll itself with all its revolting but absolutely ungovernable consequences. Karatáeff acts as one of those cows on the slope of an Alpine mountain, mentioned by the philosopher Guyau, which, when it feels that it begins to slip down a steep mountain slope, makes at first desperate efforts to hold its ground, but when it sees that no effort can arrest its fatal gliding, lets itself quietly be dragged down into the abyss. Karatáeff accepts the inevitable; but he is not a fatalist. If he had felt that his efforts could prevent war, he would have exerted them. In fact, towards the end of the work, when Pierre tells his wife Natásha that he is going to join the Decembrists (it is told in veiled words, on account of censorship, but a Russian reader understands nevertheless), and she asks him: “Would Platón Karatáeff approve of it?” Pierre, after a moment’s reflection, answers decidedly, “Yes, he would.”

I don’t know what a Frenchman, an Englishman, or a German feels when he reads War and Peace—I have heard educated Englishmen telling me that they found it dull—but I know that for educated Russians the reading of nearly every scene in War and Peace is a source of indescribable æsthetic pleasure. Having, like so many Russians, read the work many times, I could not, if I were asked, name the scenes which delight me most: the romances among the children, the mass-effects in the war scenes, the regimental life, the inimitable scenes from the life of the Court, aristocracy, the tiny details concerning Napoléon or Kutúzoff, or the life of the Róstoffs—the dinner, the hunt, the departure from Moscow, and so on.

Many felt offended, in reading this epopee, to see their hero, Napoléon, reduced to such small proportions, and even ridiculed. But the Napoléon who came to Russia was no longer the man who had inspired the armies of the sans-culottes in their first steps eastwards for the abolition of serfdom, absolutism, and inquisition. All men in high positions are actors to a great extent—as Tolstóy so wonderfully shows in so many places of his great work—and Napoléon surely was not the least actor among them. And by the time he came to Russia, an emperor, now spoiled by the adulation of the courtiers of all Europe and the worship of the masses, who attributed to him what was attributable to the vast stir of minds produced by the Great Revolution, and consequently saw in him a half-god—by the time he came to Russia, the actor in him had got the upper hand over the man in whom there had been formerly incarnated the youthful energy of the suddenly-awakened French nation, in whom had appeared the expression of that awakening, and through whom its force had been the further increased. To these original characteristics was due the fascination which the name of Napoléon exercised upon his contemporaries. At Smolénsky, Kutúzoff himself must have experienced that fascination when, rather than rouse the lion to a desperate battle, he opened before him the way to retreat.

ANNA KARÉNINA.

Of all the Tolstóy novels, Anna Karénina is the one which has been the most widely read in all languages. As a work of art it is a master-piece. From the very first appearance of the heroine, you feel that this woman must bring with her a drama; from the very outset her tragical end is as inevitable as it is in a drama of Shakespeare. In that sense the novel is true to life throughout. It is a corner of real life that we have before us. As a rule, Tolstóy is not at his best in picturing women—with the exception of very young girls—and I don’t think that Anna Karénina herself is as deep, as psychologically complete, and as living a creation as she might have been; but the more ordinary woman, Dolly, is simply teeming with life. As to the various scenes of the novel—the ball scenes, the races of the officers, the inner family life of Dolly, the country scenes on Lévin’s estate, the death of his brother, and so on—all these are depicted in such a way that for its artistic qualities Anna Karénina stands foremost even amongst the many beautiful things Tolstóy has written.

And yet, notwithstanding all that, the novel produced in Russia a decidedly unfavourable impression, which brought to Tolstóy congratulations from the reactionary camp and a very cool reception from the advanced portion of society. The fact is, that the question of marriage and of an eventual separation between husband and wife had been most earnestly debated in Russia by the best men and women, both in literature and in life. It is self-evident that such indifferent levity towards marriage as is continually unveiled before the Courts in “Society” divorce cases was absolutely and unconditionally condemned; and that any form of deceit, such as makes the subject of countless French novels and dramas, was ruled out of question in any honest discussion of the matter. But after the above levity and deceit had been severely branded, the rights of a new love, serious and deep, appearing after years of happy married life, had only been the more seriously analysed. Tchernyshévskiy’s novel, What is to be done, can be taken as the best expression of the opinions upon marriage which had become current amongst the better portion of the young generation. Once you are married, it was said, don’t take lightly to love affairs, or so-called flirtation. Every fit of passion does not deserve the name of a new love; and what is sometimes described as love is in a very great number of cases nothing but temporary desire. Even if it were real love, before a real and deep love has grown up, there is in most cases a period when one has time to reflect upon the consequences that would follow if the beginnings of his or her new sympathy should attain the depth of such a love. But, with all that, there are cases when a new love does come, and there are cases when such an event must happen almost fatally, when, for instance, a girl has been married almost against her will, under the continued insistence of her lover, or when the two have married without properly understanding each other, or when one of the two has continued to progress in his or her development towards a higher ideal, while the other, after having worn for some time the mask of idealism, falls into the Philistine happiness of warmed slippers. In such cases separation not only becomes inevitable, but it often is to the interest of both. It would be much better for both to live through the sufferings which a separation would involve (honest natures are by such sufferings made better) than to spoil the entire subsequent existence of the one—in most cases, of both—and to face moreover the fatal results that living together under such circumstances would necessarily mean for the children. This was, at least, the conclusion to which both Russian literature and the best all-round portion of our society had come.

And now came Tolstóy with Anna Karénina, which bears the menacing biblical epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it,” and in which the biblical revenge falls upon the unfortunate Karénina, who puts an end by suicide to her sufferings after her separation from her husband. Russian critics evidently could not accept Tolstóy’s views. The case of Karénina was one of those where there could be no question of “vengeance.” She was married as a young girl to an old and unattractive man. At that time she did not know exactly what she was doing, and nobody had explained it to her. She had never known love, and learned it for the first time when she saw Vrónskiy. Deceit, for her, was absolutely out of the question; and to keep up a merely conventional marriage would have been a sacrifice which would not have made her husband and child any happier. Separation, and a new life with Vrónskiy, who seriously loved her, was the only possible outcome. At any rate, if the story of Anna Karénina had to end in tragedy, it was not in the least in consequence of an act of supreme justice. As always, the honest artistic genius of Tolstóy had itself indicated another cause—the real one. It was the inconsistency of Vrónskiy and Karénina. After having separated from her husband and defied “public opinion”—that is, the opinion of women who, as Tolstóy shows it himself, were not honest enough to be allowed any voice in the matter—neither she nor Vrónskiy had the courage of breaking entirely with that society, the futility of which Tolstóy knows and describes so exquisitely. Instead of that, when Anna returned with Vrónskiy to St. Petersburg, her own and Vrónskiy’s chief preoccupation was—How Betsey and other such women would receive her, if she made her appearance among them. And it was the opinion of the Betsies—surely not Superhuman Justice—which brought Karénina to suicide.

RELIGIOUS CRISIS

Everyone knows the profound change which took place in Tolstóy’s fundamental conceptions of life in the years 1875-1878, when he had reached the age of about fifty. I do not think that one has the right to discuss publicly what has been going on in the very depths of another’s mind; but, by telling us himself the inner drama and the struggles which he has lived through, the great writer has, so to say, invited us to verify whether he was correct in his reasonings and conclusions; and limiting ourselves to the psychological material which he has given us, we may discuss it without undue intrusion into the motives of his actions.

It is most striking to find, on re-reading the earlier works of Tolstóy, how the ideas which he advocates at the present time were always cropping up in his earlier writings. Philosophical questions and questions concerning the moral foundations of life interested him from his early youth. At the age of sixteen he used to read philosophical works, and during his university years, and even through “the stormy days of passion,” questions as to how we ought to live rose with their full importance before him. His autobiographical novels, especially Youth, bear deep traces of that inner work of his mind, even though, as he says in Confession, he has never said all he might have said on this subject. Nay, it is evident that although he describes his frame of mind in those years as that of “a philosophical Nihilist,” he had never parted, in reality, with the beliefs of his childhood.[17] He always was an admirer and follower of Rousseau. In his papers on education (collected in Vol. IV. of the tenth Moscow edition of his Works) one finds treated in a very radical way most of the burning social questions which he has discussed in his later years. These questions even then worried him so much that, while he was carrying on his school work in Yásnaya Polyána and was a Peace Mediator—that is, in the years 1861-62—he grew so disgusted with the unavoidable dualism of his position of a benevolent landlord, that—to quote his own words—“I should have come then, perhaps, to the crisis which I reached fifteen years later, if there had not remained one aspect of life which promised me salvation—namely, married life.” In other words, Tolstóy was already very near to breaking with the privileged class point of view on Property and Labour, and to joining the great populistic movement which was already beginning in Russia. This he probably would have done, had not a new world of love, family life, and family interests, which he embraced with the usual intensity of his passionate nature, fastened the ties that kept him attached to his own class.

Art, too, must have contributed to divert his attention from the social problem—at least, from its economic aspects. In War and Peace he developed the philosophy of the masses versus the heroes, a philosophy which in those years would have found among the educated men of all Europe very few persons ready to accept it. Was it his poetical genius which revealed to him the part played by the masses in the great war of 1812, and taught him that they—the masses, and not the heroes—had accomplished all the great things in history? Or, was it but a further development of the ideas which inspired him in his Yásnaya Polyána school, in opposition to all the educational theories that had been elaborated by Church and State in the interest of the privileged classes? At any rate, War and Peace must have offered him a problem great enough to absorb his thoughts for a number of years; and in writing this monumental work, in which he strove to promote a new conception of history, he must have felt that he was working in the right way. As to Anna Karénina, which had no such reformatory or philosophical purpose, it must have offered to Tolstóy the possibility of living through once more, with all the intensity of poetical creation, the shallow life of the leisured classes, and to contrast it with the life of the peasants and their work. And it was while he was finishing this novel that he began to fully realise how much his own life was in opposition to the ideals of his earlier years.

A terrible conflict must have been going on then in the mind of the great writer. The communistic feeling which had induced him to put in italics the fact about the singer at Lucerne, and to add to it a hot indictment against the civilisation of the moneyed classes; the trend of thought which had dictated his severe criticisms against private property in Holstomyér: the History of a Horse; the anarchistic ideas which had brought him, in his Yásnaya Polyána educational articles, to a negation of a civilisation based on Capitalism and State; and, on the other hand, his individual property conceptions, which he tried to conciliate with his communistic leanings (see the conversation between the two brothers Lévin in Anna Karénina); his want of sympathy with the parties which stood in opposition to the Russian Government and, at the same time, his profound, deeply rooted dislike of that Government, all these tendencies must have been in an irreconcilable conflict in the mind of the great writer, with all the passionate intensity which is characteristic of Tolstóy, as with all men of genius. These constant contradictions were so apparent that while less perspicacious Russian critics and the Moscow Gazette defenders of serfdom considered Tolstóy as having joined their reactionary camp, a gifted Russian critic, Mihailóvskiy, published in 1875 a series of remarkable articles, entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of Count Tolstóy, in which he pointed out the two men who constantly were in conflict in the great writer. In these articles, the young critic, a great admirer of Tolstóy, analysed the advanced ideas which he had developed in his educational articles, which were almost quite unknown at that time, and contrasted them with the strangely conservative ideas which he had expressed in his later writings. As a consequence, Mihailóvskiy predicted a crisis to which the great writer was inevitably coming.

One of these issues—Mihailóvskiy continued—would be to write for the people. Of course, very few are so happy as to possess the talent and the faculties which are necessary for that:

It is now known how much Mihailóvskiy’s hypothesis was a prevision. In the years 1875-76, as Tolstóy was finishing Anna Karénina, he began fully to realise the shallowness and the duality of the life that he had hitherto led. “Something strange,” he says, “began to happen within me: I began to experience minutes of bewilderment, of arrest of life, as if I did not know how to live and what to do.” “What for? What next?” were the questions which began to rise before him. “Well,” he said to himself, “you will have 15,000 acres of land in Samara, 3000 horses—but what of that? And I was bewildered, and did not know what to think next.” Literary fame had lost for him its attraction, now that he had reached the great heights to which War and Peace had brought him. The little picture of Philistine family-happiness which he had pictured in a novel before his marriage (Family Happiness) he had now lived through, but it no longer satisfied him. The life of Epicureanism which he had led hitherto had lost all sense for him. “I felt,” he writes in Confession, “that what I had stood upon had broken down; that there was nothing for me to stand upon; that what I had lived by was no more, and that there was nothing left me to live by. My life had come to a stop.” The so-called “family duties” had lost their interest. When he thought of the education of his children, he asked himself, “What for?” and very probably he felt that in his landlord’s surroundings he never would be able to give them a better education than his own, which he condemned; and when he began thinking of the well-being of the masses he would all of a sudden ask himself: “What business have I to think of it?”

He felt that he had nothing to live for. He even had no wishes which he could recognise as reasonable. “If a fairy had come to me, and offered to satisfy my wish, I should not have known what to wish ... I even could not wish to know Truth, because I had guessed of what it would consist. The Truth was, that life is nonsense.” He had no aim in life, no purpose, and he realised that without a purpose, and with its unavoidable sufferings, life is not worth living (Confession, VI, VII).

He had not—to use his own expression—“the moral bluntness of imagination” which would be required not to have his Epicureanism poisoned by the surrounding misery; and yet, like Schopenhauer, he had not the Will that was necessary for adjusting his actions in accordance with the dictates of his reason. Self-annihilation, death, appeared therefore as a welcome solution.

However, Tolstóy was too strong a man to end his life in suicide. He found an outcome, and that outcome was indicated to him by a return to the love which he had cherished in his youth: the love of the peasant masses. “Was it in consequence of a strange, so to say a physical love of the truly working people,” he writes—or of some other cause? but he understood at last that he must seek the sense of life among the millions who toil all their life long. He began to examine with more attention than before the life of these millions. “And I began,” he says, “to love these people.” And the more he penetrated into their lives, past and present, the more he loved them, and “the easier it was for me to live.” As to the life of the men of his own circle—the wealthy and cultured, “I not only felt disgust for it: it lost all sense in my eyes.” He understood that if he did not see what life was worth living for, it was his own life “in exclusive conditions of epicureanism” which had obscured the truth.

The conviction, then, that he must live as the millions live, earning his own livelihood; that he must toil as the millions toil; and that such a life is the only possible reply to the questions which had brought him to despair—the only way to escape the terrible contradictions which had made Schopenhauer preach self-annihilation, and Solomon, Sakiamuni, and so many others preach their gospel of despairing pessimism, this conviction, then, saved him and restored to him lost energy and the will to live. But that same idea had inspired thousands of the Russian youth, in those same years, and had induced them to start the great movement “V narod!” “Towards the people; be the people!”

Tolstóy has told us in an admirable book, What is, then, to be done? the impressions which the slums of Moscow produced upon him in 1881, and the influence they had upon the ulterior development of his thoughts. But we do not yet know what facts and impressions made him so vividly realise in 1875-81 the emptiness of the life which he had been hitherto leading. Is it then presuming too much if I suggest that it was this very same movement, “towards the people,” which had inspired so many of the Russian youth to go to the villages and the factories, and to live there the life of the people, which finally brought Tolstóy, also, to reconsider his position as a rich landlord?

That he knew of this movement there is not the slightest doubt. The trial of the Netcháeff groups in 1871 was printed in full in the Russian newspapers, and one could easily read through all the youthful immaturity of the speeches of the accused the high motives and the love of the people which inspired them. The trial of the Dolgúshin groups, in 1875, produced a still deeper impression in the same direction; but especially the trial, in March, 1877, of those of transcendent worth, girls Bárdina, Lubatóvitch, the sisters Subbótin, “the Moscow Fifty” as they were named in the circles, who, all from wealthy families, had led the life of factory girls, in the horrible factory-barracks, working fourteen and sixteen hours a day, in order to be with the working people and to teach them.... And then—the trial of the “Hundred-and-Ninety-Three” and of Véra Zasúlitch in 1878. However great Tolstóy’s dislike of revolutionists might have been, he must have felt, as he read the reports of these trials, or heard what was said about them at Moscow and in his province of Túla, and witnessed round him the impression they had produced—he, the great artist, must have felt that this youth was much nearer to what he himself was in his earlier days, in 1861-62, than to those among whom he lived now—the Katkóffs, the “Fets,” and the like. And then, even if he knew nothing about these trials and had heard nothing about the “Moscow Fifty,” he knew, at least, Turguéneff’s Virgin Soil, which was published in January, 1877, and he must have felt, even from that imperfect picture, so warmly greeted by young Russia, what this young Russia was.

If Tolstóy had been in his twenties, he might possibly have joined the movement, in one form or another, notwithstanding all the obstacles. Such as he was, in his surroundings, and especially with his mind already preoccupied by the problem—“Where is the lever which would move human hearts at large, and become the source of the deep moral reform of every individual?” with such a question on his mind, he had to live through many a struggle before he was brought consciously to take the very same step. For our young men and women, the mere statement that one who had got an education, thanks to the work of the masses, owed it therefore to these masses to work in return for them—this simple statement was sufficient. They left their wealthy houses, took to the simplest life, hardly different from that of a workingman, and devoted their lives to the people. But for many reasons—such as education, habits, surroundings, age, and, perhaps, the great philosophical question he had in his mind, Tolstóy had to live through the most painful struggles, before he came to the very same conclusion, but in a different way: that is to say, before he concluded that he, as the bearer of a portion of the divine Unknown, had to fulfil the will of that Unknown, which will was that everyone should work for the universal welfare.[18]

The moment, however, that he came to this conclusion, he did not hesitate to act in accordance with it. The difficulties he met in his way, before he could follow the injunction of his conscience, must have been immense. We can faintly guess them. The sophisms he had to combat—especially when all those who understood the value of his colossal talent began to protest against his condemnation of his previous writing—we can also easily imagine. And one can but admire the force of his convictions, when he entirely reformed the life he had hitherto led.

The small room he took in his rich mansion is well known through a world-renowned photograph. Tolstóy behind the plough, painted by Ryépin, has gone the round of the world, and is considered by the Russian Government so dangerous an image that it has been taken from the public gallery where it was exhibited. Limiting his own living to the strictly necessary minimum of the plainest sort of food, he did his best, so long as his physical forces lasted, to earn that little by physical work. And for the last years of his life he has been writing even more than he ever did in the years of his greatest literary productivity.

The effects of this example which Tolstóy has given mankind everyone knows. He believes, however, that he must give also the philosophical and religious reasons for his conduct, and this he did in a series of remarkable works.

Guided by the idea that millions of plain working people realised the sense of life, and found it in life itself, which they considered as the accomplishment of “the will of the Creator of the universe,” he accepted the simple creed of the masses of the Russian peasants, even though his mind was reluctant to do so, and followed with them the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. There was a limit, however, to such a concession, and there were beliefs which he positively could not accept. He felt that when he was, for instance, solemnly declaring during the mass, before communion, that he took the latter in the literal sense of the words—not figuratively—he was affirming something which he could not say in full conscience. Besides, he soon made the acquaintance of the Non-conformist peasants, Sutyáeff and Bondaryóff, whom he deeply respected, and he saw, from his intercourse with them, that by joining the Greek Orthodox Church he was lending a hand to all its abominable prosecutions of the Non-conformists—that he was a party to the hatred which all Churches profess towards each other.

Consequently, he undertook a complete study of Christianity, irrespective of the teachings of the different churches, including a careful revision of the translations of the gospels, with the intention of finding out what was the real meaning of the Great Teacher’s precepts, and what had been added to it by his followers. In a remarkable, most elaborate work (Criticism of Dogmatic Theology), he demonstrated how fundamentally the interpretations of the Churches differed from what was in his opinion the true sense of the words of the Christ. And then he worked out, quite independently, an interpretation of the Christian teaching which is quite similar to the interpretations that have been given to it by all the great popular movements—in the ninth century in Armenia,—later on by Wycliff, and by the early Anabaptists, such as Hans Denck,[19] laying, however, like the Quakers, especial stress on the doctrine of non-resistance.

HIS INTERPRETATION OF THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING

The ideas which Tolstóy thus slowly worked out are explained in a succession of three separate works: (1) Dogmatic Theology, of which the Introduction is better known as Confession and was written in 1882; (2) What is my Faith? (1884); and (3) What is then to be Done? (1886), to which must be added The Kingdom of God in Yourselves, or Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new Understanding of Life (1900) and, above all, a small book, The Christian Teaching (1902), which is written in short, concise, numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a full and definite exposition of Tolstóy’s views. A number of other works dealing with the same subject—such as The Life and the Teachings of the Christ, My Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication, What is Religion, On Life, etc., were published during the same year. These books represent the work of Tolstóy for the last twenty years, and at least four of them (Confession, My Faith, What is to be Done, and Christian Teaching) must be read in the indicated succession by everyone who wishes to know the religious and moral conceptions of Tolstóy and to extricate himself from the confused ideas which are sometimes represented as Tolstóyism. As to the short work, The Life and the Teaching of Jesus, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told in a language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstóy’s reading of the gospels.

These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a rationalistic interpretation of Christianity that has ever been ventured upon. Christianity appears in them devoid of all gnosticism and mysticism, as a purely spiritual teaching about the universal spirit which guides man to a higher life—a life of equality and of friendly relations with all men. If Tolstóy accepts Christianity as the foundation of his faith, it is not because he considers it as a revelation, but because its teaching, purified of all the additions that have been made to it by the churches, contains “the very same solution of the problem of life as has been given more or less explicitly by the best of men, both before and since the gospel was given to us—a succession which goes on from Moses, Isaiah, and Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others, often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere trust, have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about the meaning of life”[20]; because it gives “an explanation of the meaning of life” and “a solution of this contradiction between the aspiration after welfare and life, and the consciousness of their being unattainable” (Chr. Teach. §13)—“between the desire for happiness and life on the one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the certainty of calamity and death on the other” (ibid., §10).

As to the dogmatic and mystical elements of Christianity, which he treats as mere additions to the real teaching of Christ, he considers them so noxious that even he makes the following remark: “It is terrible to say so (but sometimes I have this thought): if the teaching of Christ, together with the teaching of the Church that has grown upon it, did not exist at all—those who now call themselves Christians would have been nearer to the teachings of Christ—that is, to an intelligent teaching about the good of life—than they are now. The moral teachings of all the prophets of mankind would not have been closed for them.”[21]

Putting aside all the mystical and metaphysical conceptions which have been interwoven with Christianity, he concentrates his main attention upon the moral aspects of the Christian teaching. One of the most powerful means—he says—by which men are prevented from living a life in accordance with this teaching is “religious deception.” “Humanity moves slowly but unceasingly onward, towards an ever higher development of consciousness of the true meaning of life, and towards the organisation of life in conformity with this development of consciousness;” but in this ascendant march all men do not move at an equal pace, and “the less sensitive continue to adhere to the previous understanding and order of life, and try to uphold it.” This they achieve mainly by means of the religious deception which consists “in the intentional confusion of faith with superstition, and the substitution of the one for the other.” (Chr. Teach., §§181, 180.) The only means to free one’s self from this deception is—he says—“to understand and to remember that the only instrument which man possesses for the acquisition of knowledge is reason, and that therefore every teaching which affirms that which is contrary to reason is a delusion.” Altogether, Tolstóy is especially emphatic upon this point of the importance of reason. (See The Christian Teaching, §§206, 214.)

Another great obstacle to the spreading of the Christian teaching he sees in the current belief in the immortality of the soul—such as it is understood now. (My Belief, p. 134 of Tchertkoff’s Russ. ed.) In this form he repudiates it; but we can—he says—give a deeper meaning to our life by making it to be a service to men—to mankind—by merging our life into the life of the universe; and although this idea may seem less attractive than the idea of individual immortality, “though little, it is sure.” (Chr. Teaching.)

In speaking of God he takes sometimes a pantheistic position, and describes God as Life, or as Love, or else as the Ideal which man is conscious of in himself (Thoughts about God, collected by V. and A. Tchertkoff); but in his last work (Christian Teaching, ch. VII. and VIII.) he prefers to identify God with “the universal desire for welfare which is the source of all life.” “So that, according to the Christian teaching, God is that Essence of life which man recognises both within himself and in the whole universe as the desire for welfare; it being at the same time the cause by which this Essence is enclosed and conditioned in individual and corporal life” (§36). Every reasoning man—Tolstóy adds—comes to a similar conclusion. A desire for universal welfare appears in every reasoning man, after his rational consciousness has been awakened at a certain age; and in the world around Man the same desire is manifest in all separate beings, each of whom strives for his own welfare (§37). These two desires “converge towards one distinct purpose—definite, attainable, and joyful for man.” Consequently, he concludes, Observation, Tradition (religious), and Reason, all three, show him “that the greatest welfare of man, towards which all men aspire, can only be obtained by perfect union and concord among men.” All three show that the immediate work of the world’s development, in which he is called upon to take part, is “the substitution of union and harmony for division and discord.” “The inner tendency of that spiritual being—love—which is in the process of birth within him, impels him in the same direction.”

Union and harmony, and steady, relentless effort to promote them, which means not only all the work required for supporting one’s life, but work also for increasing universal welfare—these are, then, the two final accords in which all the discords, all the storms, which for more than twenty years had raged in the distraught mind of the great artist, all the religious ecstasies and the rationalistic doubts which had agitated his superior intelligence in its insistent search for truth finally found their solution. On the highest metaphysical heights the striving of every living being for its own welfare, which is Egoism and Love at the same time because it is Self-Love, and rational Self-Love must embrace all congeners of the same species—this striving for individual welfare by its very nature tends to comprise all that exists. “It expands its limits naturally by love, first for one’s family—one’s wife and children—then for friends, then for one’s fellow-countrymen; but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to embrace all” (ibid., §46).

MAIN POINTS OF THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS

The central point of the Christian teaching Tolstóy sees in non-resistance. During the first years after his crisis he preached absolute “non-resistance to evil”—in full conformity with the verbal and definite sense of the words of the gospel, which words, taken in connection with the sentence about the right and the left cheek, evidently mean complete humility and resignation. However, he must have soon realised that such a teaching not only was not in conformity with his above-mentioned conception of God, but that it also amounted simply to abetting evil. It contains precisely that license to evil which always has been preached by the State religions in the interest of the ruling classes, and Tolstóy must have realised this. He tells us how he once met in a train the Governor of the Túla province at the head of a detachment of soldiers who were armed with rifles and provided with a cart-load of birch-rods. They were going to flog the peasants of a village in order to enforce an act of sheer robbery passed by the Administration in favour of the landlord and in open breach of the law. He describes with his well-known graphical powers how, in their presence, a “Liberal lady” openly, loudly and in strong terms condemned the Governor and the officers, and how they were ashamed. Then he describes how, when such an expedition began its work, the peasants, with truly Christian resignation, would cross themselves with trembling hand and lie down on the ground, to be martyrised and flogged till the heart of the victim stopped beating, without the officers having been touched in the least by that Christian humility. What Tolstóy did when he met the expedition, we don’t know: he does not tell us. He probably remonstrated with the chiefs and advised the soldiers not to obey them—that is, to revolt. At any rate, he must have felt that a passive attitude in the face of this evil—the non-resistance to it—would have meant a tacit approval of the evil; it would have meant giving support to it. Moreover, a passive attitude of resignation in the face of evil is so contrary to the very nature of Tolstóy, that he could not remain for a long time a follower of such a doctrine, and he soon altered his interpretation of the text of the gospel in the sense of: “Don’t resist evil by violence.” All his later writings have consequently been a passionate resistance against the different forms of evil which he has seen round about himself in the world. Continually he makes his mighty voice resound against both evil and evil-doers; he only objects to physical force in resisting evil because he believes that works harm.

The other four points of the Christian teaching, always according to Tolstóy’s interpretation of it, are: Do not be angry, or, at least, abstain from anger as much as you can: Remain true to the one woman with whom you have united your life, and avoid all that excites passion: Do not take oaths, which in Tolstóy’s opinion means: Never tie your hands with an oath; oath-taking is the means resorted to by all governments to bind men in their consciences to do whatever they bid them do; and finally, Love your enemies; or, as Tolstóy points it out in several of his writings: Never judge, and never prosecute another before a tribunal.

To these five rules Tolstóy gives the widest possible interpretation and he deducts from them all the teachings of free communism. He proves with a wealth of arguments that to live upon the work of others, and not to earn one’s own living, is to break the very law of all nature; it is the main cause of all social evils, as also of nearly all personal unhappiness and discomforts. He shows how the present capitalistic organisation of labour is as bad as slavery or serfdom has ever been.

He insists upon the simplification of life—in food, dress, and dwelling—which results from one’s taking to manual work, especially on the land, and shows the advantages that even the rich and idle of to-day would find in such labour. He shows how all the evils of present misgovernment result from the fact that the very men who protest against bad government make every effort to become a part of that government.

As emphatically as he protests against the Church, he protests against the State, as the only real means for bringing to an end the present slavery imposed upon men by this institution. He advises men to refuse having anything to do with the State. And finally, he proves with a wealth of illustrations in which his artistic powers appear in full, that the lust of the rich classes for wealth and luxury—a lust which has no limits, and can have none—is what maintains all this slavery, all these abnormal conditions of life, and all the prejudices and teachings now disseminated by Church and State in the interest of the ruling classes.

On the other hand, whenever he speaks of God, or of immortality, his constant desire is to show that he needs none of the mystical conceptions and metaphysical words which are usually resorted to. And while his language is borrowed from religious writings, he always brings forward, again and again, the rationalistic interpretation of religious conceptions. He carefully sifts from the Christian teaching all that cannot be accepted by followers of other religions, and brings into relief all that is common to Christianity as well as to other positive religions; all that is simply humane in them and thus might be approved by reason, and therefore be accepted by disbelievers as well as by believers.

In other words, in proportion as he has lately studied the teachings of different founders of religions and those of moral philosophers, he has tried to determine and to state the elements of a universal religion in which all men could unite—a religion, however, which would have nothing supernatural in it, nothing that reason and knowledge would have to reject, but would contain a moral guidance for all men—at whatever stage of intellectual development they may halt. Having thus begun, in 1875-77, by joining the Greek Orthodox religion—in the sense in which Russian peasants understand it—he came finally in The Christian Teaching to the construction of a Moral Philosophy which, in his opinion, might be accepted by the Christian, the Jew, the Mussulman, the Buddhist, and so on, and the naturalist philosopher as well—a religion which would retain the only substantial elements of all religions: namely, a determination of one’s relation towards the universe (Weltanschaung), in accordance with present knowledge, and a recognition of the equality of all men.

Whether these two elements, one of which belongs to the domain of knowledge and science and the other (justice) to the domain of ethics, are sufficient to constitute a religion, and need no substratum of mysticism—is a question which lies beyond the scope of this book.

LATEST WORKS OF ART

The disturbed conditions of the civilised world, and especially of Russia, have evidently more than once attracted the attention of Tolstóy, and induced him to publish a considerable number of letters, papers, and appeals on various subjects. In all of them he advocates, first of all, and above all, an attitude of negation towards Church and State. Never enter the service of the State, even in the provincial and urban institutions, which are granted by the State only as a snare. Refuse to support exploitation in any form. Refuse to perform military service, whatever the consequences may be: for this is the only method of being truly anti-militarist. Never have anything to do with Courts, even if you are offended or assailed;—nothing but evil results from them. Such a negative and eminently sincere attitude, he maintains, would better promote the cause of true progress than any revolutionary means. As a first step, however, towards the abolition of modern slavery, he also recommends the nationalisation, or rather the municipalisation, of land.

It is manifest that the works of art which he wrote during the last five-and-twenty years, after 1876, must bear deep traces of his new point of view. He began, first, by writing for the people, and although most of his small stories for popular reading are spoiled to some extent by the too obvious desire of drawing a certain moral, and a consequent distortion of facts, there are a few among them—especially How much Land is required for a Man—which are wonderfully artistic. The Death of Iván Illýtch need only be named to recall the profound impression produced by its appearance.

In order to speak to a still wider audience in the theatres for the people, which began to be started in Russia about that time, he wrote The Power of Darkness,—a most terrible drama from the life of the peasants, in which he aimed at producing a deep impression by means of a Shakespearian or rather Marlowian realism. His other play—The Fruits of Civilisation—is in a comical vein. The superstitions of the “upper classes” as regards spiritualism are ridiculed in it. Both plays (the former—with alterations in the final scene) are played with success on the Russian stage.

However, it is not only the novels and dramas of this period which are works of Art. The five religious works which have been named on a preceding page are also works of art in the best sense of the word, as they contain descriptive pages of a high artistic value; while the very ways in which Tolstóy explains the economical principles of Socialism, or the No-Government principles of Anarchism, are as much masterpieces as the best socialistic and anarchistic pages of William Morris—far surpassing the latter in simplicity and artistic power.

Kreutzer Sonata is surely, after Anna Karénina, the work of Tolstóy which has been the most widely read. However, the strange theme of this novel and the crusade against marriage altogether which it contains so much attract the attention of the reader and usually become the subject of so passionate a discussion among those who have read it, that the high artistic qualities of this novel and the analysis of life which it contains have hardly received the recognition they deserve. The moral teaching that Tolstóy has put in Kreutzer Sonata hardly need be mentioned, the more so since the author himself has withdrawn it to a very great extent. But for the appreciation of Tolstóy’s work and for the comprehension of the artist’s inner life this novel has a deep meaning. No stronger accusation against marriage for mere outer attraction, without intellectual union or sympathy of purpose between husband and wife, has ever been written; and the struggle that goes on between Kóznysheff and his wife is one of the most deeply dramatic pages of married life that we possess in any literature.

Tolstóy’s What is Art? is mentioned in Chapter VIII. of this book. His greatest production of the latest period is, however, Resurrection. It is not enough to say that the energy and youthfulness of the septuagenarian author which appear in this novel are simply marvellous. Its absolute artistic qualities are so high that if Tolstóy had written nothing else but Resurrection he would have been recognised as one of the great writers. All those parts of the novel which deal with Society, beginning with the letter of “Missie,” and Missie herself, her father, and so on, are of the same high standard as the best pages of the first volume of War and Peace. Everything which deals with the Court, the jurymen, and the prisons is again of the same high standard. It may be said, of course, that the principal hero, Neklúdoff, is not sufficiently living; but this is quite unavoidable for a figure which is meant to represent, if not the author himself, at least his ideas or his experience: this is a drawback of all novels containing so much of an autobiographical element. As regards all the other figures, however, of which so immense a number pass under our eyes, each of them has its own character in striking relief, even if the figure (like one of the judges or of the jurymen, or the daughter of a jailer) appears only on a single page, never to reappear again.

The number of questions which are raised in this novel—social, political, party questions, and so on—is so great that a whole society, such as it is, living and throbbing with all its problems and contradictions, appears before the reader, and this is not Russian Society only, but Society the civilised world over. In fact, apart from the scenes which deal with the political prisoners, Resurrection applies to all nations. It is the most international of all works of Tolstóy. At the same time the main question: “Has Society the right to judge? Is it reasonable in maintaining a system of tribunals and prisons?” this terrible question which the coming century is bound to solve, is so forcibly impressed upon the reader that it is impossible to read the book without, at least, conceiving serious doubts about our system of punishments. Ce livre pèsera sur la conscience du siècle. (“This book will weigh upon the conscience of the century”) was the remark of a French critic, which I heard repeated. And of the justice of this remark I have had the opportunity of convincing myself during my numerous conversations in America with persons having anything to do with prisons. The book weighs already on their consciences.

The same remark applies to the whole activity of Tolstóy. Whether his attempt at impressing upon men the elements of a universal religion which—he believes—reason trained by science might accept, and which man might take as guidance for his moral life, attaining at the same time towards the solution of the great social problem and all questions connected with it—whether this bold attempt be successful or not, can only be decided by time. But it is absolutely certain that no man since the times of Rousseau has so profoundly stirred the human conscience as Tolstóy has by his moral writings. He has fearlessly stated the moral aspects of all the burning questions of the day, in a form so deeply impressive that whoever has read any one of his writings can no longer forget these questions or set them aside; one feels the necessity of finding, in one way or another, some solution. Tolstóy’s influence, consequently, is not one which may be measured by mere years or decades of years: it will last long. Nor is it limited to one country only. In millions of copies his works are read in all languages, appealing equally to men and women of all classes and all nations, and everywhere producing the same result. Tolstóy is now the most loved man—the most touchingly loved man—in the world.