Leon
Trotsky: Tolstoy: Poet and Rebel
September
15, 1908
[Leon
Trotsky on Literature and Art, New York ²1972, p. 127-141]
I
Tolstoy
has passed his eightieth birthday and now stands before us like an
enormous jagged cliff, moss-covered and from a different historical
world.
A
remarkable thing! Not alone Karl Marx but, to cite a name from a
field closer to Tolstoy's, Heinrich Heine as well appear to be
contemporaries of ours. But from our great contemporary of Yasnaya
Polyana we are already separated by the irreversible flow of time
which differentiates all things.
This
man was thirty-three years old when serfdom was abolished in Russia.
As the descendant of "ten generations untouched by labor,"
he matured and was shaped in an atmosphere of the old nobility, among
inherited acres, in a spacious manorial home and in the shade of
linden-tree alleys, so tranquil and patrician.
The
traditions of landlord rule, its romanticism, its poetry, its whole
style of living were irresistibly imbibed by Tolstoy and became an
organic part of his spiritual makeup. Prom the first years of his
consciousness he was, as he remains to this, very day, an aristocrat
in the deepest and most secret recesses of his creativeness; and
this, despite all his subsequent spiritual crises.
In
the ancestral home of the Princes Volkonsky, inherited by the Tolstoy
family, the author of War
and Peace
occupies a simple, plainly furnished room in which there hangs a
handsaw, stands a scythe and lies an ax. But on the upper floor of
this same dwelling, like stony guardians of its traditions, the
illustrious ancestors of a whole number of generations keep watch
from the walls. In this there is a symbol. We find both of these
floors also in the heart of the master of the house, only inverted in
order. If on the summits of consciousness a nest has been spun for
itself by the philosophy of the simple life and of self-submergence
in the people, then from below, whence well up the emotions, the
passions and the will, there look down upon us a long gallery of
ancestors.
In
the wrath of repentance Tolstoy renounced the false and worldly-vain
art of the ruling classes which glorifies their artificially
cultivated tastes and envelops their caste prejudices in the flattery
of false beauty. But what happened? In his latest major work
Resurrection,
Tolstoy still places in the center of his artistic attention the one
and the same wealthy and well-born Russian landlord, surrounding him
just as solicitously with the golden cobweb of aristocratic
connections, habits and remembrances as if outside this
"worldly-vain" and "false" universe there were
nothing of importance or of beauty.
From
the landlord's manor there runs a short and narrow path straight to
the hut of the peasant. Tolstoy, the poet, was accustomed to make
this passage often and lovingly even before Tolstoy, the moralist,
turned it into a road of salvation. Even after the abolition of
serfdom, he continues to regard the peasant as "his" — an
alienable part of his material and spiritual inventory. From behind
Tolstoy's unquestionable "physical love for the genuine toiling
people" about which he himself tells us, there looks down upon
us just as unquestionably his collective aristocratic ancestor —
only illumined by an artist's genius.
Landlord
and moujik
— these are in the last analysis the only people whom Tolstoy has
wholly accepted into his creative sanctuary. But neither before nor
after his spiritual crisis was he ever able to or did he strive to
free himself from the purely patrician contempt for all those figures
who stand between the landlord and the peasant, or those who occupy
positions beyond the sacred poles of this ancient order — the
German superintendent, the merchant, the French tutor, the physician,
the “intellectual” and, finally, the factory worker with his
watch and chain. Tolstoy never feels a need to understand these
types, to peer into their souls, or question them about their faith.
And they pass before his artist’s eye like so many insignificant
and largely comical silhouettes. When he does create images of
revolutionists of the seventies or eighties, as for example in
Resurrection,
he simply adapts his old landlord and peasant types to a new milieu
or offers us purely external and humorously painted sketches.
At
the beginning of the sixties when a flood of new European ideas and,
what is more important, of new social
relations
swept over Russia, Tolstoy, as I said, had already left a third of a
century behind him: psychologically he was already molded.
Needless
to recall, Tolstoy did not become an apologist for serfdom as did his
intimate friend Fet (Shenshin), landlord and subtle lyric poet, in
whose heart a tender receptivity to nature and to love was coupled
with adoring prostration before the salutary whiplash of feudalism.
But imbued in Tolstoy was a deep hatred for the new social relations,
coming in the place of the old. "Personally I fail to see any
amelioration of morals," he wrote in '1861, "nor do I
propose to take anyone's word for it. I do not find, for instance,
that the relation between the factory owner and the worker is more
humane than that between the landlord and the serf."
Everywhere
and in everything there came hurly-burly and turmoil, there came the
decomposition of the old nobility, the disintegration of the
peasantry, universal chaos, the rubbish and litter of demolition, the
hum and ding-dong of city life, the tavern and cigarette in the
village, the factory limerick in place of the folk song — and all
this repelled Tolstoy, both as an aristocrat and as an artist.
Psychologically he turned his back on this titanic process and
forever refused it artistic recognition. He felt no inner urge to
defend feudal slavery, but he did remain wholeheartedly on the side
of those ties in which he saw wise simplicity and which he was able
to unfold into artistically perfected forms.
His
whole heart was fixed there where life is reproduced changelessly
from one generation to the next, century after century. There where
sacred necessity rules over everything; where every single step
hinges on the sun, the rain, the wind and the green grass growing.
Where nothing comes from one's own reason or from an individual's
rebellious volition and, therefore, no personal responsibility
exists, either. Everything is predetermined, everything justified in
advance, sanctified. Responsible for nothing, thinking nothing, man
lives only by hearing
and obeying,
says Uspensky, the remarkable poet of "The Dominion of the
Land." And this perpetual hearing and obeying, converted into
perpetual toil, is precisely what shapes the life
which outwardly leads to no results whatever but which has its result
in its very self … And lo, a miracle! This convict-labor dependence
— without reflection or choice, without errors or pangs of
repentance — is what gives rise to the great moral "ease"
of existence under the harsh guardianship of "the ears of rye."
Mikula Selyanovich, peasant hero of the folk epic, says of himself:
"I am the beloved
of raw mother earth."
Such
is the religious myth of Russian populism which ruled for decades
over the minds of the Russian intellectuals. Stone deaf to its
radical tendencies, Tolstoy always remained personally, and
represented in the populist movement, its aristocratic conservative
wing.
Tolstoy
was repelled by the new and in order to create artistically Russian
life as he knew, understood and loved it, he was compelled to
withdraw into the past, back to the very beginnings of the nineteenth
century. War
and Peace
(written in 1867-69) is his best and unsurpassed work.
The
anonymous massiveness of life and its sacred irresponsibility were
incarnated by Tolstoy in his character Karatayev, a type least
comprehensible to a European reader; at all events, furthest removed
from him.
"Karatayev's
life, as he himself saw it, had no meaning as an individual life. It
had meaning only as a small particle of the great whole, which
Karatayev constantly felt. Of attachments, of friendship, and love as
Pierre understood them, Karatayev had none. He loved and lovingly
lived with everything that life brought him into contact with, and
particularly with human beings. … Pierre felt that Karatayev,
despite all his affectionate tenderness toward him, would not grieve
for a moment over their parting."
It
is that stage when the spirit, as Hegel put it, has not yet attained
inner self-consciousness and therefore manifests itself only as
spirit indwelling in nature. Despite his rather rare appearances,
Karatayev is the philosophical, if not the artistic, axis of War
and Peace;
and Kutuzov whom Tolstoy turns into a national hero is this very same
Karatayev, only in the post of commander-in-chief.
In
contrast to Napoleon, Kutuzov has no personal plans, no personal
ambition. In his semiconscious tactics, he is not guided by reason
but by that which rises above reason — by a dim instinct for
physical conditions and by the promptings of the people's spirit.
Czar Alexander, in his more lucid moments, as well as the least of
Kutuzov's soldiers all stand equally under the dominion of the land.
… In this moral unity is the pathos of Tolstoy's book.
How
miserable, in reality, is this Old Russia with its nobility
disinherited by history, without any elegant past of hierarchical
estates, without the Crusades, without knightly love or tournaments
of knighthood, without even romantic highway robberies. How
poverty-stricken so far as inner beauty is concerned; what a ruthless
plunder of the peasant masses amid the general semi-animal existence!
But
what a miracle of reincarnation is a genius capable of! From the raw
material of this drab and colorless life he extracts its secret
multicolored beauty. With Homeric calm and with Homer's love of
children, he endows everything and everybody with his attention.
Kutuzov, die manorial household servants, the cavalry horse, the
adolescent countess, the moujik, the czar, a louse on a soldier, the
freemason — he gives preference to none among them, deprives none
of his due share. Step by step, stroke by stroke, he creates a
limitless panorama whose parts are all inseparably bound together by
an internal bond. In his work Tolstoy is as unhurried as the life he
pictures. It is a terrifying thing to say, but he rewrote his
colossal book seven
times. …
Perhaps what is most astounding in this titan creativeness is that
the artist permits neither himself nor the reader to become attached
to any individual character.
He
never puts his heroes on display, as does Turgenev whom Tolstoy
disliked, amid bursts of firecrackers and the glare of magnesium
flares. He does not seek out situations for them that would set them
off to advantage; he hides nothing, suppresses nothing. The restless
seeker of truth, Pierre Bezukhov, he shows us at the end as a smug
head of a family and a happy landlord; Natasha Rostov, so touching in
her semi-childlike sensitiveness, he turns, with godlike
mercilessness, into a shallow breeding female, untidy diapers in
hand. But from behind this seemingly indifferent attentiveness to
individual parts there rises a mighty apotheosis of the whole, where
everything breathes the spirit of inner necessity and harmony. It
might perhaps be correct to say that this creative effort is
permeated with aesthetic
pantheism
for which there is neither beauty nor ugliness, neither the great nor
the small, because it holds as the great and beautiful only the whole
of life itself, in the perpetual circuit of its manifestations. This
is an agricultural
aesthetic,
mercilessly conservative by nature. And it is this that lends to the
epics of Tolstoy kinship with the Pentateuch and the Iliad.
Tolstoy’s
two recent attempts to find some room for psychologic images and
"beautiful types" to which he feels closest affinity within
the framework of a more recent historical past — in the days of
Peter the First and of the Decembrists of 1825 — have been
shattered against the artist's hostility to foreign influences which
color both of these periods so sharply. But even where Tolstoy
approaches most closely to our own times as in Anna
Karenina
(1873), he remains inwardly alien to the reigning hurly-burly and
inflexibly stubborn in his artistic conservatism, scaling down the
sweep of his own horizons and singling out of the whole of Russian
life only the surviving oases of gentility, with the old ancestral
home, ancestral portraits and luxurious linden alleys in whose shade,
from one generation to the next, the cycle of birth, love and death,
changeless in its forms, is repeated.
And
Tolstoy delineates the spiritual life of his heroes in accord with
the day-to-day life of their motherland: calmly, without haste and
with vision unclouded. He never runs ahead of the inner play of
emotions, thoughts or the dialogue. He is in no hurry to go anywhere
nor is he ever late. His hands hold the strands tying together a host
of lives, but he never loses his head. Like the master of an enormous
enterprise who keeps an ever-wakeful eye on all its many parts, he
mentally keeps an errorless balance sheet. All he does, seemingly, is
to keep watch while nature itself carries out all the work. He casts
a seed upon the soil and like a good husbandman calmly permits it to
put out its stalk naturally, and grow full of ears. Why, this is the
genial Karatayev with his silent worship of the laws of nature!
He
will never seek to touch a bud in order forcibly to unfold its
petals, but permits them silently to open in the warmth of the sun.
He is both alien and deeply hostile to the aesthetic of the big-city
culture which, in its self-devouring voracity, violates and torments
nature, demanding from it only extracts and essences; and which with
convulsively clutching fingers searches on the palette for colors
nonexistent in a sunray's spectrum.
Tolstoy's
style is identical with all of his genius: calm, unhurried, frugal,
without being miserly or ascetic; it is muscular, on occasion
awkward, and rough. It is so simple and always incomparable in its
results. (He is just as far removed from Turgenev who is lyrical,
flirtatious, scintillating and aware of the beauty of his style as he
is from Dostoyevsky's language, so sharp, so choked-up and so
uneven.)
In
one of his novels Dostoyevsky — the city dweller without rank or
title and the genius with an incurably pincered soul — this
voluptuous poet of cruelty and commiseration, counterposes himself
profoundly and pointedly, as the artist of the new and "accidental
Russian families," to Count Tolstoy, the singer of the perfected
forms of the landlord past.
"If
I were a Russian novelist and a talented one," says Dostoyevsky,
speaking through the lips of one of his characters, "I would
unfailingly take my heroes from the well-born Russian nobility,
because this is the only type of Russian capable of at least a
semblance of beautiful order and beautiful sensations. … Saying
this, I am not at all joking, although I am not at all a noble
myself, which besides, you yourself know. … Believe me, it is here
that we have everything truly beautiful among us up till now. At any
rate, here is everything among us that is in the least perfected. I
do not say it because I unreservedly agree with either the
correctness or the truth of this beauty; but here, for example, we
have already perfected forms of honor and duty which apart from the
nobility are not to be found anywhere in Russia let alone perfected
but even started. … The position of our novelist," continues
Dostoyevsky without naming Tolstoy but unquestionably having him in
mind, "in such a case would be quite definitive. He would not be
able to write in any other way except historically, for the beautiful
type no longer exists in our own day, and if there are remnants
abroad, then, according to the prevailing consensus of opinion, they
have not retained any beauties for themselves."
When
the "beautiful type" disappeared, there came tumbling down
not only the immediate object of artistic creativeness but also the
foundations of Tolstoyan moral fatalism and his aesthetic pantheism.
The sanctified Karatayevism of the Tolstoyan soul was perishing.
Everything that had been previously taken for granted as part of an
unchallenged whole now became chipped into a sliver and by this token
into a problem. What was rational had become the irrational. And, as
always happens, precisely at the moment when being had lost its old
meaning, Tolstoy started asking himself about the meaning of being in
general. In the life not of a youth but of a man fifty years of age
there ensued a great spiritual crisis (toward the latter part of the
seventies). Tolstoy returns to God, accepts the teachings of Christ,
rejects division of labor and, along with it, culture and the state;
he becomes the preacher of agricultural labor, of the simple life and
of nonresistance to evil by force.
The
deeper was the internal crisis — and by his own admission the
fifty-year-old artist for a long time contemplated suicide — all
the more surprising must it seem that Tolstoy returned, as the end
result, to what is essentially his starting point. Agricultural
labor
— isn't this, after all, the basis on which the épopée of War
and Peace
unfolds? The
simple life,
self-submergence in the elementary people — isn't that where
Kutuzov's strength lies? Nonresistance
to evil by force
— isn't the whole of Karatayev contained in fatalistic resignation?
But
if that is so, then of what does the crisis of Tolstoy consist? Of
this, that what had previously been secret and subterranean breaks
through the crust and passes over into the sphere of consciousness.
Inasmuch as the spirituality indwelling in nature disappeared along
with that "nature" which incarnated it, the spirit begins
striving toward inner self-consciousness. That automatic harmony
against which the automatism of life itself had risen must henceforth
be preserved by the conscious power of the idea. In this conservative
struggle for moral and aesthetic self-preservation, the artist
summons to his aid the philosopher-moralist.
II
It
would not be easy to determine which of these two Tolstoys — the
poet or the moralist — has won greater popularity in Europe. In any
case, it is unquestionable that behind the condescending smirk of the
bourgeois public at the genius innocence of the Yasnaya Polyana
elder, there lurks a peculiar sort of moral satisfaction: a famous
poet, a millionaire, one of "our own circle," and an
aristocrat to boot, wears out of moral conviction a peasant shirt,
walks in bast shoes, chops wood. It is as if here was a certain
redemption of the sins of a whole class, of a whole culture. This
does not, of course, prevent every bourgeois ninny from looking down
his nose on Tolstoy and even lightly casting doubts about his
complete sanity. A case in point is the not unknown Max Nordau, one
of the brotherhood who take the philosophy of old and honest Samuel
Smiles, spiced with cynicism, and dress it up in a clown's costume
for columns on Sunday. With his reference text from Lombroso in hand,
Nordau discovers in Tolstoy all the symptoms of degeneration. For all
these petty shopkeepers, insanity begins at the point where profit
ceases.
But
whether his bourgeois devotees regard Tolstoy suspiciously,
ironically or with favor, he remains for all of them a psychological
enigma. Aside from a couple of his worthless disciples and
propagandists — one of them, Menshikov, is now playing the role of
a Russian Hammerstein — one would have to say that for the last
thirty years of his life, Tolstoy, the moralist, has stood completely
alone.
Truly
his was the tragic position of a prophet crying in the wilderness.
Completely under the dominion of his conservative agricultural
sympathies, Tolstoy has unceasingly, tirelessly and triumphantly
defended his spiritual world against the dangers threatening it from
all sides. He has dug, once and for all, a deep moat between himself
and every variety of bourgeois liberalism, and, in the first
instance, has cast aside "the superstition of progress
universally prevalent in our times."
"It's
all very well," he cries, "to have electricity, telephones,
exhibitions and all the gardens of Arcadia with their concerts and
performances, along with all the cigars and match boxes, suspenders
and motors; but I wish them all at the bottom of the sea. And not
only them but also the railroads and all the manufactured cotton and
wool doth in the world. Because to produce them ninety-nine out of
every hundred people must be in slavery and perish by the thousands
in factories where these items are manufactured."
Aren't
our lives adorned and enriched by division of labor? But division of
labor maims the living human soul. Let division of labor rot! Art?
But genuine
art must unite all the people in the idea of God and not disunite
them. Our art serves only the elite, it sunders people apart and
therefore it is a lie. Tolstoy courageously rejects as "false”
the art of — Shakespeare, Goethe, himself, Wagner, Böcklin.
He
divests himself of all material cares connected with business and
enrichment and dons peasant clothing as if performing a symbolic
rite, renouncing culture. But what lurks behind this symbolic act?
What does it oppose to the "lie," that is, to the historic
process.
After
doing some violence to himself, Tolstoy's social philosophy may be
summed up, on the basis of his writings, in the following
"programmatic theses":
1.
It is not some kind of iron sociologic laws that produce the
enslavement of peoples, but legal codes.
2.
Modern slavery rests on three statutes: those on land, taxes and
property.
3.
Not alone the Russian state but every state is an institution for
committing, by violence and with impunity the most horrible crimes.
4.
Genuine
social progress is attained only through the religious and moral
self-perfection of individuals.
5.
"To get rid of states it is not necessary to fight against them
with external means. All that is needed is not to take part in them
and not to support them." That is to say: (a) not to assume the
calling of either soldier
or field
marshal,
either minister
or village
head,
either juryman
or member
of parliament;
(b) not to pay taxes, direct or indirect, to the state voluntarily;
(c) not to utilize state institutions nor government funds whether
for salaries
or
pensions;
and (d) not to safeguard one's property by measures of state
violence.
If
from this schema we were to remove the fourth point — which clearly
stands by itself and which concerns religious and moral
self-perfection — then we would get a rather rounded anarchist
program. First, there is a purely mechanical conception of society as
the product of evil legislation. Next, a formal denial of the state
and politics generally. And finally, as the method of struggle — a
passive general strike and universal boycott. But by removing the
religious-moral thesis, we actually remove the single nerve which
connects this whole rationalistic structure with its architect: the
soul of Lev Tolstoy. For him, owing to all the conditions of his
evolution and position, the task does not at all consist in
establishing "communist" anarchy in place of the capitalist
order. The task is to safeguard the communal-agricultural order
against destructive influences "from without."
As
in his populism, so, too, in his "anarchism," Tolstoy
represents conservative agricultural interests. Like the early
freemasons who sought by ideological means to restore and strengthen
in society the caste-guild morality of mutual aid which was falling
apart naturally under the blows of economic development, Tolstoy
seeks to revive by dint of a religious-moral idea the life under a
purely natural economy.
Along
this road he becomes a conservative anarchist, because what he
requires, first and foremost, is that the state with its whips of
militarism and its scorpions of the federal treasury let live in
peace the all-saving Karatayev commune. Tolstoy has no Inkling
whatever of the globe-encompassing struggle between the two worlds —
that of the bourgeoisie and that of socialism — on the outcome of
which hinges the destiny of mankind. In his eyes socialism always
remained a variety of liberalism, of little interest to him. In his
eyes Karl Marx as well as Frederic Bastiat were representatives of
one and the same "false principle" of capitalist culture,
of landless workers, of state coercion. In general, once mankind has
ventured onto a false road, it really matters little how near or how
far this road has been traveled. Salvation can come only by turning
back.
Tolstoy
is at a loss for words contemptuous enough to hurl against that
science which maintains that while we shall continue for a very long
time to live badly "in accordance with the historic, sociologic
and other laws of progress," our life shall nevertheless "become
very good by itself ultimately."
It
is necessary to put an end to evil right now; and for this it is
enough to understand that evil is evil. All the moral feelings which
have historically held the people together and all the
moral-religious fictions arising from these ties are reduced by
Tolstoy to the most abstract commandments of love, of temperance and
of passive resistance. And since these commandments lack any
historical content, and are therefore without any content whatever,
they seem to him to be applicable at all times and to all peoples.
To
history Tolstoy grants no recognition; and this provides the basis
for all his thinking. Upon this rests the freedom of his metaphysical
negations as well as the practical impotence of all his preachings.
The human life which he accepts — the former life of Ural-Cossack
farmers in the sparsely populated steppes of Samara province — took
place outside
of history; it constantly reproduced itself like the life of a
beehive or ant heap. What people call history is the product of
senselessness, delusions and cruelties which deformed the true soul
of humanity. Fearlessly consistent, Tolstoy throws property out of
the window, along with history.
Newspapers
and magazines are abhorrent to him as documents of current history.
With his breast he would beat back all the waves of the global ocean.
His historical blindness renders him childishly helpless when it
comes to the world of social problems. Tolstoy's philosophy resembles
Chinese painting. Ideas of entirely different epochs are not located
in perspective but arranged on one and the same plane. Against war he
launches arguments of pure logic and to reinforce them adduces the
opinions of Epictetus as well as those of Molinari (nineteenth
century Belgian economist of the Manchester school); of Lao Tse
(Chinese philosopher of the pre-Confucian era) as well as Friedrich
II; of the prophet Isaiah as well as the columnist Hardouin, oracle
of the Parisian grocers. In his eyes writers, philosophers and
prophets represent not then- own epochs but rather eternal moral
categories.
With
him, Confucius strolls shoulder to shoulder with Harpagus (a minister
of the Median King Astyages, sixth century BC); and Schopenhauer
finds himself keeping company not alone with Jesus but also Moses. In
his tragic single-combat against the dialectic of history to which he
opposes his yes-yes
or no-no,
Tolstoy falls at every step into hopeless self-contradictions. And
from this he draws a conclusion wholly worthy of the stubbornness of
this genius. "The incongruity between man's position and man's
moral activity,” he says, "is the surest
sign
of truth." But this idealistic pride bears within it its own
punishment. It would be hard to mention another writer whom history
has used so cruelly as she has Tolstoy, against his own will.
Moralist
and mystic, foe of politics and revolution, he nourishes with his
criticism the confused revolutionary consciousness of many populist
sects.
Denier
of all capitalist culture, he meets with benevolent acceptance by the
European and American bourgeoisie, who find in his preachments a
delineation of their own purposeless humanism along with a
psychologic shield against the philosophy of the revolutionary
overturn.
Conservative
anarchist, mortal enemy of liberalism, Tolstoy finds himself on his
eightieth birthday a banner and a vehicle for the noisy and
tendentious political manifestation of Russian liberalism.
History
has gained a victory over him, but failed to break him. Even now, in
his declining years, he has preserved intact his priceless talent for
moral indignation.
In
the heat of the vilest and most criminal counterrevolution on record
which seeks with its hempen web of gallows to eclipse forever our
country's sun; amid the stifling atmosphere of degraded and cowardly
official public opinion, this last apostle of Christian
all-forgiving, in whom kindles the wrath of Biblical prophets, has
flung his pamphlet I
Cannot Keep Silent
as a curse upon the heads of those who serve as hangmen and a
condemnation upon those who stand by in silence.
And
though he refuses a sympathetic hearing to our revolutionary
objectives, we know it is because history has refused him personally
an understanding of her revolutionary pathways. We shall not condemn
him. And we shall always value in him not alone his great genius,
which shall never die so long as human art lives on, hut also his
unbending moral courage which did not permit him tranquilly to remain
in the ranks of their
hypocritical church, their
society and their
state but doomed him to remain a solitary among his countless
admirers.