And yet Tolstoy’s stories, varied as they are, have their own brand of unique fascination. Some are long and on the scale of nouvelles, like The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad. Some are very short, like ‘The Wood-Felling’, from Tolstoy’s own army experiences, or his brief parables like ‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits’. All are distinguished by the same sense of a subject worked away on, made to reveal the utmost of itself that it can. And yet one could say that Tolstoy had a light touch. Turgenev, who admired his youthful tales, none the less displeased their author by telling him ‘My dear Leo, you really shouldn’t spend quite so long telling us the exact way the hero puts his hand in his pocket.’ An exaggeration, but a telling one. The stories do spend a disproportionate time going into such details. And yet so compulsive is Tolstoy’s method, and so penetrating and powerful the mind and observation at work, that he manages not to forfeit the reader’s attention for a second.
Irtenyev, the ‘hero’ of Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, has a good deal in common with Olenin, the young officer who is the centre of consciousness in The Cossacks. That is to say of course that both have a good deal in common with the author himself, though by no means everything. Tolstoy kept just as beady an eye on his own failings and vanities as he did on those of other people; and at the same time he could present, as he does in the character of Ivan Ilych, a man who is like all men, whose suffering and fate are inseparable from the smallness of his outlook and the necessary triviality of his life. But by the time he wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych the preacher in Tolstoy had got the upper hand. The life of Ivan Ilych is remorselessly chronicled: Tolstoy seems determined that it should appear as ‘unexamined’, in Socrates’ sense, as he can make it, and his death correspondingly without dignity or redemption. But Tolstoy cheats in the manner in which he finally presents that death itself. It is a black bag into which Ivan Ilych is being thrust, but at the bottom of that black hole there is a light. Characteristically Tolstoy produces an odd metaphor for what he sees as the process, drawn from everyday life:
What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.
Well, maybe. Tolstoy, the expert on physical being, ‘the seer of the flesh’ as the critic Merezhkovsky called him, has no hesitation in projecting his knowledge into the last moments of a dying man. Undeniably the effect is strangely impressive: everyone who has read the story remembers that black bag and the moment of light that follows. And – who knows? – perhaps Tolstoy is not cheating here after all.
The Russian historian Prince Mirsky used to say that up to the time he wrote War and Peace Tolstoy saw life as an enchanted ballroom: afterwards it seemed to him like Ivan Ilych’s black bag. Certainly the experiences he underwent, and afterwards wrote about in A Confession, changed not only his outlook but his manner of writing. But this too it is possible to exaggerate, at least where the stories are concerned. Hadji Murad is one of his last, his finest and in a sense one of his most epically tranquil tales: one would not guess that the man who wrote it had become a religious crank and a fervent disbeliever in literary art. The way in which Tolstoy describes Hadji Murad’s death in action is in sharp contrast to the way he concludes the story of Ivan Ilych: but at the same time he claims the right of a ‘seer of the flesh’ to know how the flesh dies.
Surrounded by his enemies and wounded by pistol-shots and sabre-cuts, Hadji Murad is on the very verge of physical extinction:
He did not move but still he felt.
When Hadji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murad that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.
Survival after death? Tolstoy probably never believed in it: his consciousness as a writer was too absorbed in his own being, and in the awareness of the body. But of course he was intensely curious about it, and often gives the impression that he cannot really believe death can possibly take place or at least that he himself can die, although he is careful not to make any such claim on behalf of Ivan Ilych.
As he dies Hadji Murad recalls the moment in babyhood when his mother washed him and shaved his head; a memory of Tolstoy’s own, of which in the story he makes an austere but touching use. He virtually claimed to remember the moment of being born in the same spirit in which he claims knowledge of the body in its last moments. It is touching too that in his last moments he kept repeating ‘I do not understand what it is I have to do.’ It was as if he could not believe that his will and being and power of action were about to be taken away from him, and that he had to do nothing now but cease to exist.
Certainly death has a surprisingly prominent part in the stories, almost acting as if it were itself a narrative device. One of the most powerful, Master and Man, was written in 1895, years after the spiritual crisis which had caused him to renounce art, and to reject the great novels he had written twenty years earlier. I feel it to be the most impressive story that Tolstoy ever wrote, and for that reason worth choosing for a detailed commentary. Part of the interest lies in its exemplification of his own theory of art, developed in this later period. His dogmatic essay What is Art? is perverse in many ways, even absurd; but the main point it makes, that all good art has to be simple, in order to appeal to the simplest people, is brilliantly exemplified in Master and Man and justified by its total success as a story.
And the story it tells is indeed very simple. Brekhunov, a merchant proud of his ability to drive a hard bargain, sets out by sleigh on a business trip with his servant Nikita. A snow storm blows up, and the pair take refuge with a well-off peasant family. The writing is as vivid here as it ever was in Tolstoy’s younger days, and amusing too. The son of the house who is sent to guide them keeps shouting lines from Pushkin’s poem ‘Winter Evening’, which he has learnt in school. On that snowy evening poetry and reality unexpectedly coincide, and the comedy of this (Tolstoy’s humour, though uncertain and cautious, is always to be reckoned with) is deadpan. His view of poetry, even Pushkin’s, was never high, but ‘Winter Evening’ is both a wonderful and a simple poem, and the boy’s pleasure in it shows that it meets Tolstoy’s requirements as set out in What is Art? Tolstoy is setting out to write a story as simple and as effective as Pushkin’s poem. One that is not ‘a lie’. ‘But why did I write a lie?’ the narrator in Childhood asks himself when he has had to write a birthday poem for his grandmother; and in War and Peace the essential falsity of the relations between Boris and Julie is exemplified by the album verses they write to each other.
Pushkin’s snow-storm verses pass the test because their young guide who keeps reciting lines about ‘snowy circles wheeling wild’ finds they ‘described what was happening outside so aptly that it cheered him up’. Having set the travellers on the high road he bids them farewell and goes off home. But soon they lose their way again in the blizzard; and now poetry contrasts with the terrifying starkness of Tolstoy’s prose as he calmly describes what happens. When Nikita decides it is futile to travel through the night, Brekhunov leaves him and goes on alone. He has in fact gone blindly round in a circle, but seeing a dark patch ahead he thinks he has come to a village: