FOOTNOTES:
[3] The change from you to thou is significant here, because among the Russians thou is employed only in familiar or intimate sense.
TOLSTOI, ARTIST AND PREACHER
As a man of letters, Lyoff Nikolaievitch, Count Tolstoi, holds undisputed place in the first rank; as a philosophical preacher of reform, his position is much less secure. And it is sadly ironical that one who was so ready to lay aside those fictional laurels which all men yielded to him readily, has not been accorded the preëminence among moralists which he held to be of so much greater worth.
The last twenty years of his abundant life disclosed in this greatest of all Russians that which was always really present—the single eye, with its gaze constantly set upon ethical ideals. Even a swift survey of his life and its so closely interpenetrating work will bear out this estimate—perhaps surprisingly.
In 1828, on September 9—August 28, old style—Tolstoi was born at Yasnaia Polyana, in the government of Tula, Russia. For several centuries his wealthy and noble family was distinguished in military and state affairs as well as in literature, one of his ancestors, Peter Tolstoi, having been the intimate of Peter the Great. Lyoff’s father, Nikolai, and his mother, the Princess Volkhonsky, died while he was yet a lad, leaving him in charge of an aunt. He inherited a rich estate which his father had succeeded in thriftily disencumbering from the debts of extravagance contracted by his own father.
The future author was educated at home, spent some time (1843-44) at the University of Kazan, did further private work at home, for a while studied law in St. Petersburg, alternated between his estates and the social life of the great cities, and eventually entered the army in 1851. It was during this period that he gathered much of the material for his early stories, notably “The Cossacks,” a short novel of unmistakable power and insight; and the rambling autobiographical stories, “Childhood,” “Boyhood,” and “Youth,” generally combined under the first title. When the Crimean War broke out, in 1853, Tolstoi was transferred to the army of the Danube, and distinguished himself for bravery before Sevastopol—as well as by his three notable sketches which bear the name of this great siege, “Sevastopol in December,” “Sevastopol in May,” and “Sevastopol in August.”
Tolstoi’s life as a soldier was that of a rake—in which he differed not at all from the young noblemen of the period. But this wild career does not seem to have interfered with his fondness for moralizing, nor with his conviction that he was the spiritual Moses, divinely commissioned to lead the Russian people out of the wilderness. His youthful diary confesses that the three passions to which he yielded, gambling, sensuality, and vanity, were moral stumbling-blocks; and with naïve premonition he wrote: “There is something in me which makes me think that I was not born to be just like everybody else.” But the most remarkable youthful forecast is found in the words which Professor Phelps quotes from Tolstoi’s journal of this period: “The man who has no other goal than his own happiness is a bad man. He whose goal is the good opinion of others is a weak man. He whose goal is the happiness of others is a virtuous man. He whose goal is God is a great man.” In these cumulative epigrams we have a summary of Tolstoi’s creed. However far afield he wandered in middle years, distressed by doubts and confused by jangling voices, the sturdy seeking-soul of him followed this great light with the single eye of an honest man, and this altruistic doctrine he preached with increasing loftiness, through excommunication and charges of insanity, down to the very end. That so extreme a theory should lead him often into blind avenues, and that the phantoms of many inconsistencies should challenge his way, was inevitable; yet Tolstoi stands before the world today as a good man and an earnest one, who never lay upon a couch of down while he preached abnegation for others.
An insatiable psychological curiosity possessed the Russian master from youth to the close of his fiction-writing years. In the exercise of this minute observing power, he is as amazing a realist as was Balzac, and when he confines his examinations to humans he is quite as profoundly interesting, but rather tiresome when he records the numberless details of inanimate nature.
A character so given to scrutiny would naturally be introspective, so that his novels are markedly autobiographical. And it is always the struggling, set-upon, brooding character which the novelist chooses through which to depict his own nature. How different from the romantic self-exploitation of Byron! In “Childhood,” Nikolenka is Tolstoi himself, as Olénine is in “The Cossacks.” So too in Levine of “Anna Karenina,” Pozdnichev, of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” and Nekhlioudov, of “Resurrection” (his final creed-summary), we have pictures of the self-recognized characteristics and beliefs of the author.