“Reflections of this sort—destructive of all resolve or method—often occupied Pierre’s mind….” Tolstoï has skilfully made use of this weak nature, which is as receptive of all impressions as a photographer’s plate, to give us a clear conception of the chief currents of ideas in Russia in the reign of Alexander I.; these successively influence this docile adept with all their changes. We see the liberal movement of the earlier years of that reign developed in the mind of Bezushof, as afterwards the mystic and theosophic maze of its later years. Pierre personifies
the sentiments of the people in 1812, the national revolt against foreign intervention, the gloomy madness of conquered Moscow, the burning of which has never been explained, nor is it known by whose hands it was kindled. This destruction of Moscow is the culminating point of the book. The scenes of tragic grandeur, simple in outline, sombre in color, are superior, I must acknowledge, to anything of the kind in literature. He pictures the entrance of the French into the Kremlin, the prisoners and lunatics roaming by night in freedom about the burning city, the roads filled with long columns of fugitives escaping from the flames, beside many other very striking episodes.
Count Pierre remains in the burning city. He leaves his palace in plebeian guise, in a peasant’s costume, and wanders off like a person in a trance; he walks on straight before him, with a vague determination to kill Napoleon and be an expiatory victim and martyr for the people. “He was actuated by two equally strong impulses. The first was the desire to take his part of the self-sacrifice and universal suffering—a feeling which, at Borodino, had impelled him to throw himself into the thick of the battle, and which now drove him out of the house, away from the luxury and habitual refinements of his daily life, to sleep on the ground and eat the coarsest of food. The second came from that indefinable, exclusively Russian sentiment of contempt for everything conventional and artificial, for all that the majority of mankind esteem most desirable in the world. Pierre experienced this strange and intoxicating feeling on the day of his flight, when it had suddenly been impressed upon him that wealth, power, life itself, all that men seek to gain and preserve with such great effort, were absolutely worthless, or, at least, only worth the luxury of the voluntary sacrifice of these so-called blessings.” And through page after page the author unfolds that condition of mind that we discovered in his first writings, that hymn of the Nirvâna, just as it must be sung in Ceylon or Thibet.
Pierre Bezushof is certainly the elder brother of those rich men and scholars who will some day “go among the people,” and willingly share their trials, carrying a dynamite bomb under their cloaks, as Pierre carries a poniard under his, moved by a double impulse: to share the common suffering, and enjoy the anticipated annihilation of themselves and others. Taken prisoner by the French, Bezushof meets, among his companions in misfortune, a poor soldier, a peasant, with an uncultivated mind, one, indeed, rather beneath the average. This man endures the hardships on the march, through these terrible days, with the humble resignation of a beast of burden. He addresses Count Pierre with a cheerful smile, a few ingenuous words, popular proverbs with but a vague meaning, but expressing resignation, fraternity, and, above all, fatalism. One evening, when he can keep up with the others no longer, the soldiers shoot him under a pine-tree, on the snow, and the man receives death with the same indifferent tranquillity that he does everything else, like a wounded dog—in fact, like the brute. At this time a moral revolution takes place in Pierre’s soul. Here I do not expect to be intelligible to my fellow-countrymen; I only record the truth. The noble, cultured, learned Bezushof takes this primitive creature for his model; he has found at last his ideal of life in this man, who is “poor in spirit,” as well as a rational explanation of the moral world. The memory and name of Karatayef are a talisman to him; thenceforward he has but to think of the humble muzhik, to feel at peace, happy, ready to comprehend and to love the entire universe. The intellectual development of our philosopher is accomplished; he has reached the supreme avatar, mystic indifference.
When Tolstoï related this episode, he was twenty-five years of age. Had he then a presentiment that he should ever find his Karatayef, that he would pass through the same crisis, experience the same discipline, and come out of it regenerated? We shall see later on how he had actually prophesied his own experience, and that from this time he, together with Dostoyevski, was destined to establish the ideal of nearly all contemporaneous literature in Russia. Karatayef’s name is legion; under different names and forms, this vegetative form of existence will be presented for our admiration. The perfection of human wisdom is the sanctification, deification of the brute element, which is kind and fraternal in a certain vague way. The root of the idea is this:—
The cultured man finds his reasoning faculties a hindrance to him, because useless, since they do not aid him to explain the object of his life; therefore it is his duty to make an effort to reject them, and descend from complications to simplicity, in life and thought. This is the aim and aspiration, under various forms, of Tolstoï’s whole work.
He has written a series of articles on popular education. The leading idea is this:—
“I would teach the children of the common people to think and to write; but I ought rather to learn of them to write and to think. We seek our ideal beyond us, when it is in reality behind us. The development of man is not the means of realizing that idea of harmony which we bear within us, but, on the contrary, it is an obstacle in the way of its realization. A healthy child born into the world fully satisfies that ideal of truth, beauty, and goodness, which, day by day, he will constantly continue to lose; he is, at birth, nearer to the unthinking beings, to the animal, plant, nature itself, which is the eternal type of truth, beauty, and goodness.”
You can catch the thread of the idea, which is much like the contemplative mistiness of the ancient oriental asceticism. The Occident has not always been free from this evil; in its ascetic errors and deviations, it has ennobled the brute, and falsified the divine allegory of the “poor in spirit.” But the true source of this contagious spirit of renunciation is in Asia, in the doctrines of India, which spring up again, scarcely modified, in that frenzy which is precipitating a part of Russia toward an intellectual and moral abnegation, sometimes developing into a stupid quietism, and again to sublime self-devotion, like the doctrine of Buddha. All extremes meet.
I will dwell no longer upon these scarcely intelligible abstractions, but would say a word concerning the female characters created by Tolstoï. They are very similar to Turgenef’s heroines, treated, perhaps, with more depth but less of tender grace. Two characters call for special attention. First, that of Marie Bolkonski, sister of André, the faithful daughter, devoted to the work of cheering the latter years of a morose old father; a pathetic figure, as pure in outline, under the firm touch of this artist, are the works of the old painters. Of quite another type is Natasha Rostof, the passionate, fascinating young girl, beloved by all, enslaving many hearts, bearing with her an exhalation of love through the whole thread of this severe work. She is sweet-tempered, straightforward, sincere, but the victim of her own extreme sensibility.
Racine might have created a Marie Bolkonski; the Abbé Prévost would have preferred Natasha Rostof. Betrothed to Prince André, the only man she truly loves, Natasha yields to a fatal fancy for a miserable fellow. Disenchanted finally, she learns that André is wounded and dying, and goes to nurse him in a mute agony of despair. This part of the book presents the inexorableness of real life in its sudden calamities. After André’s death, Natasha marries Pierre, who has secretly loved her. French readers will be horror-stricken at these convulsions in the realms of passion; but it is like life, and Tolstoï sacrifices conventionality to the desire to paint it as it is. Do not imagine he sought a romantic conclusion. The young girl’s fickleness ends in conjugal felicity and the solid joys of home life. To these the writer devotes many pages, too many, perhaps, for our taste. He loves to dwell upon domestic life and joys; all other affections are in his eyes unwholesome exceptions—exciting his curiosity but not his sympathy. Thus he analyzes with a skilful pen, but with visible disgust, the flirtations and coquetry carried on in the salons of St. Petersburg. Like Turgenef, Tolstoï does not hold the ladies of court circles in high estimation.