Tolstoy

The greatest task facing the biographer of Tolstoy is the challenge of making sense of a man who was truly larger than life. It was a task he himself took on the moment he started writing a diary in his late adolescence, and one he never abandoned, particularly in his last years. Tolstoy never stopped trying to make sense of himself in his writing, whether it was through the public medium of his fictional characters or the quasi-private one of his diary entries. Indeed, as the scholar Irina Paperno has suggested, he even seems to have wanted to extend the extraordinary feat he achieved in his fiction of articulating latent as well as overt psychological processes by ‘turning himself into a book’ in his diaries.¹² If encompassing and describing his consciousness as it evolved was a project doomed to failure, like so many Russian utopian dreams, its very lack of finitude nevertheless reassures us of Tolstoy’s humanity.

The task of charting his artistic and intellectual journey has also proved a daunting one for Russia’s great Tolstoy scholars. It is indicative that the mammoth multi-volume biography which Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev embarked on in the 1950s is modestly titled Materials for a Biography. It remained unfinished at his death at the age of eighty-five in 1967, when his pupil Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya took up the baton. Although she added a further two volumes to Gusev’s four, she also died before the project could be completed, leaving the last eighteen years of Tolstoy’s life still to be covered (before this distinguished scholar’s death in 2003 she launched the new definitive hundred-volume edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works).¹³ While there is a paucity of sources concerning Tolstoy’s early life, necessitating reliance on the sometimes erratic and incomplete memoirs the writer compiled in old age, the sheer abundance of sources on his last years create problems for the biographer of a different kind. Such was his fame that many episodes in the ‘hagiography’ of Lev Tolstoy were set down while he was not just still alive, but comparatively young: the first biography was published when he was in his early sixties, in German moreover. The innumerable cliches which cling to Tolstoy’s vita – ‘great writer of the Russian land’, ‘the Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’ – can also be inhibiting, as can be the many contradictions with which his personality bristles. Tolstoy’s life is rich and fascinating but also deeply mythologised, and he himself contributed to the process of mythologisation.

In the early years of his marriage, while he was writing War and Peace, Tolstoy would insist that his young wife was present, and so Sonya would usually curl up by his feet on the bearskin rug next to his desk – a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions.¹⁴ Later on he worked in seclusion, but all through their married life, the Tolstoys read each other’s diaries, which meant their confessions could never really be private. In Sonya’s case, it was in the letters she wrote to her sister Tanya that she wrote most frankly; her diary was often written with a high degree of self-consciousness. For Tolstoy, however, who was always deeply connected to the land and those who worked it, there was from the beginning that very Russian yearning for oneness, to the extent that the borders between public and private eventually became blurred. His was a Russian life.

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ANCESTORS: THE TOLSTOYS AND THE VOLKONSKYS

[T]he extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air – all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything – above all the swaying of the birch trees on the avenue – is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.

Letter to Sofya Tolstaya, Yasnaya Polyana, 3 May 1897¹