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.