Tolstoy
By A. N. Wilson
Norton, 572 pages, $25
Few periods in history have seen a more dazzling array of literary masterpieces than the half-century before the First World War in Russia. Between 1860 and 1880, Turgenev and Dostoevsky published their greatest works. Chekhov published his first short story just a few months before Dostoevsky`s death in 1881, and Gorky`s star rose a little more than a decade after that. As the 20th Century opened, Russia stood on the threshhold of a silver age that would produce such literary giants as Belyi, Blok and Maiakovskii.
Clad in dull peasant garb, roughshod in ill-fitting boots that he fashioned with his own hands, the monumental figure of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy-author of ”War and Peace,” ”Anna Karenina” and scores of lesser works-towered over this half-century of cultural brilliance.
At times, Tolstoy stood at the very center of Russia`s literary universe. At others, he provoked the bitter suspicion of Russia`s secular authorities and the wrath of her clerics. For 50 years he doubted his friends, tormented his wife and family, and raged against his enemies, as he issued
pronouncements on war and peace, good and evil, celibacy, social justice and right and wrong. Rarely was his pen or voice silent. When the last volume of the Jubilee edition of his collected works appeared in 1958, the set numbered 90 volumes.
More than any of his contemporaries, Tolstoy embodied in his life and work the dilemmas of an age that saw the emancipation of Russia`s serfs, the coming of her industrial revolution, the first great revolutionary challenge to Russia`s autocracy (in 1905) and the timid beginnings of representative government. Like Russia herself, Tolstoy was a mass of contradictions, and, like Russia, he moved from crisis to crisis. A pacifist who began his adult life as an army officer, an advocate of sexual abstinence who bedded women of every class and calling, a profligate gambler who later urged men to give what they had to the poor and an aristocrat who searched for the meaning of life in the huts of Russia`s peasants, Tolstoy first immortalized the Russians` place in history and then challenged the very cornerstones upon which that place had been built.
In his new biography, A. N. Wilson carefully, thoughtfully and sensitively seeks to resolve these contradictions by viewing Tolstoy`s writing as an extension of his life and vice-versa. The result is impressive. This, Wilson tells us, ”is the history of a great genius whose art grew out of three uneasy and irresolvable relationships: his relationship with God, his relationship with women and his relationship with Russia. In all cases, the relationships were stormy, full of contradictions. They were love-hate relationships, and the hate was sometimes rather hard to distinguish from the love.”
Tolstoy was a man obsessed with gambling (he lost several of his estates at cards before he turned 25), with women, with Russia, with God and, most of all, with himself. Nowhere was this more evident than in ”War and Peace,”
Tolstoy`s epic account of how the Russians confronted Napoleon`s invasion of their land in 1812. ”No book seems more real, more universal in its concerns, less self-preoccupied,” Wilson tells us. ”And yet when the literary historian comes to unweave the strands which make up the tapestry, we find a process which is every bit as self-obsessed as Proust.” In ”War and Peace” Wilson sees ”nothing less than the history of . . . (Tolstoy`s) own nation seen entirely through his own imagination: or, to put it another way, the history of his own soul dressed up as the history of Russia.”
”War and Peace” is an opulent tapestry of detail, so replete with the everyday experience that each of us knows and understands that it transcends time and place. Still, as Wilson concludes, neither detail nor self-obsession fully accounts for the power of Tolstoy`s work. An accumulation of detail, rich in quantity but without life, is what we find, for example, in Solzhenitsyn`s ”August, 1914”, which, Wilson argues, ”shows what `War and Peace` would be like if it had not been written by a great genius.”
But of what does Tolstoy`s ”great genius” consist? Wilson defines it as Tolstoy`s ”passionate impulse to recapture life” in prose. Yet the day would come, Wilson reminds us, when Tolstoy would reject his desire to ”make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations” in favor of the view that ”an artist`s function was to tell the world how it should behave.” Tolstoy turned in that direction after he finished ”Anna Karenina,”
when, Wilson argues, he had drained dry his well of experience and ”was tragically written out.” The path that Tolstoy trod to reach that point was painful, torturous and long. At each step of the way, he grappled with life`s eternal questions: Why are we here? Is there a God? What is Good? What is the point of living at all?
For the next 30 years, works about how men and women should behave, how they should live, and how they should relate to God marked Tolstoy`s painful pilgrim`s progress from artist to sage. This stage of his career, Wilson quite properly insists, ”seems embarrassing or a bit of a bore” to Western readers. Yet it is crucial to our understanding of Tolstoy and of Russian literature in general-because Tolstoy was only one of a surprising number of great Russian writers who have fallen victim to the same desire to become prophets of mankind`s destiny.
Unraveling the tangled skeins of Tolstoy`s love-hate relationships with women, God and Russia is a formidable challenge that few in the West have taken up with great success. It has been a full two decades since Henri Troyat published his ”Tolstoy,” in which, like Wilson, he tried to view Tolstoy`s creative genius through the eyes of a novelist. Certainly, Wilson`s book stands well above Troyat`s pioneering effort, for he has a deeper awareness of the immensely complex creative process that produces great literature. Yet, precisely because that process is so complex, Wilson`s ”Tolstoy” is more than a ”good read.” It is a serious attempt to come to grips with the complex forces that drove the pen of one of the greatest writers of his, or any other, age-a book worth having and one from which there is much to be learned.
