Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

PREFACE

TOLSTOY was not only a prolific writer, but a writer given to producing numerous plot outlines, drafts and re-drafts, and unfinished sections of works which either never came to fruition or were re-absorbed into the making of other stories or novels. The ninety volumes of the Russian-language Jubilee Edition (1928–58) contain, as well as Tolstoy’s letters and diaries, a great quantity of this type of material, much of it of interest only to specialists. The two texts printed below, apparently not translated into English before, are included in the present edition both because they are documents of some biographical and literary value, and because readers of biographies and critical studies of Tolstoy in English may well come across references to them.

The first and much better-known of the two, A History of Yesterday, is a fragment written in a few days in late March 1851, some four weeks before Lev Tolstoy left with his brother Nikolai for the Caucasus, where (from November 1851 to July 1852) he was to write the fourth, final draft of his first published work, Childhood. Childhood looks like a thinly disguised autobiography, but is actually a complex blend of borrowed experiences, personal recollections and fiction. In A History of Yesterday, on the other hand, Tolstoy has, in Eikhenbaum’s words, ‘not yet severed the umbilical cord which connects the story to his diaries’. A History of Yesterday is much nearer to autobiography, or rather to Tolstoy’s diaries, of which there are surviving volumes for parts of 1847 and 1850, most of 1851 and nearly all of 1852.

A. N. Wilson points out the very close relationship between the opening section of the story and the diary’s record of the evening of 24 March 1851, which Tolstoy spent playing cards at the Moscow house of his cousin Alexander Volkonsky, and flirting with Alexander’s wife, Louisa Ivanovna. The story’s account of this social evening, with a minute dissection of the narrator’s thoughts and his conversation (spoken and implied) with his hostess, is followed by a description of his journey home. This includes a short essay on cab-drivers and their characteristics: the populist note and the details of verbal abuse and Russian nicknames are strongly reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Having brought his bachelor narrator home, Tolstoy plunges him into a long and typically heavy-footed disquisition on the diary or journal form itself, and its usefulness – or its futility – as a tool of moral self-improvement. This is the first in a long line of similar meditations in Tolstoy’s fiction, though by no means the first in his own diaries. It leads in turn to a detailed account of the processes of falling asleep, dreaming and waking up. The account of the experience is much more entertaining than the leaden analysis which follows: Proust’s treatment of very similar material sixty years later yielded a far more beautiful result. The text concludes with a much shorter fragment ‘written on another day’, a day which seems to bear no relation whatever to the Yesterday of the title, about the narrator’s projected journey down the Volga to Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. Even this small fragment again partially reflects Tolstoy’s own life experience: he and Nikolai accomplished a three-week section of their journey to the Caucasus on a boat which took them down the Volga, not from Moscow but from Saratov to Astrakhan. (It is characteristic of Tolstoy’s endless and economical recycling of the raw material of experience that a similar journey down the Volga is undertaken by the Polish exiles escaping from Siberia in the late story What For?)

Important as the autobiographical element in A History of Yesterday is, scholars have emphasized the decisive literary influence which led Tolstoy to write it in the first place – his passionate enthusiasm for Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), which he read early in 1851 and partially translated into Russian. Some critics have enthused about the daring originality of Tolstoy’s early foray into ‘stream of consciousness’ writing: D. S. Mirsky invokes the names of Proust and Joyce. But a version of the ‘stream of consciousness’ convention is already present in Sterne, and A. N. Wilson argues that ‘far from being proto-Modernist, the fragment actually suggests (with its debts and allusions to Sterne and Rousseau) a world of literary modes and models which, by the standards of Western Europe, were at least half a century out of date’. R. F. Christian lists the many unmistakably Sternian fingerprints in this story – including frequent dashes (and parentheses) – and notes its paradoxical Shandean failure ever to get as far as telling us about what happened ‘yesterday’. He concludes: ‘The occasional diary-like entries and the passage on the subject of diaries are evidence also that Tolstoy’s own writing habits no less than his reading tastes are reflected in this early story which, like much of his juvenilia, is related less to contemporary life than to literature.’

The other early story included here for the first time in English is much less well-known. A Christmas Night dates from 1853, the year when Tolstoy’s second published story, The Raid, appeared, and in which he was working on Boyhood, the second part of his trilogy, while serving with the army in the Caucasus. Henri Troyat refers to this story (under the title A Holy Night) as the earliest of several texts, autobiographical as well as fictional, dealing with sexual initiation and sexual disgust. There is no suggestion, however, that A Christmas Night is a piece of barely-concealed journal writing in the manner of A History of Yesterday. A Christmas Night is a more conventionally literary piece, close to the mainstream of nineteenth-century novel fiction. This time the narrative is almost entirely in the ‘omniscient’ third person mode, and is far closer to Balzac than to Sterne, especially in its melodramatic treatment of romantic love and in the substantial ball scene which reads like an admiring pastiche of Le Père Goriot.

The text of A Christmas Night is incomplete, with two chapter headings indicated but not fleshed out, and the surviving manuscript is a mixture of a first rough draft, and a second ‘fair copy’ draft which extends almost to the end of Chapter III. As a result there are some incoherences in the treatment and the development of the minor characters, as well as a hesitation about the name of the hero – initially Alexandre, but in the second draft Seriozha Ivin. (In this translation ‘Seriozha’ is used throughout.) As in A History of Yesterday, the ms. contains a number of deleted but still decipherable passages, indicated in the present edition of both stories by pointed brackets.

Despite these imperfections, A Christmas Night is a complete and coherent story as it stands. It has a clear plot line, plenty of observation of human behaviour at carefully contrasted different social levels (an echo perhaps of the literary physiologies which came into fashion in the mid-1840s in imitation of French models), some passages of lyrical nature description which would be equally at home in Youth, and the perennial Tolstoyan theme of the moral superiority of the country over the city. The only undigested element (which Tolstoy would surely have excised, had he ever prepared this piece for publication) is the digression on gypsy music towards the end, which may be of some historical and even musicological interest but radically disrupts the narrative flow. This apart, if A History of Yesterday shows the young Tolstoy’s mastery of the Sternean sentimental manner, A Christmas Night, coming only two years later, demonstrates that he was also capable of producing a convincing Russian equivalent of the French romantic fiction of the 1830s and 1840s.