By Bergotte
Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasant fields of Yasnaya Polyana to the last corridor of consciousness before death. It is because Tolstoy looked at human life with a completeness of attention — a refusal to avert the eye from anything, the beautiful or the shameful, the grand or the trivial — that no other writer has quite matched. He is the novelist of the body and the soul simultaneously, of social performance and private anguish, of the vast collective movements of history and the single heartbeat in the dark. He wanted to know everything about what it means to be alive, and he spent eighty-two years failing magnificently to find out.
The Contradiction
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region south of Moscow, into one of the great aristocratic families of Russia. He was orphaned young — his mother died before he could remember her, his father when he was nine — and was raised by aunts on the estate that would become the centre of his imaginative life. He was a mediocre student at Kazan University, a soldier in the Caucasus and later at Sevastopol during the Crimean War, a gambler, a womaniser, a young man of prodigious appetites who was also, from very early, tormented by the distance between how he lived and how he believed he should live. This torment was not occasional or passing. It was the engine of everything he wrote and everything he did, the wound that never closed, the contradiction that grew larger with every decade until it finally, at the age of eighty-two, drove him out of his house into a winter night to die in a railway station.
He married Sophia Behrs in 1862, had thirteen children, and produced, in the first two decades of marriage, War and Peace and Anna Karenina — two of the greatest novels ever written, both of them composed in the same house, in the same study, while a large family moved around him and Sophia copied his manuscripts by hand in the evenings. By the late 1870s, he had undergone the spiritual crisis he described in A Confession — a confrontation with the meaninglessness of his achievements, with the certainty of death, with the question of whether any life premised on wealth and social privilege and artistic ambition could be justified in the face of the poverty and suffering that surrounded him. He became, in his late fifties, a kind of secular saint and a tremendous nuisance: he gave away his copyrights, tried to give away his property, dressed as a peasant, made his own boots, preached non-violence and vegetarianism, and was eventually excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. His marriage became a war that lasted thirty years, conducted in diaries that both partners wrote knowing the other would read them. He left home on the night of October 27, 1910, in secret, in the dark, boarded a train with no clear destination, caught pneumonia, and died eleven days later at the stationmaster’s house in Astapovo, surrounded by reporters, while Sophia was refused entry to the room.
He is buried at Yasnaya Polyana, under the trees, in an unmarked grave. He had requested no monument. Visitors still come in their thousands.
The Body Knows
Tolstoy is the great novelist of the body. Not in the sense of the erotic, though desire courses through all the major works, but in the sense that he understood the body as the primary site of truth — as the place where the self’s real condition is revealed regardless of what the mind chooses to believe or the social performance requires. His characters’ bodies betray them constantly: they blush at the wrong moment, feel nausea at the smell of corruption they had convinced themselves to ignore, are seized by joy in circumstances where social decorum demands restraint. In Anna Karenina, Levin’s body tells him he loves Kitty before his mind has caught up; in War and Peace, Pierre’s physical awkwardness in the drawing rooms of Moscow is the most precise possible index of his alienation from the world those drawing rooms represent.
This is why Tolstoy’s descriptions of physical experience are so unlike anyone else’s — they carry the weight of moral information. When Gerasim, the peasant servant in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, lifts his master’s legs and holds them through the night because the elevation eases the pain, the gesture is erotic in the original Greek sense — it is eros, the force of connection, expressed through the body without embarrassment, without the self-consciousness that afflicts every other relationship in the story. Gerasim is the only person in Ivan Ilyich’s world who is not lying, and his truthfulness is a bodily truth: he simply does what needs to be done and does not pretend it is otherwise.
War and Peace opens in a drawing room and ends on a road in Russia after a battle, and the journey between those two points is, in part, a journey from a world organised around performance and social surfaces to a world of elemental physical reality — the reality of hunger, cold, terror, exhilaration, and the animal awareness that comes with proximity to death. Prince Andrei, one of the great characters of world literature, has his deepest moment of understanding lying wounded on the battlefield at Austerlitz, looking up at the sky — the famous sky, infinite and quiet above the smoke and noise — and feeling, for the first time, the irrelevance of everything he had previously valued. Napoleon rides past, small and self-satisfied, and Andrei, who had idolised him, sees only a small man on a horse. The wound and the sky have stripped away the apparatus of ambition and left him facing something simpler and more permanent.
Anna
Anna Karenina begins, famously, with the assertion that all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — a sentence so frequently quoted that it has been partially emptied of meaning, but which, returned to in context, is a precise statement of what the novel is about. Not happiness, whose uniformity Tolstoy dismisses in a clause, but the specific textures of specific unhappiness: the failure of love, the failure of self-knowledge, the failure of society to accommodate the reality of desire.
Anna Karenina is one of the most fully realised characters in fiction, which makes it all the more disturbing that the novel judges her. Tolstoy loved her — the evidence is everywhere, in the physical presence she commands on every page, in the intelligence and warmth he gives her, in the way every other character in the novel is diminished in her vicinity — and he destroyed her, and he was right to do both, and the fact that both of these statements are true is the measure of the novel’s moral seriousness and its moral complexity.
Anna’s tragedy is not that she falls in love with Vronsky, though the love is real and its ending is terrible. It is that she has no language for her own desire, no framework within which to understand what is happening to her that does not require the destruction of everything else. Society has not provided her with one. Her husband Karenin — a good man in many technical respects, a man of intelligence and position who is genuinely wounded by her betrayal — is also a man who has organised his entire existence around the suppression of feeling, and who is therefore, when feeling arrives, absolutely helpless. He cannot respond to Anna’s crisis because he has spent his whole life training himself not to feel what he feels, and the training has worked too well.
Anna’s descent in the novel’s second half — the jealousy, the laudanum, the progressive dissolution of her ability to trust her own perceptions — has sometimes been read as Tolstoy punishing her for adultery, and there is something to this reading that cannot be entirely dismissed; Tolstoy’s attitude to female sexuality was not uncomplicated. But it can also be read as a precise psychological account of what happens to a person whose capacity for genuine feeling has been given no legitimate outlet, who is trapped between a social order that denies her desire and a private life built entirely on that desire, with nothing to stand on. The train at the end is not divine punishment. It is the destination of a particular track, laid down long before Anna bought her ticket.
Alongside Anna, the novel follows Levin — widely understood as Tolstoy’s self-portrait — through his courtship of Kitty, his work on the land, his philosophical crisis, and his eventual, fragile arrival at something like faith. The famous scene in which Levin works alongside the peasants in the hayfields, losing himself in the rhythm of the work, feeling a contentment he cannot intellectually justify, is the novel’s counterweight to Anna’s tragedy: an image of the life that is possible when thought and body, aspiration and daily practice, are no longer at war. It is not a solution. Levin’s final pages make clear that the peace he has found is provisional, that the questions will return tomorrow. But it is real, and it is earned, and it points toward the thing Tolstoy spent his whole life trying to demonstrate: that meaning is not found in the drawing room or the philosophical treatise but in the specific gravity of specific work, in the full attention given to the thing immediately in front of you.
How Ivan Ilyich Died
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, published in 1886, is the work in which Tolstoy’s moral vision achieves its most concentrated expression, and it is, at fifty pages, the most devastating thing he ever wrote. Ivan Ilyich Golovin is a judge in the Imperial Russian Courts, a man who has organised his entire life around the principle of propriety — doing the done thing, maintaining the correct appearance, rising through the ranks of a bureaucracy whose values he has never questioned because questioning them has never been necessary. He hangs curtains in his new apartment, falls off a ladder, bruises his side, and begins to die.
The dying takes months. What it reveals, one layer at a time, is the total emptiness of the life that preceded it. His colleagues are already calculating who will get his position. His wife is concerned primarily with the inconvenience. His daughter resents the disruption to her social life. Only Gerasim — the peasant servant, young, healthy, cheerful, unafraid of bodies or of death — attends him with genuine uncomplicated care. The contrast is absolute and the point is as sharp as a scalpel: the entire civilised apparatus of Ivan Ilyich’s world — the career, the marriage, the furniture, the card parties, the correctly managed social relations — has not produced a single person capable of sitting with him in his dying.
What Ivan Ilyich discovers in the final days, through an agony that strips away every remaining pretension, is that the life he lived was wrong. Not wrong in the sense of criminal or vicious — he was not a wicked man — but wrong in the sense of false, a performance in the place of a life, a series of correct appearances substituted for genuine experience. He cannot die peacefully because he cannot accept this, and he cannot accept it because accepting it would require admitting that the decades are gone and cannot be recovered. But in the last hours, something shifts. His son comes to his bedside and takes his hand and weeps, and Ivan Ilyich feels, for the first time, something unconditioned — pity for the boy, pity for his wife, a faint unclenching of the fist that has been his relationship to his own life. The fear of death goes. What replaces it is something the narrative calls joy, though Tolstoy is careful not to make this legible as conventional religious consolation. It is more like: the relief of finally, once, not lying.
The story is the most powerful argument against inauthenticity ever written, and it works not because Tolstoy tells us that Ivan Ilyich’s life was wrong but because he shows us, in the minutest physical detail, exactly what it felt like to have lived it. The bureaucratic career is not satirised. The furniture is described with the same care Tolstoy brought to the sky above Austerlitz. The story trusts that if you can feel the weight of the life in full, you will feel the weight of its emptiness in full, and you will not need the author to draw the conclusion.
War and What It Is
War and Peace is not a war novel in the conventional sense. It is a novel about what war does to the ideas people have about themselves — about the relationship between the stories a society tells about glory and heroism and the reality of men lying in frozen mud with shrapnel in their stomachs. Tolstoy had been to war himself, at Sevastopol, and the Sevastopol Sketches he produced from that experience — raw, unideological, the first genuinely modern war writing — are the laboratory in which the techniques of War and Peace were developed.
In War and Peace, the battles are chaos. This is the radical claim. Commanders do not control battles; they issue orders that bear no relation to what is happening and are interpreted in ways they did not intend by subordinates who are themselves responding to a situation that changes faster than communication can track. Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeats Napoleon, is great not because he is a brilliant strategist but because he understands that the most important thing a commander can do is sleep — that the attempt to control events through force of will is not merely futile but counterproductive, that the wisdom is to be receptive to the current of events rather than to insist on mastering it.
This is a philosophy of history and a philosophy of life simultaneously. Tolstoy’s long theoretical digressions in War and Peace — the passages in which he argues explicitly against the great man theory of history, against the idea that individuals rather than vast impersonal forces drive events — have irritated readers since the novel’s publication, and continue to irritate them. They are not elegantly integrated. But they are not wrong, and they are not incidental. They are the intellectual scaffolding that holds the enormous human edifice of the novel together, the argument that makes the individual stories — Andrei, Natasha, Pierre, Sonya, Nikolai, the old Prince Bolkonsky, Petya dying young in a skirmish that nobody will remember — mean what they mean.
What they mean is this: we are not the authors of our lives. The forces that shape us are larger than our choices, and the stories we tell about those choices — the narratives of heroism and decision and self-determination — are comforting fictions, useful perhaps, but fictions. What we can be is present, attentive, capable of the quality of attention that Natasha brings to the night sky and the opera and the first ball, the quality that is simply the willingness to receive what is actually there rather than what we have decided to see. This is not passivity. It is the most demanding form of engagement.
The Flight from Yasnaya Polyana
The late Tolstoy — the Tolstoy after the spiritual crisis, after A Confession, after the conversion to a stripped-down, anti-institutional Christianity that horrified the Church and alarmed the state — is the Tolstoy that the literary establishment has tended to treat with embarrassment, as if his decision to become a moral philosopher and social agitator represented a betrayal of the novelist. This is a misreading. The late works are different from War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, Father Sergius, and the final novel Resurrection are not the work of a man who has abandoned his powers. They are the work of a man who has decided that the powers must serve a different master.
Hadji Murat, written in the last years and published posthumously, is the work that reconciles the two Tolstoys most completely. It is the story of a Chechen warrior — fierce, proud, political, a man of action — who defects to the Russian side in the Caucasian wars for reasons of tribal politics, and who is killed in the end through a combination of Russian bureaucratic indifference and his own refusal to surrender. It is the most purely novelistic of the late works: a story of extraordinary vividness and speed, without the moralistic machinery of Resurrection or the polemical edge of The Kreutzer Sonata. It is also, in its portrait of a man defined entirely by physical courage and personal loyalty, a kind of elegy for the values of the early Tolstoy — the values of Prince Andrei and the old Prince Bolkonsky — written with full knowledge of everything those values cost.
The thistleflower passage that opens Hadji Murat is one of the most arresting beginnings in all of Tolstoy. Walking in a field, the narrator comes across a thistle that has been crushed by a plough but has not died — its stem broken, its flower blackened, but still alive, still upright, still vital. He thinks of Hadji Murat. The image is not a symbol in the allegorical sense. It is the thing itself — the brute vitality of a living creature that refuses to yield, that continues to be what it is regardless of what has been done to it. Tolstoy admired this above everything. He spent his life in the tension between it and the spiritual impulse that told him vitality without direction was not enough.
He never resolved the tension. The flight from Yasnaya Polyana — the old man in the dark, the secret departure, the death in a railway station — is either the final failure of the life project or its culmination, depending on how you read it. He was running toward something, or away from something, or both. The train took him somewhere he had not planned to go, and he arrived there, as always, completely.
What Tolstoy Demands
Tolstoy demands more of the reader than almost any other writer, and not because his books are long — length is a superficial obstacle that yields to time — but because he demands that you bring your whole self. His fiction does not allow the comfortable distance that permits a reader to admire technique without being personally implicated. He is always, just beneath the surface of the narrative, asking whether you are living rightly, whether the life you have constructed is the life you actually want, whether the things you have told yourself about yourself are true. These are not comfortable questions. They are also, Tolstoy insists, the only questions.
He had no patience with art for art’s sake, with the idea that beauty could justify itself without moral purpose. This has struck many of his critics as a kind of philistinism, and in its most extreme expression — in What is Art?, his late polemic, in which he rejects Shakespeare, Beethoven, and most of his own earlier fiction as elitist and morally useless — it produces conclusions that are genuinely difficult to defend. But the impulse behind it is not philistinism. It is the refusal to separate the aesthetic from the ethical, the insistence that what we make and what we read and what we love are moral acts with moral consequences, that the question of how we spend our attention is inseparable from the question of how we live.
The body of work he produced — from the early autobiographical trilogy through to Hadji Murat, with the cathedral of War and Peace and Anna Karenina at its centre and the extraordinary concentrated grief of The Death of Ivan Ilyich as its moral fulcrum — is the most complete account any novelist has given of what it feels like to be in a human body, in a human society, moving through time toward death with intermittent awareness of what is actually happening. He did not resolve the questions he raised. Nobody has. But he raised them with such force, and with such concrete, physical, humane intelligence, that the raising itself feels like a form of answer.
The snow was falling on the night he left. He did not look back at the house.
Sources and Further Reading
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2008.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin Classics, 2000.
Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2010.
Tolstoy, Leo. Hadji Murat. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2012.
Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession. Translated by Aylmer Maude. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.
Tolstoy, Leo. Resurrection. Translated by Louise Maude. Oxford World’s Classics, 1999.
Tolstoy, Leo. The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories. Translated by David McDuff. Penguin Classics, 2008.
Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy. Translated by Nancy Amphoux. Doubleday, 1967.
Wilson, A. N. Tolstoy: A Biography. W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Orwell, George. “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.” In Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. Secker and Warburg, 1950.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 1996.
Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. Chatto and Windus, 1966.
Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953.
Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. Princeton University Press, 1986.
Discover more from My World of Interiors
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My World of Interiors 