Tolstoy

No doubt the Russian public was gratified with the explanation, but not all readers relished the epilogue. Levin’s disparaging remarks about the Balkan Question and the Russian Volunteer Movement were highly contentious, and ran exactly counter to those of Tolstoy’s great rival Dostoyevsky, whose messianic nationalism (or jingoistic Orthodox megalomania, depending on your viewpoint) was centred on Russia’s role as crusading saviour in the Balkans. Although Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy never met, they were, of course, aware of each other, but were natural antipodes who found many shortcomings in each other’s work. As a journalist, it was more or less incumbent upon Dostoyevsky to deliver a verdict on Tolstoy’s novel, and after much prevarication he finally came out in print with an opinion of Anna Karenina in early 1877. Tolstoy, however, never returned the compliment of publicly commenting on any of Dostoyevsky’s fiction, remaining, as always, aloof.

To begin with, Dostoyevsky was generous with his praise of Anna Karenina. He was particularly enthusiastic about Levin as a literary character, and he devoted several pages to the novel in the February issue of his Diary of a Writer, the independent monthly journal he had started up in 1876 to explore the character and destiny of the Russian people. But when he read the epilogue later in the year, Dostoyevsky was beside himself. In the July–August issue he lambasted Levin for being egocentric, unpatriotic and out of touch with the Russian people.¹²⁸ He took a dim view of Levin’s claim that the Russian people shared his lack of concern for the predicament of the Balkan Slavs, and took strong exception to his declared unwillingness to kill, even if it resulted in the prevention of atrocities. It is here, of course, that we meet in embryonic form the idea of non-resistance to violence which would lie at the heart of the new religious outlook which Tolstoy would develop over the next decade. People like Tolstoy were supposed to be our teachers, Dostoyevsky concluded at the end of his lengthy tirade, but what exactly were they teaching us? Needless to say, Dostoyevsky did not receive a response either in 1877 or in the years leading up to his death in January 1881. But Tolstoy made up for that by then spending the next thirty years of his long life doing little else but answering that very question.

10

PILGRIM, NIHILIST, MUZHIK

If I was on my own, I wouldn’t be a monk, I would be a holy fool – that is, I wouldn’t cherish anything in life, and would do no one any harm.

Letter to Nikolay Strakhov, 6 November 1877¹

AS SOMEONE WHO CAME TO BELIEVE fervently in the idea that our lives are made up of seven-year cycles, and who was also extremely superstitious, Tolstoy was bound to look upon his forty-ninth year as being of special significance – particularly since this birthday fell in the seventh year of the seventh decade of the century. And so it was, for looking back in October 1884, when seven more years had passed, he realised that the most radical change in his life had indeed been, as he put it numerically in a letter to his wife, ‘7 × 7 = 49’.² It was in 1877 that Tolstoy began to tread more firmly on the path he had first tentatively started out on when he set up his Yasnaya Polyana school – the path of living in accordance with Christian ethics. Twice he had been diverted – when he married and again when he committed himself to writing Anna Karenina. But this time there was to be no straying, and the further he progressed along the path that was taking him away from his artistic calling as a novelist, and also away from his wife, the lighter his step became. He did not stop writing fiction entirely, but it became secondary to the more pressing task of exposing the hypocrisy and immorality he saw around him.