Even The Prisoner of the Caucasus, a story meant for peasant schoolchildren, is more self-consciously literary than it seems. It is a deliberately anti-romantic retelling of Alexander Pushkin’s romantic poem of the same title, written in 1822. Pushkin tells the story of a world-weary, Byronic Russian officer taken prisoner by the Caucasian mountaineers. When a beautiful Circassian girl falls in love with him, he is too jaded to respond. In the end she helps him to escape and then throws herself into a mountain torrent and drowns. Tolstoy’s hero is a sturdy, practical fellow with the rather crude, physiological name of Zhilin, which comes from the word for sinew. His fat fellow prisoner is Kostylin, whose name comes from the word for crutch. The Circassian beauty is turned into the thirteen-year-old Dina, who likes Zhilin because he makes dolls for her. The polemic of this near parody has little to do with educating peasant children and much to do with Tolstoy’s own literary stance and temperament.
The second piece in the collection, The Diary of a Madman, also borrows its title from an earlier literary work, Nikolai Gogol’s hallucinatory tale of the petty clerk Mr. Poprishchin. But they have only the title in common. In fact, Tolstoy first called his story The Diary of a Non-madman, to mark his distance from Gogol and assert the actual sanity of his self-declared madman. The theme and the experience behind it were of profound significance for him. The first draft dates to 1884. He returned to it a number of times between 1887 and 1903, but left it unfinished. The fragment, which Mirsky considered “the most genuinely mystical” of Tolstoy’s writings, recounts a crisis close to the one described in A Confession, but closer still to something that actually happened to Tolstoy in 1869, when he, like his hero, was cheerfully traveling to Penza to buy an estate and stopped for the night in Arzamas. Tolstoy wrote to his wife on 4 September 1869: “The day before yesterday I spent the night in Arzamas, and an extraordinary thing happened to me. At two o’clock in the morning, a strange anxiety, a fear, a terror such as I have never before experienced came over me. I’ll tell you the details later, but never have I known such painful sensations …” In the story, Tolstoy develops that one incident and attempts to find a resolution for its metaphysical anguish. There was an even earlier experience, however, that was a prelude to the night in Arzamas and the crisis of A Confession. This was the death of his brother Nikolai in the southern French town of Hyères, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. In September 1860 Tolstoy visited him and in a letter described his death and burial as “the most painful impression of my life.” The confrontation with the mystery of death became a central theme of his later work.
Rumination on the same themes, places, and even moments over long stretches of time is typical of Tolstoy. The presence of the Caucasus in his work is a good example of it. He first went to the Caucasus as a volunteer in 1851, to join Nikolai, who was on active duty there. He happened to be in Tiflis in December of that same year when the Avar chief Hadji Murat came over to the Russians, an act he condemned at the time as base. In 1853 he wrote his first story about the war in the Caucasus, The Raid, describing the destruction of a Chechen village by the Russian army; in 1855 he described another Russian tactic against the mountaineers in The Woodfelling. From 1852 to 1862, he worked at his novel The Cossacks, portraying the failed attempt of a self-conscious young Russian officer to enter into the unreflecting, natural life of the Cossacks who manned the line of fortresses against the Chechens in the mountains. In 1872 he returned to the same setting in The Prisoner of the Caucasus. And, finally, in 1896 he began work on Hadji Murat, which, incidentally, contains another version of the raid that formed the subject of his first story (the earlier version had been somewhat cut by the censors).
The Devil (1889), a story of sexual obsession, also had roots in Tolstoy’s past: the relations of his hero Irtenev with the peasant woman Stepanida are based on Tolstoy’s own relations, described in detail in his diary, with a married peasant woman on his estate, in the years prior to his marriage in 1862. Similarly, the brief story After the Ball, written in 1903, was based on an incident that had occurred with Tolstoy himself when he was living in Kazan in the 1840s. So, too, the blizzard in Master and Man (1895) is a variant of The Snowstorm, written in 1856.
Tolstoy’s religious ambitions, which came to dominate his public life after 1880, were also not the result of his “conversion,” but had long been brewing in him. As early as March 1855, he wrote in his diary:
Yesterday a conversation on the divine and faith led me to a great, an immense thought, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life.—This thought is to found a new religion corresponding to the evolution of humanity, a religion of Christ, but stripped of faith and mysteries, a practical religion which promises no future blessedness, but grants blessedness on earth … To act consciously for the union of men with the help of religion, that is the basis of a thought which, I hope, will sustain me.
There could be no clearer statement of the program he developed during the last decades of his life. Mirsky rightly observes:
From the very beginning we cannot fail to discern in him an obstinate search for a rational meaning to life; a confidence in the powers of common sense and his own reason; contempt for modern civilization with its “artificial” multiplication of needs; a deeply rooted irreverence for all the functions and conventions of State and Society; a sovereign disregard for accepted opinions and scientific and literary “good form;” and a pronounced tendency to teach.
Of the eleven stories in this collection, only four were published in Tolstoy’s lifetime: The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Master and Man. The others first appeared in the volumes of his posthumous writings edited and published by Vladimir Chertkov in 1911–12. Some of the stories were finished relatively quickly (After the Ball and Alyosha the Pot each in a single day); some, like Father Sergius, The Forged Coupon, and Hadji Murat, he worked at for many years. His reluctance to publish had several reasons: disputes between his wife and Chertkov over the rights to his work; concerns about the censorship (The Kreutzer Sonata, written in 1887–89, was published in 1891 only after Tolstoy’s wife personally petitioned the emperor); and a feeling of guilt for concerning himself with art at all (after finishing Master and Man, one of his most perfect stories, he wrote in his diary: “I am ashamed to have wasted my time on such stuff”).