Odd Jobs (50 page)

Those around him were dismayed at the new direction he took at the end of the Seventies. Sonya wrote to her sister in November of 1879, “Leo is still working, as he calls it, but alas! all he is producing are philosophical disquisitions! He reads and thinks until it gives him a headache.… My only hope is that he will soon get over it, and it will pass, like a disease.” Turgenev, visiting in 1880, wrote, “In contemporary European literature he has no equal.… But what is one to do with him? He has plunged headlong into another sphere: he has surrounded himself with Bibles and Gospels in all languages, and has written a whole heap of papers.” The superego embodied in the diary has triumphed, and the journals greatly expand, singing the same conscience-stricken, self-hating song—religious self-mortification mixed in with exorbitant artistic standards and a dandyish
Weltschmerz
. “I often wish to die. Work doesn’t absorb me” (9/2/81). “Shameful and vile. Terrible depression. Full of weakness. I must take care of myself, as though I were asleep, so as not to damage what I need when I’m awake. I’m being more and more dragged into the mire, and my convulsions are of no avail” (4/11/84). “I try to be serene and happy, but it’s very, very hard. All that I do is bad, and I suffer terribly from it” (5/28/84). In his peculiar mire he devoted more energy to making boots, mingling with the peasants, urging chastity and poverty upon his unreceptive family, and reproaching his own laziness and sensuality than to writing: “I’m writing
The Kreutzer Sonata
and even
On Art
, and both are negative and evil, and I want to write something good” (7/24/89). “Thought about the fact that I’m fussing over my writing of
The Kreutzer Sonata
out of vanity; I don’t want to appear in public as not fully finished, clumsy, even poor. And that’s bad” (8/29/89). “In the morning I wrote a new variant of
The Kreutzer Sonata
—not badly, but sluggishly” (10/6/89). “Looked through the whole of
The Kreutzer Sonata
, made deletions, corrections and additions. I’m awfully fed up with it. The main thing is that it’s artistically wrong and false” (12/6/89). “Read through all the works of fiction which I’ve begun. They’re all bad” (6/14/94).

The year 1895 brings us, with a weary sigh, into the second volume of the journals. Tolstoy had fifteen more years to live. In this period he managed to finish
Resurrection
—“Finished
Resurrection
. It’s not good. Not revised. Too hurried. But I’m free of it, and it doesn’t interest me
any more” (12/18/99). He also produced “Master and Man” (“pretty worthless”) and
Hadji Murád
(“stupid”), some fables, the play
The Light Shineth in Darkness
, several volumes of an anthology of the world’s wisdom called
A Cycle of Reading
, and a large number of pamphlets and pronouncements. “But still I’m a disgusting, repulsive creature,” he reassures his diary. “And how good it is to know this and remember it” (10/9/1900). “Thank God, I’m loathsome and worthless to the last degree” (12/21/09). His struggles with virtue’s impossible demands, the world’s intractable problems, his incorrigible family, his implacably clinging wife, and his own oppressive celebrity make for a hectic atmosphere. His diary seems to be read, almost like a bulletin board, as he writes it, and Sonya is keeping her own, which he in turn reads, while he hides his top-secret diary in his blouse or his boot. She rifles through his papers in the dead of the night and, at the height of her jealousy of Vladimir Chertkov, the chief apostle of the Tolstoyan creed, waves in her husband’s face passages she has copied from his old diaries as proof of his homosexuality. It all seems childishly violent and repetitive, and had been going on for years. In the year 1889 Tolstoy recorded a dialogue with Sonya that captures the tone of their discussions, not entirely to his own advantage:

Tolstoy for all his self-flagellation and willed saintliness only rarely detects the tyrannical egoism of his determination to “drum in,” to achieve the long-deferred “all-round development of everything that exists,” beginning with his wife and recalcitrant, roistering sons. A few months after his dialogue with Sonya, he does confess that “the devil” assails him “in the form of a proud passion, a desire that everyone should immediately share my views.” In 1891 he rather desperately concludes, in regard to the world’s deplorable plight, “The only possible arrangement is to make all men good.”

He often notes that he is depressed: “I’m depressed. I’m a worthless,
pathetic, unnecessary creature, and moreover a self-centered one. The one good thing is that I want to die” (5/3/84). “I don’t remember such depression for a long time” (5/13/95). “I can’t sleep for depression” (1/12/97). He reads William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
and finds that “in James’ book it is said that I’m a melancholic, close to mental illness.” Saturation in these melancholy diaries led this reader to conclude that Tolstoy suffered from the ailment of excessive clear-sightedness. He saw through everything to the hard truth, and art was the one realm where such clairvoyance could be utilized. Having had his spell of sexual adventuring and family happiness, he saw through these pleasures to their bottom of selfishness and transience. He saw the oppression and cruelty in the autocratic, capitalist system that prevailed, but also saw that Socialist revolution was no solution. His critiques of Marxism, two decades before it came to rule his country, are prophetic:

Tolstoy saw that life without a religion amounts to death and darkness and Darwinian struggle; but he also saw orthodox Christianity as absurd and had great trouble maintaining even a minimal faith: “Sonya has gone to Kiev. An inner struggle. I don’t much believe in God.” His creed, when stated, is stripped-down Kant, a hypothetical “law”: “Does God exist? I don’t know. I know that there is a law governing my spiritual being. The source of, and the reason for that law I call God.” As a thinker, Tolstoy belongs not with the Victorian rediscoverers of faith like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Newman, but with the eighteenth-century
philosophes
and Deists, and even with the cynical, reductionist court maximists like La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort. He seeks the underlying principle, the sweeping law, and at the end of
War and Peace
confounds the readers of his momentous panorama of human activity and moral search with the announcement that free will is as much an illusion as the stationariness of the earth. Nowhere is Tolstoy more powerful as
a writer than when, with Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina, he sees through to the horror of things—a horror he then attempts to cancel with a flash of light: for Ivan Ilyich, “in place of death there was light,” and, as the train wheel crushes Anna, “the light … flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness.” May it prove so; but Tolstoy’s religiosity usually seems somewhat strained, and his theories advocating a “moral,” populist art self-woundingly reactionary and doctrinaire.

The journals contain many severe and downright dismissive comments on other writers. “I’ve been reading Shaw. His triviality amazes me.” “Read Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra
, and his sister’s note about how he wrote it, and am absolutely convinced that he was completely mad when he wrote it.” “Read Boccaccio. The beginning of ruling-class immoral art.” “Read Dostoyevsky and was astonished at his slipshod manner, artificiality and fabrication.” Goncharov’s
Oblomov
provokes the exclamation “How paltry!” and a sampling of Walt Whitman is summarized as “Some stupid poems.” Writers he partially admires elicit rather subtler judgments. “We spoke about Chekhov.… It became clear to me that he, like Pushkin, has made an advance in form. And that’s a great service. But, like Pushkin, he hasn’t any content.” “Sat all evening alone, read Chekhov. He has the ability to love as far as artistic insight goes, but as yet no reason to.” “Have just read Chekhov’s story
On the Cart
. Excellent for its descriptiveness, but rhetorical as soon as he wants to give a meaning to the story.” “Read Coleridge. A writer very sympathetic to me—precise, clear, but unfortunately timid—an Englishman—the Church of England and redemption. Impossible …” When Tolstoy came, late in life, to express his literary opinions in print, he proved to be one of the great scolds in the history of criticism. He devoted pages of
What Is Art?
to condemning Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other “decadents” as “incomprehensible.” He composed a lengthy, energetic essay in justification of the “insuperable repulsion and tedium” aroused in him by the works of Shakespeare; he troubled to read the original sources for Shakespeare’s plots (the old play
King Leir
, the Italian tale of Othello) and in every instance found them more logical and plausible than the contorted, ambiguous plays that Shakespeare scribbled and that Goethe and other Germans foisted off on the gullible nineteenth century as great works. Clarity and naturalness were Tolstoy’s touchstones; as his religious mission thickened, he demanded patent moral purpose and sobriety, even abstemiousness. In “Why Do Men
Stupefy Themselves?” he asserts that “Kant’s works would not have been written in such a curious and bad style had he not smoked so much.” He came to believe, in a chilling approach to the totalitarian view, that art must serve society with moral instruction, if it is to exist at all.

Yet, as his life draws to a close in a tumult of private quarrels and public causes and global celebrity, he wistfully notes in his diary a longing for “literary work”: “Yes, I would like some literary work. One can express everything and unburden oneself without condemning anyone” (10/21/09). A bit later, this man of eighty-one confides sadly, “I think I’m played out as a writer of literary works. I can’t concentrate on one thing. But there’s a lot I want to do.” A year before his death, he notes, “I’ve been reading through my books. I oughtn’t to write any more. I think in this respect I’ve done all I could. But I want to, I terribly want to …” (11/2/09). Most of the ideas he jots down after completing
Resurrection
never came to anything, as Mr. Christian’s notes faithfully inform us. But
Hadji Murád
, published posthumously, is as much a masterpiece as
Billy Budd
, and the one passage in these two volumes that for me came alive with the full Tolstoyan impetus, the racing pulse of truth, came very near the end, when the old sage and patriarch, already in failing health, at long last makes his escape from home, and sets out to be a pilgrim:

This rapid succession of clauses unfurls the nervous clarity and concreteness, even the comedy, of the mind and body shown in slightly discordant
action, of sensations and emotions constantly subject to a critique delivered by a motionless, watchful, beautifully honest intelligence—the lucid partner in the Tolstoyan balancing act. Ten days later, Tolstoy was dead.

More threads than can be counted run through these journals. His remarks on art, for instance, range dramatically:

Happiness, like art and women, belongs to the realm of temptation; yet he can never quite turn his back on it: