I.
Count L. N. Tolstoï was born on the 28th of August, 1828 (O.S.), at Yasnaya Polyana, a village near Tula, in the Government of Tula. He reckons among his direct ancestors one of the best servitors of the Tsar Peter the Great, Count Piotr Tolstoï. Early left an orphan, he studied at the University of Kazan, entered successively the departments of Oriental languages and of law, got tired of both, left the university, returned to his paternal estate, and one fine day set out for the Caucasus, where his eldest brother, Nikolaï Tolstoï, was serving with the rank of captain. He quickly became an officer, took part in the guerilla warfare in Circassia, returned to be shut up in Sevastópol, underwent the siege, was greatly distinguished by his bravery, and resigned at the conclusion of peace.
Count Lyof Tolstoï’s works have not been all published in the order in which they were written. “The Cossacks,” published after the “Military Scenes,” and after “Childhood and Youth,” it seems was written, in part, during his stay in the Caucasus. The romantic portion of the work may have been thought out towards the period when the book appeared, but the impressions which fill the book are the first which the writer took pains to note down. It is well to emphasize this fact from the very first moment: in the study of Tolstoï’s works, we can make it a starting-point in our investigation of the steps traced in the evolution accomplished by his mind.
The “Military Sketches,” collected into a volume in 1856, were produced in the form of articles in the Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”). These tales bear the following subtitles: “Sevastópol in December,” “Sevastópol in May,” “The Felling of the Forest,” “The Incursion.” They paint at once the energy with which the French invasion was resisted, and the monotony of the siege, more terrible than its dangers. The book narrowly escaped remaining in the censor’s hands: this suspicious and petty critic was offended by the most beautiful pages. There is, for example, an admirable passage where the soldiers, in order to escape the irksomeness whereby they have been overcome in the long days, listen with truly infantile excitement to the reading of fairy-stories. According to the censor’s opinion, it was a bad example. The author should have depicted the soldiers as engaged in reading some serious work, capable of exerting a good influence on their moral state, on their spirit of discipline. “The attention of the army should be called only to useful literature.” Fortunately the book escaped this rolling-mill, and roused the Russian public to enthusiasm.
As regards this album of impressions noted with incomparable vivacity of observation, vigor of tone, and energy of touch, Count Lyof Tolstoï gave another example, which is like a first confession, in his “Childhood and Youth.” The material of this biography is family life brought into the exact environment which the Russian nature, when very closely observed and very poetically described, can furnish. On one side external impressions, very accurately and very powerfully retained; on the other, profound reflections upon self, and a very keen view in regard to the most secret and the least explored regions of consciousness: these are the two sides of Tolstoï’s talent; these, from the very beginning of his literary career, are the two elements which will combine to form the great novels of the writer’s maturity, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina.”
These masterpieces having been once finished, Tolstoï turned aside from fiction to apply himself to pedagogy. The great painter of men becomes the instructor of children; the creator of heroes undertakes the mission of popularizing the alphabet.
At the present time we see him passing through a new transformation, and from pedagogue becoming preacher. He propagates a new dogma; or, rather, he is on his way to increase the number of Russian sectaries who seek in the Gospels a solution of the social problem.
Soldier, literarian, agriculturist, popular educator, and prophet of a new religion,—Count Lyof Tolstoï has been all these in succession. But the secret of these transformations is no longer far to seek: he has explained it to us in his latest work, entitled “My Confession,” the publication of which has been forbidden in Russia by the ecclesiastical censor. The work is read in spite of the interdiction, and it makes converts; copies are hawked about; it will not be slow in following the fortunes of “My Religion:” it will be printed abroad in some sheet edited by exiles, and will be translated, doubtless, in France.
Let us find in this “Confession” the commentary on the strange existence which we have sketched only in broad lines.
Every man has, so to speak, a moral physiognomy; and this physiognomy, like the face itself, is more or less characteristic. In Count Lyof Tolstoï, this characteristic is the need of a fixed principle, of a well-established rule of conduct. This principle has changed, and more than once changed, the formula which expresses the sum of his acts, and explains them, justifies them, which becomes enlarged, transformed, entirely reversed; but what remains immutable is his attachment to some formula, his absorption in the article of faith. Count Tolstoï’s soul is, before all things, the soul of a believer.
He begins by believing in the ego. He started with a sort of Darwinian conception of the world, of the struggle of individuals, with the conflict of egoisms. For Tolstoï, the ideal at this first period of his life was individual progress. The aim of existence was to get above other individuals, and to subjugate them in some degree by his own superiority. “I tried at first to cultivate the will in me; I laid down rules which I compelled myself to follow. Physically I strove towards perfection by developing, with all sorts of exercises, my strength and my skill, and by wonting myself by privations of every sort, to be neither wearied nor disheartened by any thing.” He pitilessly analyzes the feelings which he had at this time; after the fashion of La Rochefoucauld, he tells us to what a degree he was the dupe, the victim, of self-love. Under the pretext of discovering the progress made by the ego, and of advancing it towards perfection, “I gave in, above all, to the desire of finding that I was better not in my own eyes, not even in the eyes of God, but above all, but solely, in the eyes of others, in the judgment of the world.... And even this desire to seem better to other men quickly yielded to the single desire of being stronger than all others.” All these manifestations of individual force so much esteemed by men, and called “ambition, passion for power, cupidity, pleasure, pride, wrath, vengeance,”—Tolstoï also admired them, coveted them, and finally realized them to such a degree as to rouse admiration and envy. “Just as in my life I offered homage to strength and to the beauty of strength, so in my works I most often sang all the manifestations of individual force; and yet I pretended to love truth, and boasted of it! In reality I loved only force, and when I found it without alloy of folly, I took it for truth.” We shall see in studying “The Cossacks” to what a degree Tolstoï’s first ideal, followed and realized especially during his stay in the Caucacus, is reflected in this work, which is the actual product, if not the immediate outcome, of his residence there.
At the age of twenty-six Tolstoï changes his environment: he leaves the army and the bastions of Sevastópol, and passes directly into the circles of St. Petersburg where the famous writers are gathered. He is welcomed, fêted, placed at the very first in the front rank. He changes his whole manner of existence; but he changes it in the name of a new faith, the faith in the “mission of the men of thought.” This mission consists in teaching other men. “Teaching them what? I had not the slightest idea myself. But I was paid for it in ready money. I had a magnificent table, a sumptuous dwelling. I had women, I had society, I had glory. What I taught could not help being very good.” At the end of two or three years of this existence, Tolstoï begins to doubt the infallibility of his literary faith: he applies to the settling of the question his dissolvent analysis. He bethinks himself to discuss also the moral worth of the priests of this faith, of the writers. “They were almost all immoral men; and the great majority were bad men, of no character, and in no respect less so than the boon companions of yore, of the time when my life was only a round of gayety and disorder.” A sort of misanthropy seizes Tolstoï as the result of his inquiry. A new Alceste, he hotly tears himself away from the perverse environment of literary people, and begins to hunt up and down the world for the support of a new conviction.
After having visited foreign lands, interviewed philosophers, questioned the men of “the vanguard,” Tolstoï returns to his country, persuaded that progress must be realized, not within himself, but outside of himself. He becomes farmer, judge of the peace, magistrate, instructor; he founds a pedagogical review, and starts a school. “I got upon stilts to satisfy my desire for teaching.” In spite of its simple and calm appearance, this existence let all the inward trouble, all the moral anguish, remain. “I left every thing, and I departed for the steppe. I went forth among the Bashkirs to breathe the pure air, to drink kumis, and to lead an animal life.”
On his return from his visit to the Bashkirs, Tolstoï marries. The joy of family life at first takes all his will, absorbs all his reflective powers. “For a long time his life is centred in his wife and in his children: it is entirely monopolized by the anxiety of increasing their well being.” At the end of fifteen years, he finds that he is still the dupe of selfish illusion, that this sacrifice to the greatest advantage of his family has simply turned him aside from the search after the real meaning of life. Is not his present existence, in fact, full of contradictions? Long ago he has become convinced that literary activity is vanity, and yet he continues to write. What impels him to it? “The seduction of glory, the attraction of large pecuniary remuneration.” What moral principle is there at bottom of all that? Here begins a period of perplexity, of despondency, of bitter and morbid scepticism. The two questions, “Why?” and “What is to come?” force themselves more and more upon his mind. By reason of attacking the same problem, like dots on the same bit of paper, they finally “make a huge black blot.” And Tolstoï’s scepticism goes over from theory into practice: it is nihilism in the truest sense of the word. “Before I undertake the charge of my property at Samara, the education of my son, my literary work, I must know what is the good of doing it all. As long as I could not know the reason, I could do nothing.... Well, suppose I shall come to possess ten thousand acres and three hundred head of horses, what then? Suppose I become more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakspeare, and all the writers in the world, what then? I found no reply.” At this moment of strange trouble, Tolstoï seriously considers the question of suicide.
How did he succeed in escaping the entanglement of scepticism? He takes the back track in his ideas in regard to humanity. He had long believed, “like so many other cultivated and liberal minds, that the narrow circle of savants and wealthy people to which he belonged constituted his entire world. As to the thousands of beings who had lived, or were living still, outside of him, were they not animals rather than men? I can scarcely realize to-day, so strange do I find it, that I should have fallen into such a mistake as to believe that my own life, that the life of a Solomon, that the life of a Schopenhauer, was the true or normal life, while the life of all these thousands of human beings was a mere detail of no account.” Fortunately for Tolstoï, the taste for country life, and his intercourse with the field-hands, brought him to divine, that, “if he desired to live and comprehend the meaning of life, he must find this meaning, not among those who have lost it, who long to get rid of life, but among these thousands of men who create their life and ours, and who bear the burden of both.” Having found only the leaven of doubt or negation among the men of his own society, he goes to ask the germs of faith, the elements of religion, among the poor, the simple, the ignorant, pilgrims, monks, raskolniks, peasants. In them alone he finds agreement between faith and works. “Quite contrary to the men of our sphere, who rebel against fate, and are angry at every privation, at every pain, these believers endure sickness and sorrow without any complaint, without any resistance, with that firm and calm conviction that all must be as it is, or could not be otherwise, and that all this is a blessing. The more enlightened we are, the less we comprehend the meaning of life: we see only cruel mockery in the double accident of suffering and death. With tranquillity, and more often with joy, these obscure men live, suffer, and approach death.” Seeing these simple souls so unanimous in their interpretation of existence, so obstinately bent on seeking the good by means of calm labor and patience capable of enduring any trial, Tolstoï again begins to feel love for men; and he endeavors to imitate these models. After ten years of initiation into the holy life, he reaches the most perfect renunciation. No longer to think of self, and to love others only,—that is the moral scheme which can alone reconcile us to existence, and reveal to us the good concealed under this apparent evil. The question is, therefore, not to think well, as Pascal said, but to live well. And who shall tell us what it is to live well? “The thousand who create life, and get from it all their faith.”
This expression, “create life,” must be understood in all its senses. In the moral sense, it is explained only by its contrary. What do the wise men, the Solomons, the Sakyamunis, and the Schopenhauers do? They destroy life; they present it to us as an absurdity and as an evil. The calmness with which the humble, the simple, the pariahs of society, support existence, shows the falseness of the assertions of the thinker; and that which the philosophers in their supercilious speculation claim to annihilate, the modest practice of these virtuous men re-establishes, creates in a certain degree.
Once fixed on the rock of this faith, which seemed to him unassailable, Count Tolstoï felt that it was his duty to study its dogma and formulate its credo. He wrote “My Religion.” Later we shall return to this work, in which not only the propensities of the author’s mind are revealed, but also the tendencies of a considerable part of the Russian nation. It is enough for us to note here the fundamental article of this religious law, to which Count Tolstoï assents with all his heart, like thousands, nay millions, of his compatriots: “Resist not him that is evil.” This saying of Jesus sums up for him all duties, and gives us the secret of all the virtues. We shall see in detail the applications of this principle to the conduct of individual and social life; for the present, let us content ourselves with calling the reader’s attention to the path followed by the man whom we are studying. He started with this principle,—the exclusive development of the ego. In practice, this principle led him to conflict, to violence, and to hatred. He ended with this principle,—the absolute sacrifice of the ego. In practice, this principle leads him to a life of abnegation, of gentleness, and of love.
Between these two extreme limits of his development, we have seen all the mental states through which Tolstoï has passed. These varying dispositions will be found in his literary work. It would be running systemization into the ground to desire to show the writer going through this development, side by side with the man. But it is only just to remark to what a degree Tolstoï’s earlier writings, his “Kazaki,” for example, express his first ideal, that of the epoch in which he was taken up exclusively with force, and when he worshipped it in himself, giving it the name of truth. Later on in “Anna Karénina,” one of his favorite characters, Levin, will closely resemble Tolstoï changed into a farmer, and already, in his drawing towards the rural populace, advancing towards the abandonment of all egotism, towards the spirit of sacrifice, towards that simplicity of virtue personified by the peasant Feódor in the story of “Anna Karénina,” and the soldier Platon Karataïef in “War and Peace.”