Tolstoy: Russia’s Thunderous Prophet
The death of Leo Tolstoy on November 20 1910 in a small railway station in southern Russia, was being turned into mythology even as it was happening. Pathé, the pioneer of newsreels, made one of its first moving-pictures about the event. Lenin had said two years earlier that Tolstoy was “a mirror of the revolution”. Both communist revolutionaries and the Russian government were watching to e what the effect of the death of the great anarchist would be on the Russian people, who felt that they had lost not just a great artist but the most eloquent voice that had thundered on their behalf against monstrous injustices.
To such deceptively simple questions as how should we live, the answers he gave caud tsars, armies, cret police and church inquisitors to shake in their souls. By the end, millions of people worldwide were hanging on his words. A week after he died, a woman in a Moscow railway cafeteria made a slighting remark about Tolstoy. The café workers rounded on her and the waiter refud to give her tea.
The anniversary of a writer’s death is usually a chance to reasss and re-read their work but it is rarely a provocation to ask the most arching questions about the world as it is now, and about ourlves. Yet Tolstoy’s death still challenges us to ask the deepest political and personal questions. It is hard to think of any of the great public questions facing the world today that Tolstoy did not anticipate and address in some way, whether we speak of the environmental crisis, religious debate (creationist versus atheist) or the anti-war movement.
So who was the man who came to reprent the soul of his nation? Tolstoy was born in 1828 and was related to some of the grandest diplomats and courtiers in Russia. He joined the army and rved in the Crimean war. In 1862 he married, going on to have a huge family (13 children) as well as help to start the education of the peasants with a wide network of local schools, and pioneer agriculture. After his early travels, he spent most of his life in the country at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, about 130 miles south of Moscow.
In his Sevastopol Sketches and in the Caucasian tales translated as Cossacks, he revealed early his genius for cloly obrved realistic depictions not only of military life, but of nature. The desire to find out how best to live is at the core of all Tolstoy’s writings, finding its way into the inner musings of Prince Andrei and Pierre in War and Peace and in the lf-questionings of Levin in Anna Karenina.
After writing that novel, however, Tolstoy had a mid-life crisis and became a fervent Orthodox Christian. Changing again, he decided that the Church was teaching mumbo-jumbo. What mattered was what Jesus himlf had taught. And what Jesus taught, in Tolstoy’s version – he actually rewrote the gospels – was pacifism, anarchism, no government, no army, no upper class, no quest for wealth. To this was added Tolstoy’s own increasingly obssive vegetarianism.
Rosamund Bartlett’s new biography, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, conveys Tolstoy to me more vividly than any biography I have read. An academic and translator, Bartlett is steeped in Russia’s language and history. At every stage of Tolstoy’s life we feel ourlves in a gigan
tic prence: when he planted an apple orchard at his Yasnaya Polyana estate it was the cond largest in Europe. Although born to wealth, he came to despi his riches. When he undertook famine relief, he became a one-man Oxfam, galvanising a whole nation into action to save the starving.
It is difficult as a reader to take in the sheer scale and extent of Tolstoy’s interest and achievement. For the biographer to put all this into less than 500 pages is an achievement in itlf. But Bartlett never ems hurried and she gives herlf time to paint the scene for us, bringing the scent of Russian earth and grass to the nostrils.
In her pages, we know the difference between far-away, sophisticated St Petersburg and Moscow, where Tolstoy reluctantly bought a town hou; just as she conveys his need not merely for the pastoral idyll of Yasnaya Polyana but also for the barren expans of Samara, which he became increasingly fond of. He went there initially to drink koumiss (fermented mare’s milk) for his health but, with his obssive, all-embracing character, he soon became enamoured of the people, the Bashkir, Turkic-speaking Muslims. He acquir
ed 7,000 acres of Bashkir land and forced his family to spend far longer than they would have wished living in tents and drinking koumiss from leather churns while, with his Greek tutor, he read from Herodotus.
It is not a reverent biography: Bartlett admits that he was an impossible husband and that he was unattractively humourless. But she conveys a perfect balance between admiration for Tolstoy’s art and respect for his life as a prophet. The conventional wisdom is that, having written Anna Karenina, the novelist went off the boil, had a nervous breakdown, and reinvented himlf as a crackpot prophet issuing moral clarion calls. Egging him on in his fads was the high priest of Tolstoyism, the writer Vladimir Chertkov, to whom almost all biographers give a bad press.
