Leo Tolstoy

A day before leaving for Penza, Tolstoy wrote to Fet telling him that he had spent the entire summer reading German philosophy. He had always believed that abstract reasoning had no value unless connected to actual moral issues, but now, approaching the end of his monumental work, he searched for a general justification for human existence. Tolstoy found Hegel an ‘empty collection of phrases’, appreciated Kant, but Schopenhauer gave him ‘spiritual joy’ he ‘had never experienced before’. Tolstoy told Fet, an old admirer of the German philosopher, that he found Schopenhauer ‘the most brilliant of men’ (Ls, I, p. 221) and offered to produce a joint translation of his works, the job that later Fet had to accomplish alone.

Tolstoy at forty years old, in 1868, after he had just finished War and Peace.

Schopenhauer believed that the driving force for all our decisions, passions and ambitions is an unconscious ‘will to live’. The desires provoked by the will to live are ‘unlimited, their claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one’. The human mind is able only to produce illusionary goals hiding from an individual bound for destruction, the futility imminent in all his wishes and labours. In reality, ‘nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts and our struggles, all good things are empty and fleeting, the world on all sides is bankrupt, and life is a business which does not cover the costs.’⁷

This vision was close to Tolstoy’s cherished notion of the human beehive, in which the movement of bees is driven by a natural force beyond individual control. Although the idea of a will to live comes across in War and Peace as a fundamentally benign force, the influence of the great German pessimist is evident in the second epilogue of the novel. As he approached the end of his magnum opus, Tolstoy was gradually losing his optimism. Schopenhauer had helped him to reassess his views.

In 1865 Petr Boborykin, the editor of the magazine Reader’s Library and one of the most prolific writers of his time, asked Tolstoy for a contribution. Boborykin was a highly popular author but is now remembered mostly because of the reply Tolstoy drafted but decided not to send:

Problems of the local self-government, literature and emancipation of women etc. . . . are not only not interesting in the world of art; they have no place there at all . . . The aims of art are incommensurable (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours’ work to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about 20 years’ time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my life and all my energies to it. (Ls, I, p. 197)

Tolstoy wanted his novel to bring him money and fame, but these petty goals were secondary to his desire to tackle the most pressing existential problems. What compelled him to spend seven years chained to his desk was his hope of making people fall in love with life. His own drama, however, was that having completed his task he found himself unable to love life himself; moreover, he desperately hated it. He wrote to Fet in January 1871: ‘I’ve stopped writing and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace. I am guilty, but I swear I’ll never do it again’ (LS, I, p. 230).

In 1884, when going over the history of his discord with his wife in his diary, Tolstoy remembered the early 1870s as the time ‘when the string snapped’ and he ‘became aware of his loneliness’ (Ds, p. 188). Never before were his depressions so acute. Sofia, who had already witnessed a lot, was appalled to see her hyperactive husband lying motionless on the sofa, staring at the ceiling and pleading with her to leave him alone and let him die peacefully. He was afraid he would go insane and felt that everything was finished for him.