The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first work Tolstoy published after the crisis described in A Confession. Written between 1884 and 1886, at the same time as his stories for the people, it shows clearly both a continuity with his earlier work and the artistic changes that resulted from his “conversion.” The power of concrete evocation is the same, but there is a new brevity, rapidity, and concentration on essentials, an increased formality of construction underscoring the main idea, and a cast of characters not drawn from Tolstoy’s own social milieu. The protagonists of Tolstoy’s earlier works were more or less openly autobiographicaclass="underline" Nikolenka Irtenev in the early trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Olenin in The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina. They were self-conscious men, seekers of truth, concerned with their own inner development. The protagonist of The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a banal and totally unreflecting man, a state functionary, and, worst of all for Tolstoy, a judge. The germ of the story came from the sudden death in 1881, at the age of forty-five, of a certain Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, a prosecutor in the city of Tula, about eight miles from Tolstoy’s estate. He had visited Tolstoy once, and in fact Tolstoy had found him an unusual man. In the story, however, he makes him “most ordinary,” heaps him with scorn and irony, and then, through a simple but powerful inversion from outside to inside, brings him to an extraordinary transformation. The story ends where it began, but with everything changed. In The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov wrote: “The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as an artistic creation, is one of the most precious gems of Tolstoy’s work. It is a question mark so black and strong that it shines through the new and radiant colors of that preaching by which Tolstoy wished to make us forget his former doubts.”
Master and Man, written ten years later, and with an entirely different cast of characters, this time drawn from village merchant and peasant life, is a variation on the theme of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It is reminiscent of the popular stories in its setting, but is told with a gripping physical intensity and, in Mirsky’s words, “with a sustained beauty of construction” that makes it one of Tolstoy’s masterpieces. He isolates the merchant Brekhunov, as he does Ivan Ilyich, in the most extreme human situation, and, rightly, never explains the change that comes over him as he struggles to save his servant’s life. “That’s how we are,” he says to himself in his usual businesslike way, and suddenly bursts into tears of joy.
Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata and Irtenev in The Devil are also examples of Tolstoy’s testing by extremes, but in their case the testing leads not to “light,” but to the most terrible human darkness. The Kreutzer Sonata caused more of a public outcry than anything else Tolstoy wrote, owing to its frank treatment of sex. Tolstoy was accused of attacking the institution of marriage and corrupting the youth. (Incidentally, the United States Post Office, with an unusual show of erudition, refused to handle by mail any publication containing a translation of the story or excerpts from it.) Tolstoy’s sympathizers, on the other hand, tried to separate him completely from the character of Pozdnyshev. In a diary entry in 1890, before the publication of the story, but after it had spread in manuscript, Tolstoy jotted down this response: “They think he is some sort of special man, and, according to them, there is nothing at all like that in me. Can they really find nothing?” The struggle Tolstoy portrays in The Kreutzer Sonata and in The Devil is not against institutions and conventions, but against sensual seduction and the resulting loss of personal freedom. And he links art and especially music with sexuality as forces of seduction. He himself was strongly subject to all of them.
Father Sergius, begun in June 1890 and worked on over the next eight years, presents another kind of testing, though it has some relation to the sexual stories. It tells about a young prince who abandons society to become a monk and hermit; what is tested in his life is pride—the pride of an aristocrat enrolled in the elite Cadet Corps, the pride of intellectual and military ambition, but also the pride that seeks spiritual perfection, the pride of self-conscious humility. Lev Shestov sees Father Sergius as a reflection of Tolstoy in his later years—famous, attracting visitors and disciples from all over the world, but aware in himself of his own “unworthiness.” It is a story of repeated departures, which ironically keep bringing the old monk back to where the young guards officer began. In a striking way, it anticipates Tolstoy’s final departure in November 1910, leaving his estate, his family, and the “Tolstoyans” in search of solitude. After a frustrated visit to the monastery of Optino, he fell gravely ill at the railroad station of Astapovo and died in the station-master’s house.
Father Sergius is a good example of Tolstoy’s later manner, with its quick tempo and concentration on essentials. In his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky records a moment that reveals the “secret” artistic pleasure Tolstoy took in writing it:
One evening, in the twilight, half closing his eyes and moving his brows, he read a variant of the scene in Father Sergius where the woman goes to seduce the hermit: he read it through to the end, and then, raising his head and shutting his eyes, he said distinctly: “The old man wrote it well.”
It came out with such sincerity, his pleasure in its beauty was so sincere, that I shall never forget the delight it gave me at the time … My heart stopped beating for a moment, and then everything around me seemed to become fresh and revivified.
The perfect foil for characters like Pozdnyshev and Father Sergius is the hero of the little story Alyosha the Pot, a simple and obedient young peasant, a sort of holy fool, who lives and dies with a purity and inner peace that forever eluded Tolstoy and most of his characters. In his diary for 28 February 1905, Tolstoy noted with characteristic dismissiveness: “Wrote Alyosha, very bad. Gave it up.” When the symbolist poet Alexander Blok read the story on its first publication in 1911, he noted in his diary: “One of the greatest works of genius I have read—Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot.” Mirsky agrees with Blok, calling the story “a masterpiece of rare perfection.” There actually was a servant in Tolstoy’s household nicknamed Alyosha the Pot, who worked as a helper to the cook and the yard porter. Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, Tatyana Kuzminskaya, confessed in her memoirs that she remembered him only as an ugly halfwit.
Unlike the other stories collected here, The Forged Coupon does not concentrate on a single protagonist, but presents a whole series of characters—merchants, radical students, peasants, policemen, monks, sectarians, even the Russian royal family—all linked without knowing it by the consequences of a single petty crime. It is a perfect parable, circular in structure, which goes more and more deeply into evil until it reaches a turning point and doubles back into more and more good. The structure is intentionally abstract, but the abstraction is countered by a wealth of minute particulars, and the main characters—Stepan Pelageyushkin, Marya Semyonovna, the thief Vassily—have a remarkably vivid presence. It is all told in a brisk, matter-of-fact, sometimes unexpectedly humorous tone that heightens the drama of the events, as in the description of Vassily’s prison break, narrated in brief, breathless phrases—one of the best escape scenes in literature.