CHAPTER II
LIFE OF TOLSTOY—"A LANDED PROPRIETOR"—"CHILDHOOD"—"THE
COSSACKS"—"TALES FROM SEBASTOPOL"
Leo Tolstoy was born August 28, 1828, at the village of Yasnaya Polyana, not far from Tula, on the old main road to Kieff.
His parents were Count Nicolas Tolstoy and Princess Marie Volkonsky, both of them members of well-known families. The Tolstoy family had played a famous, though at times a questionable part in Russian history; its first Count—Peter Tolstoy—was an accomplice in the assassination of the Tsarevitch Alexis, son of Peter the Great; he was appointed Chief of the Secret Service, and, later on, enjoyed the confidence of the Empress Catherine I. When Peter II, son of the murdered Alexis, ascended the throne, Count Tolstoy lost his great position; being at that time an old man, he retired to the monastery of Solovetsky on the White Sea, where he died. The Tolstoy family were, for a period, deprived of their title, but it was restored in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great.
The Princess Marie Volkonsky also came of an eminent family; they traced their descent from Rurik, and several of her near relatives had been great generals.
The novelist's father, Nicolas Tolstoy, served in the great campaigns of 1813 and 1814; he was taken prisoner by the French but liberated in 1815, when the allied armies entered Paris. Tolstoy has depicted a number of his relatives in the novel of War and Peace; his father is Nicolas Rostof and his mother the Princess Mariya Bolkonsky; in real life as in the book, this mother appears to have been the more remarkable of the two parents, a woman possessed of a singularly noble and beautiful character. Leo was only eighteen months old at the time of his mother's death, but, from what his aunts and other relatives told him, he created a portrait which, whether accurate or not, is of unforgettable charm.
The father died when Leo had reached the age of nine, and the children—four brothers and a sister—were left to the guardianship of their father's sister; they were, as a matter of fact, brought up mainly by a lady named Tatiana Yergolsky, whom they called "aunt," but who was, in reality, only a distant relative. Tatiana Yergolsky had a romantic history; she loved Count Nicolas Tolstoy, and he returned her affection, but she sacrificed herself in order that he might marry the wealthy heiress, Princess Marie Volkonsky. After the marriage she remained an inmate of her cousin's house and won the deep affection of his wife; when a widower Count Nicolas once more desired to marry Tatiana, but she still refused, fearing to spoil the tenderness of her relation to the dead wife and to the children. It would be difficult to imagine a character more sweet and self-sacrificing; upon the orphaned children she bestowed a devoted love; to Leo she took the place of the mother he had never known, and the father he had lost so soon; she was the chief happiness of his childhood, and he declares that, in the building up of his moral character, she, of all human beings, played the most beneficent part.
He says: "Aunt Tatiana had the greatest influence on my life. It was she who taught me while yet in my childhood the moral joy of love. Not by words but by her whole being she imbued me with love. I saw, I felt how happy she was in loving, and I understood the joy of love. That was the first lesson. And the second was that she taught me the beauty of a quiet, lonely life."
The four Tolstoy brothers possessed strong individualities, and Tolstoy had a keen feeling of affection for all the members of his family; his favourite brother was, however, Nicolas—some six years older than himself. He and Nicolas, in their child's play, founded a society which they called "Ant-Brothers," which was to embrace all mankind and all the earth in a loving union; they buried a green stick as a kind of charm to celebrate the founding of this society. When Tolstoy came to die he asked that he might be buried on the hill where, so long ago, he and Nicolas had placed the green stick; it will, at any rate, be one of the world's great places of pilgrimage.
Nicolas possessed great talents; Leo always generously and obstinately believed this brother more gifted than himself, and quotes, with warm approval, Turgénief's opinion: "Turgénief quite correctly observed that he only lacked the imperfections necessary for the making of an author. He did not possess the principal and necessary defect—vanity. But the qualities of an author which he did possess were a refined artistic instinct, an exceedingly delicate sense of proportion, a good-natured gay humour, exceptional and inexhaustible imagination and high moral conceptions, and all this without any conceit. He had such an imagination that for hours he could tell humorous tales and ghost stories."
Tatiana Yergolsky was exceedingly religious, and one of the customs of Yasnaya Polyana was to extend hospitality to all types of pilgrims—monks and nuns and beggars, who led a life of humility and deliberately courted contumely.
Tolstoy's early life was spent in a peculiar poetic and religious atmosphere, an atmosphere mediæval in its tone. This should never be forgotten, for, after a whole lifetime of experience and achievement, we find him returning once more to the beliefs of his youth, stripping them of supernaturalism and ecclesiasticism, but holding with all his heart to the virtues of these pilgrim friends—humility and simplicity and love.
The Tolstoy brothers all went in turn to the university of Kazan. Leo first chose the faculty of Eastern languages, intending to enter the diplomatic service; he then tried law and other courses, but was capricious and unsuccessful; few great writers have ever cared so little for studies or been so scornful of intellectual attainment in others. Tolstoy left the university in disgust, and returned for a time to Yasnaya Polyana, intending to devote himself to his peasants.
There is a study of his life at this period in the book entitled A Landed Proprietor, which gives an account, at once graphic and sombre, of the enormous difficulties of the task. We are shown typical days in the life of the hero—Nekhlúdof—as he visits the peasants who have asked for his aid. Many of them live in wretched hovels—this, for example, is the house of one Churis: "The uneven, smoke-begrimed walls of the dwelling were hung with various rags and clothes; in the living-room the walls were literally covered with reddish cockroaches, clustering around the holy images and benches.... In the middle of this dark foetid apartment, not fourteen feet square, was a huge crack in the ceiling; and in spite of the fact that it was braced up in two places, the ceiling hung down so that it threatened to fall from moment to moment.
"'It will crush us to death, it will crush the children,' cried the woman."
Nekhlúdof is annoyed that Churis should have allowed his house to sink into such a condition, but he discovers that Churis has been ruined through the exactions of a land-agent (employed by Nekhlúdof's grandfather), who had cheated the peasant family out of their best land. We see how early and how decidedly Tolstoy has traced the miseries of the peasants to their landlords' exactions. Yet he does not disguise the faults of the peasants themselves: in another hut which Nekhlúdof visits the owner is thoroughly idle, lying on the oven all day and sleeping; his wife has been worked to death, and the old mother bears all the burden of the house and fields. She begs Nekhlúdof to find her a new daughter-in-law, but, with disgust and anger, he declines to force a fresh martyr into the wretched hovel. The overseer recommends that this particular peasant should be flogged, but the "barin" decides to take him into his own house and try to teach him how to labour. Tolstoy has often been accused of idealising Russian peasants, but, as these most graphic pictures attest, he perceived the worst that could be said. Indeed Turgénief complained of this particular book that it was pessimistic and did not do justice to the peasants.
After a brief space Tolstoy left the country and returned to St. Petersburg, where he plunged into dissipation; it was, morally considered, the most ignominious portion of his life. He confesses in his diary: "I am living like a beast, though not entirely depraved; my studies are nearly all abandoned, and spiritually I am very low."
In his religious work, My Confession, he speaks with bitter anger of this period of his life.
"I honestly desired," he says, "to make myself a good and virtuous man; but I was young, I had passions, and I stood alone, altogether alone, in my search after virtue. Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life I was met with contempt and derisive laughter; but directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions I was praised and encouraged.... I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing. I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man."
We should remember that it is the ascetic Tolstoy who is speaking here and judging his former life with all possible sternness, but there can be little doubt that it was this period which gave him his life-long scorn for the corrupt aristocracy whose whole existence was "a mania of selfishness." Never again did he sink so low.
In the meantime Nicolas Tolstoy was serving with the Russian artillery in the Caucasus; in 1851 he returned home on leave, perceived the danger of the immoral life his brother was leading, and persuaded Leo to join him.
Tolstoy spent nearly three years in the Caucasus, and the fresh, beautiful and poetic life restored him to mental and physical health, and awoke in him both religious and creative power. His first novel, Childhood, appeared in 1852, and was at once recognised by leading Russian writers as a work of rare promise and charm. It is largely autobiographical, not in the actual incidents, but in the general circumstances, and especially in the mental development. It is most remarkable for the amazing psychological fidelity with which the impressions of childhood are remembered and recorded; the strong affections for parents and brothers, for sister and teacher, the awe-struck reverence for the crazy pilgrim, Grisha, the first faint gleam of romantic love, the poetry of forest rides, the love of animals, the shuddering physical horror in the face of death, the strange confusion and sadness of loss. Everything is at once realistic and full of romance; Tolstoy has brought before us all the clear-cut sharpness of these early impressions of the world before custom has laid upon them a hand "heavy as frost and deep almost as life."
Tolstoy's life in the Caucasus, in its actual details, provided him with the subject-matter for two of his most fascinating works, The Cossacks, and The Invaders. These are not among his greatest productions; psychologically and dramatically they cannot equal the later novels, but they stand almost alone in their fresh, pure poetry. In these the remorseless realist shows himself as a romantic adventurer—almost, except for the deeper mentality, a Russian Stevenson; the breath of the mountain and forest, the clear, cold sweetness of dawn blows through their pages; they charm with the sense of great spaces, of gay, glad daring; they are filled, above all, with the intoxication of freedom.
It is one of the secrets of Tolstoy's greatness that he experienced, directly and at first hand, so many different kinds of life, and no change could well have been greater than that from the artificial, feverish, corrupt St. Petersburg to the primitive life of the hunter and mountaineer. The hero, Olyénin, is a reflection of Tolstoy himself. We are told how he delights in the first signs of danger, such as the carrying of weapons, &c. Before he has seen them he cannot believe in the beauty of snow-clad mountains; he thinks it as much a figment of the imagination as the melody of Bach's music or the romantic love of woman, in neither of which he is able to believe. But when he sees the mountains they surpass all he has heard and transcend his wildest dreams; they give him an almost Wordsworthian depth of inspiration. "At first the mountains aroused in Olyénin's mind only a sentiment of wonder, then of delight; but afterwards, as he gazed at this chain of snowy mountains, not piled one upon another, but growing and rising straight out of the steppe, little by little he began to get into the spirit of their beauty and he felt the mountains.... From that moment all that he had seen, all that he had thought, all that he had felt, assumed for him the new, sternly majestic character of the mountains.... 'Now life begins,' seemed to be sounded in his ears by some solemn voice."
He shares in the romantic, adventurous life of the Cossacks, a little tribe barricaded away in their own corner of the world and surrounded by their enemies—the semi-civilised Mohammedans.
The most interesting character in the book is the old Cossack hunter, Yeroshka; whole past ages of the world seem to live again in this primitive and fascinating figure; he takes us back to the very childhood of man. He is so strong that, when he has killed a wild boar weighing three hundred and sixty pounds, he can carry it home on his back. He says to Olyénin: "I will find and show you every sort of animal, every kind of bird, and how and where.... I know it all. I have dogs and two fowling-pieces, and nets, and decoys, and a falcon. I can find the track of any wild beast.... I know where he comes to his lair and where he comes to drink or wallow."
Yeroshka has studied all the wisdom of the animals, he is continually pitting his wits against theirs, and he thinks them, on the whole, much cleverer than men: notwithstanding his hunting he loves all creatures so much that he will save even moths from the flame.
Life in the forest is marvellously described—the misty mornings, the search for the stag's lair, the interpreting of his tracks, the swaying of innumerable boughs, the fear of the wild tribes; it is all here—the forest loneliness, the forest enchantment, the forest terror. Even the tiny gnats which cover Olyénin so that they make him grey from head to foot, have their own peculiar attraction; he grows to feel their stings a part of the forest fascination and freedom; they prevent him from growing somnolent, and keep him alive to that immense joy which he finds everywhere in nature and would not miss even for a moment.
Throughout Tolstoy's later work he hates civilisation, and we understand why; he is always longing to escape from it to the life that is inspired by the immense joy of nature and freshened by hard physical toil. Characteristically enough, Tolstoy will not idealise even what he loves, and he confesses that the mere touch of civilisation spoils his Yeroshka; he cannot live like a modern man, and his hut is filthy.
"On the table were flung his blood-stained coat, a half of a milk cake, and next to it a plucked and torn jackdaw.... On the dirty floor were thrown a net and a few dead pheasants, and a hen wandered about pecking, with its leg fastened to a table leg."
In the forests which he so loves Yeroshka is like a wood-god—strong, wise, and happy—but he has only to touch the ordinary life of man and he becomes a Silenus, debased and drunken.
In 1853 Tolstoy left the Caucasus for the Crimea, the influence of his relatives procuring him a post on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Prince Gorchakoff. He could not rest until he reached Sebastopol itself, and he entered it in November 1854. He was often in great danger, for he volunteered for duty on the most dangerous posts, even on the famous fourth bastion, whose horrors have never been surpassed in war.
Tolstoy published his Tales from Sebastopol in 1854; this book aroused the attention of the Czar, and gained for the author a considerable literary reputation. But Tolstoy achieved something more than reputation, for his whole nature was deepened and widened; it was Sebastopol which first showed him the heroism and tragedy of human destiny, and taught him his immense appreciation of the common man. For him mere cynicism was henceforth at an end; no man who had beheld the sublime heroism of Sebastopol—twenty-two thousand perishing under fire, as many more suffering hideous tortures on the operating tables (without chloroform) and in the hospitals, all this borne not merely with fortitude, but with cheerfulness, not for the sake of any personal gain, but for the sake of an ideal—the ideal of patriotism—no man who had beheld this could relapse into that cheap cynicism which proclaims the essential worthlessness of the human kind.
Tolstoy begins his studies (and this is quite characteristic of his grim realism) in the hospital, and dwells on the passive endurance which is shown there. He passes on to the emotions of men under fire, and gives a masterly exposition of the psychology of war; the physical shrinking, the consciousness of everything sordid and wretched, the curious elation that follows upon fear, the reckless hilarity and carelessness that mark the new recruit, the seasoned calm of the veteran who is grateful for every day left him of his life, the curious superstitions, not based on any soldier's folklore, but springing up of themselves in an environment where all things are so insecure, the swift and noble friendships broken by the heartrending tragedy of death and, through it all, the sombre pride that men feel in their own superhuman endurance.
Tolstoy describes the actual moment of death in battle with such imaginative vividness that it seems almost impossible a man could so realise it without a personal experience.
We may trace from Sebastopol also Tolstoy's characteristic attitude to war, which is peculiar because it unites such a great appreciation of war as a school of heroic virtue with such a whole-hearted condemnation. Most men are blind either to one side or to the other, but, from the very beginning, Tolstoy keeps both steadily in view. We could not explain the fascination war has possessed for so many of the noblest human minds if it were not for the fact that it is often a school of heroic virtue. Homer himself could hardly better the sublime courage of these Tolstoyan heroes, but Tolstoy's very appreciation teaches him also the vast futility of war; it is such a waste of noble human beings, and the ends for which it is waged are, compared with the tremendous sacrifices it evokes, so childish and futile.