People : Author : Peter Kropotkin Tags

i.e. in 1852, the first story of Tolstóy, Childhood, soon followed by Boyhood, made its appearance in the monthly review, The Contemporary, with the modest signature, "L.N.T." The little story was a great success. It was imbued with such a charm; it had such freshness, and was so free of all the mannerism of the literary trade, that the unknown author at once became a favorite, and was placed by the side of Turguéneff and Gontcharóff.
There are excellent children stories in all languages. Childhood is the period of life with which many authors have best succeeded in dealing. And yet no one, perhaps, has so well described the life of children from within, from their own point of view, as Tolstóy did. With him, it is the child itself which expresses its childish feelings, and it does this so as to compel the reader to judge full-grown people with the child 's point of view. Such is the realism of Childhood and Boyhood-that is, their richness in facts caught from real life-that a Russian critic, Písareff, developed quite a theory of education chiefly on the basis of the data contained in these two stories of Tolstóy's.
It is related somewhere that one day, during their rambles in the country, Turguéneff and Tolstóy came across an old hack of a horse which was finishing its days in a lonely field. Tolstóy entered at once into the. feelings of the horse and began to describe its sad reflections so vividly, that Turguéneff, alluding to the then new ideas of Darwinism, could not help exclaiming, "I am sure, Lyov Nikoláevitch, that you must have had horses among your ancestors!" In the capacity of entirely identifying himself with the feelings and the thoughts of the beings of whom he speaks, Tolstéy has but few rivals; but with children this power of identification attains its highest degree. The moment he speaks of children, Tolstóy becomes himself a child.
Childhood and Boyhood are, it is now known, autobiographical stories, in which only small details are altered, and in the boy Irténeff we have a glimpse of what L.N. Tolstóy was in his childhood, He was born in 1828, in the estate of Yásnaya Polyána, which now enjoys universal fame, and for the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and grandfather-so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Vengueroft-are described in War and Peace, in Nicholas Róstoff and the old Count Róstoff respectively; while his mother, who was born a Princess Volkhónskaya, is represented as Mary Bolkónskaya. Leo Tolstóy lost his mother at the age of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T.A. Ergólskaya, in Yásnaya Polyána, and after 1840, at Kazáñ, by his aunt P.I. Yúshkova, whose house, we are told, must have been very much the same as the house of the Róstoffs' in War and Peace.
Leo Tolstóy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazáñ University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty and two years in the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-staff of both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a single professor was able to awaken in the young man some passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in 1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstóy had already left the University and was making at Yásnaya Polyána some attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking sincerity, in The Morning of a Landlord.
The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight into what he was then-slightly exaggerated, of course, and dramatized-we can get from the Notes of a Billiard Marker. Happily he could not put up with such paltry surroundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he had hitherto led-that of an idle aristocratic youth-and following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in order to enter military service. There he stayed first at Pyatigórsk-the place so full of reminiscences of Lérmontoff-until, having passed the necessary examinations, he was received as a noncommissioned officer (yunker) in the artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks of the Térek.
His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings, we know from his Cossacks. But it was there also that in the face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired Púshkin and Lérmontoff he found his true vocation. He sent to the Contemporary his first literary experiment, Childhood, and this first story, as he soon learned from a letter of the poet Nekrásoff, editor of the review, and from the critical notes of Grigórieff, Annenkoff, Druzhínin, and Tchernyshévskiy (they belonged to four different esthetical schools), proved to be a chef d'aeuvre.
DURING AND AFTER THE CRIMEAN WAR
However, the great Crimean war began towards the end of the next year (1853), and L.N. Tolstóy did not want to remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his transfer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria, and later on in the battle of Balakláva, and from November, 1854, till August, 1855, remained besieged in Sebastopol-partly in the terrible "Fourth bastion," where he lived through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War: he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as was the defense of these forts and bastions which had grown up under the enemy's shells. He obstinately refused during the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with his battery in the most dangerous spots.
I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, Sebastopol in December, 18 54, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches-produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because the were not representing one corner only of real life-the corner which accidentally fell under the writer's observations-but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented-and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy-an interweaving of Dichtung and Wahrheit, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.
Tolstóy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual meter and language of soldiers' songs, a satirical song in which he described the blunders of the commanders which ended in the Balakláva disaster. The song, written in an admirable popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other Tolstóy.
On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of peace (1856) Tolstóy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and partly at Yásnaya Polyána. In the capital he was received with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a "Sebastopol hero" and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men-officers of the Guard and jeunesse dorée of his own class-which was passed in the restaurants and cafés chantants of the Russian capital, amid gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He became at that time friendly with Turguéneff and saw much of him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yásnaya Polyána-the estates of the two great writers being not very far from each other; but, although his friend Turguéneff was taking then a lively part in co-editing with Hérzen the famous revolutionary paper, The Bell (see Chapter VIII.), Tolstóy, seems to have taken no interest in it; and while he was well acquainted with the editing staff of the then famous review, The Contemporary, which was fighting the good fight for the liberation of the peasants and for freedom in general, Tolstóy, for one reason or another, never became friendly with the Radical leaders of that review-Tchernyshévsky, Dobrolúboff, Mikháiloff, and their friends.
Altogether, the great intellectual and reform movement which was going on then in Russia seems to have left him cold. He did not join the part of reforms. Still less was he inclined to join those young Nihilists whom Turguéneff had portrayed to the best of his ability in Fathers and Sons, or later on in the seventies, the youth whose watchword became: "Be the people," and with whom Tolstóy has so much in common at the present time. What was the reason of that estrangement we are unable to say. Was it that a deep chasm separated the young epicuraean aristocrat from the ultra-democratic writers, like Dobrolúboff, who worked at spreading socialistic and democratic ideas in Russia, and still more from those who, like Rakhmétoff in Tchernyshévsky's novel What is to be done, lived the life of the peasant, thus practicing then what Tolstóy began to preach twenty years later ?
Or, was it the difference between the two generations -the man of thirty or more, which Tolstóy was, and the young people in their early twenties, possessed of all the haughty intolerance of youth,-which kept them aloof from each other. And was it not, in addition to all this, the result of theories? namely, a fundamental difference in the conceptions of the advanced Russian Radicals, who at that time were mostly admirers of Governmental Jacobinism, and the Populist, the No-Government man which Tolstóy must have already then been, since it distinctly appeared in his negative attitude towards Western civilization, and especially in the educational work which he began in 1861 in the Yásnaya Polyána school?
The novels which Tolstóy brought out during these years, 1856-1862, do not throw much light upon his state of mind, because, even though they are, to a great extent autobiographical, they mostly relate to earlier periods of his life. Thus, he published two more of his Sebastopol war-sketches. All his powers of observation and war-psychology, all his deep comprehension of the Russian soldier, and especially of the plain, un-theatrical hero who really wins the battles, and a profound understanding of that inner spirit of an army upon which depend success and failure: everything, in short, which developed into the beauty and the truthfulness of War and Peace was already manifested in these sketches, which undoubtedly represented a new departure in war-literature the world over.
YOUTH, IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL
Youth, The Morning of a Landed Proprietor, and Lucerne appeared during the same years, but they produced upon us readers, as well as upon the literary critics, a strange and rather unfavorable impression. The great writer remained; and his talent was showing evident signs of growth, while the problems of life which he touched upon were deepening and widening; but the heroes who seemed to represent the ideas of the author himself could not entirely win our sympathies. In Childhood and Boyhood we had had before us the boy Irténeff. Now, in Youth, Irténeff makes the acquaintance of Prince Nektúdoff; they become great friends, and promise, without the slightest reservation, to confess to each other their moral failings. Of course, they do not always keep this promise; but it leads them to continual self-probing, to a repentance one moment which is forgotten the next, and to an unavoidable duality of mind which has the most debilitating effect upon the two young men's character. The ill results of these moral endeavors Tolstóy did not conceal. He detailed them with the greatest imaginable sincerity, but he seemed nevertheless to keep them before his readers as something desirable; and with this we could not agree.
Youth is certainly the age when higher moral ideals find their way into the mind of the future man or woman; the years when one strives to get rid of the imperfections of boyhood or girlhood; but this aim is never attained in the ways recommended at monasteries and Jesuit schools. The only proper way is to open before the young mind new, broad horizons, to free it from superstitions and fears, to grasp man's position amid Nature and Mankind; and especially to feel at one with some great cause and to nurture one's forces with the view of being able some day to struggle for that cause. Idealism-that is, the capacity of conceiving a poetical love towards something great, and to prepare for it-is the only sure preservation from all that destroys the vital forces of man: vise, dissipation, and so on. This inspiration, this love of an ideal, the Russian youth used to find in the student circles, of which Turguéneff has left us such spirited descriptions. Instead of that, Irténeff and Neklúdoff, remaining during their university years in their splendid aristocratic isolation, are unable to conceive a higher ideal worth living for, and spent their forces in vain endeavors of semi-religious moral improvement, on a plan that may perhaps succeed in the isolation of a monastery, but usually ends in failure amid the attractions lying round a young man of the world. These failures Tolstóy relates, as usual, with absolute earnestness and sincerity.
The Morning of a Landed Proprietor produced again a strange impression. The story deals with the unsuccessful philanthropic endeavors of a serf-owner who tries to make his serfs happy and wealthy-without ever thinking of beginning where he ought to begin; namely, of setting his slaves free. In those years of liberation of the serfs and enthusiastic hopes, such a story sounded as an anachronism-the more so as it was not known at the time of its appearance that it was a page from Tolstóy's earlier autobiography relating to the year 1847, when he settled in Yásnaya Polyána, immediately after having left the University, and when extremely few thought of liberating the serfs. It was one of those sketches of which Brandes has so truly said that in them Tolstóy "thinks aloud" about some page of his own life. It thus produced a certain mixed, undefined feeling. And yet one could not but admire in it the same great objective talent that was so striking in Childhood and the Sebastopol sketches. In speaking of peasants who received with distrust the measures with which their lord was going to benefit them, it would have been so easy, so humanly natural, for an educated man to throw upon their ignorance their unwillingness to accept the threshing machine (which, by the way, did not work), or the refusal of a peasant to accept the free gift of a stone house (which was far from the village) . . . . . But not a shade of that sort of pleading in favor of the landlord is to be found in the story, and the thinking reader necessarily concludes in favor of the common sense of the peasants.
Then came Lucerne. It is told in that story how the same Neklúdoff, bitterly struck by the indifference of a party of English tourists who sat on the balcony of a rich Swiss hotel and refused to throw even a few pennies to a poor singer to whose songs they had listened with evident emotion, brings the singer to the hotel, takes him to the dining-hall, to the great scandal of the English visitors, and treats him there to a bottle of champagne. The feelings of Neklúdoff are certainly very just; but while reading this story one suffers all the while for the poor musician, and experiences a sense of anger against the Russian nobleman who uses him as a rod to chastise the tourists, without even noticing how he makes the old man miserable during this lesson in morals. The worst of it is that the author, too, seems not to remark the false note which rings in the conduct of Neklúdoff, nor to realize how a man with really humane feelings would have taken the singer to some small wine-shop and would have had with him a friendly talk over a picholette of common wine. Yet we see again all Tolstóy's force of talent. He so honestly, so fully, and so truly describes the uneasiness of the singer during-the whole scene that the reader's unavoidable conclusion is that although the young aristocrat was right in protesting against stone-heartedness, his ways were as unsympathetic as those of the self-contented Englishmen at the hotel. Tolstóy's artistic power carries him beyond and above his theories.
This is not the only case where such a remark may be made concerning Tolstóy's work. His appreciation of this or that action, of this or that of his heroes, may be wrong; his own "philosophy" may be open to objection, but the force of his descriptive talent and his literary honesty are always so great, that he will often make the feelings and actions of his heroes speak against their creator, and prove something very different from what he intended to prove.3 This is probably why Turguéneff, and apparently other literary friends, too, told him: "Don't put your 'philosophy into your art.' Trust to your artistic feeling, and you will create great things." In fact, notwithstanding Tolstóy's distrust of science, I must say that I always feel in reading his works that he is possessed of the most scientific insight I know of among artists. He may be wrong in his conclusions, but never is he wrong in his statement of data. True science and true art are not hostile to each other, but always work in harmony.
SMALL STORIES-THE COSSACKS
Several of Tolstóy's novels and stories appeared in the years 1857-1862 (The Snow-Storm, The Two Hussars, Three Deaths, The Cossacks) and each one of them won new admiration for his talent. The first is a mere trifle, and yet it is a gem of art; it concerns the wanderings of a traveler during a snow-storm, in the plains of Central Russia. The same remark is true of the Two Hussars, in which two generations are sketched on a few pages with striking accuracy. As to the deeply pantheistic Three Deaths, in which the death of a rich lady, a poor horse-driver, and a birch-tree are contrasted, it is a piece of poetry in prose that deserves a place beside Goethe's best pieces of pantheistic poetry, while for its social significance it is already a forerunner of the Tolstóy of the later epoch.
The Cossacks is an autobiographical novel, and relates to the time, already mentioned on a previous page, when Tolstóy at twenty-four, running away from the meaningless life he was living, went to Pyatigórsk, and then to a lonely Cossack village on the Térek, hunted there in company with the old Cossack Yeróshka and the young Lukáshka, and found in the poetical enjoyment of a beautiful nature, in the plain life of these squatters, and in the mute adoration of a Cossack girl, the awakening of his wonderful literary genius.
The appearance of this novel, in which one feels a most genuine touch of genius, provoked violent discussions. It was begun in 1852, but was not published till 1860, when all Russia was awaiting with anxiety the results of the work of the Abolition of Serfdom Committees, foreseeing that when serfdom should be done away with a complete destruction of all other rotten, obsolete, and barbarous institutions of past ages would have to begin. For this great work of reform Russia looked to Western civilization for inspiration and for teachings. And there came a young writer who, following in the steps of Rousseau, revolted against that civilization and preached a return to nature and the throwing off of the artificialities we call civilized life, which are in reality a poor substitute for the happiness of free work amid a free nature. Everyone knows by this time the dominant idea of The Cossacks. It is the contrast between he natural life of these sons of the prairies and the artificial life of the young officer thrown in their midst. He tells of strong men who are similar to the American squatters, and have been developed in the Steppes at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, by a perilous life, in which force, endurance, and calm courage are a first necessity. Into their midst comes one of the sickly products of our semi-intellectual town life, and at every step he feels himself the inferior of the Cossack Lukáshka. He wishes to do something on a grand scale, but has neither the intellectual nor the physical force to accomplish it. Even his love is not the strong healthy love of the prairie man, but a sort of slight excitement of the nerves, which evidently will not last, and which only produces a similar restlessness in the Cossack girl, but cannot carry her away. And when he talks to her of love, in the force of which he himself does not believe, she sends him off with the words: " Go away you weakling!"
Some saw in that powerful novel such glorification of the semi-savage state as that in which writers of the eighteenth century, and especially Rousseau, are supposed to have indulged. There is in Tolstóy nothing of the sort, as there was nothing of the sort in Rousseau. But Tolstóy saw that in the life of the Cossacks there is more vitality more vigor, more power, than in his well-born hero's life-and he told it in a beautiful and impressive form. His hero-like whom there are thousands upon thousands-has none of the powers that come from manual work and struggle with nature; and neither has he hose powers which knowledge and true civilization might have given him. A real intellectual power is not asking itself at every moment, "Am I right, or am I wrong?" It feels that there are principles in which it is