Anatoly Lunacharsky 1931
Written: 1931
First published: 1933 (Introductory article to the publication of the novel Anna Karenina for American readers), Limited Editions, New York
Source: Lunacharsky Archive
Translated by: Anton P.
The fame of Leo Tolstoy, especially in the last years of his life, was enormous, truly world-encompassing.
At the same time, admiration and respect for Tolstoy were determined not only by recognition of his artistic genius, admiration for his fiction; he was also seen as a “modern saint,” a teacher of life, a protestant against public lies, and a prophet of the spiritual renewal of mankind.
Europe, Asia and America, following the millions of Russians, extended their hands to him, seeking help on the paths of life from the sage of Yasnaya Polyana.
Numerous portraits of Tolstoy, together with his works, together with his commandments, formed the basis of that grandiose image that grew before the eyes of the century under this name: Tolstoy.
It seemed to everyone that a giant in peasant clothes, with a gray beard fluttering under the breath of some mystical storm, with a face sharp as if carved from solid wood, and prickly eyes that pierced everything through, rose up among people of ordinary height. A huge figure stood before the eyes of everyone, as in the famous portrait of Repin, laying his knotted peasant hands behind the belt of his shirt, and, looking at the whole world around him, proclaimed the harsh truth with such knowledge of the human soul, which seemed insurmountable.
The contradictions of his nature that immediately caught the eye attracted particular attention to the “prophet”: this muzhik in appearance and in the essence of his teaching, this sage was from head to toe a gentleman, an aristocrat, a landowner in a country of reactionary monarchy and proud nobility.
This preacher of the extreme simplicity of life, this debunker of the vain tinsel of art and all modern civilization, was one of the greatest artists of his age in the whole world.
If a titled gentleman, an illustrious artist, discarded all the treasures of his exclusive position as worthless trinkets, then was this not obvious proof of the seriousness of his preaching?
I must say that this sermon, perhaps, did not penetrate so deeply into the consciousness of wide public circles. There were very few such followers of Tolstoy who would really rebuild their lives, according to his teachings, even in Russia, and especially outside of it.
But it was pleasant to realize the presence in our culture of this picturesque and daring personality of such an undeniably huge scale. Tolstoy, the crusher of culture, was at the same time its adornment, and not only as a wonderful artist of the word, but precisely as a kind of “conscience” or even “remorse,” which seemed to almost everyone somehow to face our civilization, in general, burdened with such contradictions, vice and suffering.
The name of Tolstoy could be pronounced with great reverence all the more because his teaching, which contained so many elements destructive to modern civilization, was combined with the preaching of non-resistance to evil by violence, and this side of it not only did not threaten “society” with illness and blows, but could even serve for it, to some extent, a shield from various revolutionary accusers, who, in their call to resist the unbearable evil of public life by violence, stumbled upon Tolstoy, the Tolstoyans and their teaching as a force that weakened the will to such resistance.
Here in general, in the most summary form, is that social portrait of Tolstoy in his relations with his contemporaries, from which one must proceed as from a social fact.
Let us get closer to the giant. Let us take a closer look at him as an artist and as a public preacher.
For now, we will confine ourselves to stating the undoubted facts and the content of Tolstoy’s works, which the count himself put into them.
For Tolstoy, fiction has never been either a pleasant pastime or the production of values aimed at entertaining people.
Tolstoy always, almost from his very childhood, was distinguished by the ability, or rather, was almost a slave to the need to observe himself, to analyze all his experiences.
These experiences, of course, are inextricably linked with the environment. Tolstoy, in his mind, took his inner world in this inseparable connection with the outer. At the same time, it becomes noticeable early (we will say later why) that Tolstoy, in his self-analysis, in his self-reports, in his judgment of himself and through himself over everything around him, is not looking for happiness, not some kind of self-satisfied balance, not fame or consciousness of greatness of his deeds, but above all, and almost exclusively, justice. Almost from childhood, his consciousness suffers from the fear of sin, of a crime in his own eyes, of the ensuing deep dissatisfaction with himself. At first, along with this feeling, the desire for wealth, for the organization of a harmonious family life, for fame, play a significant role, but then all this is swept aside as impure, and the thirst for righteousness, purity, i.e. the purity of one’s conscience before oneself comes to the fore.
The so-called upheaval in Tolstoy’s life, which took place in him around the fiftieth year of his life, was only the moment when conscience took a decisive advantage over other aspects of consciousness.
Everything was already prepared in Tolstoy even before this coup. In the same way, the religious character of this predominantly ethical thinking of Tolstoy was inherent in him from childhood. The truth and justice with which the human soul must live in complete peace is God. The untruth and injustice that lead a man of passion, inflamed by temptations, is the world, the earth, this is, so to speak, the devil.
It was precisely this sincere and agonizing and at the same time rich and colorful inner lynching that led Tolstoy to write long diaries and to the birth of short stories and novels from these diaries.
Tolstoy was aware, however, that those thoughts and feelings that passed through him and that so often cast into bright, life-filled images were by no means something important only for himself: he was aware that the same questions should torment and probably torture people in general, especially people of his circle. And if these problems did not torment other people, then this would only mean that their soul is sleeping a deathly sleep and that it needs to be awakened. To write for others, to reveal to everyone his inner drama of falls and self-healing, dressing this drama in various artistic masks, seemed to Tolstoy not only an exciting business, for his intensive life required its extensive expansion, but also a socially important matter, if you like, a religiously important one.
Tolstoy in his works of art was, in essence, always a preacher. Not only are his later works of art already quite clearly preachy, but also his early ones, which he himself later condemned as too self-sufficient art, were always charged, almost to overflowing, with the ethical electricity of Tolstoy’s nature.
True, Tolstoy was not only an ethicist. In part, the very strength of the internal storms that took place in him was caused precisely by the fact that in him was extremely strong – to use his terminology ” not only God, i.e. conscience, but also the devil, i.e. passion.
Tolstoy was by nature excessively passionate. He was a man of indomitable sensuality, an almost superhuman development of sight, hearing, touch, memory, brightness of the imagination, the power to transform oneself into any external being.
All this, on the one hand, allowed Tolstoy to dress his morality in extraordinarily luxurious artistic clothes. On the other hand, this, if we dare to say so, tailor in Tolstoy, this manufacturer of colorful, sparkling clothes, often turned out to be stronger than Tolstoy the moralist, so that the dolls made by Tolstoy to prove his ethical theses were, as it were, absorbed by magnificent clothes, and for a while Tolstoy’s preaching, even more correctly a drawing, was drowned in the fireworks of lights and colors of Tolstoy the magician, the Tolstoy obsessed with life and its passions.
However, when finally weighing Tolstoy as an artist, one cannot but come to the conclusion that his main strength from the very beginning, that is, from the Sevastopol Tales and Childhood and Adolescence, was not in the landscape, not in the portrait, not in external descriptions in general, even less so in the harmony of language, but above all in the fascinating truthfulness of the depiction of emotional experiences.
For Tolstoy, the inner world of his characters always comes to the fore. Drawing their actions, captivatingly conveying their speeches, Tolstoy especially likes to suddenly reveal what is not visible to anyone and not heard by anyone, namely what the hero thought, what he felt, or even what he himself did not guess, but what happened in the recesses of his personality is unconscious even for himself.
Tolstoy, the artist, works especially as a clairvoyant, to whom the secrets of the consciousness of all people and even animals are revealed.
The variety of “souls” created by Tolstoy, that is, consciousnesses, characters, is very great. However, it must be said frankly, all this colossal variety was created mainly from purely Tolstoy material, that is, from those experiences, those outbursts of passion, those repentances, that thirst for salvation, which were inherent in the author himself. In his vast garden, the most lush and poisonous flowers bloom alongside medicinal plants. In one part of this vast garden there are impenetrable jungles, and in the other, everything is enlightened, developed, and everything bears the seal of purity and lofty peace. In evil and in good, Tolstoy’s garden contains both the most modest herbs and the most bizarre giant plant forms. And all this is Tolstoy. Only in all of this as a whole can we understand Tolstoy. And to this we must add dynamics, that is, Tolstoy’s conscious desire to translate evil into good, as he understood this good, by the way, at least at the cost of transforming the giants of evil into virtuous dwarfs in this way.
Tolstoy“s world of evil (what Tolstoy considered evil) seems to me much more attractive than the oil-sprinkled, boring and monotonous world of his goodness. But that is another matter. The only important thing is that Tolstoy, the artist, serving his cause of the triumph of good, creates figures in his works of art, taking for this cause one or another particle of his vast inner world. But that is precisely why all the souls built by Tolstoy seem so amazingly alive, natural, and everything that happens in them is so convincing and interesting.
Let us add here just one more remark about Tolstoy the artist. Tolstoy is an amazing realist. We will return to this main formal characteristic of his artistic creation. Now I want to note the duality of the roots from which Tolstoy’s realism arose. Of course, in part it was already explained by the epoch: all other writers contemporary with Tolstoy in Russia were also realists.
But Tolstoy had special reasons for writing realistically. The first was that he loved reality, felt it, that it alone was dear to him and interested him. Entertaining or distracting oneself and others with fantasies Tolstoy would consider unworthy. Life is serious. And Tolstoy is deeply serious. Reality, of course, frightened him: he did not put up with it, but its contradiction, i.e., the fact that Tolstoy seemed indubitable that there are two realities, one material, transient, and the other eternal, ideal, all this entered into reality in general, into the one on which Tolstoy worked and which he wants to portray in order to enlighten.
Another root of Tolstoy’s realism, perhaps half-conscious, is his confidence in the enormous persuasiveness of artistic realism, in its preaching power, in its ability to create an all-conquering proof. The more an artistic picture seems to be created by nature itself, the more it breathes truth, the sooner the reader will believe in it and, together with its factual side, so to speak, will swallow the tendency that Tolstoy, sometimes very skillfully, hid under an artistic shell.
However, without understanding Tolstoy’s philosophy, his religion, Tolstoy the artist remains incomprehensible, and besides, we have no right to forget the moralist behind the artist.
True, some of Tolstoy’s greatest critics, for example, a man of such fine culture as Stefan Zweig, and indeed many Russian critics, even Marxists, are inclined to distinguish too sharply between Tolstoy the artist and the moralist and to accept the one while dismissing the other. But although we recognize Tolstoy as a deeply contradictory nature, these contradictions do not at all fall away from each other, like badly glued parts: Tolstoy is contradictory and at the same time one.
Not a single novel by Tolstoy is intelligible if the ethical tendency that lives in it and builds it is not understood. On the other hand, Tolstoy’s religious-philosophical system was able to exert its influence only because it grew on the same powerful roots that nourished Tolstoy the artist.
We have just taken a closer look at Tolstoy the artist. Let us do the same with respect to Tolstoy the thinker, i.e. the moralist.
Tolstoy’s religious philosophy bears the features of unity from the very appearance of its first foundations to the end of the days of the great writer. Of course it has evolved. But, on the one hand, it has always been faithful to its first basic principle, so to speak, to the seed that gave birth to it, and on the other hand, from beginning to end, the movement of this religious thought and this religious feeling constantly intersects and, so to speak, is overshadowed by an internal doubt.
It must not be forgotten for a moment, if you want to understand Tolstoy, that he never attained serene holiness. And this, of course, is very good. Gorky is a thousand times right when he says that the most negative, perhaps most antipathetic trait to Tolstoy himself, is his holiness. If, during his lifetime or after his death, he or his disciples managed to drown all this life full of struggle into a huge personality in a white and sweet sauce of holiness, this would be a rather big misfortune for the entire human culture, which, in our opinion, Tolstoy could serve and serves only as a fighter against himself.
So, all his life Tolstoy to a certain extent doubted his own teaching, although he angrily refuted others who doubted him or those who assumed doubts in him.
Tolstoy was looking for a living god. Sometimes he tried to convince himself that he had found him. Sometimes, probably, he even vividly felt in and around himself this found god. But then he would certainly lose him. And so on until the end.
As the great Marxist critic G. V. Plekhanov rightly noted, one of the roots of Tolstoy’s religiosity was his childish faith, instilled in him from the beginning of his life. However, such an early suggestion could not have ensured the firmness of this faith in a man of great sincerity and great capacity for criticism. If the shelling of Tolstoy’s burning criticism did not crush Tolstoy’s faith in God, while the entire official Orthodox theological and liturgical structure was smashed to pieces, then there were special reasons for this, because special nourishing sources were found that again and again soldered Tolstoy’s faith in God.
Such a source was the main one and already noted by us in Tolstoy: his constant painful lynching, the unceasing work of his conscience. At the end of this chapter, we will note another reason for the strength of Tolstoy’s faith, another source that powerfully nourished it. But for now, let us stick with it.
The main thing in Tolstoy’s well-being and worldview was the awareness of the pain and torment of the entire life process, which is also characteristic to a high degree of Buddhism and of Asian moral and religious thought in general. Why is a person unhappy? Here is the main question. And that a person is unhappy – this seemed to Tolstoy indisputable thanks to his own experience.
Man’s unhappiness, Tolstoy argued, is closely connected with his so-called needs or passions. Misfortune is deprivation or suffering resulting from the misuse of the passions. Billions of human beings in time and space are released into the arena of the world, like greedy animals, boundlessly striving for the multiplication of bestial pleasures. At first glance, it seems that a person can satisfy all his lusts when he is rich, and that poverty is cursed precisely because it means the impossibility of satisfying one’s needs. Hence the desire to accumulate property. People are tearing each other’s property. They accumulate it for immediate enjoyment, as a reserve and as a source of social power. Therefore, a person has no boundaries in his greed for wealth and in his fear of poverty.
One of the best types of property, from the point of view of the satisfaction of passions, is human property, the right to dispose of other people. Slavery in all its forms is an indispensable part of wealth, whether it be a slave of old times, a serf, a proletarian, a debtor, a servant, a purchased wife, a mistress or a prostitute, in all these cases the owner can dispose of another person for himself, not inquiring about the will of the subordinate.
However, the amount of goods, power, of course, is not such as to satisfy all people. Wealth is distributed unevenly. Everyone strives to get the greatest share of it: hence the terrible battle of all against all for wealth, for material enjoyment. Hence the falsely directed work towards the multiplication of material wealth and profit at the same time. Hence sinful, criminal human associations, such as the state, churches, parties, trusts, unions, etc. People are united here not by love, but by rapacity, they join their forces in order to rob and enslave others.
All this is the main source of human unhappiness. But is it possible under such conditions to believe in God: why did the creator of all this hell create such a terrible world?
No, according to Tolstoy, one can and must believe in God. It remains unclear whether Tolstoy’s god is the creator of both good and evil. Tolstoy has no clear instructions for this. First of all, for Tolstoy, God is peace. He is a great realm of light and love. There is no movement in God. Tolstoy’s God is like Buddhist nirvana. He is bliss beyond time. And this bright ocean, this abyss of happiness calls people to itself. Man is part of God. He must return to God. This is his whole purpose. Only the approach to God is happiness. The satisfaction of material passions never gives happiness: it is only a seductive devilish mirage. The human body with its passions is, as it were, dirt adhering to the fiery spirit of man. It not only holds the human spirit captive, but it overshadows its plans, makes it convulsively rush about and smell fetidly.
So what is the healing of man? Where is the way to get rid of unhappiness? The path for Tolstoy, as for many Asian thinkers, is to give up worrying about the satisfaction of passions. However, it is not suicidal asceticism, much less simple suicide, that delivers a person from matter, but victory over it by replacing enmity towards people with love for them and helping them on the basis of rejecting everything superfluous, living by the labor of one’s own hands, carefully avoiding any subordination of one’s brother to oneself.
Tolstoy never presented his worldview as something new. He proudly found that he was only repeating the teachings of Confucius, Laodze, Buddha and the gospels. In Tolstoy’s teaching we have a deeply Asian morality. The moral of the rejection of science, labor, progress in general and simply the power of man over nature. Such power seems to Tolstoy unnecessary, because he does not appreciate the flourishing of material life, he does not see that the material and the highest peaks of the so-called spirit are one and the same thing, that it is matter at the stage of development of the brain and, moreover, at the stage of development of a highly organized union of refined and rich brains, that creates and, in particular, will create the highest forms of thought and feeling. The only thing that could be called divine, if we, the true champions of progress, did not seem musty and repulsive to this very word.
But, not to mention the fact that the dualist Tolstoy did not understand the unity of the material and the spiritual, it was not clear that consciousness and its greatest forms are precisely highly organized matter, he still did not believe that the paths of progress could be free from the destructive struggle of man against man and not irrigated with their blood. With all the more passion he called back. He called to stop, to change his mind, to renounce, to withdraw into the smallest, most necessary needs and to stop all struggle.
This terrible passivity of Tolstoy is not only common between him and the Asiatic sages, but it occurs among representatives of classes condemned by history, whenever progress destroys, first of all, the foundations of life familiar to them. That is why Tolstoy extends his hand to the West, to kindred minds like Rousseau, Sismondi, Carlyle and the like.
In his writings, for example, in the well-known fairy tale about Ivan the Fool and his kingdom, Tolstoy does not stop at the most extreme conclusions. He is not afraid that his kingdom of monotonous gardeners, without cities, without means of communication, without science and art, will be the kingdom of the holy fools. This does not scare Tolstoy. The holy fool seems to him, like to all his Asian brothers, something much higher than, say, Napoleon or Leonardo da Vinci.
Tolstoy rightly considers sexual love to be one of the main sources of enjoyment of the material order. What happens here? Will people not fight among themselves over the distribution of this good? Absolutely. For a long time Tolstoy preaches the root and basic sinfulness of carnal passion, but defends legal marriage in the name of procreation. But by the time of the Kreutzer Sonata, he takes it a step further. Together with Christianity of the ascetic order, he says: “He who is able to contain, let him contain.” Let him who is able to remain celibate do so. And, of course, a completely happy humanity is a celibate humanity. But such a humanity will die out in the shortest possible time! – Tolstoy objected with horror and bewilderment. Well, – the sage of Yasnaya Polyana answered, – this will be holy humanity, and holy humanity has no reason to live: it has fulfilled its duty and must return to God. Thus, at the bottom of Tolstoy’s wisdom, we find spiritual misery and death. The savior of mankind turns out to be its gloomy seducer. To follow the paths of Tolstoy means to embark on the road of decadence, to retreat back to savagery and to the destruction of the highest form of life that we know, that is, man and his society.
In order to get rid of the feeling of sin, from the ocean of crimes that all mankind seems to Tolstoy, Tolstoy is ready to condemn it to destruction. To a certain extent, the same thing happens with the individual. Tolstoy was a great personality. He lived on a gigantic scale, which is precisely why individual death seemed to him something infinitely terrible. Master, intellectual, sensualist, genius – all this screamed in him against the merciless word of fate: you will die! The problem of death, the debilitating premonitions of death, play a huge role in Tolstoy. Tolstoy struggles with death. Tolstoy does not want to acknowledge death. But death can be conquered only in God. God is immortality. To remain in peace means to die. To renounce the world, to go to God means to avoid death.
But after all, everything that makes a person a person belongs to the corporeal world. That which is divine in man: love, great peace, is it impersonal? Yes, yes. This means that one can become immortal only by blurring in an impersonal element, becoming like everyone else, round, like Platon Karataev from War and Peace.
Oh yes, yes! Dive into the world of men. A man is not afraid of death, because he does not suffer from individualism. A man lives by the labor of his hands, he does not exploit anyone, does not offend anyone. He strongly, unshakably believes in God. He is the vanguisher of wealth, greed, vain striving forward, he is the vanguisher of death. The peasant is a great station on the path to complete bliss, and there is one more amazing thing about the peasant: the peasant is the basic element of old Russia, that same Russia which Tolstoy madly loves, for which he fears, which cracks and collapses before his eyes under the blows of advancing capitalism. Of course, in this old Russia there is something even closer, even more native to Tolstoy, this is a nobleman. But the positions of the master, as Tolstoy gradually became convinced, could not be defended in any way. Barin is completely defeated. Broken economically and broken morally. A powerful class instinct prompts Tolstoy that if he does not want to surrender to the new, terrible, vulgar world of grubby capitalists and their petty-bourgeois henchmen, then he must dig in on peasant positions. Thus, Tolstoy’s moral, socio-philosophical wisdom is reinforced by his class instinct, in this way Tolstoy becomes from a master, despite the nobility, almost thanks to the nobility, an amazing representative of the middle peasant type, the average village thought in Russia in the era of the great collapse of the Russian village of the old peasant-landlord regime.
And this not only does not limit Tolstoy, but this is what ensured, unconsciously for his admirers, his worldwide success.
The genius of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, rarely wrote literary critical articles. However, he wrote several of them about Tolstoy. They are small, but extremely insightful. Lenin’s lines are, of course, the most brilliant thing ever written about Tolstoy.
As always, Lenin, without getting lost in biographical material, sees from an eagle’s eye the whole epoch and the true place in it of every truly socially active figure. For Lenin, Tolstoy is above all the spokesman for all the moods of the peasantry in the era of the great collapse of the old, pre-capitalist way of life. It would be easy to prove that all great writers are the product of some significant social crisis. Of course, the so-called organic epochs, when this or that class, undividedly dominating society, calmly develops the whole program, easily contribute to the so-called mature or, as they sometimes say, classical works. The formal definition of the classical is taken as a complete correspondence of form and content, their balance. With this point of view, it is easy to see in reality the often recurring phenomena of progressive Romanticism, when a new class in the struggle rushes to its zenith, has a great ideological and emotional content, but cannot find a completely appropriate form for it, and the era of retreating or falling Romanticism, which can be expressed in mysticism or black pessimism, but is also reflected in purely formal art, in which the artist does not think about the content at all and strives only for purely external mastery.
However, when we look closely at the so-called classical eras of art, we see that because in them, at least approximately, the calm maturity of the ruling class was realized, because it was reflected in works of art (architecture and sculpture of Phidias, fine arts of the 16th century, etc.), insofar as we are essentially already present at the transition to formalism. Classical art, which is characterized by balance, calmness, confidence, is itself already somewhat lifeless, and it is not for nothing that the overestimation of these pinnacle works of art so often appears, and the classics are compared as something more valuable to either archaic forms of art, or, on the contrary, the restless time following the classics or the baroque.
As far as literature is concerned, here, where idea and feeling must dominate, and where a word devoid of living content dies much faster than insufficiently inspired marbles or canvases, it can be said directly that the classics in the sense in which we have indicated above are not able to produce a truly living work of art for centuries. Suffice it to recall that Greek Classicism in literature, as its highest achievement, corresponds to the deeply class-agitated theater of Sophocles and Aristophanes.
True, it was common for both of these giants of ancient Hellas to seek reconciliation. Their task, in essence, was just the implementation of a calm and, in essence, an aristocratic state. But the turbulent, burning life that still beats clearly in the dramas and comedies of that time was precisely the product of an unfinished, and never ended, struggle for this social world and for all the voluntarily recognized dictatorship of the “best”.
That is why we again dare to assert that great writers are the product of major social changes, of an intensified social struggle. Great writers ride either on the crest of the coming surf of the new class, or on the outgoing wave of the falling aristocracy. Here we have no opportunity to apply such a method of social analysis to the works of various great writers of world literature, we must limit ourselves to only one grandiose example, Count Leo Tolstoy. But here, in the main monumental features, this work has already been done by Lenin.
For Lenin, Tolstoy is the great product of the era of crisis, which, in his opinion, runs from 1861 to 1905. Lenin cites the words of Levin, one of the heroes of the novel Anna Karenina: “Now everything has turned upside down in our country and is only just fitting in” and finds these words an apt description of the above-mentioned epoch. Lenin says about it: “L. N. Tolstoy acted as a great artist even under serfdom. In a number of brilliant works that he produced during his more than half a century of literary activity, he painted mainly the old, pre-revolutionary Russia, which remained after 1861 in semi-serfdom, rural Russia, the Russia of the landowner and peasant. Drawing this period in the historical life of Russia, Leo Tolstoy managed to raise so many great questions in his works, managed to rise to such artistic power that his works took one of the first places in world fiction. The epoch of the preparation of the revolution in one of the countries crushed by the feudal lords appeared, thanks to the ingenious coverage of Tolstoy, as a step forward in the artistic development of all mankind.”
But the revolution that Lenin speaks of here was, for the most part, a peasant revolution. Being the mouthpiece of this revolution, Tolstoy was precisely the mouthpiece of its peasant character. Lenin writes about this: “Belonging mainly to the era of 1861-1904, Tolstoy strikingly embodied in his works – both as an artist and as a thinker and preacher – the features of the historical originality of the entire first Russian revolution, its strength and its weakness. One of the main distinguishing features of our revolution is that it was a peasant-bourgeois revolution in an era of very high development of capitalism throughout the world and a relatively high development in Russia. It was a bourgeois revolution, because its immediate task was to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy, the Tsarist monarchy and to destroy landlordism, and not to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie. In particular, the peasantry was not aware of this last task, was not aware of its difference from the more immediate tasks of the struggle. And it was a peasant bourgeois revolution, because objective conditions put forward in the first place the question of changing the fundamental conditions of life of the peasantry, of breaking up the old medieval land tenure, of “clearing the land” for capitalism.”
It is in the nature of the peasant revolutionary sentiments, directed both against capitalism, hated by the nobleman Tolstoy, but also against the nobility, the state, the church, that Lenin sees the reason for the basic duality of the whole philosophy of life, which Tolstoy expressed in his works. Lenin says about it: “The works of Tolstoy expressed both the strength and weakness, both the power and limitations of the peasant mass movement. His passionate, often mercilessly sharp protest against the state and the police-state church conveys the mood of primitive peasant democracy, against which centuries of serfdom, bureaucratic arbitrariness and robbery, church Jesuitism, deceit and fraud have accumulated mountains of malice and hatred. His inflexible denial of private landed property conveys the psychology of the peasant masses at such a historical moment when the old medieval landownership, both landlord and state-owned “allotment” finally became an intolerable obstacle to the further development of the country and when this old landownership was inevitably subject to the most abrupt, merciless destruction. His incessant full of the deepest feeling and the most ardent indignation, denunciation of capitalism conveys all the horror of the patriarchal peasant, on whom a new, invisible, incomprehensible enemy began to approach, coming from somewhere in the city or from somewhere from abroad, destroying all the foundations of village life, bringing with it unprecedented ruin, poverty, starvation, savagery, prostitution, syphilis, all the disasters of the era of primitive accumulation, exacerbated a hundredfold by the transfer to Russian soil of the latest methods of robbery developed by Mr. Coupon.”
The peasant revolution, according to Lenin, is a dual phenomenon. It contains its own weakness. And this is fully reflected in the works of Tolstoy. Lenin splendidly characterizes this aspect of the matter in these words: “But an ardent protester, a passionate accuser, a great critic, at the same time, revealed in his works such a lack of understanding of the causes of the crisis and the means of overcoming the crisis that was approaching Russia, which is characteristic only of a patriarchal, naive peasant, and not of a European-educated writer. The struggle against the feudal and police state, against the monarchy turned into a denial of politics for him, led to the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil”, led to his complete isolation from the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905-1907. The fight against the state church was combined with the preaching of a new, purified religion, that is, a new, purified, refined poison for the oppressed masses. The denial of private property in land did not lead to the concentration of the entire struggle on the real enemy, on landownership and its political instrument of power, i.e., the monarchy. but to dreamy, vague, powerless sighs. The denunciation of capitalism and the disasters it inflicted on the masses was combined with a completely apathetic attitude towards the worldwide struggle for liberation waged by the international socialist proletariat.”
We have already written about how master Tolstoy, in his passionate resistance to capitalism as a plebeian soulless principle that destroys the dear old way of life, gradually became convinced that it was impossible to wage a struggle against captalism from the position of the landlord, because the main thing he wanted to reproach, for which he wanted to mercilessly condemn the hated capitalism, i.e., the cruel exploitation of man by man and greed for profit, was also quite characteristic of the lordly world itself, which, before Tolstoy’s eyes, left its stable forms and was openly drawn into speculation in land, bread, etc. This undermined nobility showed Tolstoy its weaknesses. It was impossible to beat the enemy, the yellow devil, the kingdom of money, while remaining the defender of the rich landowners. It was impossible to strike the culture of the ruling classes in its face and at the same time to highly appreciate the refined culture of the landowners’ estates.
And Tolstoy decided to take this step. He defended old Russia by idealizing it, by transforming the past into a picture of the future, in which the nobility was swept aside entirely and the basis of everything was the average peasant economy with its corresponding religious, philosophical, moral, artistic and technical superstructure. Having thus perceived Tolstoy in his contradictions, Lenin was equally far from total admiration for him, and from total denial. When in 1910 one of the most prominent publicists, V. Bazarov, gave an unusually high assessment of Tolstoy, Lenin burst into a magnificent protest. Bazarov wrote, among other things: “Our intelligentsia, broken and limp, turned into some kind of formless mental and moral slush, having reached the last verge of spiritual decay, unanimously recognized Tolstoy – the whole of Tolstoy – as their conscience.”
Lenin already protests against this assertion of Bazarov. Of course, the intelligentsia of that time, which seemed to Bazarov himself “limp”, very much wanted to accept Tolstoy as a whole, but could not, because just the revolutionary force of Tolstoy’s protest was unacceptable to them. However, the same Bazarov and the huge masses of the liberal Russian intelligentsia did everything possible to glorify Tolstoy as a national “conscience” with indecisive “reservations”. They contributed to the legend of a single Tolstoy, from which we drew our colors for the first summary portrait of Tolstoy at the beginning of our article, to determine the appearance of Tolstoy that is known to most average readers in the world.
Now, after the judgment of Lenin, more or less sufficiently represented in the above long quotations, we already know who Tolstoy is and what his teaching is. Rejecting him as a teacher of life, we, however, by no means reject him as a great monument of a certain deeply important era, we do not reject the valuable and eternal that is contained in his contradictory heritage. Lenin recognized Tolstoy as an “eternal writer”. He says about this: “Tolstoy not only gave works of art that will always be appreciated and read by the masses when they create humane living conditions for themselves, overthrowing the yoke of landowners and capitalists, he was able with remarkable power to convey the mood of the broad masses, oppressed by the modern order, to describe their situation, express their spontaneous feeling of protest and indignation.”
Back in 1910 Lenin predicted that the socialist revolution, which, of course, would help everyone and everyone to understand Tolstoy correctly, would by no means lead to the rejection of his works. He wrote: “Tolstoy the artist is known to an insignificant minority even in Russia. To make his great works truly the property of all, we need a struggle against such a social system, which has condemned millions and tens of millions to darkness, oppression, hard labor and poverty, we need a socialist revolution.”
A socialist revolution has taken place in our country. The State Publishing House of the USSR has already published a number of volumes of the gigantic ninety-volum complete works of Tolstoy, which includes everything he wrote down to diaries and letters. This edition contains much as yet unpublished material. It is produced with the utmost care. Tolstoy’s closest friends were invited to work on it, led by the executor of his will, Chertkov, and his daughter, Alexandra Lvovna. The editorial board includes the best experts in Tolstoy and editorial affairs from among our old professors. The publication is produced completely objectively. The special state editorial board, headed by the author of these lines, only sees to it that no changes or omissions are made for family reasons or considerations of the Tolstoy school, because this large edition should have the character of completely objective material, give Tolstoy’s works in full in that form, as they were written by him, and with all the options and comments that were given by Tolstoy himself. The editorial text is only in the nature of chronological and technical explanations, but by no means an interpretation of Tolstoy’s works. Of course, the government of the USSR is not limited to such an edition of Tolstoy. It also comes out in cheap editions, giving all the most important. But the most serious work lies ahead: this is an edition of Tolstoy in all the essential things he wrote, with a detailed, purely scientific, i.e., Marxist, commentary.
Then Lenin’s behest regarding Tolstoy will be fulfilled: his works will become accessible to everyone, and the internal structure of his consciousness, his works, full of contradictions, will become clear to everyone. Great and small, revolutionary and reactionary, truthful and tendentiously invented, everything will fall into place, and then Tolstoy will finally appear before mankind, forever alive, firmly rooted in his era and precisely because of this, he can become a contemporary of many centuries.
Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina, which, next to the even more grandiose epic War and Peace, is his main foundation as a great world writer, occupies a very peculiar position among his works.
On the one hand, this novel is also connected, moreover, by very strong ties, with those class-landowner positions that were characteristic of the relatively young Tolstoy and which were brilliantly reflected precisely in the novel War and Peace, on the other hand, in Anna Karenina those social observations of Tolstoy and those internal shifts made by him that led him, shortly after the end of Anna Karenina, to a complete break with class-landowner tendencies and to a peculiar replacement of them with Christian-peasant positions, are clearly visible.
In order to understand this peculiar place of the second great work of a brilliant writer in the evolution of his worldview and thus in the history of human culture, we need to analyze the peak of the previous period of his work, the epic “War and Peace”.
If the contemporaries of the original publication of this great work were still quite aware of its obvious class tendentiousness, then later such an understanding of Tolstoy’s main work was completely lost or, at least, extremely weakened.
The later reader, and also, to a very large extent, a foreign, non-Russian reader, is struck first of all by the extraordinary grandeur of the picture, which includes hundreds of various characters, introduces them into salons and headquarters, onto battlefields, and most importantly, into the very bowels of “souls” different people, young and old, noble and common, men and women. The colossal epic force with which the pictures of internal and external events unfold are shocking, calmly, confidently and majestically, as if nature itself creates its self-sufficient manifestations in front of you.
Separate amazing, wide-ranging scenes that no one had hitherto achieved in their brightness and no one after Tolstoy surpassed: a dog hunt, a ball and the sensations of a young maturing girl, a battle, etc., all this is quite rightly recognized as a high achievement of universal human verbal art. At the same time, the sincerity and truthfulness of the author, which seems to be something obvious, is terribly captivating. Some readers are also given the illusion of an almost unbelievable, almost superhuman objectivism. Indeed, on hundreds of pages, the author seems to be completely absent: events and experiences unfolding with extraordinary truthfulness and elusive logic in reality seem to be left to themselves, not invented by the writer, not arranged by him, but self-generated, deeply natural.
These features of objective persuasiveness are especially distinguished in the first part of the novel. If the great Flaubert, after reading the second part, wrote in a letter to a friend: “What a fall”, then he had in mind precisely the appearance in the work of long passages, where the author moves to the fore and himself directly speaks to the reader, philosophically, publicistically imposing on him his opinions.
But even these historical-philosophical reasonings of Tolstoy do not reduce the average reader’s assessment of his work as evidence of an unusually truthful one. The enormous, concentrated seriousness of the author subdues the average reader, and it seems to him that Tolstoy’s commentary on the events of 1812, that Tolstoy’s understanding of the historical element, the role of the individual in history, all this is just as true, just as undoubted, as the whole stream of artistically depicted figures and phenomena, in which these moral-sociological sermons are interspersed.
One of the most talented Marxist and, moreover, Bolshevik critics, later tragically murdered in his capacity as the ambassador of the Union, Vatslav Vorovsky (pseudonym Orlovsky) was himself largely deceived by Tolstoy’s imaginary objectivism. He lamented the fact that proletarian literature–inasmuch as it had already manifested itself in his time in Gorky’s story “Mother”–could not fail to appear tendentious, proving some truth, and not simply rejoicing in the very skill of reproducing life in all its brilliant diversity. Vorovsky directly pointed to “War and Peace” as an example of that pure art, which in essence it should supposedly always be. But the luminary and the father of Marxist criticism, G. V. Plekhanov, who, of course, perfectly noticed some striking features of Tolstoy’s depiction of the life of the aristocracy in the era of 1812, cites a number of considerations “justifying” Tolstoy for this supposedly “completely involuntary” trend. Of course, Plekhanov understood that Tolstoy was an aristocrat and that he was interested almost exclusively in aristocrats. Thus, he writes in his famous analysis of Tolstoy: “And what are the various heroes of Turgenev’s “Noble Nests”? What are the characters in War and Peace or Anna Karenina, all these Kuragins, Bolkonskys, Bezukhovs, Rostovs, Vronskys, Oblonskys, Levins, etc., etc.? All this is bone from bone, flesh from the flesh of our nobility. In Tolstoy’s works, the “people” appears only in passing and only to the extent that the artist needs it in order to depict the state of mind of the hero-nobleman: remember, for example, the soldier Platon Karataev, bringing peace to the restless soul of Count Pyotr Bezukhov.”
Plekhanov also sees that in this novel Tolstoy not only concentrates all his interest on aristocrats, but that he avoids introducing into his broad picture of serfdom in Russia–let us remember this–the depiction of all the damned aspects of shameful serfdom. We take the liberty of quoting for our American readers a rather lengthy extract from Plekhanov’s article to show to what extent even the revolutionary, proletarian, Marxist critic was defeated, enchanted by Tolstoy’s so-called “psychological realism”: “Drawing the Otradnoye idyll, Tolstoy did not at all set himself the goal of hiding or brightening up anything: he did not even think about the Otradnoye serfs. His attention was focused on the depiction of Nikolai Rostov’s love for Sophia, and the participation of serfs in Christmastime amusements was depicted by him completely in passing and simply because it was impossible not to portray it: it would have come out inconsistent with reality. If the everyday scenes painted by him turn out to be a real idyll, then this is not the fault of the artist and not his merit. What was he to do if such idyllic scenes took place despite all the horrors of serfdom? Tolstoy, of course, was well aware of the existence of these horrors. But he did not see the slightest need to draw them, since his heroes were not serfs, but well-bred, noble aristocrats in their own way. Knowing our serf life and supplementing with our own imagination what was not told by the artist, we can reasonably assume that one or another of the Otradnoye serfs, who amused themselves at Christmas time with young gentlemen, was very soon after subjected to a shameful punishment in the stable. But after all, it was not the young gentlemen who punished, not Natasha, not Sonya, not Nikolai, and not even the old Count Rostov. In Otradnoye, the manager Mitenka ordered the punishments. It follows that Tolstoy had nothing to talk about punishments; he was talking about the nobles: about Natasha, Sonya, Nikolai, the old count, etc. In the novels of the nobility, even if they were multi-volume, there was little room for depicting people’s grief.”
Tolstoy himself, however, was well aware of the significance of his analysis. He was fully aware that this was a polemical work, that it was a passionate political pamphlet and a colossal glorification of his own class. He realized, probably, even more, namely, what a huge power in his hands is precisely the seemingly so masterfully carried out, apparent truthfulness of everything he depicts.
At the time of writing War and Peace, Tolstoy felt completely in solidarity with all the landowners. Even a very rosy liberal, the recently deceased professor Gruzinsky, as an honest scientist, cannot hide Tolstoy’s extreme tendentiousness from his readers, although he is looking for justifications for this.
Professor Gruzinsky points out that initially Tolstoy decided to speak directly in War and Peace about “the atrocities of the old landlords”, but that “the increased emphasis in society and in the press on the horrors of serfdom disgusted Tolstoy’s peculiar nature”, which caused his spirit of contradiction to expose himself as a landowner and an aristocrat. Professor Gruzinsky is only partly right: the spirit of contradiction was natural here, he considered the intensified criticism of the wild landowners and the hell of serfdom as an attack on his class, and in the novel War and Peace he wanted to give the hated bourgeoisie, with their great leader Chernyshevsky at the head, an image of depth and charms of noble culture and noble soul. Tolstoy himself openly polemicizes against the condemnation of serfdom. He wrote in his article in the Russian Archive in 1868: “Studying letters, diaries, legends of that time, I did not find all the horrors of this rampage to a greater extent than I find them now or ever. If in our conception an opinion was formed about the nature of the self-will and brute force of that time, it is only because in the legends, notes, stories and novels from that time the prominent cases of violence have reached us. To conclude that the prevailing character of that time was riot is just as unfair as a person who sees only the tops of trees from behind a mountain would unfairly conclude that there is nothing in this area but trees.”
From this remark of Tolstoy, it is clear that Plekhanov is completely wrong in thinking that Tolstoy, so to speak, technically or in the course of the story, did not have to touch on the horrors of serfdom: he deliberately and tendentiously wanted to hush them up.
In the original version of the novel, there was a rather dirty detail of the life of the patriarch-aristocrat, the old man Bolkonsky. There he has both a serf mistress and a child sent by him to an orphanage. But Tolstoy then carefully erased this inhuman detail from his novel so as not to compromise one of his favorite characters. And how “nice” it sounded initially, the reader can judge by this extract from the original edition of the novel: “Alexandra was the maid of the princess, the baby was the son of the prince. This was already the fifth, and they were all sent to an orphanage, and the mother was returning back. Everyone knew this, but the prince pretended as if it had not happened, and everyone pretended the same way, and when Alexandra returned, everyone doubted whether it was all real. Alexandra’s children began to be born one-and-a-half years after the prince’s widowhood.”
Similarly, according to the original plan, one of the main characters of the novel, Nikolai Rostov, was supposed to have a serf concubine, which should have made it possible to describe Sonya’s jealousy towards her. This was also carefully thrown out by Tolstoy. Protect your class, so defend to the end!
I have already said that contemporaries, to whom the whole formulation of the question was clearer and closer, understood perfectly well that Tolstoy’s realism was only an external weapon that covered his desire to give an ingenious protection, ingenious idealization to his class. This was understood by both the enemies of this class and its friends. The novel was met with a hail of critical articles, indignation, ridicule and caricatures from the leading circles of the country. But on the other hand, perhaps the most talented and insightful of the deeply conservative critics, Konstantin Leontiev, praised Tolstoy as a class writer of the aristocracy and he so definitely and so clearly, and so talentedly noted the importance of realism as a method of persuasiveness, that we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of citing here his words in full: “Why I preferred the word “political” over the word “historical” merit, I will now tell. The expression “historical” merit of the writer means rather the merit of accuracy, fidelity of the image, than the merit of a strong and useful influence ... That is why. It is not yet easy to decide how true the depiction of the era in War and Peace is, but it is easy to admit that this depiction leaves a deep patriotic imprint in the soul of the reader. With our inclination to always suspect something in ourselves, to see in everything that is bad and weak before good and strong – the most external methods of Count Tolstoy, sometimes to a stretch thin and picky, sometimes to the point of rudeness – I won’t even say real, but realistic or naturalistic are very useful. If it had been written a little more ideally, simply, more generally, perhaps they would not have believed it. And when a Russian reader sees that Count Tolstoy is still much more attentive and captious than he is when he sees this pet of the “Gogolian” and “semi-Gogolian” period, that in Lev Nikolaevich that hero (the real hero) “sniffled”, that one “sobbed”, that one “squealed”; one hero is timid, another is intriguing, the third is a downright scoundrel, but dies for his homeland (for example, young Kuragin); when this ever-wavering Russian reader notices that Count Tolstoy laughs a little at almost all the characters (it seems, at everyone, with the exception of: Tsar Alexander Pavlovich, Andrei Bolkonsky and the evil Dolokhov, for some reason), then he, the reader, is already disposed to believe more in everything good, lofty, ideal. Secondly, Count Tolstoy is also right because, I repeat, that consciously or unconsciously, he did a patriotic service to the readers with all these petty outward humiliations of life; they love it and because of this they believe more in the lofty and are more amazed at what is elegant in it.”
As I have already said, the novel Anna Karenina is the next great step in Tolstoy’s self-awareness and his social position. It should be immediately noted that the profound changes that took place in Tolstoy were caused not so much by his internal spiritual growth as by external social processes and, above all, by the further course of the disintegration of the landlord economy under the blows of advancing capitalism. At the time of War and Peace, Tolstoy, as we see, wanted to glorify his class. To do this, he chose a moment that seemed to him something like a climax in the life of the nobility. The novel was historical. This helped to obscure those features of noble life that could shock, to show the nobility through the haze of time.
Anna Karenina gives a broad picture of the life and state of mind of the landlord aristocracy in the second half of the 1860s. It keenly feels the disintegration of the nobility, firstly, economic disintegration, and secondly, the internal disintegration resulting from this. The nobility lost all its aplomb. Part of it swam with the current of those new types of economic accumulation that capitalism opened up. For the most part, however, awkwardly, clumsily, so that from this the process of ruin intensified even more.
The heroes of the novel are the same aristocrats as in War and Peace. But in their actions and speeches their inner uncertainty is reflected. The class psychology there is still strong and harmonious in its own way. Here it is gradually falling apart.
The “soul” of the somewhat obtuse Vronsky, a man generally unsure of himself, of his future path, is far from whole. Oblonsky’s outward cheerfulness cannot for a moment hide from us that here is given a brilliant image of a landowner who is decomposing both economically and morally. Even more typical are the convulsive throwings of Konstantin Levin, the undoubted bearer of the ideas and feelings of the then Tolstoy, and the somewhat eerie image of his brother looming over his shoulder with some strange surroundings and sick, with a paradoxical transition to the positions of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, in general, however, left in shadows and, obviously, extremely unsympathetic to the author.
As a social picture, the novel “Anna Karenina” was the result of Tolstoy’s long struggle for himself as a master, as a landowner. Just at this time, Tolstoy was buying land, trying to get stronger economically, talking in different ways about the special role of the landowner in relation to the economy of the country and the peasantry. In general, he showed a great and intense economic activity. The result was a huge disappointment, a sense of being out of touch with his class and, to a large extent, with himself.
Everything in the novel that concerns a negative description of the decay of the nobility, everything that moves around Levin himself with his plans, eccentricities, failures and upsurges, all this testifies to the painful process of Tolstoy’s transition from the landowner’s point of view to some other. Not long before that, Tolstoy had argued the need to liberate the landless peasants, and to the fear that this would lead to proletarianization, he was inclined, paradoxically, to respond with some kind of rants about the merits of the proletariat, which, of course, only covered up a rather frank, greedy desire to grab all the land for himself. By the time Anna Karenina was written, we already come across in Tolstoy’s economic discourses a situation that has nothing in common with the nobility. In one of the notebooks of 1865 we read: “Russia’s world-wide task is to introduce into the world the idea of a social order without landed property. “La propriete c’est le vol” (property is theft) will remain more true than the truth of the English constitution, as long as the human race continues. This is an absolute truth, but there are also relative truths arising from it–applications. The first of these relative truths is the view of the Russian people on property. The Russian people denies the most durable property, the most independent of labor, and the property that, more than any other, restricts the right to acquire property by other people, land property. This truth is not a dream - it is a fact expressed in the communities of peasants, in the communities of Cossacks. This truth is understood equally by a learned Russian and a peasant who says: Let them write us down as Cossacks, and the land will be free.”
Only desperation in some way of reconciling the interests of the landowners with the peasants, some possibility of resistance to destructive forces could lead to such a shift in the moods and convictions of a very strong, very caring, sometimes cruelly prudent landowner, as Tolstoy showed himself at that time. From this point of view, “Anna Karenina” in the context of the Levin part of the novel is the most important document both for understanding the essence of the economic and social revolution of that era, and for understanding the movement of Tolstoy’s consciousness. Economic questions occupied him closely, although he mentions Levin in one place: “Levin considered all talk of economic reorganization to be nonsense,” and although this shows a disdainful attitude towards some kind of semi-Marxism, about which, perhaps, at that time Tolstoy heard something obscure, the accursed reality grabbed his heart so tightly that in fact he speaks precisely about himself when he testifies: “Talk about the harvest, hiring workers, etc., which, Levin knew, is usually considered something very low, was now the only thing that seemed important to Levin. “Perhaps it didn’t matter under serfdom, or it didn’t matter in England. In both cases the very conditions are specified; but with us now, when all this has turned upside down and is only just beginning to fit in, the question of how these conditions will fit is the only important question in Russia,” thought Levin.”
So, the socio-economic picture contained in the novel offered to the attention of readers, both objectively and subjectively, serves as a transition to the peasant point of view which Tolstoy developed and which for the first time gave the role of relative unity to his worldview, making him that kind of reactionary-revolutionary figure that the whole world was then introduced to.
But in Anna Karenina we have not only this picture. This novel is not only the “result” of the struggle against the advancing capitalism and the story of the search for ways to protect the old order from destructive forces. This is not only a description of Levin’s life and struggle on social grounds. It is also a novel devoted to the issues of love and marriage, and in this part of it, Anna herself is the central figure.
If the importance of the socio-economic content of the novel is emphasized by the fact that Levin is a transparent self-portrait, then, on the other hand, the importance of this second strip of problems treated in the novel is emphasized by the fact that the whole work is named after the central figure of this element in the novel. It is impossible to think that the thoughts that Tolstoy wanted to put into practice, elucidating in a peculiar way the questions of love and marriage, are, from the point of view of social preaching, in some way divorced from his social tendencies.
One can only say that in the Levinian strip of the novel, Tolstoy does not actually come to any conclusion: he is shaken, he searches, he almost despairs. With restrained satire he paints his perishing class. He pins all his hopes on those who love the truth in it, like Levin, and still, not only he cannot guarantee that they will find a solid path, but he does not even know well whether such a path exists.
On the contrary, in the Karenina section of the novel, the most fictionally perfect, strikingly lively and dizzyingly captivating, the section in which Tolstoy’s artistic genius shows itself in all its brilliance, he is an absolutely confident teacher of life. He behaves in a way that only the possessor of the truth can behave. If he writes in the form of an epigraph to his novel the words put into the mouth of a deity: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay,” then this shows how much he feels like a prophet, revealing true light to humanity.
Meanwhile, Tolstoy’s confidence in this part of the novel, i.e., in posing the problem of love and marriage, stemmed only from the fact that here he was a more consistent reactionary. Already at that time, thoughts and feelings were ripening in Tolstoy, which much later would violently appear in the Kreutzer Sonata. Already in the 1860s, Tolstoy felt sexual love as a terrible thing. He already knew it well as depravity. Several times, with rapture, with all the strength of the voluptuousness hidden in him, he threw himself into the muddy waves of the most unrestrained and basest sexual adventures.
But the teacher of life, but the judge of himself, but the constant checker of the state of his soul, noted with horror the transience of moments of acute satisfaction and the terrible bitter taste that is characteristic of them, noted with horror that spiritual darkness and dirt which remained as a result of such “vicious weaknesses”.
According to the old noble views in which he was brought up, Tolstoy could seek salvation from this pool either in monasticism, in renunciation of sexual life – and this problem worried Tolstoy for a long time – or in pure marriage. Tolstoy at the end of his bachelor life intensely and with sweet hope dreamed of an innocent and pure girl who would become the girlfriend of his life, of lofty enlightened love, of a holy and deeply moral marriage. He tried his best to find it. These searches are reflected in the novel by the story of Levin and Kitty.
In that era, Tolstoy still stands on the point of view of recognizing the possibility of a happy and pure marriage. He knows that this is not an easy task. He knows that everything is here: sexual life itself, childbirth with its torments and dangers, harmonization of the existence of two different people into one system – that all this is fraught with complications and often torments. But the whole depth of the tragedy of marriage, that very marriage in which he so firmly believed, Tolstoy at that time was not yet aware of. With a firm voice he says to the world: “Carnal love, with all its undeniable beauty and excitement, which I know as well as anyone and which I can describe as well as anyone, is in itself a diabolical temptation. However, one can come to terms with this need for a person, since reproduction is determined by its satisfaction. If you look at marriage as an institution supposedly created to satisfy your lust, male or female, then you thereby reveal a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of marriage and the family. Marriage is not a source of pleasure either for a husband, much less for a wife: marriage is a severe duty, marriage is truly a chain that must be carried patiently and reverently. And the real justification for marriage is in the children.”
This is exactly how Lev Nikolaevich builds his own family and – in general, as we know – his wife completely succumbed in this case to his leadership. She endlessly bore him children as a young woman and an old woman, she fed and nursed them, healed, buried or worried along with them on the further paths of their lives. She was a wonderful mother. She also had many traits that made her, from Tolstoy’s point of view, from the point of view of that ideal marriage that Tolstoy teaches about in Anna Karenina, a wonderful wife. A devoted friend, a good hostess. What else?
The beginning of the love of Lev Nikolaevich and Sofya Andreevna is described with scrupulous accuracy in Anna Karenina. There was a lot of young mutual love. For a very long time, until gray hair, there was a mutual desire. On the part of Sofya Andreevna there was reverence for the great husband. But there was no happiness. Or almost none at all. And by the end it all turned into a terrible tragedy. Among the mass of accusations that Countess Tolstaya raises in her book against Lev Nikolaevich, the loudest are those in which she speaks of the merciless suppression of her personality, of her eternal pregnancies, of this ruthless, biblical: give birth! “Let a woman give birth in pain to a child.”
With a thick, imperious hand, he built his Yasnaya Polyana idyll according to his old noble view, but it turned out that two enemies lived under the roof and that Tolstoy finally had to flee, as if from a place of plague, from this very Yasnaya Polyana, and his wife looked back with horror at all the past.
By the time of The Kreutzer Sonata, all this was already clear to Tolstoy: there are no reservations, no illusions. The devil, who, according to Tolstoy, reigns over the entire field of eroticism, makes no exception for marriage. Meanwhile, only from two points of view could one justify the cruelest trial of the talented, sympathetic heroine of the novel, which was carried out by its author.
Indeed, what is the significance of the immediate romance between Karenina and Vronsky? With dazzling artistic power, a monstrous knowledge of all the experiences of not only men, but also women in the erotic field, Tolstoy draws the rapprochement of two young people, the torment and joy of love, the conflict of their passion with “duty” and the death of the heroine. Tolstoy tells us all the time: “Look how rich in possibilities our body is, how it seduces us and how it deceives us, with what smells, colors, forms it covers the inevitable disappointment. If I captivate you with a masterful depiction of love experiences, then this is only to tell you the whole truth about them, to show you later its reverse side, that other terrible truth about jealousy, repentance, shame, with which sexual passion is associated.”
Okay, we answer. “But why are you telling us, teacher? What was Anna supposed to do: was she supposed to stifle her passion for Vronsky, kill the living feeling in herself, and then joylessly drag out her miserable lot with her hateful husband?” Yes, the teacher replies. “That is exactly what she should have done. She had to do it in the name of the child. She had to sacrifice herself to him. She had to do this because of the sanctity of marriage and the commitments she had made.”
And we told him: but do you really think, teacher, that the continuation of marriage with such a soulless sentimental fantosh, with such a righteously base mummy like Karenin, would create a healthy environment for the development of a boy? Do you think that the deep lies on which the world of this family would rest would not poison it through and through? Do you think that a mother who killed herself, full of unsatisfied passion and invincible, although hidden hatred for the violence committed against her, would be such a suitable educator for her son? Not to mention that one can still ask oneself why one person, in this case Anna, should be completely sacrificed for the sake of some accidental, partial and dubious benefits of another person, in this case her son.
Tolstoy could answer this question with certainty only in that period of time when he considered an indestructible marriage as a matter of duty something really stable and necessary. But his own example showed how far from the truth this construction is.
There is another point of view from which one could demand abstinence from Anna. It could also be said that sexual love in general is dirty and vicious, and that it must be abstained from it in the name of virginity. But then one asks what is more dirty and vicious: the connection of two young people who love each other, find joy in each other, or the connection from which Anna’s son was born, that is, an accidental and in this respect stupidly depraved connection with an unloved man, whom someone’s cold calculation had given out to Anna. No, in fact Tolstoy’s tendencies regarding marriage and love in Anna Karenina are extremely weak and ugly. His thesis remains unproven. If Anna dies, then she dies because of the ugly social system, which has piled up a huge pile of dirt, shame, threats, misfortunes, and fear on the way to an outright divorce. Tolstoy, however, does not protest with a single word against all these state and church shackles that the society of that time wore in the sphere of love. The fact of the matter is that in this strip of the novel, Tolstoy, already shaken by his conservatism in relation to economic questions, remains a gloomy reactionary. The novel polemicizes not against the state and the church, not against the lie of marriage without love, but for the state, for the church, for matchmaking, for condemning gossip, for the cruel persecution of free love, against human feelings, against the right of the individual to dispose of himself.
In this novel, just as in the first, Tolstoy acts as a polemicist. After all, not only the nobleman and the merchant competed in the public arena at that time. If Tolstoy later transferred his foundations to peasant soil, then Tolstoyan anarchism could and did grow only on this dual reactionary-revolutionary soil.
Part of the petty bourgeoisie also managed to become spokesmen for the peasant revolution, but in a much purer and deeper way than Tolstoy: such were the revolutionary populists, and above all Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, the great ideologists of revolutionary populism. And they did not limit themselves only to the amazingly correct resolution of economic issues for that time, going at the same time much further than Levin, they resolved family issues, too, in a completely different way than Tolstoy. For them, a man and a woman were or should have become strong, bright, intelligent, free personalities, able to dispose of themselves and make alliances with each other according to their feelings. A brilliant solution to these questions, which was pronounced then precisely due to the rise of women, was given by Chernyshevsky in his novel What Is To Be Done?
Tolstoy understood, of course, that the disintegration brought by capitalism and the radical revolution marching under the flag of socialism are not the same thing. But as a nobleman, he could call on the help of a peasant working with his own hands and even bow before this neighbor, this recent slave, but certainly not borrow wisdom from a strange camp, from the damned city, where radical revolutionaries and the socialist proletariat seemed to him only seriously lost and unhappy sons of the same intolerable new spirit.
And Tolstoy in Anna Karenina tries directly to oppose the preaching of free love. He tries to warn his class against such phenomena. For him, not only the dubious characteristics of Oblonsky, frivolity, stupidity, bureaucratic arrogance, etc., are serious signs of the corruption of the aristocracy still dear to him, but Anna’s love for Vronsky, her attempt to be truthful in this love, also seem to him as signs of the corruption of his class. And, imagining himself a prophet of a formidable god, he raises his finger and thunders about God’s vengeance to all those who destroy the foundations of noble life.
Such is the social and moral content of this novel. It is great not because of its tendency. Its tendencies are antipathetic and weak. It is great because, in defending these tendencies of his, Tolstoy has developed such an inexhaustible gallery of luxuriously varied paintings.
First, Tolstoy’s tendencies have not yet completely died out, if not in Russia, then throughout the world. It is good to revisit them when they are presented by such a titan and with such abundance of figurative evidence. And secondly, in addition to his tendencies, often contrary to them, Tolstoy speaks as a connoisseur of life and an enthusiastic portrayer of it. And then we get something non-Tolstoyan, even often anti-Tolstoyan, from the hands of Tolstoy. We get artistically, ingeniously concentrated clots of life itself in its amazing power.
One of Tolstoy’s very zealous and somewhat narrow-minded followers, Nikiforov, told with amazement that Tolstoy, who generally loved Maupassant for his tart and melancholy rendering of the evils of life, advocated for the selected collected works of this writer some kind of story about a dog in which not only there was not a single edge of morality visible, but where even that charming frivolity, that Gallic piquancy which plays such a significant role in Maupassant, sounded especially powefully. “Be afraid of God, Lev Nikolaevich! What is so great about this story?” exclaimed the fat man. “There really is nothing instructive,” Tolstoy replied. “but it is very well written.”
Here it was the artist who spoke through his lips. And the artistic principle in Tolstoy, which he so often, almost constantly violated, on which he loaded the burden of his Christian ideas, was by no means something empty either: it was filled with boundless admiration for the “picture” of the life stream, intense sensual passion, bright ironic mind, huge, not artificially holy, but living, an almost animal love for man and the world, direct, passionate anger against the same immediate, obvious injustice.
Such was, so to speak, the ingenious biological material of Tolstoy the artist, layered on, ingrained into, merged with the social image of Tolstoy – the aristocrat of the era of the decomposition of this class. And then, on top of this, already consciously, often not without falsehood, the constructed image of the holy preacher of the new peasant truth, from the height of which it is possible and necessary to reject not only the immediate enemy – the capitalist world, but also the nobility who had its gilded robes thrown off; not only the misunderstood and the unfortunate socialism of the democratic lower classes of the hated city, but even all that spontaneous passion, all that fiery nature that Tolstoy felt in himself and which he was ready to sacrifice to his Asiatic ideal of movement through love for peace, bordering on that very death, from which Tolstoy fled with such horror.
In Gorky’s wonderful characterization of Tolstoy, the most valuable thing is precisely that no one ever felt so deeply this perversion of the class, other than this masculine, repentant nobleman, other than this indefatigable, luxurious, doubtful man overflowing with life and strength, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.
Thus, Tolstoy, and in particular his novel Anna Karenina, is recognized by us as a huge asset of human culture because, firstly, it is a monument of a very important social era; because, secondly, by criticizing Tolstoy, overcoming Tolstoy, we grow; because, thirdly, along the way, everywhere, and perhaps especially in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy gives so many artistically designed pieces of genuine external and internal reality.