Tolstoy

Ralston was right on the mark in claiming Anna Karenina had made more money for its author than any other previous work of Russian literature, but some way off it when he speculated that Anna Karenina and War and Peace were unlikely to be translated into English.⁸⁶ In fact, the first French translation of War and Peace had already appeared in the same year as his article, and it had been this momentous event which prompted Turgenev to promote Tolstoy as a great novelist in his letter to Edmond About in January 1880. English translations soon followed. In May 1880, Turgenev came to spend a couple of days at Yasnaya Polyana. It was now three years since Tolstoy had finished Anna Karenina, and he had published nothing new since. Turgenev was hopeful that his friend would come back to fiction. He was also hoping he could persuade Tolstoy to take part in the Pushkin celebrations in Moscow the following month, but he was to be disappointed on both counts. Probably about the only thing they agreed on now was hunting, for which they still shared a passion.

While it is hard to imagine Tolstoy standing beside Dostoyevsky and Turgenev to honour Russia’s first truly great writer at this stage in his career, his refusal does in retrospect look a little churlish. The occasion for the celebrations was the unveiling of the first statue of Pushkin in Russia. It was scandalous that it had not happened sooner (Pushkin died in 1837), but none of the nineteenth-century tsars was prepared to sanction the official veneration of a rebellious and subversive poet fatally wounded in a duel. What was therefore important about this statue is that it was paid for entirely by public subscription, and its unveiling was a cause for celebration precisely because it had nothing to do with the government. The fact that Turgenev came especially from Paris for the occasion, and that Dostoyevsky, who was gravely ill, broke off writing The Brothers Karamazov at his country house south of Novgorod to come and take part, speaks eloquently about the importance of this occasion as a public event, which lasted for four days and was widely seen as a triumph for the Russian intelligentsia, and for Russian culture generally. As Turgenev said in his speech, the whole of educated Russia had in some way contributed to the erection of the statue, and this was a sign of its love for one of its greatest fellow countrymen. It was Pushkin, he proclaimed, who had completed the final refinement of ‘our language, which in its richness, force, logic and beauty of form is acknowledged by even foreign philologists to be the best after ancient Greek’. Pushkin, he said, ‘spoke with typical images, and immortal sounds embracing all aspects of Russian life’. Tolstoy did not care much for ‘educated Russia’, and now scorned the intelligentsia, and yet he was in some ways biting the hand which had fed him, for as a writer he too owed an enormous debt to Pushkin.

Turgenev’s rhetoric was nothing compared to Dostoyevsky’s messianic identification of Pushkin with Russia and Christ, which was greeted by an ecstatic thirty-minute ovation. Writing to his wife afterwards, Dostoyevsky told her ‘strangers in the audience were weeping, sobbing, embracing one another, and swearing to one another to be better, not to hate each other in the future, but to love’. Even Turgenev was moved to embrace his old opponent.⁸⁷ Tolstoy was at this very moment immersed in Christ’s teaching of brotherly love, as he had begun to coordinate and translate the Gospels, but his ego would never have permitted him to join in the communal rejoicing at this extraordinary, unparalleled event. Many years later he explained that, much as he valued Pushkin’s genius, he had not gone to Moscow because he felt there was something unnatural about such celebrations, something, which, while not exactly false, did not meet his ‘emotional requirements’.⁸⁸