A Martyr to the Truth

I was back home for Christmas and convalescing from the toxic fuzz induced by months of a student existence. I lay in bed mostly trying to ignore Anna Karenina, a brick of a Penguin Classic that I had to read before rejoining the fray. A scan of the first page had been enough to convince me Tolstoy was going to be boring. No kind of style. Ordinary plot and ideas. The work of a literary oaf who handled language like a peasant feeding chickens from his bucket.

But in the fug of the festive season the novel began to prompt the sensations that must come from wild swimming, an unexpected ease and familiarity in what had looked to be murky and unpromising waters. A clearing of the mind. A feeling that the pleasures of the novel could be endless. Anna Karenina was somehow, in some mysterious way, an immersion in life at its sweetest and most meaningful. Leo Tolstoy became my first bookish passion. Not a fling – I was going to be a pale-faced acolyte. The following summer, lying on a grubby blanket in our student garden, I consumed A. N. Wilson’s excellent biography in a single day. Then I walked the streets of the nearest city in holy pursuit of second-hand bookshops and lesser known works, critical studies and commentaries, trying to discover what gives Tolstoy’s novels their magical reality. The unpredictability of book-hunting prior to the digital age meant that the one book I didn’t come across was Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy (1965). It was only twenty years later that this wonderfully readable biography (still managing to seem short at almost 1,000 pages) brought it all back to me – the same questioning of the sanity of our stressful and dissatisfied civilization: wouldn’t it be better to wake up with the dawn, work long days in hot fields and return in the evening for a reviving glass of fermented mare’s milk? Troyat was himself a Russian. Born Lev Aslanovich Tarassov in 1911, he had his own memories of the grotesque contrasts of Tsarist Moscow, how the velvet-upholstered interiors lit by the steady pulse of gaslight opened directly on to an abyss of poverty. In 1920, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks had prevailed, the Tarassovs fled to Constantinople before finally settling in Paris. Adopting a Gallic nom de plume, Troyat began to introduce a wider French audience of readers to the special qualities of Russian literature, writing biographies of Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, as well as long cycles of his own novels and short stories. It’s not surprising that Troyat managed to produce a biography of Tolstoy that is as engaging as any novel. The plot could be by Dostoevsky – a nightmarish addiction to gambling; wild nights among the gypsies; a desperate plunge into religion as an escape from despair; how Tolstoy turns his back on aristocratic privilege to wed himself to the ‘dark ones’, the drifters, as well as some calculating and aspirational seekers after spiritual enlightenment. Troyat begins with a very Russian idyll. He is especially good at taking you behind the scenes of the Tolstoys’ country estate of Yasnaya Polyana. The gentry did not occupy a separate, cleaned-up space away from the peasantry – as would have been the case in England – but enjoyed lives richly embroidered with the folk rituals and tastes of the muzhiks.

In the afternoon, when the weather was fine, there were outings in the carriage with the aunts and the tutor . . . The canopied charabanc with its leather apron and the high-springed yellow cabriolet bounced along the rutted paths of the forest of Zakaz in single file. The children shouted and sang, the horses flicked their ears. At the end of the road Matryona the cowgirl was waiting for them with black bread, sour cream and raw milk.

The heart of this epic tale, the knotted centre to all the drama that follows, is Tolstoy’s courtship of his wife-to-be, Sonya. Even though we know the outcome, it is still painful to see the faltering progress of our hero towards marriage. He’s like a troglodyte in full-dress uniform in the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg. Awkward and blurting. Rouble-less from losing at cards. Unable to keep his hands off the peasant girls and tortured by constant lapses from his strict ‘rules of life’. A hugely promising writer who was never convinced of the value of artistic creation (‘Art is a lie, and already I am no longer able to love a beautiful lie.’). A thirty-something who’d lost all his teeth, Tolstoy saw himself as old, ugly and depraved. Not much of a catch for an innocent 17-year-old girl. Beauty and the Beast with no chance of turning the Beast back into a prince. But we know the primary reason for Tolstoy’s rude exterior is a fatal yearning for truth and beauty. Inside the bear is the soul of a butterfly. His favourite piece of poetry was from Fyodor Tyutchev: ‘Be quiet, lie low and hide/ Your feelings and your dreams.’ The melodies of Chopin and Beethoven would bring tears to his eyes. He’d cry when he heard peasant children swearing at each other. Arguments upset him deeply. It was this combination of a bullish approach to life with a torrid sensitivity that made Tolstoy’s novels miraculous. For novelists hoping to find out how Tolstoy managed to pull it off, Troyat offers many clues. There are Tolstoy’s tricks, like abandoning a conventional style in order to be clear and precise; sticking to direct, un-literary adjectives (‘I never saw lips of coral, but I have seen them the colour of brick’); his way of making people stick in his readers’ imagination by referring to one or two telling details, a dry pair of hands, the crease in the back of someone’s neck (‘a button half-undone may explain a whole side of a person’s character’); not having a fixed plot in mind but allowing his characters the freedom to surprise him; and the way in which he warmed himself up by reading Dickens. Also important was Tolstoy’s monstrous capacity for the research needed to ensure that every detail was based on documented reality. The lack of style wasn’t the product of speedy composition. ‘The margins of his drafts’, observes Troyat, ‘are full of trial adjectives, as a painter mixes trial colours on the edge of his palette.’ Another feature of Tolstoy’s mighty engine as a novelist, I think, is his radical sincerity. He believes life has a solemn beauty. To show us what he means he dissects the hypocrisy, the artificial thinking and the behaviour of conventional society, the careful, self-aware pleasantries and the ambitions they hide. We see how the pretensions of smart, civilized society are just wallpaper. Beneath is a reality that has always something lovely and limpid about it, a truth that the most simple, uneducated and uncivilized people know. Always truth. Tolstoy was a martyr to it. But in his effort to find and rationalize his way through essential truths he kept bumping into Death. The unavoidable fact of mortality led to his sometimes desperate search for consolation and a sense of purpose from religion, and to a great extent it ended his career as a novelist. It also meant a sad ending to his own Russian family idyll with Sonya. As father to thirteen children, Tolstoy had been master of the revels at home. There were games of football and croquet, long winter days of sledging and ice-skating. He would also charge about the house pretending to be riding a horse and invent his own games, such as dragging the children around in a giant laundry basket, swamped under clothes so that they didn’t know which room they’d come to. Yasnaya Polyana had kept its muzhik charm. When the children wanted a treat they would go to a house servant who’d dole out jam with an ancient battered spoon. ‘We knew why the spoon was like that,’ recalled Tolstoy’s son Ilya. ‘It had been thrown in the garbage pail and a sow had chewed on it.’ But the Great Author turned Great Prophet could no longer bear the itch of compromise. Why was he being made to live in luxury, waited on by servants in white gloves, while all he wanted to do was put the Gospels into practice and finally plunge himself into the freshest source of peasant wisdom? Yasnaya Polyana, the Bright Glade, became a place of intrigue and misery. Sonya could see where her husband’s philosophy was heading. He would give away his writings and the estate, and the family would be left with nothing. After years of childbirth and managing the household, and endless days writing up manuscripts, she at least deserved some security, to be remembered as the faithful wife of a world renowned figure. She knew that Tolstoy’s closest friend and chief advocate of Tolstoyan values, Vladimir Chertkov, had his own agenda. The sight of the man, always so mild and reasonable, gliding about her house and engaged in yet another confidential conversation with her husband drove her to mental collapse. That smooth villain Chertkov was going to take control of Tolstoy’s whole body of work, including the diary containing his most intimate thoughts. She was right to worry. At one stage, when the battle over the ownership of Tolstoy’s diaries had become farcical (members of the family would try and pinch pages when no one was looking), Chertkov arranged a working group to write up a version of the diary with all positive references to Sonya removed. By the conclusion of his biography, Troyat has made us feel the tragedy not only of the man himself – who found no revelations before he died, only muddle and noise – but also of the full cast of characters left behind with the legend, their own ghosts and regrets, and an empty house that had become the property of everyone and no one. I wasn’t meant to have been reading Anna Karenina for pleasure. An exam hall awaited me at the end of the year. It was only then, turning over the question paper and gripping my biro, that a feeling of outrage hit me. I had forty-five minutes to write about a novel I must have read three or four times already, I’d loved it so much. Was this all there was to the study of literature? I had an almost Tolstoyan urge to run off to the fields and escape the unfeeling rules of civilization.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 75 © Tim Blanchard 2022