Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

PREFACE

TOLSTOY’s late stories have had a troubled critical history. In July 1883 Turgenev, then on his deathbed, sent Tolstoy the last letter he ever wrote, begging him to ‘return to literary work’. Tolstoy’s first published fictions after Anna Karenina and the moral and religious crisis which seemed to have ended his literary career were the cluster of ‘popular tales’, including Where Love is, God is, which appeared in 1885. It is doubtful whether Turgenev would have felt that this was ‘literature’ as he understood the word. The following year, with the appearance of The Death of Ivan Ilych, many of Tolstoy’s admirers felt, in the words of one critic, that ‘his train had come out of the tunnel’, and this story was not the last to be greeted as a masterpiece on the level of the two great novels: Hadji Murad (ten drafts, 1896–1904) has long enjoyed a similarly high valuation. Yet Hadji Murad was written with a guilty conscience by a man who felt that it was a betrayal of his new-found moral principles, and of the new aesthetic which he was to state at length in What is Art?

This new aesthetic was to be based on simplicity, clarity and moral ‘infectiousness’ – that is, effectiveness in influencing the reader’s outlook for good. From the point of view of the later Tolstoy, a simple moral fable which could be readily understood by a newly literate peasant was of far greater value than Anna Karenina, whose moral confusion and structural sophistication now seemed reprehensible. Not many later critics have agreed with the later Tolstoy, but estimates of how much of his post-1880 writing is valuable have varied widely, from the view that none of it beyond Resurrection and a very few stories is worth reading, to the view that anything Tolstoy wrote, even a child’s reading book, must be of some value because it is by Tolstoy. The Centenary Edition (1928–37) of translations by Aylmer Maude (1858–1938) and his wife Louise included a selection of short tales in the folk idiom and a number of simple moral fables but did not attempt to be exhaustive. It excluded, along with most of the ‘reading book material’, a good many more substantial stories published posthumously, and the opportunity has now been taken to include a selection of these in the present edition.

In his essay on Hadji Murad A. D. P. Briggs, referring to the brutal raid on the Chechen village carried out on the orders of Nicholas I, writes: ‘This is not only good storytelling, it is as effective a condemnation of cruel government and militarism as a trunkful of anarchist and pacifist pamphlets.’ The same could be said of at least three of the stories printed below, and it neatly encapsulates the impossibility of separating the ‘literature’ from the ‘pamphlet’ in Tolstoy’s late stories, which are consciously propaganda (literally: ‘things to be propagated’) as well as pieces of literary art.

After the Ball (1903) is a prime example: its raison d’étre is the harrowing description of an army deserter being made to run the gauntlet, a punishment which was effectively a death sentence (although officially capital punishment did not exist in Russia at the time of Nicholas I). This description, and the effect the sight has on the man who witnessed it, provides the moral explosive charge of the story, but it is enclosed within an apparently anodyne tale of rapturous young love. The narrator recalls his youthful passion for Varenka, the daughter of a distinguished army colonel (‘with white, curled moustaches à la Nicholas I’) who is almost as captivating on the dance floor as his lovely daughter, and the account of the ball at which father and daughter dance together is intoxicating in its exuberance – calculatedly so, of course, for early the next morning it is Varenka’s father whom the narrator sees as the officer in charge of the punishment battalion, urging on the soldiers to strike harder and ordering fresh sticks. The story is an elegant theorem: its QED, the brutality of the militaristic state and the disgust it should provoke in all humane people.

What For? (1906), though longer and more complex, is connected to After the Ball by a similar scene of brutal punishment, and to Hadji Murad by the scene in Chapter XV of that story where Tolstoy depicts the Tsar’s loathing for the Poles and shows him sentencing a Polish exile to death by running the gauntlet. What For? is, like Hadji Murad, a miniature historical novel, if on a more modest scale. It ends with another bitter attack on Nicholas I, whose reign was the high-water mark of Russian militarism and chauvinism, but even in the days of Nicholas II this story would not have been considered publishable: it undermines the whole edifice of Great Russian patriotism and raises uncomfortable thoughts about political freedom by telling the story of the Polish insurrection of 1830 from an exclusively Polish point of view – a deeply shocking act in Russian eyes. If the result is somewhat simplistic, reading in places like an adventure story for school children, with a relatively happy ending, this is very likely in keeping with Tolstoy’s design for a story which would entertain but also educate, to be read by young people – or by adults for whom literacy was only a recently won achievement.

The most ambitious by far of these four stories is The Forged Coupon. The idea of the story seems to have been in Tolstoy’s mind for quite a long time: it is mentioned in a list of titles in 1895, and was ‘half finished in rough’ early in 1904. These dates place it in the same creative era as Hadji Murad. While this story is more clearly didactic than Hadji Murad, and less elegantly shaped, it shares with its more famous brother the honour of being Tolstoy’s last exercise in the epic genre – if ‘epic’ can look forward to the linear, moralistic story-telling of Brecht, as well as back to War and Peace, The Cossacks and Homer.

The Forged Coupon, like Resurrection, is a story tracing the consequences of an evil action. Its moral message is close to the heart of Christianity (whether Tolstoy’s version or any other): our actions are infectious, for good as well as for evil, and we are all responsible for one another. Resurrection pursues this theme in a single story line developed at great length. The Forged Coupon, in a much smaller space, attempts something more ambitious: to follow the ramifications of a simple act of dishonesty as they affect the lives of more and more characters in a variety of places and at many social levels. The Forged Coupon pushes at the limits of the reader’s capacity to remember multiple groups of characters, but in doing so it achieves a remarkably wide panoramic view of Russian society from convict to Tsar, and something like a God’s-eye view of human behaviour.

In Part One, Chapter VIII the narrator hints at ‘something far more serious than anything merely human eyes could perceive’ having happened: Tolstoy, the master of detailed observation and psychological analysis, is now pursuing God-like omniscience into the moral sphere. This involves a strong conviction not only of the power of darkness, but of the power of light. The central point of the story is the brutal murder of the saintly Mariya Semyonovna, and Part One ends with her killer Stepan, overcome with weariness and vodka, collapsing in a ditch where he lies until two days later. It is on the third day that he rises again, not yet to a redeemed life, but to the Tolstoyan equivalent of purgatory. Mariya Semyonovna’s death haunts her killer and ultimately brings about Stepan’s moral regeneration, and the salvation of others with whom he comes into contact, so that he comes nearest to being the hero of the story – if it had one. Despite the contrived nature of its structure, The Forged Coupon, like almost everything Tolstoy wrote, retains his extraordinary ability to make us feel that this is all part of real life, and as in many of his fictions the ‘open’, indeterminate ending seems a confirmation of this: life continues, the truth marches on, and despite the suffering and squalor there is hope.

Tolstoy coined his own term, oproshchéniye (from prostói – simple), to denote the process of simplifying down to embrace a way of life closer to that of the peasantry and the soil, and there are characters in The Forged Coupon who exemplify this process in action. The technique of the story, however, remains complex and sophisticated, even though its language is low-key throughout and in places approaches the speech of the common people. Alyosha Gorshok (1905) takes this linguistic process of simplifying down much further, and narrates the life (and since this is Tolstoy, the death) of a peasant character in the sort of language which he himself would have used – had he been articulate enough to tell his own story, which he certainly is not. Alyosha Gorshok is, for Tolstoy, an extreme example of laconicism, which has been justly compared to Chekhov. There are only two named characters in the story – Alyosha (or Alyoshka when he is very young, and when people are talking down to him) and the cook Ustinya, and all the material details are the humdrum details of daily life which would be much the same anywhere for the lower classes in Russia. Thus Alyosha becomes a semi-anonymous representative figure, and also a late example of the well-known Holy Fool, who smiles, obeys orders and ‘dies well’. Yet the cryptic nature of the story gives no real clue to whether Tolstoy sees Alyosha as a hero, or merely as a victim, and the final impression is one of tragic waste, together with a mute, smouldering anger at the social system of which Alyosha is a victim. Despite everything, however, the economy of means and the implied sympathy produce a result which is both beautiful and moving. Would Turgenev have approved?

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I should like to express my sincere gratitude to the following people for their help in the translation of these and the two preceding stories: to Gillian Squire of the London University School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, for her assistance in tracing texts; and to Ignat Avsey, Leonid Feygin, Prince Andrei Golitsyn, Dmitry Usenko, Susan Wilkins and Helen Wozniak, for their invaluable advice on matters of fact and language.

N. J. Cooper

April 2000