Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s female characters based on Aksinya totally lack a satanic dimension. Both Malanya and Marianna are inherently chaste, in spite of their sex appeal, liveliness and playfulness. Their seductive power is morally redeemed because it is rooted in the primordial simplicity of the world the author longed to join.

In any case, Tolstoy was unable to complete these works. His preoccupation with taking writing lessons from peasant children betrayed deep dissatisfaction with the course of his own literary activity. He regarded all his new stories like ‘Albert’ and ‘Lucerne’, discussing the inevitable misery and loneliness of a true artist, or the moralistic tale ‘Three Deaths’, or ‘Family Happiness’, where a young woman recalls her romance, conflict and reconciliation with her husband, as outright failures and even ‘abominations’ that he only sent to the magazines for economic reasons. After ‘Family Happiness’ appeared in 1859 he stopped publishing and did his best to conceal from his literary friends that he was writing at all.

Friends, publishers and critics were desperate. Both Turgenev and Fet urged him to resume writing. Nekrasov tried to convince him that he possessed everything needed to write ‘good – simple, calm and clear stories’, not understanding that this is exactly what Tolstoy was reluctant to do. When the critic Alexander Druzhinin, who published the magazine Biblioteka dlia chtenia (Library for Reading), asked Tolstoy for new prose for his magazine, Tolstoy responded that he lacked ‘the content’ that ‘demands to be released and gives audacity, pride and power’ (TP, I, p. 289). He felt ashamed at the age of 31 ‘to write stories, which are very nice and pleasant to read’ (Ls, I, p. 129). He left Russia in 1860, insisting that he had renounced literature and was interested only in methods for teaching in popular schools. However, during this second ‘educational’ trip he started to believe that he had finally discovered the content that he needed.

The rapid changes in the social fabric of Europe that were taking place in the nineteenth century dramatically increased the demand for formal education. An individual could no longer assume he would lead the same life as his parents. The children of the working classes could not rely on the practical training they received from their families. New types of schools were proliferating and new pedagogical ideas being tested. Tolstoy, who was convinced that teaching was his lifelong vocation, was anxious to get first-hand information on the process. The practices he observed left him profoundly disappointed since the European schools he visited were using the same disciplinary practices he loathed at home.

He had another much more personal and traumatic reason for the trip. His eldest brother Nikolai, who since their childhood had served as a guide, mentor and role model for the young Leo, was slowly dying from consumption and the doctors demanded a change of climate. They went initially to the German resort of Bad Soden and then to the south of France, accompanied by their sister Maria and her children. Maria had her share of troubles, her marriage collapsed and her relations with Turgenev went nowhere.

Tolstoy had witnessed people dying and had lost loved ones, but this time he had to experience both. His brother Dmitry also died from consumption in 1856, but Leo was not present at his deathbed and Dmitry never was as close to him as Nikolai. Three weeks after Nikolai’s death Tolstoy wrote to Fet that, while everyone was amazed how quietly his brother had passed away, he was the only one to understand how excruciating it was, as not a single one of the dying man’s feelings had escaped him:

He did not say that he felt the death approaching, but I know he followed its every step and surely knew what still remained to him of life. A few minutes before he died, he dozed off, then suddenly came to and whispered in horror: ‘why, what is that?’ He had seen it – this absorption of the self in nothingness. (Ls, I, p. 141)

The presence of death turned life into an agonizing wait. Tolstoy had acutely felt, perhaps as never before, the pointlessness of existence. At the same time he was fascinated by the mystery of death. In his letter to Sergei, his only brother still alive, he recorded the astonishing impression of beauty and calm on the face of their dead brother released from the terrible suffering of his final days.