“War and Peace,” an historical novel of the time of Napoleon, and requiring an immense amount of research, and “Anna Karenina” are as great as any novels that have been written in any country. Tolstoy’s extraordinary powers of observation and his acute, almost uncanny, understanding of human nature, make his characters so living and human that, having read about them, they become as people you have known, and you can never forget them.
Also, Tolstoy’s experience of life was wide and varied, and everything he wrote about he had himself known and seen. War in the Crimea, fashionable life in St. Petersburg, life with gipsies in the Caucasus, with peasants in the country, the joys and sorrows of intimate family life with children and animals—nothing escaped his notice, and his books are simply life seen through the medium of his wonderful and penetrating mind; there is nothing like them.
So there he was, the most brilliant and successful writer of the day, with a happy domestic life, money, a delightful property, and devoted servants and tenants. If any one ought to have been contented, it might be said it was Tolstoy. And yet he became dissatisfied and began again, as he had in earlier days, to find fault with himself and with his own life. He was fifty when the change in him began to take place; and yet it was no change really, he had always been the same; and the people who amuse themselves by finding inconsistencies in his character are wrong when they accuse him of being changeable: he merely returned now to his earliest ideals, which had been there all the time, though his intense enjoyment of life and his many occupations had prevented his thinking quite so much of working out his theories. It will be seen that Tolstoy had an extraordinary tenacity of purpose, and during his life carried through nearly all he had dreamed of doing. About the big and important things of life he remained always the same, though at times his high spirits made it appear as though he had forgotten about the problems that had worried him. But now, once more the question of how to lead the best life, and what is meant by religion, became uppermost in his mind, and a great disgust seized him of the life he and his family were leading. Everything he had enjoyed he now despised. He hated the luxury of his life, the fact of having servants to wait on him, his daughters in muslin dresses drinking tea: “The life of our circle of society,” he said, “not only repelled me, but lost all meaning.”
Yet there was nothing grossly luxurious or selfish about the life led by the Tolstoy family: according to most aristocratic ideas of luxury their life was simple. Nothing could be plainer than the house at Yasnaya, solidly built as it was, with double windows to keep out the cold and large Dutch stoves. The rooms were very bare and the floors mostly uncarpeted, the furniture faded and old-fashioned. But the family fed well, and kept a great many servants, which seemed necessary, as the Tolstoys, like many Russians, had hosts of poor relations living with them, besides tutors, governesses, and old servants; they were also a very large family in themselves.
But now life appeared to Tolstoy as dust and ashes. His wife and children, the praise of men, art—he turned from it all. His family at first could not understand why he should be in such despair; it was difficult to feel sympathy with his sufferings. To them he appeared to possess everything that most people considered good and desirable, and the life he was leading excellent and blameless. So they could not help him, and he had to suffer alone.
Tolstoy’s second son, who has written his recollections of his father, says he began to notice a change in his habits about this time. He left off hunting and shooting and riding, and took instead long walks on the road, where he could meet pilgrims and beggars and have talks with them. At dinner he would tell his family about them. He became gloomy and irritable, and quarreled with his wife over trifles. He no longer played with his children. When they were enjoying themselves acting or playing croquet he would walk in and spoil it all by a word or even a look.
He did not want to spoil their fun, but for all that he did. He had often not said anything, but he had thought it. “We all knew what he had thought, and that was what made us so uncomfortable,” his son says.
It was trying for the children to lose their jolly, delightful companion, who had brought such zest into their games and whose gaiety had been so infectious. Now they rather dreaded the appearance of this stern man who disapproved of them.
He did nothing but blame the useless lives led by ladies and gentlemen, their laziness, greed, and the way they made other people work for them.
This is the sort of thing he said: