Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy needed to build himself ‘a scaffolding’ to write, but at the same time he was consciously trying to turn his literary pursuits into an innocent eccentric pastime for an old man, like playing cards for no money, horseriding or listening to Mozart on the gramophone. When rumours began to spread that he was about to be awarded the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his Swedish friends asking him to plead with the Academy to avoid ‘putting him in the very unpleasant position of refusing it’ (Ls, II, p. 660). He did his best to prevent major celebrations for his eightieth birthday in 1908.

Tolstoy on horseback at the age of eighty, 1909.

His main literary preoccupation at that time, however, was to find a form of self-effacement not only in the world of publishers and readers, but within the text itself. For several years he had been working on A Cycle of Readings. The purpose of this commonplace book of quotes and selected passages was to serve the needs of labouring people who did not have enough leisure time to spare on books. Arranged as a calendar, it collated quotations from major religious and moral teachers of all ages and nations from Lao Tzu and Confucius to Tolstoy himself. These were the fruits of Tolstoy’s years of digging through piles of books searching for pearls of wisdom that were both profound and digestible. He even found a valuable thought in Nietzsche, a philosopher he detested. Daily entries were accompanied by longer ‘weekly readings’ designed for Sundays and consisting of short stories and essays. For this purpose Tolstoy edited folk stories, religious parables and the works of dozens of writers including Turgenev, Maupassant, Anatole France and others. Some he inevitably wrote himself. The longest of these was his story The Divine and the Human, in which he set out to demonstrate the vanity and futility of revolutionary activity.

In A Cycle of Readings Tolstoy tried to dissolve his own input in an ocean of universal wisdom and morality to become just one voice in a great chorus. His creative role may have been confined to the choice and arrangement of material, but he was still shaping the artistic mainstream of the epoch. His role was akin to that of a theatre director or an orchestral conductor, two professions that were then acquiring their own independent artistic value.

Having completed A Cycle of Readings, Tolstoy started compiling For Every Day, later published in English as A Calendar of Wisdom or Wise Thoughts for Every Day, a work of the same sort addressed to even less educated readers. Here weekly readings were replaced by daily ones, simplified and rearranged in thematic order. This led to another compilation called The Way of Life, which abandoned the calendar altogether and arranged the texts thematically. This book, published in small instalments, dealt with the most pressing questions of religion, morality, life and death, sin and virtue. Tolstoy continued editing it until his death. He now included more of his own texts, presented in a short aphoristic form almost entirely devoid of the characteristic features of his authorial voice. The Way of Life was arguably the most personal of Tolstoy’s books in terms of its existential meaning, and the most impersonal in terms of style. He was trying to escape from his own expressive power to let unadulterated truth speak for itself.

In the meantime, Tolstoy’s marriage turned from dysfunctional to outright miserable. During the 1905 revolution his wife and sons had summoned police to arrest peasants cutting wood in their forests, and called armed guards to protect the estate. Having legally transferred ownership of the land to the members of his family, Tolstoy could do nothing to stop this but the peasants, the press and the Tolstoyans accused him of hiding behind his wife’s back. So did Sofia herself.

Chertkov’s return to Russia had given Tolstoy an opportunity to resume conversations with a friend he had greatly missed and brought relief from the unbearable atmosphere at home. However, Chertkov’s presence strongly aggravated the crisis in his family. Sofia considered him the cause of all her troubles and did not hold back in her diary: ‘A scoundrel and despot. He has taken the poor old man in his dirty hands and makes him perform evil deeds’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 212). She compared Chertkov to the Devil, playing on the etymology of his surname, derived from chert (‘the devil’) (SAT-Ds, II, p. 213). Sofia also spread rumours about the homoerotic nature of her husband’s attachment to Chertkov.