"As long as there is a Tolstoy in literature it is simple and gratifying to be a literary figure," or, More on Tolstoy and Chekhov

After Friday's post that set Tolstoy and Chekhov in opposition, it seems only fair to allow Chekhov to rebalance the scales a little--for Chekhov admired Tolstoy, both as a writer and as a man, like few other people. Here, in a letter to Mikhail Menshikov of January 28, 1900, he frets about reports of ill health:

Most likely Tolstoy is in good health (apart from the stones) and will live another twenty years or so. His illness frightened me and kept me in a state of tension. I dread Tolstoy's death. His death would create a vacuum in my life. To begin with, I have never loved anyone as much as him; I am an unbeliever, but of all the faiths I consider his the nearest to my heart and most suited to me. Then again, as long as there is a Tolstoy in literature it is simple and gratifying to be a literary figure; even the awareness of not having accomplished anything and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us. His career is justification for all the hopes and expectations reposed in literature. In the third place, Tolstoy stands solid as a rock, with his immense authority, and as long as he remains alive bad taste in literature, all vulgarity, be it insolent or tearful, all coarse, irascible vanities will be held at a distance, deep in the shadows. HIs moral authority alone is capable of keeping so-called literary moods and trends at a certain high level. Without him the literary world would be a flock without a shepherd or a hopeless mess.

It seems cruel that it was Chekhov who was to die first, without ever getting to read Tolstoy's late masterpiece, Hadji Murat, the posthumously published novella (worked on in secret even as he disavowed fiction) that in some sense brought him back full circle to the world of his early novel The Cossacks.

Sofia Tolstoy--whose suffering (complicated, I acknowledge, by her own complicity and problematic character) might have lessened Chekhov's devotion had he been able, as we are, to read her diaries--in general seems to have appreciated, even admired Chekhov's work. But on April 16, 1911, six months after her husband's death, when she was, it seems, still wrestling with a toxic combination of anger and loss, she wrote in her diary,

I read some Chekhov--very clever, but he sneers a lot and I don't like that.

Sneering isn't a stance I associate with Chekhov; he has too much fundamental sympathy for that. What seems more likely is that Sofia was still too wrought up by her loss to accept the sort of empathy that Chekhov extends to his characters; the rest of that day's entry, even when adjusted for Sofia's (Russian?) tendency to melodrama, is painful to read:

A fine morning, then a thunderstorm and a short, fierce shower. I haven't been crying recently--I've grown cold, my life is a matter of endurance. "To live is to submit!" according to Fet.

Which sends me to Viktor Shklovsky, epigrammatic genius of Russian critics, who in his Energy of Delusion wrote on Chekhov's short, struggling life:

It's as though in the history of literature you won't come across a story that's more moving or decent as Chekhov carrying his large family on his back.

Someone so free in his judgments, who loved Tolstoy, who strangely never noticed Dostoevsky, and who freed literature from the slavery of old forms.

That was Chekhov.

And on Karenina and Vronsky:

Were they unhappy? Was Tolstoy happy? I don't know.

I don't know what happiness means to birds, but when a flock of geese or quails fly over the ocean to their dear old nests, the nests on each side are probably identical.

They are each just as precious.

Is the goose happy after his flight from Egypt to the Arctic Sea? He is probably made for such a flight, and his stroking wing coincides with the movement of the air that carries the flock.

While searching for a path of life through the life of his novels, Tolstoy was perhaps occasionally happy.

But it's impossible to create a complete novel and sometimes it's impossible to finish even a song.

Friday, I learned today, was Tolstoy's birthday. He was born 183 years ago, and we continue to read and re-read and discuss and ponder and fret about him.

"His books move; they show mankind's way of thinking in those times," or, Some reflections on Tolstoy

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I'm deep into War and Peace now, making a concerted press to get through the last twenty percent--but I took a break tonight to turn to some of my favorite writings on Tolstoy, and I found a couple of pieces well worth sharing as a follow-up to last week's post on General Kutuzov.

First, from Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953), an account of his role and his evolution as a character through Tolstoy's innumerable drafts:

Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with all the attributes he admired--humility, freedom from bureaucratic or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble, voluptuary, the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of War and Peace, which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage--one of the most moving in literature--in which Tolstoy describes the moment when the old man is woken in his camp at Fili to be told that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us, and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere for which the evidence is flimsy, but which is artistically indispensable to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical, for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of truth.

In War and Peace Tolstoy treats facts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all obsessed by his thesis--the contrast between the universal and all-important but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed, experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical grounds.

Which leads nicely into this complementary passage on Tolstoy's method of revision, from Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (1981), a collection of oblique, pithy, idiosyncratic, piercingly acute observations that should always be close at hand for anyone who is reading Tolstoy:

I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.

He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.

When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.

He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.

The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces and crowns.

Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called "hypothetical circumstances."

This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e. his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.

This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course.

The book I'm writing is still moving in front of me, swaying on the waves. I'm cutting away at my subject with words--the way a stonecutter or sculptor works. I'm searching for meaning.

The purpose of my search is art.

The world moved in front of Tolstoy. He was near-sighted and never wore glasses, so as not to introduce yet another convention into his vision. His books move; they show mankind's way of thinking in those times.

Tolstoy's drafts are like parallel universes whose tiny initial differences lead to wildly different outcomes; I like to imagine a different, parallel Tolstoy in each of those universes who was satisfied with, and published, each of those variations. For decades after Kutuzov's death, we lived in a universe in which he was a sycophantic voluptuary--until Tolstoy, to suit his vision, shifted us into a different, one where Kutuzov's resignation in the face of fate was the mark of a hero.

"Tolstoy's truest prayer was the manuscript of Hadji Murad"

One of my tiny goals in writing this blog is to make it one of the first places people land following searches for information about Tolstoy's last fiction, the posthumously published novella Hadji Murat (1912). I've raved about the book before: though one of the least well-known of Tolstoy's works, it's the perfect introduction to his genius, offering in a mere hundred-plus pages glimpses of both his unmatched eye for telling detail and the seemingly endless wells of sympathy that underlie his characterizations. At the same time, when set next to his early novel The Cossacks, which is set in the same region, Hadji Murat serves as a clear demonstration of the growth of his skill and perception. Despite the fact that the The Cossacks was based largely on Tolstoy's own experiences as a young man, while Hadji Murat was created through research, it is the earlier novel that at times feels imagined or constructed, while the later novel never feels less than fully lived.

In Tolstoy and the Novel (1966), John Bayley writes that "some portraits in the story are as life-giving and complete as those in War and Peace," while Viktor Shklovsky, in Energy of Delusion (1981), not only makes the grand claim of this post's headline, but also writes, "Among his great works, Tolstoy has one that's the best. It's Hadji Murad." The tale's place at the end of Tolstoy's ouevre is given a further poignancy by the fact that even as he wrote it, Tolstoy was actively denying to himself that literature had value. As A. N. Wilson explains in Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

While he was writing it between 1896 and 1904, so little did its subject matter accord with mainstream Tolstoyan pacifism that he felt obliged to work on it "on the quiet" and, by the time he had completed the Shakespeare essay and persuaded himself that literature was evil or a waste of time, Hadji Murat was laid aside.

Wilson explains that though Tolstoy denigrated his achievement, his wife, even as their long-running marital wars were reaching fever pitch, treasured the book, writing in her diary,

I have done nothing but copy out Hadji Murat. It's so good! I simply couldn't tear myself away from it.

What brings me back to Hadji Murat today is a letter I came across in the second volume of R. F. Christian's two-volume collection of Tolstoy's letters. Written from Yasnaya Polyana in January of 1903 to Anna Avessalomovna Korganova, the widow of the army officer who had guarded Hadji Murat after he had crossed over to the Russian side in the perpetual war in the Caucasus, it reveals Tolstoy even at that late date searching for specific details to give his portrait of the charismatic rebel leader the force of reality.

Dear Anna Avessalomovna,

Your son, Ivan Iosifovich, having learned that I am writing about Hadji Murat, was kind enough to tell me many details about him and, moreover, permitted me to turn to you with a request for more detailed information about the naib Shamil who lived with you at Nukha. Although Ivan Iosifovich's information is very interesting, many things might have been unknown to him or wrongly understood by him, since he was only a ten-year-old boy at the time. I am venturing therefore to turn to you, Anna Avessolomovna, with the request to answer certain questions of mine and to tell me all you remember about this man and about his escape and tragic end.

Any detail about his life during his stay with you, his appearance and his relations with your family and other people, any apparently insignificant detail which has stuck in your memory, will be very interesting and valuable to me.

My questions are as follows:

1. Did he speak even a little Russian?
2. Whose were the horses on which he tried to escape--his own, or ones given to him? And were they good horses, and what colour were they?
3. Did he limp noticeably?
4. Did the house where you lived upstairs, and he downstairs, have a garden?
5. Was he strict in observing Mohammedan rituals, the five daily prayers etc.

Forgive me, Anna Avessalomovna, for troubling you with such trifles, and accept my sincere gratitude for everything you do to carry out my request.

I remain, with the utmost respect, at your service,
Lev Tolstoy

P.S. Another question (6) What were the murids like who were with Hadji Murat and escaped with him, and how did they differ from him?

And yet another question (7) Did they have rifles on them when they escaped?

It's the hurried questions in the postscript that really bring Tolstoy to life in this letter; like a good friend lingering at a dinner party because there's still so much more to talk about, he can't help but want to know more, more, more. I love question six in particular, the way its request for what are essentially brief character studies rests on an implicit confidence that the discernment and descriptive powers of a master novelist--what Shklovsky calls "Tolstoy's strength and ability to construct the temple of the human soul"--are available to any stranger to call on when asked.

The letter seems to support what Shklovsky, in his typically fervid fashion, notes about Tolstoy's work on this novel in his last years:

[E]ven when he was sick and close to death, Tolstoy was still doing research for this novel. He demanded books, checking the details in them. . . . When Tolstoy finished Hadji Murad, he lifted himself up on the arms of his chair and said: that's how it should be, yes, that's how it should be.

And there he was, a mountaineer, heading straight toward the bullets.

He was singing a song.

As I've urged before: read Hadji Murat. You won't regret it.

"And I must finish the novel that has become such a nuisance to me."

Between a weekend of proofreading and making giant pots of chili to feed to guests in honor of the incipient baseball season, I find myself again without time to write. So, as I've had Anna Karenina on my mind this past week, today I'll give you only a couple of bits from letters Tolstoy sent to his longtime friend Nikolay Strakhov during the four-year period in which Tolstoy was struggling with Anna Karenina, which are featured in one of the chapters of Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion (1981). This first letter, from March 25, 1873, gives a glimpse into the novel's moment of conception; it also offers an optimism about the ease of its inevitable composition that quickly dissipates:

I'm going to tell you about myself, but please, keep it a secret, because it may be that nothing will come of what I'm going to tell you . . . After work, I happened to pick up . . . a book by Pushkin and as always (for the seventh time, I think), reread it all, unable to tear myself away from it, as though reading it for the first time. And what's more, it seems as if it resolved all my doubts . . . And there is a line, "The guests were getting ready to leave for the country house." Involuntarily and quite unintentionally, without knowing why and how, I began thinking up people and events, went on doing so, then, of course, changed the, and suddenly everything tied in so beautifully and unexpectedly, that the result was a novel, which is almost finished in draft form. A very lively, passionate and complete novel with which I am pleased; it will be ready, if God grants me good health, in two weeks. . . . Please do not scold me for such an incoherent letter--I have been working happily all morning. I'm excited that it's finished, and now, in the evening, I have an hangover.

Perhaps Tolstoy decided the letter really was too incoherent, for he never sent it. Regardless, that short paragraph gives us so much of the man--especially his unstoppable imagination, determined to imbue with full life even the slightest thought about the things and people of the world, and his confident enthusiasm when things are going well.

As with anything to which Tolstoy turned his attention, however, Anna Karenina, as its complexity and difficulty became apparent, began to seem an insurmountable challenge, driving him nearly to despair; by November 9th, 1875, he was writing to Strakhov:

My God, if only someone could finish Anna Karenina for me! It's unbearable.

His mood continued to swing, however, with each day's writing, and within two months he was writing to a pair of friends, A. M. and T. A. Kuzminsky,

Farewell, good-by. Sonya will describe everything, and I have written it all in Anna Karenina, and nothing is left

--while telling Strakhov days later,

Anna Karenina is making progress.

I'll leave you with an image that I found particularly striking, Tolstoy's account, in a letter to Strakhov of February 13, 1874, of his working method:

You are right to assume that I'm very busy and have been working a lot. I'm glad that I didn't start publishing anything, as I wrote in one of the previous letters. I don't know how else to draw a circle but to close it first and then begin correcting the original flaws. And now I have just come to the closure, and the corrections are endless.

And now to the kitchen. Baseball season beckons.


{Photo of me making baseball chili by rocketlass.}