Simply Tolstoy

Donna Tussing Orwin

• Publisher: Casa Carlini
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781943657315
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"This is a little gem, the best introduction to Tolstoy I have ever encountered, and it is more than that. The most accomplished scholar will find important new insights, the sort that one immediately recognizes as both true and profound. Orwin brings Tolstoy to life as a person and as a writer, and she also shows beautifully how the two are linked. The discussions of Tolstoy's views on psychology and the nature of art are especially illuminating."
—Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. Subsequent experiences as an artillery officer in the Caucasian and Crimean Wars, and time spent in St. Petersburg and Europe, broadened his perspective and profoundly influenced him.

In Simply Tolstoy, Professor Donna Tussing Orwin traces the author's profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych. She shows how these books, both fiction and nonfiction, are not autobiographical in the conventional sense, but function as snapshots of Tolstoy's state of mind at specific points in his life. The story she tells is, inevitably, intertwined with the story of Russia, a country also in constant search of its identity.

Mixing biography, literary analysis, and history, Simply Tolstoy is a satisfying read for those already familiar with the author's work, as well as an accessible and thoroughly engaging introduction to a literary giant who was also a tireless and uncompromising seeker of truth.

1

Early Life

Family

Family in Russia has special significance. In a country where, to this day, institutions don’t have much power and the rule of law does not always prevail, people depend more on family for networks and support. An interesting proof of the importance of family in Russian culture is that peoples’ full names include mention of their fathers. Tolstoy’s name was Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, with Nikolayevich a so-called patronymic meaning “son of Nikolay.” Russians also rely on outstanding individuals rather than governments to bring about change. Tolstoy used family connections throughout his life, from the time he was trying to establish himself in the army to later years when he needed help with his various projects. He came from nobility and felt a keen responsibility to serve the country in some way appropriate to the high social status he had inherited but not personally earned. Tolstoy would have learned about his ancestors from family lore, which often differed from what we now know or surmise. When he wrote about those ancestors in whom he was particularly interested—he did so rarely—he left out details that he probably knew but did not want to share with the general public.

Tolstoy’s prototype for Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky in War and Peace was his maternal grandfather, Nikolay Sergeyevich Volkonsky (1753–1821). He came from a clan of princes said to be descended from Riurik, the mythical 9th-century founder of Kievan Rus, Russia’s predecessor which endured from the 9th to the early 13th century. His life story illustrates the situation of an aristocrat in his day—highly privileged but uncertain.

Prince Volkonsky distinguished himself under Tsarina Catherine the Great, first as an officer in the Turkish campaign of 1780, and after a successful career in the army, as a diplomat. Catherine wanted him to marry the mistress (and supposedly niece) of Prince Grigori Potyomkin. Volkonsky refused, saying, “What made him think I should marry his whore?” Under the rule of Catherine’s son, Paul, he was dismissed from the army in 1797 for failing to appear at a review, but was readmitted after 18 months. He retired in 1799 to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a property in the fertile heartland of Russia 120 miles south of Moscow that his father had acquired in 1763. In the final two decades of his life, Nikolay Sergeyevich planned and mostly completed the building of a two-story, 32-room mansion with surrounding outbuildings and landscaping. He also amassed a great book collection that nurtured his grandson and forms the basis of the Yasnaya Polyana library to this day.

Though he never met him (having been born seven years after Nikolay Sergeyevich’s death), Tolstoy greatly admired his grandfather for his independence, feistiness, intelligence, pride, and aesthetic sense. He must have noticed from a portrait that hung on the wall of the salon at Yasnaya Polyana that he had inherited old Volkonsky’s black eyebrows and piercing gray eyes. (His own 1873 portrait by Ivan Kramskoy that hangs across from it seems to emphasize the similarity between the two.) He may have had the prince in mind in 1844, when he enrolled in the faculty of Oriental languages at Kazan University, intending to become a diplomat, and also in the 1850s, when he joined the army and contemplated a military career. Tolstoy lived almost his entire life at Yasnaya Polyana, which in its overall geometrical design and simplicity expressed the 18th-century taste and mentality of his grandfather. He was born there and as the youngest son—there was no right of succession for the first-born child among the Russian nobility—he inherited the family’s principal residence. At first, he seemed not sufficiently to appreciate or care for the estate. In 1854, he instructed his sister’s husband to sell the main house, where he had been born, to pay off gambling debts. (It was bought by a neighboring landowner, dismantled, moved, and reconstructed in a village 20 miles away. It survived until the 1920s when it burnt down.) By 1858, however, in an unfinished work entitled Summer in the Village, that explores relations between peasants and their masters, he called his estate “my little homeland.” He wrote there that “without my Yasnaya Polyana, it is hard for me to contemplate Russia and my relation to her. Without Yasnaya Polyana, I can perhaps more clearly see the general laws necessary for my fatherland, but I will not be able to love it to distraction.” In the often-arbitrary world of Russian autocracy, Yasnaya Polyana became a private, inviolable space, the expression of the freedom and dignity of a Russian nobleman.

When Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich had retired to Yasnaya Polyana in 1799, he also tended to the upbringing of his beloved only child (and Tolstoy’s mother), Princess Marya Nikolayevna, who was born in 1790. She must have been one of the most educated Russian women of her generation. Under her father’s tutelage, she studied five languages (including Russian, which was unusual for the upper classes, who spoke and wrote mostly in French), mathematics, some science, and classical literature. She was an accomplished pianist and storyteller, as well as an author of prose and poetry. Most important to Tolstoy was her good character, which combined modesty, magnanimity, and a sense of social justice. According to his Reminiscences, she had four great loves in her life: Prince Lev Golitsyn, who died before they could marry and after whom she named her youngest son; a French companion, Mademoiselle Hénissienne; her oldest son Nikolay; and Tolstoy himself, once Nikolay had graduated to the care of male tutors. After her marriage to Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy in 1822, which was happy though not a love match, she devoted herself to raising her children.

The Tolstoy clan fancifully traced its origins to a nobleman named Indris, who supposedly traveled from Lithuania or some other part of the Holy Roman Empire with his two sons and 3,000 followers and arrived in the principality of Chernigov in 1353. The Tolstoys were known for their intelligence, their long lives, and their love of women. Tolstoy’s ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645–1729) was elevated to the rank of count in 1724, under Tsar Peter I (the Great). He was a very capable man, traveling abroad in the tsar’s service, learning Italian, and serving as ambassador to Constantinople. He was hard and morally dubious. Tolstoy, who studied the Petrine era in detail while considering writing a book about it in the 1870s, certainly knew that Pyotr Andreyevich had helped Tsar Peter lure his son Aleksey back to Russia and to his death. Peter said of him when he was already 80 years old, “Pyotr Andreyevich is in every way a very able man, but it is just as well when you have dealings with him to keep a stone in your pocket to break his teeth in case he decides to bite you!” Pyotr Andreyevich lost his title in 1727, when he fell into disgrace after having taken the wrong side in machinations following Peter’s death. (The title was restored to the family in 1760.) When Tolstoy was asked to provide a biography of his family (published in 1879), he traced the Tolstoy line back to this ancestor, identifying him only as “an associate of Peter the Great.” This was indicative of the importance that Tolstoy placed on family and of his reluctance to air its dirty linen.

Tolstoy’s paternal grandfather, Count Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy (1757–1820), was a warm-hearted, fun-loving, and impractical man, who had squandered his own fortune, so he spent his wealthy wife’s money and at the end of his life had to take a job as the governor of Kazan province. Accused of “irregularities” in the performance of his duties, he lost that position after five years and died soon afterward. Though Tolstoy could not regard this grandfather as a role model, he did defend him as an honorable man, and he admired his “trusting” nature, so different from his own keen, proud, reserved, and analytical one. Tolstoy did not mention in Reminiscences that Ilya Andreyevich was dismissed as Kazan’s governor, and in his few words about the governor’s position, Tolstoy implicitly defended him as honest. The portrait of this grandfather also hung in the salon at Yasnaya Polyana, and he was the prototype for Count Rostov in War and Peace.

Tolstoy’s father, Count Nikolay Ilyich, was born in 1794. He joined the army in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia. He fought in Germany in 1813, was eventually captured by the French, and was taken to Paris. He was liberated when the Allies took the city in 1814. He left the army in 1819 and entered civil service. Nikolay’s father’s estate was so encumbered with debt that he did not accept his inheritance when his father died, but he had to find a way to support his mother in the style to which she was accustomed. In 1824, he retired to his wife’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana and spent the rest of his life running it. Tolstoy said that although his father did not do this especially well (unlike his maternal grandfather), he was an unusually kind landowner who never mistreated his serfs. He also explained that his father and his circle of friends were “free people” who did not kowtow to the government of the day, and even allowed themselves to criticize it. The family had no civil servants among their close friends. As Tolstoy wrote late in life, even as a child, he “understood that my father humbled himself before no one and never altered his bold, merry, and often ironic tone. And this sense of personal dignity that I saw in him increased my love, my adoration of him.”

Childhood

Tolstoy himself was born on August 28, 1828. It tells us something about his personality and the way he saw patterns everywhere that he always regarded his birth date, and especially the number 28, as lucky. His mother died in 1830 when his sister Marya was five months old.

His older brothers Nikolay, Dmitri, and Sergey, had been born in 1823, 1826, and 1827, respectively. Left a widower with five young children, his father proposed marriage to a distant relative, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yorgolskaya. She declined his offer but raised the Tolstoy children nevertheless. When Count Nikolay died suddenly in 1837, his sister, Countess Aleksandra Ilynichna Osten-Saken, became the children’s official guardian, while Tatyana remained responsible for their care. Countess Aleksandra died in 1841, and her sister, Countess Pelageya Ilynichna Yushkova, took over the guardianship, and Tatyana went to live with a sister. Tolstoy spent the first eight years of his life at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1836, while still summering there, the family moved to Moscow to prepare the eldest son, Nikolay, for university. In 1841, they moved to Kazan, a port city 200 miles east of Moscow on the Volga River, to live with Countess Pelageya and her landowner husband.

All this could have been the making of a Dickensian (or Dostoevskian) melodrama, with relatives, crooked lawyers, and bureaucrats robbing the orphaned Tolstoys. But that is not what happened. Though there were some family tensions, Tatyana Yorgolskaya looked after the children lovingly, and the guardians conscientiously oversaw their money and property. Both Yorgolskaya—“Auntie” as Tolstoy called her—and Countess Pelageya ended their days as honored elders at Yasnaya Polyana. And when it came time to divide the inheritance among the children, there is no record of their having squabbled amongst themselves over their shares.

Tolstoy’s nickname was “Lyova-ryova” [Crybaby Lev]. His sister remembered him as a sunny, very impressionable child who loved to joke and cried easily when his brothers teased him. He was also very imaginative; at around age 8, he injured himself by leaping from a window six feet from the ground in an attempt to fly. The effects of these qualities are on display in two autobiographical fragments that Tolstoy wrote, one in 1878 (My Life) and the other one (Reminiscences) from 1903–06. In both, he vividly describes individual moments of his early life. All these descriptions include detailed accounts of his own feelings: how much he loved someone (“Auntie,” for instance, or his father) or how he wept or wondered. Therefore, even when he wrote about others—the adults who cared for him, his siblings, or his servants—the text is also about him, and he comes across as extraordinarily sensitive.

The ingredients of an artistic temperament were evidently present from an early age. In My Life, he confessed that as a young child his dreams and daytime musings were similar. It is also very clear that he made up the first two stories in Reminiscences: one about being swaddled and the other about being bathed as an infant. In fact, he could not have remembered such early events. Many of the recollections in the second, longer fragment are recognizable as having been written into works of fiction. The description of the father in Childhood, for instance, uses many details recorded in Reminiscences. And in War and Peace, Tolstoy recreated at the Rostov country estate his own memories of Christmas festivities and masked actors. But in his mind, reminiscences jumbled together with figments of imagination in a way that makes it impossible to distinguish them without corroborating evidence that something he “remembered” really happened. There is very little such evidence from his early life.

In both autobiographical fragments, Tolstoy complained that he couldn’t link the moments he remembered into a coherent chain of cause and effect. As he put it in Reminiscences, he could not write a full biography because of his inability to connect individual “events and states of mind.” This is a very important clue about how he mined his own life to construct fiction and, in some cases, nonfiction. Imagination is needed to join “memories” together, and those memories can be placed in different sequences, set within different frameworks, and serve different purposes. Depending on those purposes, Tolstoy could employ different memories. A significant example of this is the use he made of the famous anecdote of the green stick. At around age 10, Tolstoy’s oldest brother, Nikolay, supposedly told his younger siblings that a green stick buried close to a ravine in the woods near the house at Yasnaya Polyana had the secret of human happiness written on it. Tolstoy’s grave, as he requested, is near this place. He recounted this anecdote in Reminiscences, and his son Ilya wrote in his memoirs, published in 1914, that his father often related it to him and his siblings. It advanced an ideal of universal brotherhood especially dear to him at that time, one that he wanted his biography to support. Given the importance he ascribed late in his life to this memory, it is surely significant that, so far as I know, he did not mention it in any of his writings before then. There is no reason to think that the anecdote is not true, however. Tolstoy treated his memories as a bank of insights into the realities of inner life that preceded any conclusions about that life, but that he could use in the service of such conclusions.

Like everyone, Tolstoy was shaped by his life and times. The early loss of his parents was the definitive event of his own life. His first book, Childhood, is about the death of the protagonist’s mother. Having lost his own mother so early, Tolstoy could not remember her, and therefore he was free to imagine her as perfect. Significantly, the father in Childhood is loved and loving, but flawed. Tolstoy did not idealize his father, whom he lost when he was eight, the way he did his mother. The relationship he imagined with her arguably became a model for an intimacy he longed for his entire life but never achieved.

This hunger for intimacy was a driving force behind his desire to write fiction. From the beginning, he imagined his “perfect reader” (whom he actually defined and addressed in drafts of Childhood). This ideal reader would be perfectly in harmony with him, the author. In that sense, all his art is a confession to this reader, and it is no accident that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions had, in Tolstoy’s own words, an “enormous” effect on him. The first draft of what became Childhood identifies his reader as his “confessor,” and, paraphrasing Rousseau from his Confessions, presents the narrator as imperfect but worthy because, unlike others, he sincerely confesses his faults.

In 1851, quoting Nikolay Gogol (the greatest writer of the previous generation) that his last work, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, had “sung itself out of my soul,” Tolstoy wrote that all good compositions are created this way. This romantic mantra became the basis of his definition of art—expressed in his book, What Is Art?—as an infection by the artist’s feelings of another. His need for intimacy with his reader helps explain why Tolstoy could not give up fiction even, as occasionally happened, he very much wanted to do so.

University

At Kazan University, Tolstoy was not a motivated student. He lacked purpose and discipline, showing up late for some classes and skipping others. Having failed his exams in Oriental languages, he transferred to the faculty of law rather than repeat his first year. He left the university in 1847 without graduating. While at university, he participated in Kazan’s society life, both high and low, managing to contract a venereal disease for the first, but no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Tolstoy
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Early Life
• War and Peace and the 1860s
• The 1870s and Anna Karenina
• A Midlife Crisis
• A New Path
• Tolstoy as Guru and Man in Later Life
• Art and Aesthetics in the Late Period
• Conclusion and Legacy
• Sources
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher