We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

I

Leo Tolstoy

There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure, rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning. Working girls with handkerchiefs over their heads, round, red-cheeked, merry-faced girls with large hips, dressed in pink cotton skirts, their stockingless feet in high-heeled spatterdashes; little ladies with smiling eyes appearing under their flowered hats, and the large, well-developed figures of grown women kindly disposed, walking with indolent, matronly carriage—they pass us by one by one; we know their faces as little as we know their names, they vanish as quickly as they came, and like all the vague though memorable impressions of our first childhood, they come softly as the twilight, and glide away like the image of a dream.

I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me, never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment.

There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver, when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. Nowhere as there, in those Russian wildernesses far removed from civilisation, does nature speak as clearly, and make humanity her mirror. Nowhere is happiness so careless and the heart so large, and nowhere does fear so clutch at the throat like invisible hands which grasp and then slacken their hold—slacken their hold, only to grasp the tighter....

At the moments when these impressions arise, I see behind them and through them something which resembles a large and powerful man’s head, with a broad forehead, and the dark, sparkling, deep-set eyes of a thinker and seer, eyes which seem as though they were trying to creep inwards. Sometimes this head is set on a uniform, and sometimes on a peasant’s smock; sometimes he is young with moustaches, and his hair is cut short; sometimes he is old with a wrinkled face, and the greasy, waving hair of a peasant, with a long Russian peasant’s beard; but the head always rests upon the same broad shoulders, the same giant’s body, and there is always the same shy, sombre gleam in his eyes, the cold gleam which betokens the lonely fanatic. The youthful head was the head of Tolstoy when he wrote The Cossacks; the aged one belongs to the author of The Kreutzer Sonata.

In the interval between these two were produced works of such a deep and genuine character as have not been surpassed by any contemporary writer, I allude to the story called Family Happiness, and the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

A short time ago Tolstoy’s writings were the great literary event of Europe. His reformatory zeal moved and perplexed even the unbelievers; his confessions startled society; and his probing into all the layers of human nature, which had hitherto been ignored in accordance with a highly-respected custom, aroused the anxiety and excitement of all who had senses and nerves, especially those with a bad conscience who had suppressed their senses, and with ill-used nerves that sought vengeance.

Tolstoy writes from the moral standpoint—his own peculiar standpoint—of the man with a bad conscience.

The man with a bad conscience had long led a hidden existence as a church penitent when the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche discovered him and drew him into the light of day out of the darkness of life and of literature. Since then it has become possible to know him and to study his character.

But it is not often that this study possesses as many finger-posts to point the way, as many rifts in the veil, as are disclosed in the personality of Tolstoy.

His books are the personification of Russian nature with its golden laugh and soul-devouring melancholy; the healthy frivolity and spontaneity of the Russian woman and the self-tormenting sectarianism of the Russian man.

In all Tolstoy’s books there is an ever-recurring figure which is none other than himself, depicted in a manner that combines an intimate knowledge with perfect candour. This figure is connected throughout an extensive network of fine root fibres with the profoundest qualities of the Russians as a typical race. Concerning Tolstoy as a private individual, we are, so to speak, lacking in all psychological data, with the exception of those which he has himself given us in his various confessions, and which, for that very reason, are almost useless with regard to their psychology. But like all authors, great or small, he has unconsciously revealed himself in his novels, especially in those longer ones which he has since disowned; and now when the Kreutzer Sonata has fixed a boundary, behind which not even the most extreme moral severity can discover a second, and when the great life-painter has attained to the negation of life, there is a peculiar interest attached to the enquiry as to what were the national and individual circumstances which conducted him thither, and what were the stations on the road towards the crucifying of the flesh which are indicated in his books.

Three main points occur to my mind, although they are apparently quite unconnected with one another; these are:

A depth of intuition in his grasp and comprehension of woman which is unequalled by anything in the whole of European literature.

An everlasting bad conscience which wears a squinting expression of asceticism, and which, in all his writings, takes its stand between him and the woman and lies in wait for love’s sacrifice.

A secret hardness and spiritual reserve which acts like a bitter taste in the mouth, and gives the lie to the universal gospel of love in his later works and the craving for union with the woman in his earlier ones. With an evil-eyed love of cruelty it attaches itself to the most private conditions of life, and rejoices when sweetness is turned to gall; it evinces a refined brutality in self-torture, a sensation of positive delight in the arousing and enduring of pain, all of which are national and psychological features in the spiritual life of the Russian race, and a key to the perversities of its countless religious sects.

At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he is, and lonely where he loves.

No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience; think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde, of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature. In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer, with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved, and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half sorrowful individuality.

Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being, in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working under other aspects.

The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function—woman as a mother—is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.

The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance, no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety, she is more of a natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than the woman of western Europe.

No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and not one has described it with greater intuition.

It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl in The Cossacks, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of all.

This was the origin of that child-woman in War and Peace; I think her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at all,—poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and arms of her mother—still a child, already a woman! This was also the origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek one another, play and dance together, and cannot be happy without one another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and truth of which is shown at a glance.

There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.

Then, for the third time, and this time the portrait is better executed and the likeness is more striking, the same young man steps forward as Lievin in Anna Karenina. He is tall and strong, honest, with the Gallic temperament, but awkward and somewhat clumsy in confiding his inner life; he belongs to the class of men whom women ignore, whose presence awakens a vague shyness in them. There is something in his nature which arouses a feeling of distrust and dislike in women. What is it? Can it be a want of feeling, an absence of sympathy? Or is it something in his person that is physically repellent? His first advances meet with no response, it is possible that they are misunderstood, and he is bitterly disheartened. Later on, when the young girl has herself undergone a disappointment in love, she expresses herself willing, and they marry. But here already, many years before the aged Tolstoy wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, the first months of marriage are described as a torture. Lievin experiences a feeling of shame and disillusion. They try to avoid one another, to avoid being together; they have nothing in common. When they avoid each other, his conscience reproaches him; when they are together, his bad conscience is a torture to him. It is really nothing but a process of animal existence, represented as a psychological mystery. The husband goes on his way in careless indifference, and held fast by the circle of ideas belonging to society and the Church, becomes displeased and irritable. There are a number of men in whom the prudery of the spirit and the denseness of the perceptions never permit of that refinement of impulse which is love. It is merely a psychological peculiarity, and is neither moral nor immoral; but according to our ideas of morality, love must co-exist with marriage, and the thinker who realises that it is not there has a bad conscience. His bad conscience makes nature appear evil in his sight, and casts a halo over everything that might deliver him from it. Asceticism, as an eternally unsatisfied desire, possesses the extra advantage of being a never-ending delight, an inverted pleasure. This feature is deeply impressed on the character of the Slav; it is a combination of those two principal features of the Russian temperament—sensibility and passiveness. It is from this, the psychological standpoint, that we must view Tolstoy’s increasing moral rigour as displayed in his works. When we remember that it is a Russian author who chooses this problem for his motive, and that all great Russian writers are as admirable in their powers of observation as they are second-rate thinkers, as subtle in their psychology as they are helpless altruists—both indications of a young literature—then his obscure personality loses much that is incomprehensible and confusing.

At last Lievin finds rest for his conscience and satisfaction in his marriage through the birth of a child, which seems to bring a meaning into it and also, to a certain extent, an excuse. The other couple, Anna Karenina and Vronsky, cannot find either, because in their free union the child is no excuse, but only a burden. With an incomparable discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people; the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on injured morality.

But before the sinful relationship had begun—as long as love is nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the soul of Anna Karenina—what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman? With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the young girl in Family Happiness is still more worthy of admiration than that of the matured woman. There we have everything: the innocent sensuousness of the first awakening of womanhood in the child, the woman who is such a thorough woman, with her inexplicable attraction, her thoughtless impatience, and her active imagination which transforms the first man whom she meets into the man, the beloved man, to whom she gives her whole affection.

There is a scene in the book after the young girl has had her hot Russian bath, when, with her hair still wet, she sits at the coffee table out of doors and turns the head of an elderly gentleman, who is her only male acquaintance; then there is a second scene where they both look for cherries on the trees—and such a description of pure sensuous delight on a warm, damp, dreamy summer’s day as I have never seen equalled anywhere.

And yet it was this same author who wrote the dangerous, poisonous Kreutzer Sonata, and preached the doctrines of a misogynist on a basis of universal love for humanity, a love which was to end with the extermination of the human race.

The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked down with an evil eye upon the great natural basis of all love, love between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and through, heart and soul.

When we examine the personality of a great master like Tolstoy, what do we find? First that strange, absorbing impulse, the desire to create, to reveal himself, which indicates an excessive consciousness of the ego. In his youth there was apparently an intense longing to make himself understood without the mental capacity necessary for success; failure resulted in shyness, uncertainty, doubt, and according to his own confession he experienced a transient, sensual love without spiritual depth. He was out of harmony with himself in consequence, and at last the longed-for event took place—he married. It was a marriage such as there are thousands: healthy bodies, dried-up souls, the temperament of a thinker and fanatic with a narrow and obstinate nature, very little real knowledge, very little power of intellectual expansion, while with increasing years was added an increase of moral severity. Discontented with the primal conditions of existence, his writings showed an increase of pessimism, while an ever greater number of past joys escaped his memory, and there was no pleasure that did not leave an after-taste of bitterness. When as an elderly man he looked back upon the first time when a young girl caused his pulse to beat the faster, he sought to explain the circumstance in the Kreutzer Sonata by describing her as the only one who is pure and good, thus rendering a coarse touch to the imagination which betrays itself in the glorification of the child-woman. Hence the pose of a social reformer who takes an egotistic delight in nourishing the consciousness of martyrdom.

These are a few general outlines contributing to a picture of Tolstoy, as he appears to me in his writings. For I believe that it is a man’s personal experiences which determine his opinions and form the rudiments of his mind and character, and that these rudiments, however much they may be obscured by time, are still there to be discovered by those who seek them.