Tolstoy: What is Art? & Wherein is Truth in Art (Essays on Aesthetics and Literature). Leo Tolstoy
In all countries truth, on such matters, spoken before it is stale, is unpatriotic.
When the war was over Count Tolstoy left the army and settled in Petersburg. He was welcome to whatever advantages the society of the capital had to offer, for not only was he a nobleman and an officer, just back from the heroic defence of Sevastopol, but he was then already famous as a brilliant writer. He had written short sketches since he was twenty-three, and while still young was recognised among Russia’s foremost literary men.
He had, therefore, fame, applause, and wealth — and at first he found these things very pleasant. But being a man of unusually sincere nature, he began in the second, and still more in the third, year of this kind of life, to ask himself seriously why people made such a fuss about the stories, novels, or poems, that he and other literary men were producing. If, said he, our work is really so valuable that it is worth what is paid for it, and worth all this praise and applause — it must be that we are saying something of great importance to the world to know. What, then, is our message? What have we to teach?
But the more he considered the matter, the more evident it was to him that the authors and artists did not themselves know what they wanted to teach — that, in fact, they had nothing of real importance to say, and often relied upon their powers of expression, when they had nothing to express. What one said, another contradicted, and what one praised, another jeered at.
When he examined their lives, he saw that, so far from being exceptionally moral and self-denying, they were a more selfish and immoral set of men even than the officers he had been among in the army.
In later years, when he had quite altered his views of life, he wrote with very great severity of the life he led when in the army and in Petersburg. This is the passage — it occurs in My Confession: “I cannot now think of those years without horror, loathing, and heart-ache. I killed men in war, and challenged men to duels in order to kill them; I lost at cards, consumed what the peasants produced, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder … there was no crime that I did not commit; and people approved of my conduct, and my contemporaries considered, and consider me, to be, comparatively speaking, a moral man.”
Many people — forgetting Tolstoy’s strenuous manner of writing, and the mood in which My Confession was written — have concluded from these lines that as a young man he led a particularly immoral life. Really, he is selecting the worst incidents, and is calling them by their harshest names: war and the income from his estate are “murder” and “robbery.” In this passage he is — like John Bunyan and other good men before him — denouncing rather than describing the life he lived as a young man. The simple fact is that he lived among an immoral, upper-class, city society, and to some extent yielded to the example of those around him; but he did so with qualms of conscience and frequent strivings after better things. Judged even as harshly as he judges himself, the fact remains that those among whom he lived considered him to be above their average moral level.
Dissatisfied with his life, sceptical of the utility of his work as a writer, convinced that he could not teach others without first knowing what he had to teach, Tolstoy left Petersburg and retired to an estate in the country, near the place where he was born, and where he has spent most of his life.
It was the time of the great emancipation movement in Russia. Tolstoy improved the condition of his serfs by commuting their personal service for a fixed annual payment, but it was not possible for him to set them free until after the decree of emancipation in 1861.
In the country Tolstoy attended to his estates and organised schools for the peasants. If he did not know enough to teach the ‘cultured crowd’ in Petersburg, perhaps he could teach peasant children. Eventually he came to see that before you can know what to teach — even to a peasant child — you must know the purpose of human life. Otherwise you may help him to ‘get on,’ and he may ‘get on to other people’s backs,’ and there be a nuisance even to himself.
Tolstoy twice travelled abroad, visiting Germany, France, and England, and studying the educational systems, which seemed to him very bad. Children born with different tastes and capacities are put through the same course of lessons, just as coffee beans of different sizes are ground to the same grade. And this is done, not because it is best for them, but because it is easiest for the teachers, and because the parents lead artificial lives and neglect their own children.
In spite of his dissatisfaction with literary work Tolstoy continued to write — but he wrote differently. Habits are apt to follow from afar. A man’s conduct may be influenced by new thoughts and feelings, but his future conduct will result both from what he was and from what he wishes to become. So a billiard ball driven by a cue and meeting another ball in motion, takes a new line, due partly to the push from the cue and partly to the impact of the other ball.
At this period of his life, perplexed by problems he was not yet able to solve, Tolstoy, who in general even up to old age has possessed remarkable strength and endurance of body as well as of mind, was threatened with a breakdown in health — a nervous prostration. He had to leave all his work and go for a time to lead a merely animal existence and drink a preparation of mare’s milk among the wild Kirghíz in Eastern Russia.
In 1862 Tolstoy married, and he and his wife, to whom he has always been faithful, have lived to see the century out together. Not even the fact that the Countess has not agreed with many of the views her husband has expressed during the last twenty years, and has been dissatisfied at his readiness to part with his property, to associate with ‘dirty’ low-class people, and to refuse payment for his literary work — not even these difficulties have diminished their affection for one another. Thirteen children were born to them, of whom five died young.
The fact that twenty years of such a married life preceded Tolstoy’s change of views, and that the opinions he now expresses were formed when he was still as active and vigorous as most men are at half his age, should be a sufficient answer to those who have so misunderstood him as to suggest that, having worn himself out by a life of vice, he now cries sour grapes lest others should enjoy pleasures he is obliged to abandon.
For some time Tolstoy was active as a “Mediator of the Peace,” adjusting difficulties between the newly emancipated serfs and their former owners. During the fourteen years that followed his marriage he also wrote the long novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karénina. His wife copied out War and Peace no less than seven times, as he altered and improved it again and again. With his work, as with his life, Tolstoy is never satisfied — he always wants to get a step nearer perfection, and is keen to note and to admit his deficiencies.
The happiness and fulness of activity of his family life kept in the background for nearly fifteen years the great problems that had begun to trouble him. But ultimately the great question: What is the meaning of my life? presented itself more clearly and insistently than ever, and he began to feel that unless he could answer it he could not live.
Was wealth the aim of his life?
He was highly paid for his books, and he had 20,000 acres of land in the Government of Samára; but suppose he became twice or ten times as rich, he asked himself, would it satisfy him? And if it satisfied him — was not death coming: to take it all away? The more satisfying the wealth, the more terrible must death be, which would deprive him of it all.
Would family happiness — the love of wife and children — satisfy him, and explain the purpose of life? Many fond parents stake their happiness on the well-being of an only child, and make that the aim of their lives. But how unfortunate such people are! If the child is ill, or if it is out too late, how wretched they make themselves and others. Clearly the love of family afforded no sufficient answer to the problem: What am I here for? Besides, there again stood death — threatening not only him but all those he loved. How terrible that they, and he, must die and part!
There was fame! He was making a world-wide literary reputation which would not be destroyed by his death. He asked himself whether, if he became more famous than Shakespeare or Molière, that would satisfy him? He felt that it would not. An author’s works outlive him, but they too will perish. How many authors are read 1000 years after their death? Is not even