A giant in tumultuous times
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 12, 2011
TOLSTOY: A RUSSIAN LIFERosamund BartlettProfile Books, 544pp, $49.99In an era of great change, Tolstoy's influence as a social reformer and thinker as well as a literary genius spread far beyond his homeland. The extraordinary thing about Tolstoy is that he not only deserves his reputation as the greatest novelist who ever lived but he also has a separate reputation as a religious and political thinker and sage. He also lived a life of unusual intensity and drama.Tolstoy continues to be read by a massive readership - War and Peace attracts millions of people at times of conflict and enforced leisure (it is, after all, the greatest of airport novels) and Anna Karenina is the novel that F.R. Leavis was willing to concede topped any in English literature. Nabokov said Tolstoy had the key to the mystery of making everything in his fiction occur in the right amount of time and James Joyce regarded him as the writer of the greatest of all short stories (How Much Land Does a Man Need). Tolstoy was also a potent influence on Gandhi, someone who both paved the way for the Bolsheviks and proved an alternative to them.He not only attacked Shakespeare's King Lear (in an empathic attack full of storm and wind and blindness) but he also succeeded in getting himself excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. And, yes, he ran away from home and from his wife, the Countess Sonya, to die at a railway station, in the full glare of the encamped world press, after scenes of marital disarray as dramatic and ghastly as anything in Strindberg or Edward Albee. Hence last year's film The Last Station, with Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as the countess.As with the movie, Rosamund Bartlett's biography is inspired by the 50th anniversary of Tolstoy's death and it provides in almost pointillist fashion the myriad details that go to make up this walking mountain range of a man.He alarmed his young wife with the details of his diaries (homoeroticism and all) yet she continued to read his self-revelations until the last years of estrangement.From the outset, he wrote like one of the archangels who judge all other literary beings. Childhood, Boyhood and Youth are among the greatest of all fictionalised exercises in autobiography. Written right at the end of his life, Hadji Murad, the extraordinarily compressed mini-epic (much admired by Harold Bloom) about a Chechen warrior, is a piece of narrative to place with Homer. The Death of Ivan Ilych, the novella Susan Sontag pressed on Vikram Seth, is a work of incomparable genius: a dull, common, apparently mean man meets death and it comes as an illumination.Tolstoy was born to the self-confidence that comes with aristocracy, not to great wealth. Rousseau, in both his radicalism and his confessionalism, is an early and abiding influence, though Tolstoy as a writer had none of the thorniness that sometimes seems to have touched him as a man. He wasn't so much ornery as titanic.From the start he loathed the idea of injustice and especially loathed it when the whip was in the hand of the state. He appeared - unsuccessfully - in his army officer days for a common soldier on a capital charge for having lost his temper and struck an officer.One of the things Bartlett brings out - almost to the point of distortion - is the extent to which Tolstoy laboured over the elementary readers he produced to educate his beloved peasants. It's remarkable that when he wrote fables with the deliberate intention of making them comprehensible to simple people, he succeeded in producing works of art that humble the greatest modernists on earth.No one has gone further in imagining the consequences of a radical democracy than the author of Master and Man or Father Sergius, yet Tolstoy, with his devotion to the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and his reduction of Christianity to the figure of the compassionate, humane Christ, was inseparable from his own sense of being born to rule. Matthew Arnold, the first major English enthusiast for his work, objected to his essentialising of Christianity and said that only the whole tradition of religion could be seen as a guide.Tolstoy comes across as a kind of autodidact of genius even though his wisdom is part of his eccentricity.Bartlett points out that Tolstoy was not only Lear-like in his willfulness but that the later Lear in Shakespeare's representation is like the Holy Fool treasured by Tolstoy. He made a point of seeking out the holy men of Russia, including the saint who served as the model for Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The saint said that Tolstoy was very proud and that he would lead many astray but God's will would be done.When Tolstoy died, the thousands of Russians who assembled for the walk to the graveyard sang Eternal Memory , the age-old hymn of the dead.There is something terribly moving about this old count who thought that he should give everything he had to the poor and who fought his dear wife most bitterly over copyright. He was opposed to capital punishment, corporal punishment and abattoirs. He wrote letters to the tsars pleading for the downtrodden and for his many causes. Lenin was intensely alert to him and, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, was conscious of the way Tolstoyanism posed a threat to communism because it had such parallels while remaining a spiritual system.Chertkov, the disciple Tolstoy loved and the countess loathed, was appointed by the Soviets to edit the Complete Works of Tolstoy and Lenin made a point of paying Tolstoy's widow the same pension of 10,000 roubles a year that had been agreed to by the tszar. Tolstoyans were persecuted under Stalin and the new Russian authoritarianism of Putin is not especially good at providing funding for further editorial labours.Bartlett is good at co-ordinating a thousand factual details though she does not have the colour and vivacity of A.N.Wilson's life of 20 years ago nor the grace and gravity of Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy's great translator, who wrote an early life. Still, the man who read Dickens in English, corresponded with Shaw and shaped the mind of Gandhi casts a blazing light on anyone who touches his life.
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald