The Women-Haters: Tolstoy and Strindberg
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.