In 1879, only a year after the publication of Anna Karenina, he began work on a book to which he gave the title A Confession. This was not a novel; it was a sustained and rhetorically powerful exposition of the spiritual crisis he had lived through and the “conversion” (his own term) it had brought about in him, a conversion to what he called “true Christianity” as opposed to “Church Christianity.” A Confession was the first, and the most personal and compelling, of the series of polemical works Tolstoy wrote over the next twenty years, culminating in What Is Art? (1898), in which he expounded his new religious views and their philosophical, social, and aesthetic consequences. These works made Tolstoy world famous, not as an artist but as a moral teacher; they led to what became known as “Tolstoyism,” an anti-State, anti-Church, egalitarian doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, which brought him adherents such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi, and the founders of the kibbutz movement in Palestine, among many others. It also brought him some of his first English translators.
The stories collected here have a complex and ambiguous relation to Tolstoy’s moral teaching; some, like Hadji Murat, were even written, as he admitted, “in secret from himself” and contrary to his notions of “good art.” But they all have a direct relation to the crisis he describes so forcefully in A Confession:
My life stopped. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and could not help breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping; but there was no life, because there were no desires whose satisfaction seemed reasonable to me … I could not even desire to know the truth, because I guessed what it consisted in. The truth was that life was an absurdity … The idea of suicide came to me as naturally as ideas for improving my life had come to me before. This idea was so tempting that I had to use tricks with myself so as not to carry it out at once.
• • •
My question, the one which brought me, at the age of fifty, to the verge of suicide, was the simplest of questions, the one that every man carries in the depths of himself, from the stupidest child to the wisest old man—the question without answering which life is impossible, as I indeed experienced. Here is that question: “What will come of what I do now, of what I will do tomorrow—what will come of my whole life?” Formulated differently, the question would be the following: “Why should I live, why desire anything, why do anything?” It can also be put like this: “Is there a meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the death that inevitably awaits me?”
For all his ambition to change the world by his teaching, Tolstoy shows in his later stories how deeply troubled he remained by these questions which he tried repeatedly to answer for others. Late in life he remarked to Gorky: “If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there is death?” It was this unappeasable anguish, and not the settled positions of his tracts, that nourished Tolstoy’s later artistic works, in which the conversions are not rational and collective but mystical, sudden, unique, and the “answers” are almost beyond the reach of words.
In 1882 the imperial censorship refused to allow publication of A Confession, which Tolstoy had finished in 1880, but it was already circulating in thousands of handwritten copies and was eventually printed in Geneva in 1884, through the efforts of Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s first and most active disciple. Chertkov, a wealthy young landowner and horse guards officer, met Tolstoy in 1883 and immediately fell under the influence of his new ideas. After A Confession, Tolstoy had begun to write moral tales intended for the people. The first was What Men Live By (1881), a parable set in realistic peasant circumstances, in which the archangel Michael, exiled temporarily by God, can only return to heaven once he has learned three things: what is given to man, what is not given to man, and what men live by. Some of the other stories have equally moralizing titles: Where Love Is, God Is; Evil Allures, but Good Endures; A Spark Neglected Burns the House; How Much Land Does a Man Need? In 1885, on Tolstoy’s initiative, Chertkov founded and financed a publishing house called The Mediator in order to make the stories available to the people in inexpensive illustrated editions.
These stories were meant to embody simple Christian moral principles in the simplest style possible, but in fact they cost Tolstoy a great deal of work. Thirty-seven manuscript versions of What Men Live By were found among his papers. He was, in a sense, relearning his craft. Like The Prisoner of the Caucasus, the popular tales occupy a middle position between his earlier expansive and inclusive realism and the later stories collected here. They were experimental, the work on them dominated by questions of form. That may seem surprising in the light of Tolstoy’s obsession with truth and scant respect for formalists and formalism in the arts (“You’re an inventor,” he once said to Gorky, meaning it as a criticism). But he was always concerned with form and formal innovation, though never for its own sake. There is a revealing comment in his diary for 20 January 1890: “Strange thing this concern with perfection of form. It is not in vain. Not in vain when the content is good.—If Gogol had written his comedy [The Inspector General] summarily, weakly, it would not have been read by a millionth of those who have now read it. One must sharpen an artistic work so that it penetrates. And sharpening it means making it artistically perfect …” Mirsky comments in his History: “It is quite wrong to affirm that in any literary sense the change that overcame Tolstoy about 1880 was a fall. He remained forever, not only the supreme writer, but the supreme craftsman of Russian letters.”
Tolstoy’s later ideal, the model of “universal ancient art” by which he proposed to measure all narratives, including his own, was the story of Joseph from the book of Genesis. In What Is Art? he explains why:
In the narrative of Joseph there was no need to describe in detail, as is done nowadays, Joseph’s blood-stained clothes, Jacob’s dwelling and clothes, and the pose and attire of Potiphar’s wife when, straightening a bracelet on her left arm, she said, “Come to me,” and so on, because the feeling contained in this story is so strong that all details except the most necessary—for instance, that Joseph went into the next room to weep—all details are superfluous and would only hinder the conveying of the feeling, and therefore this story is accessible to all people, it touches people of all nations, ranks, ages, has come down to our time, and will live on for thousands of years. But take the details from the best novels of our time and what will remain?
Yet Tolstoy was unable to achieve that ideal even in the plainest of his later stories. On the contrary, everywhere in them we find the most precisely observed details of time and place, a concentration on the particular, on sights and smells, on the gestures and intonations of characters—on all that was so specific to Tolstoy’s genius, to his extraordinary sensual memory and gift of concrete realization. If that were taken away, there would indeed remain a core of universal human experience—Tolstoy was not interested in the topical issues of his time and almost never wrote about them—but there would not be that poetry of reality which characterized his artistic works from the very beginning and reached perhaps its highest point in his last major work, Hadji Murat.
In What Is Art? Tolstoy discards “the all-confusing concept of beauty” and defines art as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” The metaphor of infection has a quality of physical closeness, even of impingement, about it: infection does not require the consent of the infected. But art is also the creation of an image held up for contemplation, and contemplation implies distance and the freedom of the contemplator. The formal qualities of the work create the distance necessary for contemplation. In The Kreutzer Sonata, a story that dramatizes an attempt at “infection” in Tolstoy’s sense, distance is created by the narrator, a fellow passenger on the train, a curious but passive listener, who throws the would-be infector, Pozdnyshev, into high relief. And it is the vivid, contradictory, pathetic figure of Pozdnyshev that Tolstoy finally holds up to us (and to himself) as a sign.