Leo Tolstoy

At that time Tolstoy still believed that a ruling class, however repulsive, was a necessity in the course of history. Nearly a decade later he could no longer see any justification for their plundering and bullying. Writing the history of a nation was one thing, but writing the history of a criminal gang was totally different. By the same token, if a peasant family was not, as he had previously believed, mysteriously connected with events in the palace, its story was that of a victim, rather than a historical actor. Tolstoy knew his job too well not to understand that this approach would not sustain a narrative stretching over a century. The story of the exiled Decembrists also lost its allure. The dialogue between the nobles and the peasants he envisaged became useless, because the educated classes had nothing to teach or even to say to those who worked on the land. The only useful thing the ruling elite could do was simply to disappear and let the suffering people lead their own life according to their own ideals and values.

In April 1878, three months after the publication of the complete text of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov that everything seemed to be ready for him to start writing – and fulfilling his earthly mission. The only thing he was lacking was ‘the push of belief . . . in the importance of the occupation . . . the energy of delusion, that earthly elemental energy that could not be invented’ (CW, LXII, pp. 410–11). The ‘energy of delusion’ that had previously sustained him stemmed from a belief that his writing would change the world or, no less importantly, himself. When working on War and Peace that energy was burning in him; when he wrote Anna Karenina its intensity became more subdued, but he still managed to keep it alive. Now there was no literary plan that could spark that delusion.

In his Confession, written in 1879 and published in 1882, Tolstoy gave a concise description of how his life was brought to a virtual standstill by a simple question he asked himself many times: ‘“Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world – and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all’ (CW, XXIII, p. 11).

3

A Lonely Leader

The last page of Anna Karenina describes Levin’s religious epiphany. The conversion of the hero of the novel roughly coincided with that of the author. As he approached the end of his narrative, Tolstoy came to the conviction that only God could restore meaning to the world permeated with death.

In his Confessions Tolstoy portrayed himself as a sceptic, an atheist even, who had finally recognized the futility of earthly pursuits such as fame and prosperity. His diaries tell a different story. The hope of a religious awakening was Tolstoy’s long-cherished dream, something he had thought about and wrestled with for decades. In June 1851 Tolstoy recorded in his diary that he was fighting with the ‘petty, vicious side of life’, and asked God ‘to receive him into His bosom’. The ‘sweetness of the feeling’ this prayer gave him was ‘impossible to express’ (Ds, p. 26). Another time Tolstoy confessed that, while he could not prove God’s existence to himself, he ‘believed in Him’ and asked Him for help ‘to understand Him’ (Ds, p. 59).

The characters of his novels also experience spiritual epiphanies: Prince Andrei gazing into the sky of Austerlitz and preparing for his death, and Pierre embracing the teaching of the Freemasons and when in French captivity. Anna Karenina and her husband feel the raptures of Christian forgiveness as Anna lies on what seems to be her deathbed. With the evident exception of Andrei’s final revelation, however, these existential experiences are, as the Russian writer and thinker Lydia Ginzburg has put it, ‘reversible’.¹ They cannot change the lives of the characters, who later revert to their old ways. Tolstoy suggests, however, that Levin’s newly found beliefs are different.

In 1873, the year he began writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote to the atheist Fet about the necessity of ‘religious respect’. Despite his contempt for ‘religious rites’, Tolstoy’s brother Sergei had ordered an Orthodox funeral for a deceased child. Both brothers had ‘the feeling almost of revulsion at this ritualism’, but Leo had to confess that he could not imagine any alternatives:

What could my brother have done to carry the decomposing body of his child out of his house at the end? . . . And where should it be put, how should it be buried? What, generally speaking, is a fitting way to end things? Is there anything better than a requiem, incense etc.? (I, at least, can’t think of anything.) And what about growing weak and dying? Should one wet oneself, s…, and nothing more? That’s no good.