Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy attacked modern art not only on moral, but on artistic grounds. He quoted poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine or Maeterlinck that were, in his view, utterly incomprehensible. He understood that in the absence of universal criteria, this objection was relative – the same accusations could be made against the artists he himself admired. However, the notion of looking for a middle ground was not in his nature. Tolstoy had often denigrated his own work and did not hesitate to proclaim that, in order to be considered great, art should be understandable to everyone, including illiterate working people. He allowed for happy exceptions, but as a rule only folklore and religious parables could pass this threshold.

Did he fully believe what he was writing? In real life Tolstoy could not live without music. Taneyev was gradually replaced as his performer of choice by the young pianist Alexander Goldenveizer. In his memoirs Goldenveizer recalled a conversation in 1899 about a poem by Fedor Tyutchev, whom Tolstoy valued more highly than Pushkin and Fet:

L. N. told me: ‘I always say that a work of art is either so good that there is no gauge to measure its value – this is true art. Otherwise, it is just all wrong. Look, I am happy that I found a true work of art. One I cannot read without tears. I learned it by heart. Wait, I’ll recite it to you.’ L. N. began with an unsteady voice: ‘Blue-grey shadows mingled.’ Even on my deathbed, I shall not forget the impression L. N. made on me then. He was lying on his back convulsively gripping in his fingers the edge of the blanket, trying in vain to contain his suffocating tears. Several times, he stopped and started again, but finally, when he reached the end of the first stanza, ‘Everything is in me. I am in everything’, his voice broke.⁹

Tyutchev’s lyrical verse was a long way from being folk poetry, but came close to encapsulating Tolstoy’s long-cherished idyll of a peaceful dissolution in universal love. Tears prevented him from reciting to Goldenveizer the final stanza of Tyutchev’s poem: ‘By the haze of self-oblivion/ Fill my feelings to overflowing/ Let me taste annihilation/ Mix me with the slumbering world.’¹⁰ In spite of his denunciation of all modern artistic forms, at the time of his conversation with Goldenveizer Tolstoy was completing his third and the last major novel: Resurrection.

As usual, Tolstoy’s work on the novel was long and tortuous. In 1887 he had been impressed by a story told to him by the lawyer Anatoly Koni about a man who, sitting as a member of a jury, suddenly recognized in the prostitute accused of theft a woman he had seduced many years earlier. Distraught and repentant, he decided to marry her, but the woman died from typhus acquired in prison before they could wed. At first Tolstoy insisted that Koni, himself a man of letters, should write about this case. Then, changing his mind, Tolstoy asked Koni if he could borrow the plot. Permission was readily granted.

It is not difficult to see why this story fascinated Tolstoy. Feeling perennial disgust towards himself and his former sexual exploits, Tolstoy was thinking about the psychological mechanics of repentance and the possibility of redemption. He believed that those who, like him, were unfit for abstinence should regard their first sexual encounter as a lifetime commitment. The hero of ‘the Koni story’, as Tolstoy always called it in his manuscripts, was not only ashamed of his role as seducer, but belatedly acknowledged that this seduction actually amounted to a marriage that needed only to be sealed.

Tolstoy strongly identified himself with the protagonist of the story. In 1903 he told Pavel Biryukov, who was writing his biography, that he had once seduced his aunt’s maid, Gasha, who had subsequently perished after being driven out of the house. Five years earlier, however, writing in her diary about Resurrection, Sofia recalled that her husband had pointed out to her the same Gasha, now in her seventies and living in the house of Tolstoy’s brother. Most likely we will never know whether Tolstoy’s self-denunciation was caused by an erroneous memory or a deliberate desire to magnify his own guilt.

This time Tolstoy chose not to split his alter ego between two autobiographical characters. Instead, one gradually turns into another. Rich, prosperous and self-confident Prince Nekhlyudov, as he appears at the beginning of the novel, may be seen as a new incarnation of Prince Andrei or Vronsky, but then he is transformed into a sort of Bezukhov or Levin. After the reading of the first draft of the novel, Nikolai Strakhov suggested that Tolstoy was describing Chertkov’s rebirth, an observation that seems especially pertinent if one remembers that Chertkov was for Tolstoy an idealized embodiment of his own spiritual quest.