I read in one of those Russian transliterations that Tolstoy's novels are the only ones with characters of all 16 types.
So what type is he??
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I read in one of those Russian transliterations that Tolstoy's novels are the only ones with characters of all 16 types.
So what type is he??
Well, clearly he's God, writing a book about himself.
Where Fyodor Dostoevsky's manner of speaking is more about imparting one's own view of the individual, the future, the spiritual side of man, Leo Tostoy's manner of speaking is more in general (instead of "a real gentleman" the idealization of a gentleman that Dostoevsky speaks of Tolstoy will say "all people"); this is quite an interesting contrast. I believe it takes a person out of the frame of mind of N and puts them in the territory of S because of this view they have about man.
What are you trying to say?Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
I'm not entirely certain; I'm still thinking of extrapolating functions from his quotes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Absurd
I'm looking forward to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
That's interesting, you're right. Tolstoy is extremely neutral when doing the "omniscient narrator" thing, while Dostoevsky filters through his values even when writing from 3rd person.Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
There are a lot of moral statements in his writing, values more individual endeavor over collective in terms of getting more moral action from the individual rather than a collective institution; he has a lot of faith in love as a worth while virtue; I believe that he has Fi valuing, Delta qualities, making him ISTp type.Quote:
Originally Posted by cherrysidecar
I don't have a personal judgment, but remember reading something convincing about him being EII.
Why? because he can write? So can um...Mark Twain, maybe he's EII too?Quote:
Originally Posted by Esaman
He's ethical to me. Read his The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Maritsa.
Why? because he speaks of ethics, because he writes about LOVE. Oh God forbid that a Thinker type should do the same?Quote:
Originally Posted by Absurd
Think about it, if he's ethical, where would that place him and in what quadra. by putting an F in there, you're not just changing his type, you're changing his SOCIETY.
I have a biography on Tolstoy that I just started. I'll read it and give you my opinion. :P
You can write and speak as well and it makes you logical and what is his society?Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
His society is one which values the individual efforts as opposed to Collective; he isn't in favor of collective institutions, like corporations, ect. DeltaQuote:
Originally Posted by Absurd
:Te: blocked with :Si:
Delta types have the philosophy that they will have to rely on their own industriousness to achieve their goals rather than on luck, speculation, group effort, or strong leadership.
Groups need to be focused on some specific productive activity or topic of discussion, or else they fall apart. In Delta groups, there is a lot of splintering and decentralization. This allows for more focused and productive interaction with only those who share your particular interests or sentiments.
He preaches nonresistance to evil by violence, advises us to confine ourselves to the weapon of criticism, analyses the emotions of the representatives and defenders of the existing order - when he exposes all the intentional and unintentional hypocrisy of their constant references to the public good, one has to credit him with a great civic service, in other words, everything he writes is imbued with his moral and religious tendency plus some of Tolstoy’s followers consider themselves extreme revolutionaries refusing to do military service.
Somewhat of a Gandhi like figure to me when wanting to compare, I'm sure Gandhi is SLI in your book as well, Maritsa.
Are these things type related or are they a necessity of society/upbringing?Quote:
Originally Posted by Absurd
I'm not sure if you're talking about Tolstoy anymore with the Te blocked with Si, but I'm gonna go ahead and say he's TeNi. Intuitive guess based on Anna Karenina which is my fave book of all time, and War and Peace which I just started and is not nearly as good, but shows a lot about how he observes people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
Also, if I really enjoy Dostoevsky am I delusional or mis-typed? Quasi-identicals are not supposed to get each other's writing, supposedly, but I've never understood this. And tcauld just said I should reconsider my typing because of my love of ENFps.
Also sorry to third-wheel on the two of you here .. idk if this is already common knowledge in this forum, but SOMEONE likes to jump into my threads just to banter with Maritsa ;)
No, neither one; many of my LSI friends enjoy Dostoevsky, they say because of how complex his characters are and because of their depth; I personally find it a bit boring because I relate to his writing so much; um, what I guess I'm looking for are some of the things that I can't produce like :Si: :Fe: in Dumas, and :Te: :Si: in Newsweek, or fact related journals and publications. I like Data of Te/S and the stories of dynamic nature in Si/Fe. We seek out things to "unlock out subconscious" perception of things, so to say.Quote:
Originally Posted by cherrysidecar
That's certainly a very strong possibility. I'm thinking about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by cherrysidecar
yeah I think TeNi could be it. Gonna read this book anyway though. from what I understand, he had a bit of a god-complex.
No, that sounds like TiNe.. LIIs would totally pull something like that on their wives. But then these artist types become senile when they get older and it's hard to tell if it's type-related at that point..Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
he was also *heavily* influenced by a close friend/advisor who kind of poisoned him against his wife (urging him to give away his money instead of leaving it for his wife/children). It was a very difficult last few years of his life. WATCH THE MOVIE (The Last Station).Quote:
Originally Posted by cherrysidecar
Somehow people can let themselves be poisoned by relations. I'm going to stick with poor understanding of Se and I'm going to stick with Fi valuing and ISTp for now, especially after knowing that he was "poisoned" against his wife. But I'll take the consideration that his sanity may have influenced his personality a great bit and think about how that might factor into the possibility of LIE.Quote:
Originally Posted by redbaron
I was gonna read one of the English translations of War and Peace once, until I found out it was an abridged version. Oh well.
Ethical!
IMO ESI is very possible.
I'm OK with considering ISTp..at first I thought no way because from a modern day ISTp author I would expect something way shorter and weirder/controversial, rather than a "broad tableau of contemporary life." But back then even introverts had a wide social circle (the one they were born into). And I think the Anna + Vronsky pairing is delta irrational dual but I can't really back that up, I just want them to be a dual pairing and I want it to be irrational.Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritsa Darmandzhyan
I do know for certain, though, the character Levin is supposed to be semi-autobiographical of Tolstoy, and he does seem like Si leading.
LSI-Se. initially thought ESI-Se, then considered EII-Fi, but he's much different from dostoevsky, as maritsa noted. the focus is a bit more ideological (devoting entire chapters to these mathematical/philosophical maxims that underpin the activity of troops/citizens in various situations), and while morality plays an important role, it's more of a reactive espousal, not something laden in everything he says, like the sentimentality of dostoevsky; tolstoy seems more concerned with the devolution of ethics on a collective level (discussing how the french troops faded and turned on one another after taking moscow, interspersed with scenes of the idle ballroom chatter in petersburg) than any specific defects of his characters (he'll use trivial objects as symbols, like snuff boxes, or phrases of speech -- a very Se/Ni way of encapsulating broader attitudes). the central issue throughout war and peace is what really moves and shakes worlds; how it is that with the most intricate and organized set of social planning, people still seem to fall back into certain roles, propelled by forces not fully in their grasp; his annoyance with how historians embellish events that in essence had no real structure or meaning is colored by these kind of speculations (modeling the spirit of an army as the 'hidden variable' in a simplified equation). TiSe is showcased in the occasional repetitiveness of certain points, explaining in three different ways why the russians didn't completely sack the french, who were already destroyed, during the retreat, before diving into another mystic exploration. also, his descriptions of the upper class's social gatherings carry the sensitized distaste I've observed in virtually every beta habituated to delta formalities.
I thought Ti was sensitive to repetitive information? As in, they don't like it? But that might be because W&P was published in installments and he had to be repetitive.Quote:
Originally Posted by strrrng
Very interesting, I agree and do the same with my mostly delta family gatherings. Never thought it would fit neatly into quadras though.Quote:
also, his descriptions of the upper class's social gatherings carry the sensitized distaste I've observed in virtually every beta habituated to delta formalities.
Delta formalties? What is that? Me not shaking your hand and closing my door to be left alone?Quote:
Originally Posted by strrrng
And I thought Beta NFs were the "noble"/upper class types.
that's the thing, betas are acutely aware of the nuances of those kinds of things, but there's still always an implicit boundary that keeps them from ever being fully invested in them. for example, at family gatherings, which usually occur at my dad's picket fence mansion, my EIE-Ni friend and I will invariably greet each other with a somewhat scandalous glance amidst the prelude chatter, like we know it's just another dance and whatever. delta formalities aren't social as such, they're like the boundaries of social interaction, how a specific program is to be met, whereas betas, while tending to a more grim kind of a formality in their closer-knit interactions, always structure it around each others' inner states, the personal meaning of certain expressions that solidify the reason they're there; it isn't this mechanized quid pro quo. granted, this view is intensified in beta due to the need for social structure, but that's the point.
as for the Ti repetitiveness, it's twofold. on the one hand, Ti is prone to condensing things; however (and I've noticed this especially with beta Ti), when a point is deemed obvious, there can be a rigor in the explanation that carries redundancy to ensure that it's been addressed in the most complete way. in the example of how the russians didn't fully sack the french, he didn't so much rehash details as slightly reframe the premise of what he was saying, to repulse whatever deluded notions the historians may have had about napoleon's genius and whatnot, and thereby prove that such events in fact don't have that kind of majestic order. I've done this before with people if they ask a stupid question, trying to show every angle so that such redundancies can be avoided.
I didn't understand half of that, but I'll take your word for it.Quote:
Originally Posted by strrrng
I've only read Anna Karenina a long awhile back, so I can't really comment on type. I liked his non fiction/Christian activist work ("The Kingdom of God is Within You"). Maybe that he had such close ties and was an influence to Gandhi might put him in the Beta camp.
I can see why SLI might disagree with the formality thing, in my experience my very close SLI friend could care less about presenting himself properly in a social setting; afterwards I would lecture him on it from an entirely Fe point of view and he would again tune me out.
But even he treated people with formality in a very external sense - this person's position requires this much of an attention/greeting, whereas that person could be ignored - this was based on Te and people who ignored those boundaries would annoy him.
Betas know all this and follow the same conventions, but they want to wink at someone after they've done it.. which I think strrrng was also saying.
ENFj sx/so 1w9
His type is dynamic, Ni/Se-valuing. He very aptly delineates external dynamics in his works and advocates a unity of meaning despite the variance of external form. By all accounts he was an extravert. He loved claiming the center of attention at social gatherings and was said to quite enjoy verbal sparring in public.
There was an entire article on his typing. I haven't read through it yet, but skimming through the author has arrived at same conclusion - http://translate.google.com/translat...Fdp-tolstoy%2F
A few quotes by him -
Quote:
Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.
Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.
In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.
'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.
To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.
In order to feel complete love, we can either delude ourselves that some imperfect object of our love is “perfection” or we can love perfection, which is God.
War is not a courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous.
Judging from VI his posture on photographs is congruent with EJ temperament; he positions himself in this sort of expansive, spacious manner. Compare these pictures to the EJ photos here.
http://i.imgur.com/WmmcQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Re02U.jpg
Right so back to TeNi then. I'm not sold for ENFjQuote:
Originally Posted by siuntal
this is interesting ... apparently Tolstoy was in correspondence with Gandhi and had a formative effect on Gandhi's ideas of non-violent resistance ... i never knew that
Quote:
In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindoo outlining his belief in non-violence as a means for India to gain independence from British colonial rule. In 1909, a copy of the letter fell into the hands of Mohandas Gandhi who was working as a lawyer in South Africa at the time and in the beginnings of becoming an activist. Tolstoy's letter was significant for Gandhi who wrote to the famous writer seeking proof that he was the real author, leading to further correspondence between them. Reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You also convinced Gandhi to avoid violence and espouse nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name, the Tolstoy Colony, to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays.
what makes you think Te > Fe for him?Quote:
Originally Posted by cherrysidecar
The attention to detail. Not on various emotional states changing between characters, but solid, factual details, everywhere - and this is the catalyst to any change in emotions, usually at the end of the chapter. I'm not considering the letters and biographies, though I guess I should.Quote:
Originally Posted by siuntal
a few other Se-LSIs, donald sutherland and singer sting (no it isn't the facial hair).
http://www.biography.com/imported/im...8518-2-402.jpg
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/i...1029182434.jpg
http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/V...ZQ2-77zBvl.jpg
http://elijahkinchspector.files.word...stoy.jpg?w=600
I wouldn't say it's uncommon for Se-xSIs to have a spacious presence. the key difference between them and their Ni-xIE counterparts is how the space is occupied. the former has a contained weightiness, whereas the latter feels more aggressive and expansive, anchoring vs. magnetizing. also, in the facial structure/expression of LSIs, there's a more direct stolidity, like they're holding back just enough without giving any ground; Ni-xIEs on the other hand seem to 'look through' things, there's a similar directness but it's more active and encompassing in its energy.
Yeah that's the book I was referring to earlier. Gandhi was more of a pure idealist, but Tolstoy more or less came up with a system of nonviolence. It crystallized, in a practical way, the approach Gandhi was searching for.Quote:
Originally Posted by siuntal
It's kind of amusing though to think both Tolstoy and Lenin were Beta, more or less contemporary, and addressing the same issues of their day. Except Lenin took the Malcolm X route and Tolstoy, the MLK route (it might even be the case that X and King were also both Beta).
I cant completely rule out LSI-Se, but he is striking me as ethical and serious, over logical and merry. Therefore I am keeping my ESI-Se statement.
In the movie, his wife seemed very EIE. And I think for most of their married life, they had a good relationship. They used to read one another's diaries. And she would edit his work. It was only toward the end that things soured. And I think it tore her apart pretty badly. (not saying any of that is type-related)
SEE, confirm
Leo Tolstoy: ISFj (ESI-Fi?) [Harmonizing subtype] (ISFj-INFp?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy
“Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the world's greatest novelists.”
‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, "What an artist and what a psychologist!"’
‘Virginia Woolf declared him the greatest of all novelists. James Joyce noted that, "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!".’
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726...-h/27726-h.htm
http://www.everywritersresource.com/...y-leo-tolstoy/
Leo Tolstoy: ‘But it is not enough that Shakespeare's characters are placed in tragic positions which are impossible, do not flow from the course of events, are inappropriate to time and space—these personages, besides this, act in a way which is out of keeping with their definite character, and is quite arbitrary. It is generally asserted that in Shakespeare's dramas the characters are specially well expressed, that, notwithstanding their vividness, they are many-sided, like those of living people; that, while exhibiting the characteristics of a given individual, they at the same time wear the features of man in general; it is usual to say that the delineation of character in Shakespeare is the height of perfection.
This is asserted with such confidence and repeated by all as indisputable truth; but however much I endeavored to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare's dramas, I always found the opposite. In reading any of Shakespeare's dramas whatever, I was, from the very first, instantly convinced that he was lacking in the most important, if not the only, means of portraying characters: individuality of language, i.e., the style of speech of every person being natural to his character. This is absent from Shakespeare. All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak.
No living men could or can say, as Lear says, that he would divorce his wife in the grave should Regan not receive him, or that the heavens would crack with shouting, or that the winds would burst, or that the wind wishes to blow the land into the sea, or that the curled waters wish to flood the shore, as the gentleman describes the storm, or that it is easier to bear one's grief and the soul leaps over many sufferings when grief finds fellowship, or that Lear has become childless while I am fatherless, as Edgar says, or use similar unnatural expressions with which the speeches of all the characters in all Shakespeare's dramas overflow.
Again, it is not enough that all the characters speak in a way in which no living men ever did or could speak—they all suffer from a common intemperance of language. Those who are in love, who are preparing for death, who are fighting, who are dying, all alike speak much and unexpectedly about subjects utterly inappropriate to the occasion, being evidently guided rather by consonances and play of words than by thoughts. They speak all alike. Lear raves exactly as does Edgar when feigning madness. Both Kent and the fool speak alike. The words of one of the personages might be placed in the mouth of another, and by the character of the speech it would be impossible to distinguish who speaks. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare's various characters, it lies merely in the different dialogs which are pronounced for these characters—again by Shakespeare and not by themselves. Thus Shakespeare always speaks for kings in one and the same inflated, empty language. Also in one and the same Shakespearian, artificially sentimental language speak all the women who are intended to be poetic: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Marina. In the same way, also, it is Shakespeare alone who speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, Macbeth, expressing for them those vicious feelings which villains never express. Yet more similar are the speeches of the madmen with their horrible words, and those of fools with their mirthless puns. So that in Shakespeare there is no language of living individuals—that language which in the drama is the chief means of setting forth character. If gesticulation be also a means of expressing character, as in ballets, this is only a secondary means. Moreover, if the characters speak at random and in a random way, and all in one and the same diction, as is the case in Shakespeare's work, then even the action of gesticulation is wasted. Therefore, whatever the blind panegyrists of Shakespeare may say, in Shakespeare there is no expression of character. Those personages who, in his dramas, stand out as characters, are characters borrowed by him from former works which have served as the foundation of his dramas, and they are mostly depicted, not by the dramatic method which consists in making each person speak with his own diction, but in the epic method of one person describing the features of another.
The perfection with which Shakespeare expresses character is asserted chiefly on the ground of the characters of Lear, Cordelia, Othello, Desdemona, Falstaff, and Hamlet. But all these characters, as well as all the others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from dramas, chronicles, and romances anterior to him. All these characters not only are not rendered more powerful by him, but, in most cases, they are weakened and spoilt. This is very striking in this drama of "King Lear," which we are examining, taken by him from the drama "King Leir," by an unknown author. The characters of this drama, that of King Lear, and especially of Cordelia, not only were not created by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened and deprived of force by him, as compared with their appearance in the older drama.
In the older drama, Leir abdicates because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters as to their love for him—that, by means of a certain device he has invented, he may retain his favorite daughter on his island. The elder daughters are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless union with any of the neighboring suitors whom Leir proposes to her, and he is afraid that she may marry some distant potentate.
The device which he has invented, as he informs his courtier, Perillus (Shakespeare's Kent), is this, that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than any one or as much as her elder sisters do, he will tell her that she must, in proof of her love, marry the prince he will indicate on his island. All these motives for Lear's conduct are absent in Shakespeare's play. Then, when, according to the old drama, Leir asks his daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not say, as Shakespeare has it, that she will not give her father all her love, but will love her husband, too, should she marry—which is quite unnatural—but simply says that she can not express her love in words, but hopes that her actions will prove it. Goneril and Regan remark that Cordelia's answer is not an answer, and that the father can not meekly accept such indifference, so that what is wanting in Shakespeare—i.e., the explanation of Lear's anger which caused him to disinherit his youngest daughter,—exists in the old drama.’
http://www.everywritersresource.com/...y-leo-tolstoy/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lstoy_1848.jpg
Attachment 3374
- DarkAngelFireWolf69: 'Then comes ESI, the Guardian, who has the "golden key" that can lock the reign of third quadra and turn everything over to fourth quadra. ESI brings individual morality to his quadra, which is often incompatible with money. His morality is also based on freedom. How does a revolution start? "Give us freedom! Down with oppressive regime!" Anarchy follows. At this point, the need for a strong hand can turn things over back to second quadra. To prevent this from happening, capitalism must be built on ethical norms. Only then stability can be achieved. For example, in West capitalism was built on strict Protestant moral codes of self-restraint.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tol...itical_beliefs
‘After reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes: "Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his course, and learned so much, as I have this summer"
In Chapter VI of A Confession, Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work. It explained how the nothingness that results from complete denial of self is only a relative nothingness, and is not to be feared. The novelist was struck by the description of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness. After reading passages such as the following, which abound in Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will:
But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (Matthew 19:24): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
I also think Tolstoy is ESI. He cannot not be Fi valuing, but, especially in his earlier works, he has a detached ironical view on the world, as if he derides his characters for their weaknesses. (think Anna or War&Peace). Later works are deeper and resemble Dostoyevsky's take a bit.
AK is widely considered his greatest work. And it wasn't an early work either. I think he portrays Anna sympathetically to a point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Agni
Oh, they are very good as novels (aesthetically speaking). I meant his attitude towards the individual is rather external and reductive. By later works I mean stuff like Father Sergius or The Kreutzer Sonata ...which as far as I know were written in 1889-99. The other two novels at least a decade before (War and Peace in 69). In his later works his perspective acknowledges an abysmal (and spiritual, self-aware, open to evolution) nature of the human being rather than only describing people within the bounds and norms of society entangled in their flaws or passions (which he does treat as superficial).Quote:
Originally Posted by blood moon
.Quote:
"Oh, rent!" Levin cried with horror. "Rent there may be in Europe, where land has been improved by the labor put into it, but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it—in other words they’re working it out; so there’s no question of rent."
"How no rent? It’s a law."
"Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?..."
"Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries." He turned to his wife. "Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this year."
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.
Agafea Mihalovna, her face heated and angry, her hair untidy, and her thin arms bare to the elbows, was turning the preserving-pan over the charcoal stove, looking darkly at the raspberries and devoutly hoping they would stick and not cook properly. The princess, conscious that Agafea Mihalovna’s wrath must be chiefly directed against her, as the person responsible for the raspberry jam-making, tried to appear to be absorbed in other things and not interested in the jam, talked of other matters, but cast stealthy glances in the direction of the stove.
"I always buy my maids’ dresses myself, of some cheap material," the princess said, continuing the previous conversation. "Isn’t it time to skim it, my dear?" she added, addressing Agafea Mihalovna. "There’s not the slightest need for you to do it, and it’s hot for you," she said, stopping Kitty.
"I’ll do it," said Dolly, and getting up, she carefully passed the spoon over the frothing sugar, and from time to time shook off the clinging jam from the spoon by knocking it on a plate that was covered with yellow-red scum and blood-colored syrup. "How they’ll enjoy this at tea-time!" she thought of her children, remembering how she herself as a child had wondered how it was the grown-up people did not eat what was best of all—the scum of the jam.
"Stiva says it’s much better to give money." Dolly took up meanwhile the weighty subject under discussion, what presents should be made to servants. "But..."
"Money’s out of the question!" the princess and Kitty exclaimed with one voice. "They appreciate a present..."
"Well, last year, for instance, I bought our Matrona Semyenovna, not a poplin, but something of that sort," said the princess.
"I remember she was wearing it on your nameday."
"A charming pattern—so simple and refined,—I should have liked it myself, if she hadn’t had it. Something like Varenka’s. So pretty and inexpensive."
"Well, now I think it’s done," said Dolly, dropping the syrup from the spoon.
"When it sets as it drops, it’s ready. Cook it a little longer, Agafea Mihalovna."
"The flies!" said Agafea Mihalovna angrily. "It’ll be just the same," she added.
"Ah! how sweet it is! don’t frighten it!" Kitty said suddenly, looking at a sparrow that had settled on the step and was pecking at the center of a raspberry.
"Yes, but you keep a little further from the stove," said her mother.
After escorting his wife upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl, who stood in the corner roaring.
"And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not see one of your dolls, and I won’t make you a new frock," she said, not knowing how to punish her.
"Oh, she is a disgusting child!" she turned to Levin. "Where does she get such wicked propensities?"
"Why, what has she done?" Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.
"Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there ... I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Miss Elliot’s not with us. This one sees to nothing—she’s a machine.... Figurez-vous que la petite?..."
And Darya Alexandrovna described Masha’s crime.
"That proves nothing; it’s not a question of evil propensities at all, it’s simply mischief," Levin assured her.
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. "Then the children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children." And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
"And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!" Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.
"That all comes of itself," they thought, "and there’s nothing interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and always will be so. And it’s all always the same. We’ve no need to think about that, it’s all ready. But we want to invent something of our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s mouths. That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups."
"Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of the life of man?" he thought.
"And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?
INFp for his asceticism, socialism, and stubbornness.
Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy: ESI-Fi or LIE-Ni; or IEE-Fi or LII
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From Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation; pages 239-40 (“Dostoevskii’s Homophilia/Homophobia” by Michael Katz):
“Realists endorsed Gogol’s taboo-lifting work—the admission to the freedom of fiction of the vulgar, base, unprepossessing, and unedifying aspects of life. But no further taboos were lifted by them—the physical side of sex… continued to be concealed…. (Mirsky 1958, 179).
If, as Igor Kon, maintained, “the history of sexuality in Russia is complex and contradictory”, then the history of homosexuality in Russia is even more complex and more contradictory. In his pioneering study The Sexual Revolution in Russia from the Age of the Czars to Today, Kon begins with a discussion of sexuality and homosexuality in Ancient Rus. The concept of “sodomy”, he argues, was even vaguer there than it was in the West. In Russia the term was used to designate both homosexual relations, as well as any deviation from “normal” heterosexual roles and partners. On the other hand, many foreign travellers and diplomats visiting or living in Russia from the 15th-17th centuries remarked on the widespread occurrence of homosexuality in all social milieus, and the surprisingly tolerant attitude of Russians towards it.
But, by the end of the 18th century, the growth of “civilization” and the extended contact with Europe had led to growing uneasiness with the subject. Although most Russian doctors, like their European counterparts, considered homosexuality to be a “perversion of sexual feeling” and debated the possibility of treating and “curing” it, many other people turned a blind eye to it. Intellectuals were able to practice their proclivities in private and rarely suffered any persecution. [Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today, 11-45)]
However, if society was more or less tolerant and free to follow its own inclinations, Russian letters were not. Classical literature of the 19th century created vivid and profound images of (heterosexual) romantic love, but sensuality was virtually inadmissible, and eroticism in any form was unacceptable. Prince Mirsky’s use of the word “taboo” in his account of the origin and character of the Russian realistic novel is absolutely appropriate when applied to sexuality in general, and all the more so when applied to the subject of homosexuality.
In a pioneering and illuminating article entitled “Russia’s Gay Literature and History”, Simon Karlinsky contrasts the attitudes of Russia’s two “literary giants” Tolstoi and Dostoevskii to sexuality and homosexuality. He cites Tolstoi’s own personal experience of falling in love with both boys and girls as recorded in his early trilogy of autobiographical novels Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857), as well as the strong attraction he felt for his fellow soldiers during his years of army service in the Caucasus.
In a diary entry dated 29 November 1851 Tolstoi expresses this feeling clearly: “I have very often been in love with men;… Of all these people I still love only Dyakov…. I fell in love with men before I had the idea of the possibility of pederasty; but even when I knew about it, the idea of the possibility of coitus never occurred to me….” (Tolstoi’s Diaries, ed. and trans. By R. F. Christian, 1985, I, 39). In a similar vein Tolstoi’s wife Sofya Andreevna recorded in her “Memorandum before Death” on 23 June 1910 the following observation about her dying husband: “He has a repulsive, senile love for Chertkov (in his youth he used to fall in love with men), and he is completely subject to his will…. I am insanely jealous of Leo Nikolayevich’s intimacy with Chertkov….” (Simmons, E. J., 1960. Leo Tolstoi, II: 464).
As opposed to these explicitly homophilic impulses, Tolstoi elsewhere depicts characters who express their strong disapproval of male homosexuality. In Part II, chapter xix of Anna Karenina (1872), two army officers enter the club where Vronskii is dining alone. A plump older officer, whose “small eyes are sunk in his bloated face”, sports a bracelet on his wrist. He is clearly “courting” a younger officer with a “weak, thin face” who had just joined the regiment and who nervously fingers his budding moustache. Vronskii rejects the older officer’s attempts to engage him in conversation, frowns at them repeatedly, and further reveals his own feelings with a “grimace of disgust”. When his friend Yashvin enters the club, he first greets Vronskii, then throws a “contemptuous backward nod” and an “ironic glance” at the two officers, and finally mutters with disapproval: “There go the inseparables [nerazluchnye]”.
Thus, it is clear both from biographical accounts and literary evidence that Tolstoi experienced homoerotic attractions in his youth and old age and that he was consciously aware of the nature of his own feelings. It also seems apparent that the author had typically conflicting feelings about the subject and expressed strong, conventionally homophobic prejudices in his fiction. [Karlinsky also mentions Tolstoi’s late novel Resurrection (1899) where tolerant treatment for homosexuals figures as one of the symptoms of Russia’s moral decay.]
from Lectures on Russian Literature by Nabokov; pages 137-48 [LEO TOLSTOY (Anna Karenin)]:
Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.
The ideological poison, the message—to use a term invented by quack reformers—began to affect the Russian novel in the middle of the last century, and has killed it by the middle of this one [i.e. the 20th century]. It would seem at first glance that Tolstoy’s fiction is heavily infected with his teachings. Actually, his ideology was so tame and so vague and so far from politics, and, on the other hand, his art was so powerful, so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon. In the long run what interested him as a thinker were Life and Death, and after all no artist can avoid treating these themes.
Count Leo (in Russian Lev or Lyov) Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a robust man with a restless soul, who all his life was torn between his sensual temperament and his supersensitive conscience. His appetites constantly led him astray from the quiet country road that the ascetic in him craved to follow as passionately as the rake in him craved for the city pleasures of the flesh.
In his youth, the rake had a better chance and took it. Later, after his marriage in 1862, Tolstoy found temporary peace in family life divided between the wise management of his fortune—he had rich lands in the Volga region—and the writing of his best prose. It is then, in the sixties and early seventies, that he produced his immense War and Peace (1869) and his immortal Anna Karenin. Still later, beginning in the late seventies, when he was over forty, his conscience triumphed: the ethical overcame both the esthetical and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his wife's happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty literary career to what he considered a moral necessity: living according to the principles of rational Christian morality—the simple and stern life of generalized humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual art. And when in 1910 he realized that by continuing to live on his country estate, in the bosom of his stormy family, he still was betraying his ideal of a simple, saintly existence, he, a man of eighty, left his home and wandered away, heading for a monastery he never reached, and died in the waiting room of a little railway station.
I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people—pity for the humble and the humiliated—this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his representative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature—and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.
And when he discovered his new religion and in the logical development of this new religion—a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, Jesus minus the Church—he reached the conclusion that art was ungodly because it was founded on imagination, on deceit, on fancy-forgery, he ruthlessly sacrificed the giant of an artist that he was to a rather pedestrian and narrow minded though well-meaning philosopher that he had chosen to become. Thus when he had just reached the uppermost peaks of creative perfection with Anna Karenin, he suddenly decided to stop writing altogether, except for essays on ethics. Fortunately he was not always able to maintain in chains that gigantic creative need of his and, succumbing once in a while, added to his output a few exquisite stories untainted by deliberate moralizing among which is that greatest of great short stories, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."
Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art.
What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy.
What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels?
Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.
One discovery that he made has curiously enough never been noticed by critics. He discovered—and certainly never realized his discovery—he discovered a method of picturing life which most pleasingly and exactly corresponds to our idea of time. He is the only writer I know of whose watch keeps time with the numberless watches of his readers. All the great writers have good eyes, and the "realism," as it is called, of Tolstoy's descriptions, has been deepened by others; and though the average Russian reader will tell you that what seduces him in Tolstoy is the absolute reality of his novels, the sensation of meeting old friends and seeing familiar places, this is neither here nor there. Others were equally good at vivid description. What really seduces the average reader is the gift Tolstoy had of endowing his fiction with such time-values as correspond exactly to our sense of time. It is a mysterious accomplishment which is not so much a laudable feature of genius as something pertaining to the physical nature of that genius. This time balance, absolutely peculiar to Tolstoy alone, is what gives the gentle reader that sense of average reality which he is apt to ascribe to Tolstoy's keen vision. Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.
The queer thing about it is that actually Tolstoy was rather careless when dealing with the objective idea of time. In War and Peace attentive readers have found children who grow too fast or not fast enough, just as in Gogol's Dead Souls, despite Gogol's care in clothing his characters, we find that Chichikov wore a bearskin overcoat in midsummer. In Anna Karenin, as we shall see, there are terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time. But such slips on Tolstoy's part have nothing to do with the impression of time he conveys, the idea of time which corresponds so exactly with the reader's sense of time. There are other great writers who were quite consciously fascinated by the idea of time and quite consciously tried to render its movement; this Proust does when his hero in the novel In Search of Lost Time arrives at a final party where he sees people he used to know now for some reason wearing gray wigs, and then realizes that the gray wigs are organic gray hairs, that they have grown old while he had been strolling through his memories; or notice how James Joyce regulates the time element in Ulysses by the slow gradual passing of a crumpled bit of paper down the river from bridge to bridge down the Liffy to Dublin Bay to the eternal sea. Yet these writers who actually dealt in time values did not do what Tolstoy quite casually, quite unconsciously, does: they move either slower or faster than the reader's grandfather clock; it is the time by Proust or the time by Joyce, not the common average time, a kind of standard time which Tolstoy somehow manages to convey.
No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna or Natasha at that ball or dined with Oblonski at his favorite restaurant* . . . Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,† exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.
And in this connection it is curious to note that although Tolstoy, who was constantly aware of his own personality, constantly intruding upon the lives of his characters, constantly addressing the reader—it is curious to note that nevertheless in those great chapters that are his masterpieces the author is invisible so that he attains that dispassionate ideal of authors which Flaubert so violently demanded of a writer: to be invisible, and to be everywhere as God in His universe is. We have thus the feeling now and then that Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, by its subject, not by a definite person moving a pen from left to right, and then coming back and erasing a word, and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.
The intrusion of the teacher into the artist's domain is, as I have remarked already, not always clearly defined in Tolstoy's novels. The rhythm of the sermon is difficult to disentangle from the rhythm of this or that character's personal meditations. But sometimes, rather often in fact, when pages and pages follow which are definitely in the margin of the story, telling us what we ought to think, what Tolstoy thinks about war or marriage or agriculture — then the charm is broken and the delightful familiar people who had been sitting all round us, joining in our life, are now shut off from us, the door is locked not to be opened until the solemn author has quite, quite finished that ponderous period in which he explains and reexplains his ideas about marriage, or Napoleon, or farming, or his ethical and religious views.
As an example, the agrarian problems discussed in the book, especially in relation to Lyovin's farming, are extremely tedious to foreign-language readers, and I do not expect you to study the situation with any degree of penetration. Artistically Tolstoy made a mistake in devoting such a number of pages to these matters, especially as they tend to become obsolete and are linked up with a certain historical period and with Tolstoy's own ideas that changed with time. Agriculture in the seventies does not have the eternal thrill of Anna's or Kitty's emotions and motives. Several chapters are devoted to the provincial elections of various administrators. The landowners through an organization called zemstvo tried to get into touch with the peasants and to help the peasants (and themselves) by setting up more schools, better hospitals, better machinery, et cetera. There were various participating landowners: conservative, reactionary landowners still looked upon the peasants as slaves—though officially the slaves had been liberated more than ten years before—while liberal, progressive landowners were really eager to improve conditions by having peasants share the landlord's interests and thus helping the peasants become richer, healthier, better educated.
*“Those very particular sensations of reality, of flesh and blood, of characters really living, of living on their own behalf, the main reason for this vividness is due to the fact of Tolstoy’s possessing the unique capacity of keeping time with us; so that if we imagine a creature from some other solar system who would be curious about our time conception, the best way to explain matters to him would be to give him to read a novel by Tolstoy—in Russian, or at least in my translation with my commentaries.” VN [Vladimir Nabokov] deleted passage from the section.
†“The Russian writer Bunin told me that when he visited Tolstoy for the first time and sat waiting for him, he was almost shocked to see suddenly emerge from a small door a little old man instead of the giant he had involuntarily imagined. And I have also seen myself that little old man. I was a child and I faintly remember my father shaking hands with someone at a street corner, then telling me as we continued our walk, ‘That was Tolstoy.’ ” VN deleted passage from the section.
It is not my custom to speak of plots but in the case of Anna Karenin I shall make an exception since the plot of it is essentially a moral plot, a tangle of ethical tentacles, and this we must explore before enjoying the novel on a higher level than plot.
One of the most attractive heroines in international fiction, Anna is a young, handsome, and fundamentally good woman, and a fundamentally doomed woman. Married off as a very young girl by a well-meaning aunt to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna leads a contented life within the most sparkling circle of St. Petersburg society. She adores her little son, respects her husband who is twenty years her senior, and her vivid, optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures offered her by life.
When she meets Vronski on a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms everything around her; everything she looks at she sees in a different light. There is that famous scene at the railway station in St. Petersburg when Karenin comes to meet her on her way back from Moscow and she suddenly notices the size and vexing convexity of his huge homely ears. She had never noticed those ears before because she had never looked at him critically; he had been for her one of the accepted things of life included in her own accepted life. Now everything has changed. Her passion for Vronski is a flood of white light in which her former world looks like a dead landscape on a dead planet.
Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child—and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this “open” affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma’s dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady’s case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society’s conventions.
While Anna bears the brunt of society’s anger, is snubbed and snobbed, insulted and “cut,” Vronski, being a man—a not very deep man, not a gifted man by any means, but a fashionable man, say—Vronski is spared by scandal: he is invited, he goes places, meets his former friends, is introduced to seemingly decent women who would not remain a second in the same room with disgraced Anna. He still loves Anna, but sometimes he is pleased to be back in the world of sport and fashion, and he begins occasionally to avail himself of its favors. Anna misconstrues trivial unloyalties as a drop in the temperature of his love. She feels that her affection alone is no longer enough for him, that she may be losing him.
Vronski, a blunt fellow, with a mediocre mind, gets impatient with her jealousy and thus seems to confirm her suspicions. Driven to despair by the muddle and mud in which her passion flounders, Anna one Sunday evening in May throws herself under a freight train. Vronski realizes too late what he has lost. Rather conveniently for him and for Tolstoy, war with Turkey is brewing—this is 1876—and he departs for the front with a battalion of volunteers. This is probably the only unfair device in the novel, unfair because too easy, too pat.
A parallel story which develops on seemingly quite independent lines is that of the courtship and marriage of Lyovin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatski. Lyovin, in whom more than in any other of his male characters Tolstoy has portrayed himself, is a man of moral ideals, of Conscience with a capital C. Conscience gives him no respite. Lyovin is very different from Vronski. Vronski lives only to satisfy his impulses. Vronski, before he meets Anna, has lived a conventional life: even in love, Vronski is content to substitute for moral ideals the conventions of his circle. But Lyovin is a man who feels it his duty to understand intelligently the surrounding world and to work out for himself his place within it. Therefore Lyovin’s nature moves on in constant evolution, spiritually growing throughout the novel, growing toward those religious ideals which at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.
Around these main characters a number of others move. Steve Oblonski, Anna’s lighthearted good-for-nothing brother; his wife Dolly, born Shcherbatski, a kindly, serious, long-suffering woman, in a way one of Tolstoy’s ideal women, for her life is selflessly devoted to her children and to her shiftless husband; there is the rest of the Shcherbatski family, one of Moscow’s old aristocratic families; Vronski’s mother; and a whole gallery of people of St. Petersburg high society. Petersburg society was very different from the Moscow kind, Moscow being the kindly, homey, flaccid, patriarchal old town, and Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, fashionable, and relatively young capital where some thirty years later I was born. Of course there is Karenin himself, Karenin the husband, a dry righteous man, cruel in his theoretical virtue, the ideal civil servant, the philistine bureaucrat who willingly accepts the pseudo-morality of his friends, a hypocrite and a tyrant. In his rare moments he is capable of a good movement, of a kind gesture, but this is too soon forgotten and sacrificed to considerations of his career. At Anna’s bedside, when she is very sick after bearing Vronski’s child and certain of her impending death (which, however, does not come), Karenin forgives Vronski and takes his hand with a true feeling of Christian humility and generosity. He will change back later to his chilly unpleasant personality, but at the moment the proximity of death illumes the scene and Anna in a subconscious way loves him as much as she loves Vronski: both are called Aleksey, both as loving mates share her in her dream. But this feeling of sincerity and kindliness does not last long, and when Karenin makes an attempt at securing a divorce—a matter of not much consequence to him but which would make all the difference to Anna—and is faced with the necessity of submitting to unpleasant complications in the course of obtaining it, he simply gives up and refuses ever to try again, no matter what this refusal may mean to Anna. Moreover, he manages to find satisfaction in his own righteousness.
Though one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenin is of course not just a novel of adventure. Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral “message” Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin’s marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom.
It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband. Now such a “moral” would be of course completely “immoral,” and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil. (Remember Emma’s blue veil on her ride with Rodolphe and her dark veil in her rendezvous at Rouen with Leon.) But frank unfortunate Anna does not wear this veil of deceit. The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating. It is thus sinful. And in order to make his point as artistically clear as possible, Tolstoy in a flow of extraordinary imagery depicts and places side by side, in vivid contrast, two loves: the carnal love of the Vronski-Anna couple (struggling amid their richly sensual but fateful and spiritually sterile emotions) and on the other hand the authentic, Christian love, as Tolstoy termed it, of the Lyovin-Kitty couple with the riches of sensual nature still there but balanced and harmonious in the pure atmosphere of responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.
A biblical epigraph: Vengeance is mine; I will repay (saith the Lord).
(Romans XII, verse 19)
What are the implications? First, Society had no right to judge Anna; second, Anna had no right to punish Vronski by her revengeful suicide.
Joseph Conrad, a British novelist of Polish descent, writing to Edward Garnett, a writer of sorts, in a letter dated the 10th of June, 1902, said: “Remember me affectionately to your wife whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.” I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor.
We may look in vain among the pages of Anna Karenin for Flaubert’s subtle transitions, within chapters, from one character to another. The structure of Anna Karenin is of a more conventional kind, although the book was written twenty years later than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Conversation between characters mentioning other characters, and the maneuvers of intermediate characters who bring about the meetings of main participants—these are the simple and sometimes rather blunt methods used by Tolstoy. Even simpler are his abrupt switches from chapter to chapter in changing his stage sets.
Tolstoy’s novel consists of eight parts and each part on the average consists of about thirty short chapters of four pages. He sets himself the task of following two main lines—the Lyovin-Kitty one and the Vronski-Anna one, although there is a third line, subordinate and intermediary, the Oblonski-Dolly one that plays a very special part in the structure of the novel since it is present to link up in various ways the two main lines. Steve Oblonski and Dolly are there to act as go-betweens in the affairs of Lyovin and Kitty and in those of Anna and her husband.
From War and Peace by Tolstoy (translated by Anthony Briggs); pages 5-6:
‘Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family.* No, I give you fair warning. If you won’t say this means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist – yes, that’s what I think he is – I shall disown you. You’re no friend of mine – not the “faithful slave” you claim to be . . . But how are you? How are you keeping? I can see I’m intimidating you. Do sit down and talk to me.’
These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as she welcomed the first person to arrive at her soiree, Prince Vasily Kuragin, a man of high rank and influence. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for the last few days and she called it la grippe – grippe being a new word not yet in common currency. A footman of hers in scarlet livery had gone around that morning delivering notes written in French, each saying precisely the same thing:
"If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor sick lady is not too unnerving, I shall be delighted to see you at my residence between seven and ten. ANNETTE SCHERER"
'My goodness, what a violent attack!' replied the prince, who had only just come in and was not in the least put out by this welcome. Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee-breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity. His French was the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech, and it carried the soft tones of condescension that come naturally to an eminent personage grown old in high society and at court. He came up to Anna Pavlovna and kissed her hand, presenting to her a perfumed and glistening bald pate, and then seated himself calmly on the sofa.
'First things first,' he said. 'How are you, my dear friend? Put my mind at rest.' His voice remained steady, and his tone, for all its courtesy and sympathy, implied indifference and even gentle mockery.
'How can one feel well when one is . . . suffering in a moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?' said Anna Pavlovna. 'I do hope you're staying all evening.'
'Well, there is that reception at the English Ambassador's. It's Wednesday. I must show my face,' said the prince. 'My daughter is coming to take me there.'
'I thought tonight's festivities had been cancelled. I must say all these celebrations and fireworks are becoming rather tedious.'
'If they had known you wanted the celebration cancelled, it would have been,' said the prince with the predictability of a wound-up clock. Sheer habit made him say things he didn't even mean.
*Genoa and Lucca . . . Buonaparte family: Genoa and Lucca were territories recently annexed by France. Napoleon’s Corsican name was Napoleone Buonaparte; the original version (with a ‘u’) is used here as a deliberate insult.
'Stop teasing me. Come on, tell me what's been decided about Novosiltsev's dispatch?* You know everything.'
'What is there to tell?' replied the prince in a cold, bored tone. 'What's been decided? They've decided that Bonaparte has burnt his boats, and I rather think we're getting ready to burn ours.'
Prince Vasily always spoke languidly, like an actor declaiming a part from an old play. Anna Pavlovna Scherer was just the opposite – all verve and excitement, despite her forty years. To be an enthusiast had become her special role in society, and she would sometimes wax enthusiastic when she didn't feel like it, so as not to frustrate the expectations of those who knew her. The discreet smile that never left her face, though it clashed with her faded looks, gave her the appearance of a spoilt child with a charming defect that she was well aware of, though she neither wished nor felt able to correct it, nor even thought it necessary to do so.
*Novosiltsev’s dispatch: N. N. Novosiltsev was a special ambassador sent to Paris by Emperor Alexander to assist with (ultimately abortive) peace negotiations.
Then suddenly in the middle of this political discussion Anna Pavlovna launched forth in great excitement. 'Oh, don't talk to me about Austria!* Perhaps it's all beyond me, but Austria has never wanted war and she still doesn't want war. She's betraying us. Russia alone must be Europe's saviour. Our benefactor is aware of his exalted calling and he'll live up to it. That's the one thing I do believe in. The noblest role on earth awaits our good and wonderful sovereign, and he is so full of decency and virtue that God will not forsake him. He will do what has to be done and scotch the hydra of revolution, which has become more dreadful than ever . . . .
*‘Oh, don’t talk to me about Austria!’: Only a few weeks earlier (in April 1805) the Third Coalition had been formed between Great Britain, Austria and Russia. Their plan was to defeat Napoleon by means of a three-pronged attack. The Russians had been let down before by the Austrians, and there were many who believed they could not be relied on now.
- Pages 14-7 (Ch. 3):
The 'charming' Hippolyte bore a close resemblance to his beautiful sister; it was even more remarkable that in spite of the similarity he was a very ugly man. His features were like his sister's, but whereas she glowed with joie de vivre, classical beauty and the smiling self-assurance of youth, her brother's face was just the opposite - dim with imbecility, truculent and peevish – and his body was thin and feeble. His eyes, nose and mouth – all his features seemed to twist themselves into a vague kind of obtuse snarl, while his arms and legs were always in an awkward tangle.
'It's not a ghost story, is it?' he asked, settling down next to the princess and jerking his lorgnette up to his eyes, as if he needed this instrument before he could say anything.
'Why no, my dear fellow,' said the astonished viscount with a shrug.
'It's just that I can't abide ghost stories,' said Prince Hippolyte, his tone implying that he had blurted all this out before realizing what it meant. Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he had said was very clever or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark green frock-coat, stockings, light shoes and knee-breeches of a colour he referred to as 'the thigh of a startled nymph'.
The viscount then gave a nice rendition of a story that was doing the rounds. Apparently the Duke of Enghien had driven to Paris for a secret assignation with a young woman, Mlle George, only to run into Bonaparte, who was also enjoying the favours of the same famous actress. On meeting the duke, Napoleon had fallen into one of his fainting fits and had been completely at the duke's mercy. The duke had not taken advantage of this, but Bonaparte had later rewarded his magnanimity by having him put to death.
This was a very charming and interesting story, especially the bit when the rivals suddenly recognized each other, and it seemed to excite the ladies. 'Delightful!' said Anna Pavlovna, with an inquiring glance at the little princess. 'Delightful!' whispered the little princess, stabbing her needle into her sewing to show that the interest and charm of the story were getting in the way of her work. With a grateful smile of appreciation at this silent tribute, the viscount resumed his narrative, but Anna Pavlovna, who never took her eyes off the dreadful young man who was worrying her so much, could hear him holding forth with the abbe too forcefully and too heatedly, so she sped across into the danger zone on a rescue mission. Sure enough, Pierre had managed to get into a political conversation with the abbe about the balance of power, and the abbe, evidently taken by [the] young man's naive passion, was expounding to him his cherished idea. Both men were listening too earnestly and talking too bluntly, and Anna Pavlovna didn't like it.
'You do it by means of the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the people,' the abbe was saying. 'If one powerful state like Russia – despite its reputation for barbarity – were to take a disinterested stand as the head of an alliance aimed at guaranteeing the balance of power in Europe, it would save the world!'
'But how are you going to get such a balance of power?' Pierre was gathering himself to say, but at that moment Anna Pavlovna came across, glowered at Pierre and asked the Italian how he was surviving the local climate. His face changed instantly and assumed the sickly sweet, patronizing air which he obviously reserved for conversations with women. 'I am so enchanted by the delightful wit and culture of the society people – especially the ladies – by whom I have had the good fortune to be received, that I have not yet had time to think about the climate,' he said. Determined not to let go of the abbe and Pierre, Anna Pavlovna steered them into the larger group, where it would be easier to keep an eye on them.
At this point in walked another guest, the young Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, husband of the little princess. He was quite short, but a very handsome young man, with sharp, clear-cut features. Everything about him, from his languid, bored expression to his slow and steady stride, stood in stark contrast to his vivacious little wife. He made it obvious that he knew everybody in the room, and was so fed up with the whole lot that just looking at them and listening to them drove him to distraction. And of all the wearisome faces it was the face of his own pretty wife that seemed to bore him most. With a snarl distorting his handsome face he turned away from her. He kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand, screwed up his eyes and scanned the whole company.
'Are you enlisting for the war, Prince?' said Anna Pavlovna.
'General Kutuzov has been kind enough to want me as an aide,' said Bolkonsky, saying 'Kutuzov', like a Frenchman, rather than 'Kutuzov'.
'And what about Lise, your wife?'
'She's going into the country.'
'Shame on you, depriving us of your charming wife!'
'Andre!' said his wife, addressing her husband in the flirtatious tone that she normally reserved for other men. 'The viscount has just told us a wonderful story about Mlle George and Bonaparte!'
Prince Andrey scowled and turned away. Pierre had been looking at this man with a joyful, affectionate gaze since the moment he walked in, and now he went over and took him by the arm. Before looking round, Prince Andrey gave a pained look of irritation as he felt the touch, but the moment he saw Pierre's smiling face he smiled back in an unusually sweet and pleasant way.
'It's you! . . . Out in society!' he said to Pierre.
'I knew you'd be here,' answered Pierre. 'I'm coming to dine with you,' he added in a low voice, so as not to interrupt the viscount, who was going on with his story. 'Is that all right?'
'Of course it isn't!' laughed Prince Andrey, but his handshake told Pierre he had no need to ask. He was about to go on, but at that moment Prince Vasily and his daughter stood up and the two young men rose to let them go by.
- Pages 21-22 (Ch. 4):
'The execution of the Duke of Enghien,' said Pierre, 'was a political necessity, and in my opinion it was a measure of Napoleon's true greatness that he didn't baulk at assuming total responsibility for it.'
'Merciful heaven!' Anna Pavlovna intoned in a horrified whisper.
'So Monsieur Pierre! You think murder is the measure of true greatness,' said the little princess, smiling and drawing in her work.
Ohs and ahs came from all sides.
'Capital!' said Prince Hippolyte, using the English word, and he began slapping his knee. The viscount merely shrugged.
Pierre looked solemnly over his spectacles at his audience.
'The reason I say this,' he carried on in some despair, 'is that the Bourbons were running away from the Revolution, leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon was the only one capable of understanding the Revolution, and transcending it, and that was why, for the public good, he couldn't baulk at the taking of one man's life.'
'Would you like to come over to this other table?' asked Anna Pavlovna. But Pierre didn't answer; he was in full flow.
'Oh no,' he said, warming to his task, 'Napoleon is great because he towered above the Revolution, he stopped its excesses and he preserved all its benefits – equality, free speech, a free press. That was his only reason for assuming supreme power.'
'Yes, if only he had transferred it to the lawful king once he had obtained power, instead of using it to commit murder,' said the viscount, 'then I might have called him a great man.'
'He couldn't have done that. The people had given him power to get rid of the Bourbons, that was all, and also because they thought he was a great man. The Revolution was a splendid achievement,' Monsieur Pierre insisted, his desperate and challenging pronouncement betraying extreme youth and a desire to blurt everything out at once.
'Revolution and regicide are splendid achievements? . . . Well, whatever next? . . . Are you sure you wouldn't like to come over to this table?' repeated Anna Pavlovna.
'Ah, the Social Contract,'* said the viscount with a pinched smile. 'I'm not talking about regicide. I'm talking about ideas.'
'Yes, ideas. Robbery, murder, regicide!' an ironical voice put in.
'These were the extremes, of course, but they weren't the meaning of the whole Revolution. That was in human rights, freedom from prejudice, equality . . . Those were the strong ideas that Napoleon stood up for.'
'Liberty and equality,' said the viscount contemptuously. He seemed at last to have made up his mind to take this young man seriously and demonstrate how silly his outpourings had been. 'Nothing but loud slogans, long compromised. Which of us does not love liberty and equality? Our Saviour himself preached liberty and equality. Have the people been any happier since the Revolution? Quite the reverse. We wanted liberty, but Bonaparte has destroyed it.'
Prince Andrey smiled at them all, Pierre, viscount and hostess.
Just for a moment following Pierre's outburst Anna Pavlovna had been taken aback, for all her social skills, but when she saw that the viscount was not greatly put out by Pierre's sacrilegious way of speaking, and realized there was no stopping it, she rallied, came in on the viscount's side and attacked the other speaker.
'But my dear Monsieur Pierre,' she said, 'how do you account for a great man being capable of executing a duke, a human being after all, who was innocent and untried?'
*the Social Contract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762), a treatise on government and citizenship, was regarded by some people as a cause of the violent excesses of the French Revolution of 1789.
- From The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession by Tolstoy (translated by Peter Carson); pages 121-6 (“Confession”):
To have the fame and the money for which I was writing I had to conceal the good and display the bad. So I did. How many times under the pretense of indifference and even of slight mockery did I contrive to conceal my aspirations to good, which constituted the meaning of my life? And I achieved my aim: I was praised.
I came to Petersburg at the age of twenty-six after the war and met writers. They accepted me like one of their own and flattered me, and before I had time to look around I had adopted the writer’s professional views on life held by those whom I met, and these completely destroyed in me all my former attempts to become better. Faced with the dissoluteness of my life, these views provided a theory that justified it.
The view of life held by these people, my comrades in writing, consisted of this: life in general moves on by development, and the main part in this development is played by us, people who think, and the main influence among people who think is held by us – artists, poets. Our vocation is to teach people. To avoid the natural question being put to one—what do I know and what can I teach?—the theory made it clear that one didn’t have to know anything except that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was thought to be a marvelous artist and poet, and so it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. As an artist, a poet, I wrote, I taught myself without knowing what. I was paid money for that; I had fine food, a house, women, society; I had fame. So it had to be that what I taught was very good.
This belief in the meaning of poetry and the development of life was a religious faith, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very profitable and agreeable. And for quite a long time I lived in this faith without doubting its truth. But in the second and especially the third year of this life I began to have doubts in the infallibility of this faith and began to investigate it. The first occasion for doubt was when I started to notice that the priests of this faith didn’t always agree among themselves. Some said, “We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is necessary, but others teach wrongly.” But others said, “No, we are the true teachers but you are teaching wrongly.” And they argued, quarreled, cursed, deceived, cheated one another. Furthermore, there were many people among us who didn’t care about who was right and who was not right but were simply after attaining their mercenary aims with the help of our activity. All this made me doubt the truth of our faith.
Furthermore, having had doubts about the truth of the actual writers’ faith, I started to observe its priests more attentively and came to the conclusion that almost all of the priests of this faith, the writers, were immoral and mostly bad people, worthless in character—much lower than the people I had encountered in my previous debauched and military life—but self-confident and pleased with themselves as only truly saintly people can be, or else those who do not know what sanctity is. These people disgusted me; I disgusted myself and I understood that this faith was a fraud.
. . . . From my association with these people I took away a new vice—a morbidly developed pride and crazy certainty that I was called to teach people without myself knowing what I was teaching.
Now when I remember that time and my state of mind then and the state of mind of such people (of whom there are by the way many thousands), I feel it’s pitiful and frightening and absurd—there comes just the feeling you get in a madhouse.
We were all convinced then that we had to talk and talk, write, and publish—as quickly as possible, as much as possible, that all this was necessary for the good of mankind. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing each other, kept publishing and writing while we taught others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, that we didn’t know how to answer the simplest questions of life—what is good; what is bad? – we all without listening to each other spoke at once, sometimes indulging each other and praising each other, so that I too was indulged and praised; sometimes getting angry and shouting each other down, just like in a madhouse.
Thousands of workmen worked to the limits of their strength day and night, setting type and printing millions of words, and the mail took them all over Russia, and we kept teaching, teaching, teaching more and more and never were able to finish teaching everything and kept getting angry that we weren’t listened to very much.
All horribly strange, but now I understand it. Our real heartfelt reasoning was that we wanted to get as much money and praise as we could. To achieve that aim we could do nothing else but write books and newspapers. So we did that. But in order for us to do such useless work and have the certainty that we were very important people, we needed another piece of reasoning that would justify our activity. And so we thought up the following: everything that exists is reasonable. Everything that exists goes on developing. It goes on developing through education. Education is measured by the dissemination of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and respected because we write books and newspapers, and so we are very useful and good people. This reasoning would have been very good if we had all agreed; but since for every thought pronounced by one there always appeared a thought, diametrically opposite, pronounced by another, that should have made us think again. But we didn’t notice that. We were paid money, and people of our persuasion praised us—so we, each one of us, thought ourselves right.
It is now clear to me that this was no different than a madhouse; I only dimly suspected this then and simply, like all madmen, called everyone mad but myself.
III
I lived like this, given over to this madness, for six years more until my marriage. During this time I traveled abroad. Life in Europe and meeting Europe’s prominent people and scholars confirmed me even more in that belief in general self-perfection by which I lived, because I found that same belief in them too. This belief took in me the usual form it has in the majority of educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” I thought then that this word did express something. I didn’t yet understand that, tormented like every living man by questions of “how can I live better?,” in answering, “Live in conformity with progress,” I was saying exactly what a man, carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind, will say to the captain when the only question facing him is “Where should I steer for?” if he says without answering the question, “We are being carried along somewhere.”
"Leo Tolstoy: the forgotten genius?" by Luke Harding
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...e-last-station
'Like Deryabin, Vladimir Tolstoy admits that his ancestor's reputation is higher in the west than in Russia. This, he says, is due to the political upheaval in Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary emphasis on visual, rather than intellectual, culture. Russia's book-reading, scientific middle class has also shrunk compared to communist times.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, shows little interest in Russia's most celebrated novelist. Putin has never mentioned Tolstoy in his speeches. And the writer's criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today, Vladimir believes. "Nobody is trying to throw out the idea that he is the author of great novels. But they [official Russia] don't know what to do with his views," he says.
Tolstoy's lingering feud with Russia's Orthodox church is part of the problem. The church excommunicated him in 1901, unhappy with his novel Resurrection and Tolstoy's espousal of Christian anarchist and pacifist views. In 2001, the church reaffirmed Tolstoy's excommunication, and conservative Russian Orthodox thinkers have even placed Tolstoy's works on a blacklist.
Others whisper that Tolstoy's beliefs make him un-Russian. They also moan about his unwieldy syntax. And it is hard to imagine that Tolstoy would have kind things to say in return about Putin's bureaucratic-authoritarian state, in which black-robed priests wearing clunky gold crosses appear on pro-Kremlin talkshows.
"I feel that Leo Tolstoy needs to be defended. We need to support him morally, intellectually and emotionally," says Ludmilla Saraskina, Russia's foremost expert on Dostoevsky, and an acclaimed scholar of 19th-century Russian literature. She adds that the writer is under attack in modern-day Russia from the same reactionary forces he himself criticised – the state, the army and the church. "He's not in fashion," she says.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr8DOaysASs
- from Anna Karenina (translated by Kyrill Zinovieff & Jenny Hughes); pages 200-1 (Pt. 2, Ch. 21):
He had scarcely driven a few yards before the clouds, which had been threatening rain since morning, broke, and it began to rain in torrents.
“That’s bad,” thought Vronsky, raising the hood of the carriage. “The going was heavy enough anyway; now it’ll be a perfect quagmire.” Sitting in the seclusion of the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note and read them.
Oh, yes, it was the same story over and over again. Everyone, his mother, his brother, all of them found it necessary to interfere in his emotional life. This interference provoked him to anger, a feeling which he rarely experienced. “What business is it of theirs? Why does everyone think it his duty to look after me? And why do they pester me? Because they see that this is something they can’t understand. If it had been the usual banal society liaison they’d have left me in peace. They feel that this is something different, that this isn’t a game, that this woman is dearer to me than life itself. And that’s just what they find incomprehensible, and therefore annoying. Whatever our fate is, or may be, we have made it ourselves and don’t complain about it,” he said, in the word we associating Anna with himself. “But no, they must teach us how to live. They haven’t the slightest idea of what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love of ours there is neither happiness nor unhappiness for us – there would be no life,” he thought.
He was angry with everyone for interfering precisely because he felt, in his heart of hearts, that they were all of them right. He felt that the love which bound him to Anna was not a momentary infatuation which would pass, as worldly liaisons do, leaving no other trace than pleasant or unpleasant memories in the lives of both of them. He felt the full agony of his own and of her position, all the difficulty, exposed as they were to the eyes of the world, of hiding their love, of lying and deceiving; and of having to lie, to deceive, to scheme, and constantly to think about others at a time when the passion binding them was so violent that they both forgot about everything else except their love.
He vividly recalled the numerous occasions when lies and deceit, so repugnant to his nature, had been necessary; he recalled most vividly having observed in her many a time a feeling of shame at having to deceive and lie. And he experienced a strange feeling which, since his love affair with Anna, sometimes came over him. This was a feeling of disgust at something – whether at Karenin, or at himself, or at the whole world, he did not quite know. But he always drove away this strange feeling. Now too, he pulled himself together, and continued with his train of thought.
“Yes, she was unhappy before, but she was proud and had peace of mind; but now she cannot have any peace of mind and dignity, although she doesn’t show that. Yes, this must end,” he decided.
And for the first time he realized clearly that it was essential to put an end to all this falsehood, and the sooner the better. “We must throw up everything, both of us, and go and hide ourselves somewhere alone with our love,” he said to himself.
- p. 733-738 (Pt. 8, Ch. 15-16):
“Do you know, Kostya, who was in the train with Sergei Ivanovich?” said Dolly, after distributing cucumbers and honey among the children. “Vronsky! He’s going to Serbia.”
“And not alone either. He’s taking a whole squadron with him at his own expense!” said Katavasov.
“That is typical of him,” said Levin. “Are the volunteers still going out then?” he added with a glance at Koznyshov.
Koznyshov did not reply. With the blunt edge of a knife he was carefully rescuing a live bee stuck in the running honey from a bowl in which lay a wedge of white honeycomb.
“I should think so! You should have seen what was happening on the railway station yesterday,” said Katavasov, noisily biting off a bit of cucumber.
“But now, what’s the meaning of it? For Christ’s sake, explain to me, Sergei Ivanovich. Where are all these volunteers going to? Whom are they fighting?” asked the old Prince, evidently continuing a conversation which had begun in Levin’s absence.
“The Turks,” replied Koznyshov with a quiet smile, having extricated the bee, all dark with honey and helplessly moving its legs, and removing it from the knife to a stout aspen leaf.
“But who has declared war on the Turks? Ivan Ragozov and Countess Lidia together with Madame Stahl?”
“Nobody has declared war, but people sympathize with the sufferings of their brethren and want to help them,” said Koznyshov.
“But the Prince is speaking not of help, but of war,” said Levin, defending his father-in-law. “The Prince is saying that private individuals cannot take part in a war without the Government’s permission.”
“Kostya, look, it’s a bee. We shall all get stung, we really shall,” said Dolly, waving off a wasp.
“But it’s not even a bee, it’s a wasp,” said Levin.
“Well, well now, what’s your theory?” said Katasov to Levin with a smile, obviously challenging him to an argument. “Why haven’t private individuals got the right to take part?”
“My theory is simply this: on the one hand, war is such a bestial, cruel and terrible thing that no individual, let alone a Christian, can assume a personal responsibility for starting a war; only a government, whose job it is and which is inevitably drawn into war, can assume it. On the other hand, both science and common sense tell us that in matters of state, and particularly in matters of war, citizens renounce their personal will.”
Koznyshov and Katavazov, ready with their counter-arguments, began talking simultaneously.
“But the whole point, my dear fellow, is that there can be cases when the Government does not carry out the will of its citizens, and society then asserts its will.”
But Koznyshov evidently did not approve of this counter-argument. He frowned at Katavasov’s words and said something else:
“You shouldn’t put the problem that way. In this case there’s no declaration of war, but merely the expression of a human, a Christian feeling. Our brethren, people of the same blood and the same faith, are being killed. Or if you like, not even our brethren, not even people of the same faith, but simply children, women and old men; feeling is aroused, and Russians run to help to put an end to these atrocities. Imagine you were walking down a street and saw a drunk beating up a woman or a child; I don’t think you would stop to enquire whether war has or has not been declared on that man; you’d rush at him and defend the victim.”
“But I shouldn’t kill him,” said Levin.
“Oh yes, you would.”
“I don’t know. If I saw this, I would yield to my immediate impulse; but I can’t say in advance. And there isn’t and cannot be any such immediate impulse in the case of the oppression of the Slavs.”
“You haven’t got it, perhaps. But others have,” said Koznyshov with an angry frown. “The memory of Orthodox Christians, suffering under the yoke of ‘the infidel Hagarians’,* is very much alive among the people. ‘The people’ has heard of the sufferings of its brethren and has spoken.”
“Perhaps,” said Levin evasively, “but I don’t see it. I’m one of ‘the people’ myself, but I don’t feel it.”
“Nor do I,” said the Prince. “I was living abroad, I read the newspapers and I must admit that, even before the Bulgarian atrocities, I simply failed to understand why all Russians should suddenly have become so fond of brother Slavs, while I felt no love for them at all. I was very upset, thought I was a monster or that Carlsbad was having that effect on me. But when I came here I ceased to worry – I see that there are other people besides me who are interested only in Russia and not in brother Slavs. Konstantin, for example.”
“Personal opinions mean nothing in this case,” said Koznyshov. “They don’t matter when the whole of Russia – ‘the people’ – has expressed its will.”
“But excuse me – I don’t see this happening. ‘The people’ knows nothing about it at all,” said the Prince.
“Oh no, Papa, how can you say: nothing? What about in church last Sunday?” said Dolly who had been listening to the conversation. “Give me the towel, please,” she said to the old man who was looking at the children with a smile. “It can’t possibly be that all…”
“Well, what about in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. ‘The people’ understood nothing of it and sighed as they do at any sermon,” continued the Prince. “Then they were told that there was to be a collection in church for a worthy cause, good for their souls, and so they each produced a copeck and gave it. But in aid of what they don’t know themselves.”
“ ‘The people’ cannot help knowing; a consciousness of its destinies always exists in ‘the people’, and in moments such as the present it reveals itself to ‘the people’,” affirmed Koznyshov, with a glance at the old bee-keeper.
The handsome old man, with his black beard streaked with grey and thick silver hair, was standing immobile, holding a bowl of honey, calmly and gently looking down at the gentlefolk from his great height, and quite obviously understood nothing of what was being said and did not want to.
“That’s how it is,” he said, nodding his head with a significant air at Koznyshov’s words.
“Now you ask him. He knows nothing and doesn’t think much,” said Levin. “Have you heard about the war, Mikhailych?” he asked, turning to him. “You know – what they read in church? What do you think then? Should we be fighting for the Christians?”
“What’s there for us to think about? Alexander Nikolayevich, the Emperor, has thought about it for us and he will do so in all things. He knows best. Shall I get some more bread? Give that little fellow a bit more?” he said, turning to Dolly and pointing to Grisha, who was finishing his crust.
*Hagarians: The descendants of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham. A way of referring to Muslims.
“I have no need to ask,” said Koznyshov. “We have seen and still see hundreds and hundreds of men who throw up everything to serve a righteous cause, who come from every part of Russia and express their opinion and aim plainly and clearly. They contribute their coppers or else go themselves and say plainly why. What does this mean?”
“It means, to my mind,” said Levin, becoming excited, “that in a nation of eighty millions you can always find not hundreds as now, but tens of thousands of men, society’s outcasts, reckless ne’er-do-wells who are always ready for anything – to join Pugachev’s* band of robbers, to go to Khiva, to Serbia …”
“I tell you it’s not hundreds and they are not ne’er-do-wells,” said Koznyshov with as much irritation as if he had been defending his last penny.
“And what about donations? There it really is the whole ‘people’ expressing its will.”
“The word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, school teachers and perhaps one peasant out of a thousand knows what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty million, like Mikhailych, not only do not express their will, but haven’t got the slightest idea what it is they should be expressing their will about. What right have we got, then, to say that that is the will of ‘the people’?”
…
Koznyshov, experienced in dialectics, did not object, but immediately switched the conversation over to another aspect of the problem.
“Of course, if you want to gauge the spirit of ‘the people’ arithmetically, you’ll be hard put to it to do so. Voting has not been introduced into this country and cannot be introduced, because it does not express the will of ‘the people’; but there are other means. It can be felt in the air, the heart feels it. I needn’t mention the undercurrents which have begun to flow in the stagnant pool of the nation, and which are obvious to every unprejudiced individual; look at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse parties in the intellectual world, so hostile to each other in the past, have now all merged into one. All differences are over, all organs of public opinion say one and the same thing, all have sensed the elemental force which has gripped them and is sweeping them on in the same direction.”
“Yes, the newspapers do all say the same thing,” said the Prince. “That’s true. So much the same thing, indeed, that they are like frogs before a storm. It’s they who make it impossible to hear anything.”
“Frogs or no frogs – I am not a newspaper editor and don’t want to defend them; but I’m speaking of the unanimity of opinion in the world of the intelligentisa,” said Koznyshov, turning to his brother.
Levin wanted to reply, but the old Prince interrupted him.
“Oh, about that unanimity there is something else to be said too,” said the Prince. “Now, I have a son-in-law, Stiva Oblonsky, you know him. He’s getting a job on the committee of a commission of something, I can’t remember. Only there’s nothing to do there – oh well, Dolly, that’s no secret – but there is a salary of eight thousand roubles. You try and ask him whether his job is a useful one – he’ll prove to you that it is absolutely essential. And he is a truthful man, but one can’t really fail to believe in the usefulness of eight thousand roubles.”
“Yes, he asked me to tell Princess Oblonsky that he had got the job,” said Koznyshov crossly, presuming that the Prince was speaking out of turn.
“The same with the unanimity of the newspapers. It has been explained to me: as soon as there is a war, their profits double. How can they help thinking that the destinies of the nation and the Slavs … and all this?...”
“There are many papers I don’t like, but this is unfair,” said Koznyshov.
*Pugachev (1742-75) was a rebel Cossack leader and pretender to the throne in the reign of Catherine the Great.
I’d insist on just one condition,” went on the Prince. “Alphonse Karr* put it admirably before the war with Prussia. ‘You consider that the war is necessary? Very well then. Whoever preaches war – off to a special front-line legion and to the assault, to the attack, in the lead!’”
“The editors would look a fine lot!” said Katavasov as he burst out laughing loudly, picturing the editors he knew in that select legion.
“Oh, they’d just run away,” said Dolly. “They’d only be in the way.”
“If they run, fire grapeshot after them, or post Cossacks behind them with whips,” said the Prince.
“This is a joke and an unkind one at that, if you will forgive me saying so, Prince,” said Koznyshov.
“I don’t see it as a joke, it’s…” began Levin, but Koznyshov interrupted him.
“Every member of society is called upon to perform the task which is proper to him,” he said. “Men of ideas, too, perform their task when they give expression to public opinion. Unanimity and the complete expression of public opinion are the two services performed by the press and they are a welcome phenomenon. Twenty years ago we should have remained silent, but now the voice of the Russian people is heard, ‘the people’ which is ready to rise up like one man and ready to offer up sacrifices for the sake of its oppressed brethren; this is a great step forwards and a token of strength.”
“But it isn’t a matter merely of sacrifice, but of killing Turks,” said Levin with some hesitation. “ ‘The people’ sacrifice themselves and are ready to sacrifice themselves for the souls’ sake and not for the sake of killing,” he added, involuntarily connecting the conversation with the thoughts that preoccupied him.
“How do you mean – their souls’ sake? This, you know, is a puzzling expression for a natural scientist. What is the soul?” said Katavasov with a smile.
“Oh, you know!!”
“Now, I give you my word, I haven’t the slightest idea!” said Katavasov with a loud laugh.
“I have brought not peace, but a sword’, says Christ,” broke in Koznyshov, quoting quite simply, as if it was the easiest thing to understand, the very passage out of the Gospel which had always perplexed Levin more than any other.
“That’s how it is,” again repeated the old man who was standing beside them, in answer to a glance, casually thrown at him.
“No, my dear fellow, you’re beaten, beaten, completely beaten!” cried Katavasov cheerfully.
Levin flushed with annoyance, not because he was beaten, but because he could not restrain himself from arguing.
“No, I can’t argue with them,” he thought, “they wear impenetrable armour, and I am naked.”
He saw that it was not possible to convince either his brother or Katavasov, and saw even less possibility of agreeing with them. What they were advocating was that intellectual pride which had almost been his ruin. He could not even agree that dozens of people, including his brother, had the right, on the basis of what they had been told by hundreds of volunteers with the gift of the gab swarming into Moscow and Petersburg, to say that they and the newspapers expressed the will and ideas of “the people”, especially ideas that found their expression in vengeance and killing. He could not agree with this both because he did not find these ideas expressed by “the people”, in the midst of whom he was living, and because he did not find these ideas within himself (and he could not consider himself as other than one of the individuals making up the Russian people), but mainly because neither he nor “the people” knew or could know what the common good consisted of, though he did know beyond all doubt that the achievement of the common good was possible only through the strict observance of that law of good and evil which has been revealed to every man, and he therefore could neither want war nor advocate it for any general purpose. He spoke with Mikhailych and with the peasants who had expressed their thought in the legend concerning the invitation of the Vikings. [Legend according to which the Vikings were invited by Russian tribal chieftains in the ninth century to come into Russia and bring some order into chaos there.] “Reign and rule over us. We joyfully promise complete obedience. We assume all the toil, all humiliations, all sacrifices; but it is not our task to judge and to decide.” And now, according to Koznyshov, “the people” was giving up that right, bought at such a heavy price.
He also wanted to say that if public opinion was an infallible judge, why, then, were revolution and communes not just as legitimate as the movement in favour of the Slavs? But all these were ideas that could not solve anything. Only one thing was plain beyond a doubt – that the argument was just then irritating Koznyshov and that therefore to argue was bad; and Levin held his peace and drew his guests’ attention to the gathering clouds and to the fact that it was best to go home to escape the rain.
- p. 764-9 (Leo Tolstoy’s Life):
In March 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists, and Tolstoy wrote a letter to the new Tsar, Alexander III, asking that the six assassins should be pardoned and spared the death penalty as an act of Christian forgiveness. Not surprisingly, the Tsar refused. Tolstoy began to write more and more on social, religious and political questions, taking on all of them almost an anarchist position based on peace and love. He was now being kept under constant surveillance by the Tsarist Police.
In 1882 Tolstoy bought a large house with grounds in Khamovniki, Moscow, and from then till the end of his life divided his time between his country estate and Moscow. In the city he undertook an assiduous study of Hebrew with a rabbi.
During 1883 he worked intensively on What I Believe, inveighing against personal profit and private property and urging a return to the original message of Christ. Tolstoy’s behaviour was becoming more and more erratic and he was repeatedly threatening to leave his home and family to live the simple life of a peasant or even an itinerant pilgrim. He started to wear peasant garb and to try to learn how to become proficient at various types of manual labour and handicrafts, such as making his own shoes.
In October 1883 he met Vladimir Chertkov, a twenty-nine-year-old wealthy nobleman and fanatical Tolstoy disciple, who had resigned his position as Captain of Horse Guards to live on his own estate improving the lot of the local peasants.
In 1884 Chertkov suggested that Tolstoy should set up the Intermediary (Posrednik) Publishing House to disseminate not only those of Tolstoy’s works that had not been banned, but good literature in general at very low prices. During its first four years, the Intermediary sold over twelve million books. Chertkov laboured to have published abroad the works of Tolstoy which were suppressed or censored in Russia, and Tolstoy worked on translating and editing works for publication in his own country. He now became a vegetarian, and gave up alcohol, hunting and smoking. More and more “disciples” were appearing at Yasnaya Polyana, both from Russia and abroad, and many went back to their own areas to set up communes based on Tolstoyan principles.
However, his wife detested Chertkov’s fanaticism and increasing influence over her husband, and Chertkov returned her animosity. Tolstoy and his family drifted further and further apart. In June 1884 he actually walked out on them, but returned shortly afterwards. By this time, he had seriously alarmed the government and Church, was under police surveillance, and many of his old acquaintances feared he was mad.
In 1885, interestingly for British readers, he recommended for publication by the Intermediary all the works of Dickens, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, which he described as “outstanding”; he also claimed that Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma agreed with many of his own principles.
In addition to his polemical writings, Tolstoy also at this time wrote a certain amount of fiction, mainly novellas, such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata, all of which, although extremely powerful, were still written to make points in agreement with Tolstoy’s new world view. The Kreutzer Sonata was at first banned because it advocated sexual abstinence even in marriage, and was only finally published in 1891 following a personal interview by Sofya with the Tsar.
Tolstoy began his last full-length novel, Resurrection, in 1889, and completed it only in 1899, when it was published in full after being issued in instalments.
In 1890 Tolstoy criticized the recent persecution of the Jews in Russia, and continued to attract hundreds of idealistic disciples from home and abroad. He was now world-famous as a spiritual leader and social critic. The following year he renounced the rights to most of his works published after 1881, although he still retained the royalties from works issued before this date to maintain his family. He also distributed his wealth (580,000 roubles) in ten lots among Sofya and his nine living children.
In 1892, along with other writers and artists, such as Chekhov, he worked hard to alleviate conditions for those suffering from the catastrophic famine in central Russia, although he had already expressed a belief that organized charity merely perpetuated the division between rich and poor. The government tried to suppress news of the disaster, and were outraged to such a degree at Tolstoy’s efforts to spread awareness of the tragedy abroad that there was a real possibility that the elderly writer would at last be imprisoned or exiled.
Among Tolstoy’s other thunderous denunciations of these years was The Kingdom of God Is within You, published in Berlin in 1894, which excoriated both Church and State for crushing the masses, and advocated mass passive non-resistance to these oppressive powers to achieve change.
Another one of Tolstoy’s children, Ivan, died in February 1895 from scarlet fever, driving Sofya into temporary insanity and almost to suicide. She developed an infatuation at this period with the much younger composer Sergei Taneyev, which continued till 1904, although there is no clear evidence as to how intimate their relationship became. Tolstoy, not surprisingly, was furious and threatened more and more often to leave.
At this period he began to advocate land reform, rejecting the notions of private ownership and centralized government, and extolling the rural village commune as a model for social organization.
In 1895 he undertook a vigorous campaign for the peasant religious sect of the Dukhobors to be allowed to emigrate from Russia. They were being persecuted for refusing to serve in the army and pay taxes and, although not basing their ideas on Tolstoy’s teachings, in their way of life they had much in common with what he was propounding. Tolstoy suggested that the authorities persecute him instead, but they refused, believing this would make a martyr out of him. However, Chertkov and other prominent Tolstoyans who supported the Dukhobors were exiled for five years. Finally, in 1897, the Dukhobors were allowed to emigrate to Canada, with funds raised by Tolstoy, including the advance for his novel Resurrection. He was by now claiming publicly that patriotism was evil, that the Tsar lacked all authority and should abdicate, and that all states are illegitimate and should be dissolved.
He now also began to write on the purpose and aim of art. He commenced What Is Art? in 1896, and finished it in early 1898, when it was published simultaneously in Russia – in a heavily censored version – and in Britain, in English.
The book attracted both praise and censure, and sparked intense debate in the press. In this essay Tolstoy repudiated most of his own early work previous to his new polemical and didactic phase, and derided Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He attacked existing art as elitist and corrupting, and expounded the view that art must be produced to appeal to the masses and to create a brotherhood of humanity. In this work he claimed that Dickens was the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century because of his vivid and accessible style, and descriptions of the social conditions of the poor of the time.
In that year, he visited an exhibition of Impressionist paintings in Moscow and criticized them for lacking any central idea. Around the same time he wrote that Anton Chekhov wrote like a Decadent and Impressionist – possibly a criticism of Chekhov’s lack of a social position in his writing.
Tolstoy now laboured extremely hard to finish Resurrection, which he decided to sell at a greater price than that of the cheap editions of his previous works, so that the profits could be donated to the Dukhobors to finance their continuing emigration. Despite being heavily altered by the censor, the novel was still perceived as mocking the Orthodox Church when it was published in full in volume form, and Tolstoy was promptly excommunicated by an edict accusing him of numerous heresies and urging him to repent – which he refused adamantly to do. Letters of sympathy poured in from all over the world. He then wrote a letter to the Tsar calling for human rights and religious freedom – a demand which was of course ignored. He was still regularly feeling the temptation to leave home, although he did not do so because he was afraid Sofya would commit suicide. Although up until this point he had been very fit and active for his age – now over seventy – and had still done gymnastics and weight-training and played tennis in summer, his health now began to decline following a serious bout of malaria which almost killed him. He drew up a will, in which he stipulated that almost all of the proceeds from his previous works were to be devoted to social causes, and to his publishing company, to further his teachings. Sofya and his children were outraged, and a protracted and bitter struggle over his will began. Tolstoy went down to the Crimea to recover from his illness, and was visited by Gorky and Chekhov, whose most recent plays he disliked, although he admired some of his stories. Tolstoy now suffered in quick succession from typhoid fever and pneumonia, which once again brought him close to death.
He remained in the Crimea from September 1901 to June 1902, and despite his weakness while there, he wrote a long essay entitled ‘What Is Religion?’, and sent a letter beginning “Dear Brother” to Tsar Nicholas II, urging social reforms, and warning him that oppression by Church and State had brought the masses near to insurrection.
Tolstoy continued to produce essays and pamphlets on social questions. In January 1903, he protested vehemently against the massacre of Jews in Kishinyov and wrote three stories to be published for the victims’ financial benefit.
He was now gradually becoming frailer, and his output declined, but he still managed to finish a short novel, Hadji Murat, set in the Caucasus, and in 1904 published his notorious essay ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’, in which he questioned the reputation of King Lear and many of Shakespeare’s other plays, prompting two extremely critical letters to him by George Bernard Shaw.
During this time the Russo-Japanese War broke out and, in 1905, insurrections flared up all over Russia, which were brutally suppressed. Tolstoy issued several articles condemning the use of violence by both sides in the war, and asserting that, although the insurrections were inevitable, the participants should try to achieve results by adopting his own doctrine of non-resistance to evil.
After the upheavals, the Tsar granted a limited degree of civil rights, but Tolstoy was contemptuous, claiming that there was nothing in these reforms for the common masses. He criticized not only violent revolutionaries, but even peaceful social democrats aiming for a liberal democracy, since he believed that all forms of government were evil: he was now in his writings coming to reject civilization altogether, in all its manifestations, and advocating a return to the simple life of the peasantry, with social organization based on the democratic village peasant commune, where everybody had a say. He wrote to influential Russian statesmen urging the abolition of private property, the abandonment of industrialization and city life, and a return to agriculture and rural crafts.
In 1906, Sofya was operated on for a large tumour; the surgery was successful, although it left her debilitated. Tolstoy’s love for her resurfaced, and he looked after her devotedly, in so far as his own weak condition would allow. But in November 1906 his daughter Maria died suddenly of pneumonia, and a few months later his brother-in-law was murdered during a strike in St Petersburg.
This only deepened Tolstoy’s depression, and he renewed his interest in oriental thought. Sofya’s behaviour became erratic, and the arguments over his will increasingly savage. Chertkov had now moved back to Russia from exile, and Sofya accused Tolstoy of having a homosexual relationship with him. The writer began to suffer frequent dizzy spells, and he grew weaker and weaker. In September 1909, he received an admiring letter from Mohandas (later Mahatma) Gandhi, who throughout his life was profoundly influenced by Tolstoy’s social theories and his promotion of peaceful non-resistance to evil. A correspondence began between them which continued till Tolstoy’s death.
In 1909 Tolstoy revised his will, leaving control of his writings after his death to his daughter Alexandra, now twenty-five, who was to supervise their publication along with Chertkov. This was kept secret from Sofya.
- Back cover:
Leo Tolstoy’s most personal work Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, “moral” life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling to reconcile reason with passion, espousing a Christian anarchism that Tolstoy himself believed in.
Acclaimed by critics and readers alike, Anna Karenina presents a poignant blend of realism and lyricism that makes it one of the most perfect, enduring novels of all time.
“Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky
- From The Will to Power by Nietzsche (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A Scarpitti); page 561:
“ . . . how are we to classify . . . . [t]he social pessimism of the anarchists (or Shelley’s)? The pessimism of compassion (that of Tolstoy, A. de Vigny)?
Are all these things not also phenomena indicating disease and decay? . . . Attaching excessive importance to moral values, or to ‘otherworldly’ fictions, or to social calamities, or to suffering in general: any such exaggeration of a particular point of view is already a sign of disease. Also the preponderance of negation over affirmation!”
- From The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature by Ayn Rand; page 104:
Tolstoy preached resignation and passive obedience to society’s power. In Anna Karenina, the most evil book in serious literature, he attacked man’s desire for happiness and advocated its sacrifice to conformity.
page 55: . . . I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
pages 106-7: The essential element of Naturalism—the presentation of “a slice of life” at a specific time and place—cannot be borrowed literally. A writer cannot copy the Russian society of 1812 as presented in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He has to employ some thought and effort of his own, at least in the sense of using his own observations to present the people of his own time and place. Thus, paradoxically, on its lower levels Naturalism offers a chance for some minimal originality, which Romanticism does not. In this respect, Naturalism would appeal to some writers seeking the possibility of a literary achievement on a modest scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTWunrQWH0E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds-I8sO4Ss0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr6DYLBkyG0
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Changed my typing of him to ESI-Se a while ago, I think after reading Anna Karenina. It ultimately boiled down to the way he commented on the Fe aspects of the interactions in that kind of aristocratic context. Kind of like War and Peace but more pointed and subtle in depiction. Anyway I've forgotten most of both but his hero in AK was pretty obviously one of those conservative, humble ESIs; and his depiction of Anna (EIE-Ni 3w4 sx/sp) wasn't coming from a position of duality—it's more like he was just saying, "Look at her" in a kind of distantly appreciative way.
@HERO wow that was long but thanks for sharing. I enjoyed the analysis. The only thing I would disagree with is Vronsky as a mediocre man who got out easy at the end. I don't think that's very fair, even to Anna. Anna really is a glorious heroine, and Vronsky is worthy of her love because he returns it with the same passion. It's society that gets between them, and of course society is much more unfair to Anna. But Vronsky heading off to Turkey at the end is not at all an easy way out. For a fashionable man to leave the center of fashionable life? Head out far into the provinces to a war he previously tried to avoid? It is unlike his character to also kill himself after Anna did, but in every other way he is defeated. When Oblonsky sees him towards the end of the novel, he remarks on how miserable he looks; it seems like he's going on with his life after Anna, but that life was always open for him, even when it had been closed to Anna. He's going in a direction that will take him nowhere, his story is done without Anna.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy - ISTJ - Gorky
Attachment 13956
Gamma extravert, maybe LIE. Much more of a rationalist (and much more self-satisfied, but I digress) than Dosto, and his portrayals of his characters are much less empathetic. This is why Tolstoy didn't "get" Shakespeare, but Dosto loved the Bard.
"People frequently think that the more one knows the better it is. This is not so. The main thing is not to know much, but to know the most needful out of the mass of knowable"
"Do not fear lack of knowledge, but fear excess of knowledge, particularly if this excessive knowledge be for profit or praise. It is better to know less than one might than more than one ought. Excessive knowledge makes men self-satisfied and self-assured, and therefore more foolish than they would be if they knew nothing"
"If a man knew all sciences and spake all languages but did not know what he is and what he ought to do, he would be less enlightened than the old woman who believes in a Saviour, that is in a God whose will she recognizes in her life and who knows that God demands righteousness of her. She is more enlightened than the scientist because she has found an answer to the most important question : what is her life and how she must live. Yet the scientist having the cleverest answers for the most complex, but essentially trifling questions, has no answer to the most important question of each rational being: why do I live, and what ought I to do ?"
"People who think that the most important thing in life is knowledge are like moths that fly against the candle : they perish themselves and obscure the light"
"People either term that as science which is the most important science in the world, according to which man may learn how he ought to live in the world, or all that which it flatters a man to know and which may or may not do him any good. The first kind of knowledge is truly a great thing, but the second is for the most part a futile pursuit"
"The life task of each man is to become increasingly better. Therefore only those sciences are good which help him in this task"
"If in real life illusion mars reality but for a moment — in the domain of the abstract, illusion can rule for thousands of years and impose its iron yoke upon entire nations, choking the noblest impulses of mankind, and with the help of the slaves deceived by it, shackle those whom it cannot deceive. It is the enemy with whom the wisest minds of all ages engaged in unequal combat, and what they won from it in conquest is the noblest heritage of mankind."
When Count Tolstoy, then 34, asked 18-year old Sophia to become his wife, he wanted there to be no secrets between them. Before the marriage, Leo gave Sophia diaries in which he described his past intimate relationships with other women, including a peasant servant he had a kid with out of wedlock.
Much later, when she was over 60, Sophia would return to Leo’s diaries – this time with an obsessive desire to remove anything that might be compromising to her. She feared that for generations to come she would be remembered as a hateful shrew since Tolstoy often scorned and criticized her. Scholars believe that Tolstoy did indeed destroy some entries at Sophia’s request.
Maybe all this came out of Tolstoy’s wish to “purify” himself from the sins of his youth by choosing an innocent young woman from a conservative family in the hope that she would set him straight. Unfortunately, he couldn’t effectively put an end to the habits of his youth, which ended up accompanying him throughout his life.
Through his life, Leo Tolstoy struggled with lust. “I can’t overcome my lustiness,” he wrote in his diary, “this vice has become a habit for me.” Another entry: “I have to sleep with women. Otherwise, lust doesn’t give me a single spare minute.”
Each time his wife was pregnant and couldn’t have sex, he turned again to the peasant women in his village – where, as a landowner and a Count, he had virtually unlimited power. At the beginning of their marriage, he promised Sophia “not to have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent” – a very polite way of making it clear that he was definitely going to have affairs.
He values Te/Fi and is very direct and decisive in the way he voices his opinions. I'd say moralistic rational sensor by his non-fiction writing and his life. If you subscribe to Quadra values, I'd say he seems opposite Alpha. ESI.
Leo Tolstoy is an INFP.
He has a deep understanding of human nature. And he puts a focus on meaning, on abstracting why we're here among what the rest of us may occasionally see as meaningless chaos. But the soul, insight, sharp wit, beloved intention, racing projects, making the most of your human potential, those themes stand and stay strong.