Tolstoy

In the summer of 1869 Tolstoy had also begun to confront life and death philosophically by reading Schopenhauer (1788–1860), a thinker famed for his pessimistic view of the world. One of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer was esteemed by figures as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung, but he also held particular appeal for creative minds in view of the beauty and simplicity of his exposition, his direct engagement with the real-life problem of existence, rather than with abstractions, and the high value occupied in his philosophical system by art. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers able to undertake a serious study of Indian philosophy through translations which had become available, and the influence of Buddhist ideas on his view of life as suffering is plain to see. As in Buddhism, Schopenhauer identified suffering with attachment to desires, regarded art, along with resignation and compassion, as one of the few means available to man of experiencing a temporary liberation from suffering. Schopenhauer’s ideas about the futility of human striving made perfect sense to Tolstoy, and such was his newfound fervour for them that he acquired a portrait of the philosopher and put it up on the wall of his study.²² Tolstoy was not alone in his veneration of Schopenhauer. There have been many other major artists for whom he has been equally important, including Turgenev, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, not to mention composers such as Richard Wagner, who was engaged while Tolstoy was writing War and Peace in composing the Ring cycle, its musical equivalent not only in terms of scale and ambition, but also technically through its creative use of repetition.

Somehow Tolstoy’s morbid thoughts all came to a head in the autumn of 1869, when he made a trip to Penza province to inspect some land he was thinking of buying. While stopping overnight in the town of Arzamas, he found himself awake at two in the morning, exhausted but unable to sleep. Although physically quite well, he was suddenly gripped by a fear of dying more intense than any he had experienced before, which produced in him a state of existential anguish he found completely terrifying. Many years later he drew on this memory of extreme emotional desolation when he started writing an autobiographical story called ‘Notes of a Madman’, although he never completed it.

Apart from his fixation with death, another cloud appeared on Tolstoy’s horizon after he finished War and Peace: marital difficulties. Tolstoy may have treated his wife as a child to begin with, but in many ways he was also like a child with her. Once they started a family, Sonya became a source of maternal protection, and provided him with the emotional stability he needed to concentrate on his writing. There had been a few troubling incidents which had intruded into the serenity of the fundamentally happy years while Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, but they were exceptions rather than the rule, and had been dismissed as aberrations. Now it began to be the other way round. In August 1871 Sonya noted in her diary that something in their relationship had ‘snapped’ the previous winter when they had both been unwell. Tolstoy also later referred to becoming aware of his loneliness after ‘a string broke’ in their marriage at around this time in his diary.²³ They had squabbled before, of course, but this rift was more serious, and initially arose over their differing views of the woman’s role in a marriage. Even though Sonya continued to defer to her husband, she was becoming increasingly confident about asserting her own views, sometimes goaded by sheer physical necessity.