Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

INTRODUCTION

Tolstoy was not a particularly precocious young man, although from an early age he had vague ideas about becoming a writer. But he detested the artificiality and the hypocrisy which, as he felt, were an integral part of the way writers went about making things up. His ideal was an absolute simplicity and a straightforwardness which would describe people just as they were, and events exactly as they happened. Soon after he had written Childhood, Boyhood and Youth he came to dislike everything in it except the original childhood section. The later parts, he said, were ‘an awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, and it was the fictional element that repelled him.

Some time even before Childhood he had begun an experimental piece which he called ‘A History of Yesterday’. It is indeed just that; and as nothing much happened to Tolstoy on that particular yesterday it cannot be said to hold the reader’s attention very closely: indeed it is almost a refutation in itself of its author’s view that if the writing is simple enough it is bound to be of interest to all. The story is of interest none the less, because of its startling affinity with fictional experiments, like those of Virginia Woolf, in our own century, although Tolstoy’s manner is too precise and too beady-eyed to give the impressionist effect so important to a sketch of hers like ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

Tolstoy greatly admired the first part of Dickens’ David Copperfield, which was appearing in the Russian periodical Sovremennik while he was meditating his own book. At least one touch in Dickens – David’s curiosity about his own grief after his mother’s death, and his pride in it before his schoolfellows – may have suggested to Tolstoy his own kind of unremitting analysis of the same state of mind. But at times Childhood can remind us of the flatness of the ‘History of Yesterday’, although it has become an inspired kind of flatness.

At first I felt sorry for her, I wondered whether I ought not to try and console her, and how to do it: but finally I became vexed that she should place me in such an awkward situation.

‘Oh God, how absurd it is to keep on crying! I loved your mother so, we were such friends … we … and …’

She found her handkerchief, covered her face with it and continued to cry. My position was again an awkward one, and continued to be so for a good while. I felt vexed and yet sorry for her. Her tears seemed sincere, but I felt that she was not crying so much about my mother as because she herself was not happy now, and things had been much better in those days.

The bereaved boy is sorry for this old friend of his mother’s as he has been sorry for himself, but Tolstoy goes on adding to the list of other considerations that come into question. The writing, though so simple, is wonderfully accurate, as Childhood itself is wonderful, but Tolstoy is still a very young writer who has not yet the strange power, which will take hold of him in the composition, on its epic scale, of War and Peace, of seeming both to comfort and to inspire the reader, even while he is insisting on a multitude of extraneous and sometimes tedious details. We see the remarkable shrewdness and truth of the narrator’s perception; but the scene also brings, as it has done in real life, a dull feeling of discouragement and discomfort. It is precisely because the thing is so like life that our interest droops and our curiosity seems futile, even impertinent. Tolstoy has not the knack in his stories, as Chekhov has, of raising what is random and hapless and inconsolable to the level of art. In order to understand people with love, and to present them so that they are understood in the same way by us, he needs a story on the scale of War and Peace, or Anna Karenina.

And yet Tolstoy’s stories, varied as they are, have their own brand of unique fascination. Some are long and on the scale of nouvelles, like The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad. Some are very short, like ‘The Wood-Felling’, from Tolstoy’s own army experiences, or his brief parables like ‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits’. All are distinguished by the same sense of a subject worked away on, made to reveal the utmost of itself that it can. And yet one could say that Tolstoy had a light touch. Turgenev, who admired his youthful tales, none the less displeased their author by telling him ‘My dear Leo, you really shouldn’t spend quite so long telling us the exact way the hero puts his hand in his pocket.’ An exaggeration, but a telling one. The stories do spend a disproportionate time going into such details. And yet so compulsive is Tolstoy’s method, and so penetrating and powerful the mind and observation at work, that he manages not to forfeit the reader’s attention for a second.

Irtenyev, the ‘hero’ of Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, has a good deal in common with Olenin, the young officer who is the centre of consciousness in The Cossacks. That is to say of course that both have a good deal in common with the author himself, though by no means everything. Tolstoy kept just as beady an eye on his own failings and vanities as he did on those of other people; and at the same time he could present, as he does in the character of Ivan Ilych, a man who is like all men, whose suffering and fate are inseparable from the smallness of his outlook and the necessary triviality of his life. But by the time he wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych the preacher in Tolstoy had got the upper hand. The life of Ivan Ilych is remorselessly chronicled: Tolstoy seems determined that it should appear as ‘unexamined’, in Socrates’ sense, as he can make it, and his death correspondingly without dignity or redemption. But Tolstoy cheats in the manner in which he finally presents that death itself. It is a black bag into which Ivan Ilych is being thrust, but at the bottom of that black hole there is a light. Characteristically Tolstoy produces an odd metaphor for what he sees as the process, drawn from everyday life:

What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.

Well, maybe. Tolstoy, the expert on physical being, ‘the seer of the flesh’ as the critic Merezhkovsky called him, has no hesitation in projecting his knowledge into the last moments of a dying man. Undeniably the effect is strangely impressive: everyone who has read the story remembers that black bag and the moment of light that follows. And – who knows? – perhaps Tolstoy is not cheating here after all.

The Russian historian Prince Mirsky used to say that up to the time he wrote War and Peace Tolstoy saw life as an enchanted ballroom: afterwards it seemed to him like Ivan Ilych’s black bag. Certainly the experiences he underwent, and afterwards wrote about in A Confession, changed not only his outlook but his manner of writing. But this too it is possible to exaggerate, at least where the stories are concerned. Hadji Murad is one of his last, his finest and in a sense one of his most epically tranquil tales: one would not guess that the man who wrote it had become a religious crank and a fervent disbeliever in literary art. The way in which Tolstoy describes Hadji Murad’s death in action is in sharp contrast to the way he concludes the story of Ivan Ilych: but at the same time he claims the right of a ‘seer of the flesh’ to know how the flesh dies.

Surrounded by his enemies and wounded by pistol-shots and sabre-cuts, Hadji Murad is on the very verge of physical extinction:

He did not move but still he felt.

When Hadji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murad that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.

Survival after death? Tolstoy probably never believed in it: his consciousness as a writer was too absorbed in his own being, and in the awareness of the body. But of course he was intensely curious about it, and often gives the impression that he cannot really believe death can possibly take place or at least that he himself can die, although he is careful not to make any such claim on behalf of Ivan Ilych.

As he dies Hadji Murad recalls the moment in babyhood when his mother washed him and shaved his head; a memory of Tolstoy’s own, of which in the story he makes an austere but touching use. He virtually claimed to remember the moment of being born in the same spirit in which he claims knowledge of the body in its last moments. It is touching too that in his last moments he kept repeating ‘I do not understand what it is I have to do.’ It was as if he could not believe that his will and being and power of action were about to be taken away from him, and that he had to do nothing now but cease to exist.

Certainly death has a surprisingly prominent part in the stories, almost acting as if it were itself a narrative device. One of the most powerful, Master and Man, was written in 1895, years after the spiritual crisis which had caused him to renounce art, and to reject the great novels he had written twenty years earlier. I feel it to be the most impressive story that Tolstoy ever wrote, and for that reason worth choosing for a detailed commentary. Part of the interest lies in its exemplification of his own theory of art, developed in this later period. His dogmatic essay What is Art? is perverse in many ways, even absurd; but the main point it makes, that all good art has to be simple, in order to appeal to the simplest people, is brilliantly exemplified in Master and Man and justified by its total success as a story.

And the story it tells is indeed very simple. Brekhunov, a merchant proud of his ability to drive a hard bargain, sets out by sleigh on a business trip with his servant Nikita. A snow storm blows up, and the pair take refuge with a well-off peasant family. The writing is as vivid here as it ever was in Tolstoy’s younger days, and amusing too. The son of the house who is sent to guide them keeps shouting lines from Pushkin’s poem ‘Winter Evening’, which he has learnt in school. On that snowy evening poetry and reality unexpectedly coincide, and the comedy of this (Tolstoy’s humour, though uncertain and cautious, is always to be reckoned with) is deadpan. His view of poetry, even Pushkin’s, was never high, but ‘Winter Evening’ is both a wonderful and a simple poem, and the boy’s pleasure in it shows that it meets Tolstoy’s requirements as set out in What is Art? Tolstoy is setting out to write a story as simple and as effective as Pushkin’s poem. One that is not ‘a lie’. ‘But why did I write a lie?’ the narrator in Childhood asks himself when he has had to write a birthday poem for his grandmother; and in War and Peace the essential falsity of the relations between Boris and Julie is exemplified by the album verses they write to each other.

Pushkin’s snow-storm verses pass the test because their young guide who keeps reciting lines about ‘snowy circles wheeling wild’ finds they ‘described what was happening outside so aptly that it cheered him up’. Having set the travellers on the high road he bids them farewell and goes off home. But soon they lose their way again in the blizzard; and now poetry contrasts with the terrifying starkness of Tolstoy’s prose as he calmly describes what happens. When Nikita decides it is futile to travel through the night, Brekhunov leaves him and goes on alone. He has in fact gone blindly round in a circle, but seeing a dark patch ahead he thinks he has come to a village:

But the dark patch was not stationary, it kept moving; and it was not a village but some tall stalks of wormwood sticking up through the snow on the boundary between two fields, and desperately tossing about under the pressure of the wind which beat it all to one side and whistled through it.

The reader feels the terror of the lost moment almost as vividly as Brekhunov did. No wonder Tolstoy commented scornfully to a friend that a story by the young Andreyev, a fashionable writer in the 1890s, always seemed to be saying hopefully to its reader ‘Are you frightened? – Are you frightened now?’ when the reader was merely bored by the author’s attempts to make him so. Tolstoy’s accumulation of telling detail really does make the reader feel frightened. So does the unobtrusive way in which he gives us portraits, as the tale goes on, of the master who has so much to live for and the servant who has nothing, and so accepts their increasingly desperate situation with stoic fatalism.

The travellers are reunited. Nikita, poorly clad, is soon nearly dead from exposure, and Brekhunov seems to come to a decision. ‘Suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase’, he sets about organizing what shelter he can for both of them. Then putting the servant in the sledge he lies down on him in his heavy fur coat. He is surprised by the pleasure he feels in looking after another human being. He sheds tears, and longs to share his joy with someone else, so he tells Nikita, who only answers drowsily from below that he is getting nice and warm. But Brekhunov is being far from selfless. ‘Nikita kept him warm from below and his fur coat from above’, a calculation that he made just as he used to strike a bargain.

When they are found next day the merchant is dead, but Nikita is just alive and recovers. ‘When he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on both his feet were frozen.’

Tolstoy’s early story The Snow Storm is almost equally vivid, but it lacks the quiet accumulation of telling detail which is so effective in Master and Man. The moral of the story works without strain, because the personality of Brekhunov is fully established, and he remains true to it throughout. Mirsky remarks that ‘his is a horrifying death’, but this is surely wrong. One feels on the other hand that Ivan Ilych is not, so to speak, allowed to die in his own way, but is thrust into the black bag by Tolstoy, as into his final moment of tranquillity and brightness. One can quote Tolstoy’s own rather portentous words against him: ‘When characters do what in their nature they are unable to do it is a terrible thing.’

Brekhunov’s end is moving, and also, in a curious way, both happy and comic. It makes us want to laugh and cry, an objectionable formula when used in a blurb, or in praise of Russian ‘soulfulness’, but here neither more nor less than the truth. One is left feeling that Tolstoy’s humour here is something he is not in the least concerned with, and that probably he would despise the notion. None the less humour comes out from under his hand involuntarily when his narrative is at its best. There is the same sort of involuntary humour in the detail of the narrator’s visit to the monastery in Youth.

It may be Tolstoy’s lavish and always graphic use of detail, together of course with its romance and exotic setting, which for many readers has made The Cossacks the most popular of all his works. Conrad and Hemingway greatly admired it, and the latter virtually copied from it. And yet Tolstoy himself was never satisfied with the story, and said hard things about it in the heyday of his artistry, when he was writing War and Peace. It is true the joints of the narrative creak a little. The young Olenin’s departure from Moscow and his arrival in the mountains of the Caucasus are wonderfully done; but the Cossacks themselves seem to occupy a kind of pastoral space into which Olenin blunders, like an eighteenth-century French hero among a tribe of Noble Savages. When the Chechen braves, the abreks, cross the river Terek, what do they come for? Obviously to ambush and attack the Russians. But the Cossack village appears to take few if any precautions against them, and the one who swims over by night seems to do it chiefly in order that Tolstoy should make a fine set-piece description out of his killing.

After Tolstoy joined the army and was posted as a young lieutenant to the Caucasus, he became seriously interested in military life and made his own kind of study of it. One of his sketches from that period, The Wood-Felling, is a little masterpiece, revealing Tolstoy’s close observation of officers and simple soldiers, and his sympathy with the latter. The story is slight – merely an account of how his artillery unit is required to cut down a band of forest so that the Chechens who lurk there, with whom they are in perpetual guerrilla conflict, can be kept under fire. The soldiers come to life even more vividly in this tale than they do in the Sevastopol Sketches which Tolstoy wrote a little later whilst on active service during the Crimean war. He had a mania just then for lists, definitions, and ways of analysing human beings, their conduct and character, and The Wood-Felling contains an amusing specimen of this, dividing soldiers into three types: the submissive, the reckless and the domineering – the last being classed under two sub-types, ‘the sternly domineering’ and ‘the diplomatically domineering’.

Shortly after he left the army Tolstoy wrote Two Hussars, a striking tale which shows his continuing interest in such types, and also the growing conservatism of his outlook, a conservatism which will permeate in a more disguised form the philosophy of War and Peace. The older officer in the story has many faults – recklessness, bravado, and the love of gambling which Tolstoy himself indulged at one stage of his army career. But he is open and honest and would not cheat or lie. His conduct contrasts with that of the young Hussar of the next generation, a cold-hearted correct creature, who maintains appearances but has few if any scruples.

After leaving the army Tolstoy settled on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and began to think about marriage and a family. He became interested in various girls, and with his usual wish to get everything settled in his own mind he began to plan a sort of experimental nouvelle, setting out what he conceived a marriage in its early stages should be like. The result was Family Happiness, a work which contains much admirable writing and its author’s usual shrewd observation, but which possesses a certain awkwardness arising from what was for him the hypothetical nature of the relationship. Tolstoy had to know such things intimately before he could really settle down to writing about them. In spite of the idyll which Family Happiness hopefully suggests, and which was implemented in the marriages of Mary and Nicholas and Natasha and Pierre in War and Peace, it also contains the themes of uneasiness and guilt, themes that will become obsessive in the long stories Tolstoy wrote after his spiritual crisis in middle age.

The strangest and most morbid of these is The Kreutzer Sonata. It is full of the more tormented side of Tolstoy’s own personality, which he exaggerates immensely to create the pathological figure of Pozdnyshev. The relation between author and character is thus exceptionally unbalanced: as if Shakespeare had let us know that he hated sex, but not as much as Hamlet does, or Timon. The playwright was silent on the issue but Tolstoy was not, and he cannot detach himself and his own views from those of the character he has created. No writer explores the marriageness of marriage so directly and so exhaustively as Tolstoy, and The Kreutzer Sonata gives us another view of the question, which in part at least was coming to be Tolstoy’s own. In Family Happiness he envisaged marriage; in War and Peace he described it; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he denounces it.

Like many more ordinary stories it has a strong element of daydream, and also of nightmare.

I think of running away from her, hiding myself, going to America. I get as far as dreaming of how I shall get rid of her, how splendid that will be, and how I shall unite with another, an admirable woman – quite different …

The intended power of the tale is to compel us to own up – who doesn’t sometimes have similar daydreams? – but the accusing finger fails to disconcert us as much as it wants to. The melodrama of the murder is sensational rather than moving, but the conclusion of the story surely moves us very much. Its narrator says goodbye to Pozdnyshev in the railway carriage where the tale has been told.

‘Good-bye,’ I said, holding out my hand. He gave me his and smiled slightly but so piteously that I felt ready to weep.

‘Yes, forgive me …’ he said, repeating the same words with which he had concluded his story.

‘Forgive’ is almost the same word in Russian as ‘goodbye’. Since his wife’s death has deprived him of forgiveness, Pozdnyshev can only ask it of strangers.

Guilt is also the theme of another story, The Devil, which Tolstoy wrote just before The Kreutzer Sonata. It too concerns marriage, and the sexual guilt which the author himself had come to be obsessed by in his own life. But the longest, most detached and most successful working out of the theme is the story told in Resurrection, meditated for some time by Tolstoy and completed in 1899. He made use of a character to whom we were first introduced in Youth. Nekhlyudov there is essentially a comic character, beautifully perceived and described; the sort of person who takes himself more seriously than his friends do, and who often does the opposite of what he really wants because it gives him a feeling of self-satisfaction. In this way he takes up as a friend a poor student whom he does not like and with whom he has nothing in common. This philanthropic act makes him feel happy, but the student who is the hapless object of his philanthropy soon becomes very uncomfortable under the burden of supporting his patron’s self-esteem.

As a result of his actions in that story, and their consequences, Nekhlyudov in Resurrection becomes very much more of a serious character. But his essential temperament remains the same; and the way Tolstoy now presents it adds considerably to the interest of a story which might otherwise be too much like an enlarged version of Tolstoy’s parable tales. The young Nekhlyudov in Youth has the unconscious and slightly comic innocence of a clever young man: in Resurrection he has the innocence of a determined and conscientious convert; yet never loses the reader’s sympathy and even affection. But his motives, none the less, are not able to stand up to Tolstoy’s always remorseless and as if automatic powers of analysis. Maslova too, the girl he originally seduced and who has ended up in prison, is quite able to see in Nekhlyudov’s obstinate attachment to her not so much true remorse and repentance as the desire to display these qualities, to her but above all to himself. As she puts it to him once with brutal simplicity: ‘You want to use me now spiritually as you once did physically.’

Maslova too is very much a real personality in her own right. The fact that she had ended up as a convict on the way to Siberia is, in the circumstances, both wholly convincing and deeply pitiable as well. Tolstoy does not dismiss human justice wholesale, but he shows what may happen if it goes wrong, and how inertia and ineptitude reinforce official rigidity at each step of Maslova’s trial. If only they had done this, and had not forgotten to ask that … Is the system, corrupting and deforming those who attempt to supervise its working, always unjust, or has an exceptional miscarriage of justice occurred here? This is a point of some importance, but Tolstoy ignores it. He has to, because he believes all governmental procedures to be inherently wrong and bad. The information about such procedures which he acquired for the occasion, and which he deploys in such detail, emphasizes this underlying anomaly. He did a great deal of research. He found out about senatorial protocol, and what clauses in the penal code dealt with the various offences and with degrees of guilt. The Tolstoy archives in Moscow contain long lists of such queries.

In the end, though, the strength of Resurrection, as in the case of the other longer stories, is in the power and pictorial animation of its individual scenes – Maslova’s trial, the Siberian prison, the prison fortress of Peter and Paul at St Petersburg, the convicts’ march across Moscow. It is on such pages that the author’s magnificence as narrator and storyteller is at its height. They leave one wondering, too, at the vitality and above all at the variety of these stories by the man whom Turgenev called ‘Great writer of our Russian land’. They can be read again and again: there is always something new and fascinating to find in them.

John Bayley