Trying to make sense of Tolstoy

Tolstoy, By F. W. Taylor (public domain)

A couple of years ago I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and I can't deny, I was completely hooked. The narrative was so compelling that it pulled me along through long digressions about local government, about methods of farming, the joy of manual labour and many other themes that I later realised were among Tolstoy's real preoccupations at that time of his life. While reading, I  simply thought of them as minor irritations, since the magnificent sweep of the novel was so gripping.

On reading about Tolstoy’s life – at least, the life we are today able to describe, as a result of the publication of his diaries and letters, and so probably not at all the life that his contemporaries imagined – the situation seems utterly different. Here was a man so obsessed with himself that he mistreated his wife and children and all those around him. A man who in the end gave up fiction completely since he no longer believed in it.

The endless discussions about life versus art – whether the life that the artist led should be taken into account when evaluating the work – become irrelevant when you are confronted by passages of monstrous egotism from Tolstoy’s letters to his wife, such as:

I want to write to you about what really interests you – about my inner mental state

  

Or a passage from his diary, just after the birth of his twelfth (!) child, about his wife:

Till the day of my death she will be a millstone around my neck and the children’s.

Or the revelation that in the 1870s he had some kind of religious conversion, which resulted in his aiming for a state of celibacy, while continuing to father more children with his wife.

Or Tolstoy writing to the Tsar’s heir asking him to pardon his father’s assassins.

Given this tortured background, the strangeness of the fiction starts to become more apparent: in The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy describes a man who has murdered his wife out of jealousy (and who sounds in his justification just like Tolstoy himself).

Where now the separation of the art from the life? Again and again we discover a major creative artist whose life turns out to have been less than blameless – Lucian Freud is a recent example. Surely it affects our judgement of the work? The most galling implication of Tolstoy’s combination of misogyny and innocence is the realisation that this writer, famed for creating one of the great women in fiction (Anna Karenina, who is for example ranked in the “top fifteen literary characters we’re crushing on”, with the following endorsement:

Anna is the perfect, popular girl in school until we find out she’s just as sinful as the rest of us–which makes her even cooler.

Yet Tolstoy had no concept of the appalling way he behaved to his wife and family.

Surely such a staggering lack of self-awareness makes it difficult, even questionable, to write a standard book or article of litcrit about Tolstoy without mentioning the life. A review article by Caryl Emerson summarises the position very clearly:

Biographers of Tolstoy are conventionally divided into those who emphasize continuity, despite this period of crisis, and those who advocate two qualitatively different Tolstoys. Knapp belongs to the One Tolstoy school. Her governing leitmotif is Tolstoy’s childhood vision of universal brotherhood, from which he never deviates. The fiction is not the target or endpoint, but the testing ground. In his glorious “autopsychological” novels and stories, Tolstoy experiments with feelings, with philosophies of life, with varying definitions of “neighbour” – and then, after 1883, he formalizes these insights into moral precepts. Thus his art-plots, life-plots and ethical schemata cannot be separated.

Try remembering that next time you take an examination in litcrit – I don’t think it will go down so well. The case of Tolstoy exposes the artificiality of trying to ring-fence a writer’s work into some kind of aesthetic space where it can be measured for its intrinsic artistic merit alone. It certainly doesn’t work with Tolstoy. As a reader, you can be seduced by the writing, eventually subscribing to “the canonical image of Tolstoy as a fabulously fun-loving, life-affirming parent” (Caryl Emerson). On learning more about his life, you will have some doubts about this vision. Perhaps somewhere a dispassionate appraisal, that takes into account both the life and the work, might be possible.