In Tolstoï, other surprises are reserved for us. Younger by ten years than his predecessors, he hardly felt the influences of 1848. Attached to no particular school, totally indifferent to all political parties, despising them in fact, this solitary, meditative nobleman acknowledges no master and no sect; he is himself a spontaneous phenomenon. His first great novel was contemporary with “Fathers and Sons”, but between the two great novelists there is a deep abyss. The one still made use of the traditions of the past, while he acknowledged the supremacy of Western Europe, and appropriated to himself and his work what he learned of us; the other broke off wholly with the past and with foreign bondage; he is a personification of the New Russia, feeling its way out of the darkness, impatient of any tendency toward the adoption of our tastes and ideas, and often incomprehensible to us. Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through. Tolstoï comes to her aid. More truly than any other man, and more completely than any other, he is the translator and propagator of that condition of the Russian mind which is called Nihilism. To seek to know how far he has accomplished this, would be to turn around constantly in the same circle. This writer fills the double function of the mirror which reflects the light and sends it back increased tenfold in intensity, producing fire. In the religious confessions which he has lately written, the novelist, changed into a theologian, gives us, in a few lines, the whole history of his soul’s experience:—
“I have lived in this world fifty-five years; with the exception of the fourteen or fifteen years of childhood, I have lived thirty-five years a Nihilist in the true sense of the word,—not a socialist or a revolutionist according to the perverted sense acquired by usage, but a true Nihilist—that is, subject to no faith or creed whatever.”
This long delayed confession was quite unnecessary; the man’s entire work published it, although the dreadful word is not once expressed by him. Critics have called Turgenef the father of Nihilism because he had given a name to the malady, and described a few cases of it. One might as well affirm the cholera to have been introduced by the first physician who gave the diagnosis of it, instead of by the first person attacked by the scourge. Turgenef discovered the evil, and studied it objectively; Tolstoï suffered from it from the first day of its appearance, without having, at first, a very clear consciousness of his condition; his tortured soul cries out on every page he has written, to express the agony which weighs down so many other souls of his own race. If the most interesting books are those which faithfully picture the existence of a fraction of humanity at a given moment of history, this age has produced nothing more remarkable, in regard to its literary quality, than his work. I do not hesitate in giving my opinion that this writer, when considered merely as a novelist, is one of the greatest masters in literature our century has produced. It may be asked how we can venture to express ourselves so strongly of a still living contemporary, whose overcoat and beard are familiar objects in every-day life, who dines, reads the papers, receives money from his publishers and invests it, who does, in short, just what other men do. How can we thus elevate a man before his body has turned to ashes, and his name become transfigured by the accumulated respect of several generations? As for me, I cannot help seeing this man as great as he will appear after death, or subscribing voluntarily to Flaubert’s exclamation, as he read Turgenef’s translation of Tolstoï, and cried in a voice of thunder, while he stamped heavily upon the ground:—
“He is a second Shakespeare!”
Tolstoï’s troubled, vacillating mind, obscured by the mists of Nihilism, is by a singular and not infrequent contradiction endowed with an unparalleled lucidity and penetration for the scientific study of the phenomena of life. He has a clear, analytical comprehension of everything upon the earth’s surface, of man’s internal life as well as of his exterior nature: first of tangible realities, then the play of his passions, his most volatile motives to action, the slightest disturbances of his conscience. This author might be said to possess the skill of an English chemist with the soul of a Hindu Buddhist. Whoever will undertake to account for that strange combination will be capable of explaining Russia herself.
Tolstoï maintains a certain simplicity of nature in the society of his fellow-beings which seems to be impossible to the writers of our country; he observes, listens, takes in whatever he sees and hears, and for all time, with an exactness which we cannot but admire. Not content with describing the distinctive features of the general physiognomy of society, he resolves them into their original elements with the most assiduous care; always eager to know how and wherefore an act is produced; pursuing the original thought behind the visible act, he does not rest until he has laid it bare, tearing it from the heart with all its secret roots and fibres. Unfortunately, his curiosity will not let him stop here. Of those phenomena which offer him such a free field when he studies them by themselves, he wishes to know the origin, and to go back to the most remote and inaccessible causes which produced them. Then his clear vision grows dim, the intrepid explorer loses his foothold and falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions. Within himself, and all around him he feels nothing but chaos and darkness; to fill this void and illuminate the darkness, the characters through which he speaks have recourse to the unsatisfactory explanations of metaphysics, and, finally, irritated by these pedantic sophistries, they suddenly steal away, and escape from their own explanations.
Gradually, as Tolstoï advances in life and in his work, he is more and more engulfed in doubt; he lavishes his coldest irony upon those children of his fancy who try to believe and to discover and apply a consistent system of morality. But under this apparent coldness you feel that his heart sobs out a longing for what he cannot find, and thirsts for things eternal. Finally, weary of doubt and of search, convinced that all the calculations of reason end only in mortifying failure, fascinated by the mysticism which had long lain in wait for his unsatisfied soul, the Nihilist suddenly throws himself at the feet of a Deity,—and of what a Deity we shall see hereafter.
In finishing this chapter, I must speak of the singular phase into which the writer’s mind has fallen of late. I hope to do this with all the reserve due to a living man, and all due respect for a sincere conviction. There is nothing to me more curious than his statement of the actual condition of his own soul. It is a picture of the crisis which the Russian conscience is now passing through, seen in full sunlight, foreshortened, and upon a lofty height. This thinker is the perfect type of a multitude of minds, as well as their guide; he tries to say what these minds confusedly feel.
I.
Leo Nikolaievitch (Tolstoï) was born in the year 1828. The course of his external life has offered nothing of interest to the lovers of romance, being quite the same as that of Russian gentlemen in general. In his father’s house in the country, and afterwards at the University of Kazan, he received the usual education from foreign masters which gives to the cultivated classes in Russia their cosmopolitan turn of mind. He then entered the army and spent several years in the Caucasus in a regiment of artillery, and was afterwards transferred at his request to Sebastopol. He went through the famous siege in the Crimean War, which he has illustrated by three striking sketches: “Sebastopol in December, in May, and in August.” Resigning his position when peace was declared, Count Tolstoï first travelled extensively, then settled at St. Petersburg and Moscow, living in the society of his own class. He studied society and the court as he had studied the war—with that serious attention which tears away the masks from all faces and reads the inmost heart. After a few winters of fashionable life, he left the capital, partly, it is said, to escape from the different literary circles which were anxious to claim him among their votaries. In 1860, he married and retired to his ancestral estate, near Tula, where he has remained almost constantly for twenty-five years. The whole history of his own life is hardly disguised in the autobiography he wrote, entitled, “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.” The evolution of his inward experience is further carried out in the two great novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” and ends, as might have been foreseen, with the theological and moral essays which have for some years quite absorbed his intellectual activity.