Tolstoi and Young Russia

To Russia there are now two Tolstoïs — the Tolstoï who was alive and the Tolstoï who is dead.

The Tolstoï alive was looked upon with bitterness and pain, as a father who denied his love. Tolstoï sat within reach of all Russia on his estate in Yasnaya Polyana, looking out upon the infinite, ‘applying his soul and meditating on the law of the Most High,’ and the youth would come to him with questions and demands. ‘Leo Nicholaievitch,’ they would say, ‘they arc hanging us on every cross-road, they are starving and flogging the peasants to death, they are massacring the Jews, and all Russia is red with blood. What are you going to say? What are you going to do?’

And Leo Nicholaievitch would answer, ‘I do not like to speak on such matters, for I am a religious thinker and not a politician, but in so far as Russia disrupts union and harmony, she is in error, and in so far as you do so, you, too, are in error. We must all live in union and harmony — that is the reason of life.’

Then the youth would go away and look upon that wolf he was asked to lie down with, and anger and even distrust against Tolstoï — that great lover of mankind — would fill his heart.

But it is different with the dead Tolstoï. There is no rushing to him now to get his help or advice at each repetition of iniquity and calamity. He is no longer a figure living in Yasnaya Polyana in the nineteenth century, but a wise man, one of the great sons of Wisdom whom she has exalted. It took but the first footfall of Death for all Russia to realize this. A sob broke from them. They were bereft. Their glory had departed.

Yet because he lived on this earth only eighty-two years and three months, while as dead he may live many hundreds of years as one of the world’s great men, it is interesting from an historical standpoint to see what were his thoughts and Russia’s at the various periods of the eighty-two years they lived together.

I

The nineteenth century in Russia is characterized by periods of revolutionary outburst, — the aftermaths of the French Revolution, of the European unrest of 1848 and 1870 which found their way into that far country, —coupled with causes native to Russia itself; and by periods of reaction, of ebb-tides as it were, when the ardent youth, no longer ardent and no longer young, sat down passive and hopeless with folded arms. It was in such an ebb-tide that Tolstoï was born and reared.

The Decembrists of 1825 had fought and lost; the cynical cloak of Byronism, though rather threadbare, was still much in use even up to the forties. The result was that Tolstoï’s detached, individualistic nature was not diverted from its natural groove as it might have been had he been born twenty years later, when the sense of social solidarity was developed and the energies and passions of the youth found their outlet through political and propagandist groups.

How different from the youth of the sixties was Tolstoï’s own youth as he described it in the book of that name! Prince Nekludoff and the hero, who is Tolstoï, make a compact while at the university to tell each other every experience and emotion. The result was extreme self-analysis and introspection. Here we can almost see the foundation for that insulation of mind which was his increasingly to the very end. But it can only be fully understood through a definite picture of that cauldron of dreaming, thinking, fighting Russia into which he threw his writings, and which he did not seem to see or feel.

The Crimean War had destroyed the last shreds of Byronism, and the democratic movement of 1848 had rolled its waves into Russia. The country in the middle fifties was fired with the spirit of educational and political reform. The women broke away from their homes and demanded education; the young men rose to help spread education and encourage the women. The country was bent on freeing the serfs. Emancipation commissions were sitting, and there were rumors of great political changes. Not only was the serf to be free, but the landlord was to be divested of land, and Russia was to be turned into one glorious commonwealth!

But Tolstoï was already thirty and immune from contagion. He was in St. Petersburg leading the frivolous life of a nobleman, made more frivolous still by the fact that he was a fêted hero returned from the war and already a writer of good reputation. He makes no mention of this great political and educational movement, nor did he make friends with any of its leaders, not even with the editors of the Contemporary for which he wrote, Dabrolubeff, Michailloff and Tchernyshefsky, who kept up the fire of the agrarian reform and practically forced the issue upon Alexander II. Even Turgenieff left him cold. He ‘despised him,’ he said, and it was only a few years later that he even sent him a pair of pistols and a challenge because of a petty quarrel over the education of Turgenieff’s daughter. As for the revolutionary sheet, The Bell, which Turgenieff edited with Herzen for the purpose of hammering away at the system of serfdom, Tolstoï ignored it entirely.

No matter what his inner struggles were,—and his writings show that they were many, — he did not openly deny the class to which he belonged, an almost conventional thing to do at this time. This utter lack of sympathy with the movement of ‘Fathers and Sons,’ as this period is called in Russian history, had its effect upon his writings. His books dealt with situations and emotions already outgrown, and appeared like anachronisms to the Russia which read them.

His Morning of a Landed Proprietor deals with attempts at improving the condition of the serfs, and speaks of their intelligence. No doubt Tolstoï was telling of his experiences and feelings when he went down to Yasnaya Polyana as a lad of nineteen; but the story appeared at a time when almost all were agitating, not for the improvement of the condition of the serfs, but for the absolute abolition of serfdom, and were already beginning to recognize the peasant as an important factor in Russian progress as well as an intelligent being. The only question then raging was, how was this abolition to be accomplished, and in what form should the land be held —in communal or in private ownership?

His novel Youth, mentioned above, also created an unfavorable impression, because, although Tolstoï described faithfully in minute detail the ill effects of introspection and self-analysis, he nevertheless seemed to hold them up as an ideal to be attained. The youth of this time were abandoning themselves to a great cause, and Tolstoï’s ideal appeared egotistical and useless.

But the book which created the most violent discussion was the Cossacks, which appeared in 1860. It was begun eight years earlier, but it came out just when the country was struggling to get the last word of civilization and at great personal sacrifice was passing it on to the people. The book, showing as it did in strong colors the vital, virile, primitive life of the Cossacks as compared to the young effete hero who goes down among them, was misunderstood and thought to be a call to the primitive on the part of Tolstoï. It sounded reactionary. To overthrow serfdom meant to let the winds of western civilization sweep into Russia; it was obvious to all that it could not be done by a return to the primitive.

The misunderstanding took place in thinking that Tolstoï was writing to prove a point. He was writing of things which had made the greatest impression on him. But the difficulty for the Russian mind was to understand that the things which had made the greatest impression on him had nothing to do with the social whole at all, but with himself.

This accounts for the fact that at the time when emancipation was finally accomplished in 1861, he was away altogether from Russia and was busy writing that masterpiece, War and Peace, which was an epic poem of the year 1812.

Yet this individualistic type of mind did not mean callousness to the world at large, it only meant an inverted reaching out to it. Great as his mind and heart were, they were isolated. Reach out to the world as he would, he could not overtake the last thought of that most advanced country, Russia. The task was beyond this greatest human soul, and all his life he gave the appearance of lagging after the current thought.

II

Thus we see Russia in 1863 — disappointed and angered; the serf freed, but with a burden of sixty years’ taxes for arid, worthless patches of land. The need of organization for the purpose of gaining that for which one is educated became apparent. Unorganized peasant uprisings were general, and the authorities were quenching them with fire and sword. Back into this cauldron came Tolstoï, and began where Russia had left off five years before, with educational reform. He opened a school in Yasnaya Polyana, and his ideas were brilliant and valuable and made a sensation. But the police came and destroyed his school and took his notes.

It did not throw him into the revolutionary camp. He took the post of arbiter between peasant and landlord, and tried to enforce some justice even under the iniquitous standards. He listened to the complaints and arbitrated. But when his decisions were in favor of the peasants, the decisions were reversed from above. Nor did this throw him with the more advanced thought. Instead, we find him writing to the Grand Duke Constantine, urging him to grant land reforms and pointing out that such reforms would safeguard the autocracy against the revolution!

And for fifteen years he went on, struggling within, but outwardly at peace. He stayed on in Yasnaya Polyana, seeing that the carp did not escape from the lake, or sending horses for sale to Samara. Around him the struggle of ‘Fathers and Sons’ had begun. Russia was uttering that great cry, ‘To the people! ’ ‘ It is the movement of the Will of the People! A hundred million souls were given glorious hopes and then mocked, a hundred million souls were robbed and beaten and oppressed. If you love one another, go to one another, join hands with the hundred million, teach them all you know, fight with them.’ It is hard to believe that Tolstoï did not know of this movement going on about him. The trials of the Netchaeff groups, the Dolgushin groups, the ‘Moscow Fifty,’ the ‘Trial of the Hundred and Ninety Three,’ had full reports in the papers. The spirit that lay behind them could be told by the speeches of the men and women tried, it could be told by Turgenieff’s Virgin Soil. And yet Tolstoï remained untouched. But all this time he was struggling with the question of how to live in harmony with the world. He was like a colossus walking blindfold through the jungle of life, and he had to grope solitary and unaided, to come to the same position in 1883 which the Russian youth had held in theseventies.

But before this great thing happened to him, before his ‘crisis,’ as it is called, his novel Anna Karenina appeared. It was received with open arms abroad, but again it was looked on with disfavor by the majority at home. Already in 1863 the question of love and marriage, and of separation after marriage, had been discussed in all circles of Russia. Tchernyshefsky, in his novel of that year, What Is To Be Done, had discussed this question with the utmost frankness, and had come to the conclusions which were accepted by all Russia, namely, that there were times when separation after marriage is inevitable, and that there are instances when a real love for a third person comes after marriage and that this love should be followed. Now in 1875 Tolstoï issued this masterpiece Anna Karenina, with the inscription, ‘Vengeance is Mine. I Will Repay.’ Russia felt that Anna Karenina’s tragedy was due to man-made conditions and her own nature, and not, as the inscription suggests, to a supernatural law which could not be avoided. Thus it was received with great, displeasure by nearly all Russia, and hailed by the conservatives as the work of a Daniel come to Judgment.

III

It was at this time that the great crisis in his life took place, a crisis that had been foretold by several Russian critics. All these years he had searched for the answer to the problem of life, and when it came it was the same as the youth had found for themselves more than ten years before, — To the People! Love the People!

‘The only reason for life,’ said Tolstoï, ‘ is the universal desire for welfare which, in reasoning man, becomes expanded to a desire for universal welfare — in other words, to love. It (this universal desire for welfare) expands its limits naturally by love, first for one’s family, — one’s wife and children, — then for friends, then for one’s fellow countrymen; but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to embrace all!'

The youth of the eighties had not repudiated this doctrine of love for all, for the people, but by this time they had reached different territory. By the continued oppressions and persecutions of the government, this love for the people drove them in the name of the people into a militant, attitude toward the government. It drove them to Terrorism. For Tolstoï it led, for the first few years, to the philosophical position of absolute non-resistance to evil. ‘I know that the enemy and the so-called malefactors are all men like myself, they love good and they hate evil, and if they do an apparently evil thing, it has to be corrected by good; and in this way the immediate work of the world, which is the substitution of union and harmony for division and discord, can be carried on.’

But he could not long continue his absolute non-resistance to evil. He found that when he said that government, which is coercion and force, is evil, and that resistance is evil, both tending to disrupt the union and harmony which is the universal desire, he was nevertheless himself abetting this evil, which was the government. It was not to the non-resistance to evil that the government took exception. That doctrine sounded almost as good as a ukase from the Czar. It was only when he modified his theory, ‘ Resist, not evil,’ to ‘Resist not evil by violence,’ that the government grew uneasy about, him. For a while his passive resistance sounded threatening. ‘Take no part in violence,’he reiterated. ‘The government is violent, therefore it is evil. Take no part in it. Pay no taxes, refuse to serve in the army.’ But even these treasonable words were more than mitigated by their corollary. To take no part in violence at all meant that when the authorities sent down Cossacks to beat the peasants and raze the villages for not paying taxes, or for refusing to send recruits, the peasants should not resist, but receive this scourging with humility and patience and thus carry on the ‘universal desire of union and harmony.’ No wonder Tolstoï was left alone in Yasnaya Polyana, no wonder there was misunderstanding between him and the ardent youth whose whole life was dedicated vigilantly and zealously to the task of resisting evil.

IV

But Tolstoï’s position was anomalous even to himself, and he could not carry it out to its full logical sequence. Every now and then he stopped his ‘applying his soul and his meditating on the law of the Most High,’ to burst forth in protest against the conditions around him. In fact his last years were spent in vigorous protest against evil, though always with a half apology. Thus his letter on the Kishineff massacre of the Jews begins, that although purely a religious thinker and a philosopher and unwilling to speak on temporal things, yet he cannot help raising his voice at this moment to cry out against this great iniquity which has been committed. His letter, ‘I cannot be silent,’ has the same ring to it. He does not justify the revolutionists for their acts of violence, but he condones their acts because of their youth, their passions, and the extreme provocations by the government, composed of older and more experienced men with infinitely more power to do both evil and good than the youth. And with this power the government is bestializing its people — making hangmen where there were no hangmen before, and setting up gallows for the youth on all the cross-roads in the land. Would that he, too, were considered one with the youth and could suffer the penalty with them, rather than live unharmed on his estate and protected by the government!

It was a reaching out of his hand to the youth, an almost forced acknowledgment that there is no neutral ground in Russia — nor in all life, for that matter. This great universal thinker had to think and feel and act in a limited, temporal period. His heart kept on bleeding for the present, while his philosophy pulled him into the infinite. This is the reason for his seeming inconsistency: in his continuous reiteration, on the one hand, of his moral truths which take no cognizance of their practical relation to everyday conditions, and which say that each individual can make his own world, and his ever-ready outbursts of indignation and protest against wrongs which were being committed about him, and which he saw were beyond the control of the individual.

And herein lies the pathos and the tragedy of Tolstoï — that he was great in a great time, but that the time and the man did not fit. Herein lies the glory of death, that he can now be measured by the scope and the strivings of his soul.

At one moment he did fit into the thought of his own country, and that was when he issued What is Art ? But here, too, — as with his educational reform, his going to the people, his ideas of simplicity, his conceptions of property and labor, — the ideas he set forth were already part and parcel of current Russian thought. The difference in this case was that Russia since the later twenties had never changed its position in regard to art, but had always held that the one purpose of art was the service of humanity. Tolstoï’s confirmation of that principle was gratifying to Russian critics, for heretofore their opponents had considered Tolstoï as belonging to them. The real field of battle into which Tolstoï’s What is Art? was cast was abroad, where German metaphysical æsthetics held sway. Abroad his What is Art? was iconoclastic, in Russia its significance was historical, and this differentiation is true of almost all his life and work.

As to Tolstoï himself, there was no dualism in his nature at all. He was not a hedonist one year and an ascetic the next. The problems of the boy of twelve were the same as those of the man of seventy. The years only brought their answers to him; and the answers came from within himself and not from life. Alone he took up the god-like task of creating man and life anew. That he should seemingly have left no impress on his family and his fatherland is but natural. They did not belong to him, he belonged to himself, worked upon himself; he was his own material.

V

As one who had been in relation with his country for eighty-two years, Tolstoï was a failure. A scene in his own garden with his family, as the writer remembers it, is symbolic of the larger picture of himself and the Russia of his day.

It is May. A long table stands under a tree in an old garden surrounding a large country-house painted white. The place is suggestive of a nobleman’s estate. About the table are seated Tolstoï, his eldest daughter, Tatyana, his son, Sergei, and his son’s wife (a Swedish noblewoman), their two small sons dressed in white costumes with large sailor collars, and Tolstoï’s youngest son, a rather portly young fellow in a silk pongee costume. Our little party of three completes the group.

A samovar is singing on the table. Tatyana is pouring tea at the head, and there is a bowl of Metchnicoff’s curds on the table. Tolstoï sits on the right near the foot, eating curds. His first appearance is of one very old. He is slight and emaciated. His cheek-bones protrude, his chin is sunken, his eyebrows are thick and shaggy, and he lisps from toothlessness. One feels that he is but bones under that long peasant blouse. But the impression of age vanishes after a few minutes. He is sprightly in his movements, and his eyes are piercing under his shaggy brows. He talks animatedly, and seems conscious in a simple dignified way that it is he whom we have come to see, and that it is he who is the centre of interest. His children, too, know that he is of great importance, and their conversation centres around his home, his house, his family, his tenets, his thoughts.

Sergei (rather slight, with a small beard, exquisitely groomed, sitting on my left). — Yes, Gorky got what he deserved in America. Why, the man does not even believe in private property!

Tolstoï (at the foot). — Of course I do not like to talk about politics; I am a religious thinker, but if you want to know what I think of the revolution and the Duma, I’ll tell you: — it is a five-act drama, and you ’ll have to stay fifty years to see it through, and the Duma is the first scene of the first act and is high comedy.

Tatyana. — You know my husband is a deputy to the Duma. He is a Constitutional Democrat. You see, though, I don’t always agree with my father. I am more in sympathy with him than these two here. Now, my brother [points to the youngest] says he is a monarchist.

The Young Man (looking up from his glass of tea). —Of course I am a monarchist. If we would all stand loyal by the Czar and not pull this way and that, and be good to the peasants, there would be no trouble at all. [Sips his tea again.]

Tolstoï (passing me a bowl of curds). — That’s to live two hundred and fifty years.

Sergei. — I think I’ll go to America and give a course of lectures on my father. I’ll wager I’ll be received differently from Gorky.

Tolstoï (to my brother-in-law). — I said to the Duma leader, if you have any better solution than that of Henry George, stand for it. But those labor people are n’t really representative. Look at their hands.

My Brother-in-law. —But there are several good ones. Anikine, for example.

Tolstoï. — Yes; so I am told; my son-in-law said so.

Tatyana. — My husband was a widower with six children when I married him. You know my father believes in large families, we were thirteen ourselves.

Tolstoï. — The land question in Russia is the economic side of the problem, but it all goes back to the government question, to violence and the tax-gatherer. The agrarian programme of the labor group is socialistic, and I have no objection to Socialism if you take it broadly like the judge, who, when the witness said Socialism was the working together for the welfare of mankind, said he, too, was a Socialist.

Some One. — What about anarchism?

Tolstoï. — That too is all right, but the building-up afterwards, that is the trouble. And now I am going to tell you something you may not understand. I don’t know whether I can make myself clear. The organization of the work of the world, that is the problem — it is difficult in the country, but much worse in towns.

My Sister. — And the solution of the problem is —

Tolstoï (shrugs his shoulders). —At present I am writing tracts on religion. Come to my room and I will give you some. Did you know that Garrison was a passive-resistance man? And also Thoreau? I’ll wager you have n’t read —

I. — His Civic Disobedience; yes, we have.

Tolstoï. — The first Americans I have met who have.

[We all rise and go to his room.]

Tolstoï (walking with arms folded over his chest). — No; I can’t say I see my way to the solution of the problem, but the solutions given by others are absurd. But yet if you stay long enough you will even see it — the revolution. It will come. But I do not speak of it. It will not bring with it that which I want.

Tatyana (to me). —Let me go with you. I can show you the whole house. There are wonderful busts and portraits of my father in the drawingroom, done by the greatest artists. And when we come back I’ll show you the kitchen.

[We see the kitchen with the tileoven large enough ‘to cook banquets on,’ and the chef in his white cap and coat as befits the household of a count. We leave the family smiling and bowing to us from the veranda steps.]

How absolutely detached he was from all, this great master of Negation!

He had risen in his negations from pinnacle to pinnacle, negator of his class, negator of his art, negator of his teaching, lover of all yet never one with all, until this arch-individualist wandered off on that memorable pilgrimage which ended at Astopova, to merge himself into the common whole and make the greatest sacrifice of all, the negation of his very self.

Like a mediæval Christian, like a follower of Buddha, Tolstoï found himself by his last act of Negation. He who had been detached from man in spirit was brought back to men by the hand of Death. Through Death he became himself, through Death was he made visible to those nearest him. Death took him and returned him to the world.