In Our Time - Tolstoy

Episode Date: April 25, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the 19th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.The Russian novel has been acclaimed as one of the outstanding genres of literature alongside Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Plays and Romantic Poetry. Its heyday was the mid-19th century, and its practitioners gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day - and arguably of the modern era. These men of genius included Dostoevsky, Gogol and Turgenev, but perhaps the greatest of them all was Tolstoy, author of the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy took massive subjects and presented them in loving and intricate detail. As Matthew Arnold said, "a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a piece of life". Possessed by an urgent desire to represent real life in his work, and to reject artifice, Tolstoy declared that "The one thing necessary in life as in art is to tell the truth." What did Tolstoy mean by telling the truth? How did he convey these truths to the reader? And why did he, ultimately, give up on literature and concentrate instead on religious and political philosophy? With A N Wilson, Novelist, journalist and biographer of Tolstoy; Catriona Kelly, Reader in Russian, Oxford University; Sarah Hudspith, Lecturer in Russian, University of Leeds.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Russian novel has been acclaimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of literature, alongside Greek tragedy, Shakespeare's plays and romantic poetry.

Its heyday was the mid-late, late 19th century, and its practitioners gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day, and arguably of the modern era. These men of genius, included Dostoevsky, Gogol and Toganyev, but perhaps the greatest of them all was Tolstoy, with war and peace and Anna Karenina. Matthew Arnold said,

A work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art, but a piece of life. Possessed by an urgent desire to represent real life in his work and to reject artifice, Tolstow declared that the one thing necessary in life as in art is to tell the truth. Truth is my hero. What did Tolstoy mean by telling the truth? How did he convey these truths to the reader?

and why did he ultimately give up on literature and concentrate instead on religious and political philosophy? With me to find out something of the truth about Tolstoy, our A.N. Wilson, a novelist, a journalist and biographer of Tolstoy, Kachana Kelly, reader in Russian at Oxford University, and Sarah Hutzpitz, a lecturer in Russian at the University of Leeds. Andrew Wilson, you said in your book that Tolstoy couldn't have written or lived as he did, had it not been born in a particular time, place and situation.

Could you give us some idea of Russia the first half of the 19th century, before all this massive thing got underway. Well, that's a very big question. Perhaps the first answer, therefore, should be that we're in a very, very big place, we're in a huge place, an unimaginably big place. When Catherine, the great German empress of Russia, tried to knock it into shape in the late 18th century, she said it was too big to government.

That really is one of the first things to bear in mind about it. The unimaginable size. You have to imagine a tremendous trauma which has happened to this great life, land just before the period we're talking about, namely that it was invaded by the French, and not just by the French, but by the modern free-thinking Napoleon. You have an ancient Russian-Orthodox Christian hierarchical, huge land being invaded by the West. So that's one of the great sort of national myths, which is in the back of everybody's mind. On the one hand, you have a huge, mysterious country.

On the other hand, you have Western Europe with its ideas pressing into it. as an enemy, as an invader, and Russia united in 1812, as everybody knows, to drive Napoleon out. That's one sort of background to think about. Another thing to think about is that it's essentially an autocracy, at the top of which is an emperor, a Christian emperor, who, in all respects that matter, is a figure from the Middle Ages, as far as the modern world is concerned. And around him there is a court of...

grandees with great military base, and the Tolstoy's belonged to that very grand world. Dotted about this huge land itself, there are estates owned by the aristocracy, and the peasants who worked on these estates were themselves owned. They were slaves. So, Jane, your inner world as far as Western Europe is concerned, which is unimaginably primitive and feudal is the wrong word. because these people were actually owned. You reckoned a man's wealth, a nobleman's wealth,

and the number of souls he owned. Those are some of the things to think about, I think, happening in the generation before Tolstoy and his contemporaries came on the scene. That's terrific. And to put it on just a little bit more, there was a feeling, as I understand it, mainly from your book,

at that time, that Russia was simply not able to match, catch up with, in any way equal, was going in the West in terms of the generality, of culture. Let's stick with literature in terms of literature. It was happening in... If you think to have St. Petersburg, the capital of this extraordinary country, which is that the stream northwest looking out towards Europe and towards, as it were,

enlightenment, rather edgily in many cases, all the intellectuals in St. Petersburg felt a tremendous sense. I'm sure that Sarah and Kertria, and I know much more about this than I do, but a tremendous sense of inferiority in relation to the 18th century enlightenment and Europe and all the rest of it. were longing to bring the values of 18th century Europe into Russia. And this is one of the great clashes which the whole of the 19th century in Russia faces.

And it's one of the reasons, I suppose, if you can chronicle a reason, why there was a literary renaissance in Russia. Sarah Hutzpitt, Russia's beginning to consider itself as Russia. Andrews has given us a terrific idea of the background. The idea of being Russian, did that provoke people to look at, could their country and decide that they would write about it, it was worth writing about, obviously, if it was interesting to write about it, was something that stimulated them. Yes, I think that's absolutely the case.

I think what was happening in Russia at the time was their tendency to have a sort of national inferiority complex, but at the same time, they were beginning to consider how they related to the whole of Western Europe. And if you think about what was happening in the 19th century, in the rest of Western Europe, these great developments in science and industry and progress in general. The Russians are beginning to feel these ideas percolating through literature that was being introduced and to start to wonder how they could move their own country forward. But along with this sort of inferiority complex with regard to the progress that they see happening in the West,

I think there is very much something that is quite difficult for the Western mind to understand, and that's this sense that the Russian people have in some sense a feeling, of having a destiny of great importance on the world stage. What's that? Is that religious? I think it's partly religious, yes, certainly. I think the Russian character and psyche identifies very, very well with the biblical ideas of a chosen people

and the idea that that chosen people should be marked by suffering. Was literature, imaginative literature, a particular importance here? Was the novel a way to answer the needs, as it were, if you can talk of this in an animate way of Russia, and answer what we're called the accursed questions. What were the accurseded questions? The accurseded questions, yes, there's sort of the big questions. Why are we here?

How can one live? What does it mean to be good? Who asked these questions? All the intellectual class of society, the intelligentsia. But I think there was a sort of unconscious asking of that question as well, amongst the ordinary people of Russia, this sense of how long are we to live? under these circumstances and a sense of what is the purpose of this existence under serfdom.

And I think this is what feeds its way into the literature. And the intelligency of the writers are trying very hard to explore these issues in their novels and short stories and poems. And what we have to remember as well with the 19th century, well, in fact, you know, for most of Russia's history, is the repressive atmosphere and the strictures of the censors placed upon writers. And not just writers, but the problems with freedom of association and being able to form sort of groups where you could meet to discuss ideas of politics or society in any way.

So over to you, Gashire and Nogeli, why does Stoiffy did into all this? Very difficult to sort of summed it all up in a short time. I think I'm going to come back to this issue, first of all, of the aristocracy, because I just wanted to clarify a few things there, because I agree with much of what Andrew Wilson was saying, but I think we have to place Tolstoy quite precisely in that social bracket. In fact, it's approximately a caste. I mean, the gentry which stretches from people who have just a few serfs, if any, right up to people who own 32,000,

60,000 serfs. And Tolstoy is somewhere at the upper middle of this and has some quite characteristic ideas, certainly in the early part of his career, for somebody from that. particular social background. He's a working landowner for much of his life, and that's a distinction between him and people who are actually part of the court circle. And his views are also conservative in the broadest sense, as was very much the tendency with them.

So he can be linked with people who wrote things like behaviour manuals, how to run your estate, so these estate owners manuals. And that is clearly very important for his writing as well, so that this whole issue of how to treat the peasantry which comes through in his early fiction is something that links him with them. I mean, one thinks of a character called Vasili Lyveshin, who wrote manuals on how to keep your serfs children

from behaving badly and making sure that they're adequately occupied. And obviously it would be grotesque to imply that there's too much of that in tell story, but I do think that the issue of how do we make the peasants realize what's good for them is very important in even war and peace, certainly in a landowner's mourning, so one of his early texts. and then that shifts in mid-career, and he starts really, I think, partly because of force majeure, so the emancipation of the serfs, which happens in 1861,

so there no longer are serfs, to start thinking quite differently about the peasantry, and that's when Rousseau, who, whom Telstoy had read when he was a teenager, in fact, starts to be much more important. Can I just nail the aristocracy thing, though, because a lot is made of this. Can you just tell us what that gave him as a writer and how his view of Russia was obviously colored,

like that? Well, till the end of his life, I think he retained a sense of nobles oblige, which is very important. And so even when his attitude to the peasants had completely changed, and it becomes what can we learn from the peasantry, which is very much the sense that comes through from his educational work, I mean, there is actually an essay about this. Why are we teaching peasant children when it's we who should be learning from them? Nonetheless, there's still very much a sense that there should be a patriarchal world. This is the standpoint that he's coming from, and it's brought out quite interestingly in the essays that Lienin wrote about him, after Telstoy died, that Telstoy had got the diagnosis right,

but the solution completely wrong. And by that stage, Telstoy is castigating landowner life, but nonetheless there are a lot of his attitudes that still seem to come back to this. Well, Lenin hated Tolstoy more than any Russian, precisely because if people had followed the doctrines of Tolstoy, there wouldn't have been a revolution. Well, there would have been a revolution, but it would have been a peaceful revolution. And people, if it would have been a very nice world of people lived as they live in Tolstoy's peace essays,

but it certainly wouldn't have been a communist state. One thing I'd like to say, though I speak from a position in logic of ignorance, I have to say, about this aristocracy question, is that on the one hand, there are his cousins at court who really are very grand and are part of the actual government of the country. And his branch of the Tolstoy family were slightly the country cousins, almost bumpkinish in some ways, and his father had very much gone to the bad in ways we're not completely sure about,

but, I mean, clearly drink and sex came into it. And probably inherited. syphilis, but certainly he had various types of VD. And in fact, the first thing Tolstoy ever wrote, first thing in his collected works, though not in Russian, of course, great Russians don't have sexually transmitted diseases even nowadays. But certainly in the old days,

it wasn't ever part of the collected works in Russian, were his reflections in a little clinic in the Caucasus when he was a young soldier, poor chap. Let's look at some of his works there and see how these ideas that we've been talking about, for the first about the programme, come through. head on, war and peace, Sarah Smith, is asking questions inside war and peace,

he's particularly asking questions after his finished war and peace. He keeps saying the real question is, what is the power that moves nations? Now, why was that the real question for him? I think what fascinated him was the fact that Tulsa was always very much concerned with everyday people's lives and the little details

that make their lives fascinating an individual. And when you come to try and explain an event such as an invasion and a catastrophic war in which hundreds of thousands of people on both sides die, I think there is a need to see how the ordinary person fits in to this vast big picture. And so Tolstoy turns to historians for answers, and he didn't really find the kind of answers that he wanted. He found discussions about the power of certain important individuals, such as Napoleon, such as various military generals or kings or politicians,

and how the decisions that they made would send people to their death. And he felt that that really didn't answer it because he wanted to know how the individual soldier could possibly be part of this movement to go forward and kill someone from the opposing side. and this ordinary soldier who obviously wouldn't consider murdering someone in cold blood on the street, but within the context of the war it feels completely different. So he's very much interested in how the decisions that the historians say are made affect the way these people change their behaviour.

Well, I think one has to understand what he means by ordinary people, though, because, I mean, something that was much brought out in criticism of the time was that he actually wasn't sufficiently interested in ordinary people, and he was terribly obsessed with people who were ordinary, only in relation to the sort of stellar levels of the aristocracy. So it's, sure, by ordinary people, I mean people that one would meet every day, but within his society you would meet every day. Real people and real individuals.

I mean, when little Nicholas Rostov goes off to war, just like all young men in times of war nowadays during the Second World War, and first of all, you read this awful story of somebody who's been caught up in the enthusiasm of war, as Sarah says. And then when he's actually faced by battle, He realizes what a horrific thing it is. And there's that marvelous moment in war and peace where he says, what's wrong?

Don't they realize it's me? I'm a lovable person and they're firing at me. And that's the kind of thing, which I think Sarah was talking when you said ordinary people, you meant real actual individuals. How do groups of individuals who are all themselves? He's very dismissive of the Great Man Theory of History. It said they're liables or where they're just convenient labels,

and they come with a great baggage of 100 million things that have happened before them, that put them where they are, and these hundred million things will sweep through them and take over them. Can you just comment on that, Katrera? Well, I mean, I think he thinks it's lazy. I mean, essentially it's about a list of schoolroom names and a repetition of those,

and people aren't even thinking about the causes of history. They're just simply repeating again and again what everybody has sort of learnt at the governess's knee. And I think one of the sort of most illuminating things is that Telstoy was made by his father to learn by Hart Pushkin's tribute to Napoleon in the schoolroom. And I think he was obsessed in the middle part of his career I mean, this difficult relationship with what he remembered of his father, who was very strict,

of sort of rebelling against that, and thinking of his own Napoleon, which is essentially a caricature, I mean, a very powerful caricature, and moving the impetus, historical impetus on somewhere else. What is attractive, Fortas to about Kutuzov is the fact that Kutuzov was prepared to sort of lie down in the face of historical circumstance. He had the wisdom to recognize that you cannot direct, and that is the only way you can direct. Man directing the Russian forces.

Yes, that's right, yes. What do you make his view on predestination, the two ways, great men don't quite very much because 100 million things are sweeping through them, and they're in bondage to history. And by using almost the same sort of terminology, wanting to say, well, there's not much thing to do about it because all these things are resolved.

All they are is they're the button that's pushed, really. Well, I don't think he was very interested in theories of predestination in the way that a Calvinist or a Marxist would be. but I think that it was almost kind of Buddhist in his attitude to religion, particularly towards the end of his life, which was an acceptance of life, the unavoidability of one's place in life, wherever you happen to be born in it. And true wisdom comes with acceptance.

Well, of course, he was the least accepting person who ever lived. He was restless. He was egmaniac. He was disontententive with his own lot. He was disintentive with his character, with his sexuality, with his family, with the state of Russia's state of the world. So that you do get those tensions. I think you find them, first of all, in the fiction,

particularly in the great fiction like war and peace, where all the theories are jangling about, and they're all at odds with the things he's actually writing about. And that's what makes him so utterly fascinating, both as an individual and as a figure on the world stage. Do you find these contradictions in war and peace that Andrew has been talking about, the theories of war and the facts of peace, as it were?

He raises the question, are we really acting freely when we act? He explores those ideas in the sort of historical, essay part of war and peace, this theory that he puts forward of the great interconnectedness of events and it's impossible to know exactly what causes an action because of all

the vast chain of interconnected events that influence what leads up to that action. But in the actual fictional story parts, I think it's quite interesting because you see characters who are faced with moral choices and seem to have the ability to choose

which direction that they go down. And so for me, I think it's an interesting question. that he hasn't quite found an answer to is how the idea of moral choices fits in with this idea of the interconnectedness of events leading up to a particular point. And so we see characters like Pierre Bezukov deciding whether he is going to marry

the incredibly beautiful but obviously corrupt and debauched Helene. He's obviously trying to make this internal choice and in the end he decides that he will marry her and succumb to his own lust and afterwards realizes that you know, this was a bad choice and that he never should have married her. So I think in little instances like that in the story, we get this sense of an individual acting freely and making wrong choices. But perhaps what Tolstoy is really trying to say is that we are not free in as much as if you act in an immoral way,

suffering results from that. And that by submitting to the cause of events and following the promptings of one's conscience, which is perhaps the unfree part, because your conscience is urging you to do the right thing, perhaps that is how he sort of reconciles this contradiction between freedom and predestination. Did you think, Katya, to apply this to Anna Karan. What moral laws is he bringing to bar? What truth does he seem to be after in the Anikaerana?

Well, I think there's a question, possibly rather than the truth, which is about the nature of happiness and whether there can be such a thing as happiness which is not dependent on self-deception. And I don't think that just applies to Anna. I think it also applies particularly to possibly the most interesting relationship, from some points of view in that novel, which is between Dolly and Oblonsky,

which is based on suppression of Dolly's recognition that she is in a marriage which is false from some points of view, which depends on a moral double standard. And yet somehow she is able to be happy with this, and she has deep affection for her children. I mean, affection also that sometimes rests on illusion. I mean, sometimes her children behave very badly, and she's distressed by this, or behave badly from her point of view. So I think that's central to Tolstoy that he's asking questions, I mean, he has moral certainties, yes, but I mean, he negotiates those moral

certainties by asking questions and also is locked in a series of aesthetic conflicts about how best to represent these truths. And I think you can see that even with childhood, which is quite early and, I mean, is imbued in Rousseau, but Tolstoy has two views of the child, one of which is much more closely allied to Rousseau than the other, and there's the sort of child who says, I don't like that. It's boring. It's not true. And I think that's much more the Tolstoy child. And then there's a child who sees everything freshly

so that when Tolstoy writes at the age of seven in Lesser, the parrot is a bird which has a hook instead of a nose. There's a sort of seven-year-oldness about that which any child might produce. But Tolstoy retains that sort of seven-year-oldness throughout his life, which is closer to Rosso. And so there's two, I mean, already... I mean, I think one of the fascinating things about him, if you think of the end of Alliterreina, where the great self-image

through that book is the figure of Levine who's not the same name as himself. I mean, he's Leavnikolivich, Tolstoy, and the more than the novelry is on, the more this country landowner who loves his peasants and is never happier than mowing a field and so on, which was the real side of Tolstoy's nature,

becomes the central intelligence of the book in a way. One almost loses interest in the love affair between Anna and Vronsky so important is the sort of high moral consciousness of how to live in the country simply with your wife. I do think that's a very important part of it, but at the same time, there is the seven-year-old child looking honest at all

and realizing how silly it all is. I mean, I think he retains that right to the end of his life, a childishness. How far do you think that in these novels is he trying to get a truth? Isaiah Berlin talked about Tolstor's aim to portray the exact quality of a feeling. Now, the exact quality of feeling as a psychological insight,

the exact quality of feeling as an imagined insight. How would you interpret that, sir? I think probably both of those. I think one of his main criteria is actually clarity. And this was something that an idea of his that he maintained right through to, you know, some of his very late essays. And he's seeking very, very hard to make things universally understandable,

even something that is very individual and very personal, such as a feeling that you might have when, to take the example of Devon, when mowing your field, what that feeling produces, he tries to explain it in as simple and a clear manner as possible so that everyone, even if they haven't had that feeling, can identify with it.

And so I think the truth that he's searching for is being able to distill every minute detail and experience of life down to something that is universally recognisable, universally understandable. He has the extraordinary qualities to make you feel a whole range of his, What it's like to be a mother?

How did he know such a thing? He's watched plenty of people being... What it's like to be a dog? What it's like to be a dog? And of course he was... Or a tree. Because he was, on the one hand, one of the most sublime artists

who's ever lived on this planet, and on the other hand, one of the most trashing eugeniacs, he hated this gift. By the time he finishes Anna Terrain, he's beginning his great breakdown and saying, well, it's just a magazine story, anybody to write a story

about a woman running off with an army officer. And it's all artifice and this obsession with wanting to tell the truth. Many of us would think that he never told the truth more fully than when he was writing his novels. But nevertheless, the drive after Creighton, for the last 30 years of his life or more, was to develop his religious ideas, he became a religious leader, he became a great figure not only in Russia, a great figure throughout the world with his ideas about non-violence and anti-government.

That's terribly important. I know we have a very short time, but one of the things I must say of it is that he is the founder of the modern pacifist idea. It was the great... It was the great... ...was the great inspiration of Gandhi, and when Gandhi began passive resistance, first in South Africa before he went to India,

all that comes from Tolstoy's writings on peace. And I mean, the whole modern peace movement, Greenham-Torland, everything, CND, it wouldn't exist in the form it did, and it wouldn't have had any of the effects it's had, had it not been for those peace essays. Of that, I'm quite convinced.

Do you agree with that, sir? Not completely. I think he was very influential, but I think a lot of these things would have happened anyway, eventually, I think. He may have been a catalyst, but I don't think he was necessarily... But Gandhi did acknowledge him as his master. Yes, yeah. Yes, I mean, you could say he was responsible for the collapse of the British Empire, certainly, which, I mean, had Tolstoy lived to see it, he would have been delighted. Possibly also the collapse of the Russian Empire at some level.

I think he was quite fundamental, and I think certainly in Russia he was also responsible for the dissemination of a vegetarianism, so the first step, which is a wonderful piece of writing, apart from anything else. It has a description of a pig being killed, and Tolstoy says that he's short-sighted, so he had to go close up and see this. And so he describes this from a sort of close perspective. And it's absolutely harrowing. Some of the ideas were bats, though, weren't they? I mean, the interesting thing is the man who can write Anna Kareninir can also say that there should be total celibacy everywhere, for everyone.

Well, I mean, Tolstow was, I think, it would be safe to say, without his saturation, a sex maniac. And sex maniacs often have self-hatred. And, I mean, we haven't got time to do into all this deep stuff. But, I mean, he, you know, his first sexual experience was with a prostitute, of course. And then after it's over, he kneels down by the bed in floods of tears full of self-hatred. And oh, if my poor late mother, whom I never even saw to see me, I'd be so ashamed. But, I mean, that's all part of the thrill. And you get this out of Graham, Green novels and lots of other things,

of people who actually enjoy the whole murky. business of guilt and so forth. But going back to almost where we started from, Tolstow became a great figure. Having said that great figures didn't exist, he became a leader, having said that leaders were just labels. He became someone who had disciples, having said that. So did he notice?

I think he resisted that feeling about himself greatly. I think he hated the idea that there were people who came round to hang on his every word. and... Well, except when he went off at the end,

when he ran away from his wife aged, aged 81, he ran away with the disciples and to the disciples, and remember it's on Pathy News, which a part of him would have hated this

and another part would have been rather satisfied. I mean, that you can actually see on the newsreel the poor Countess Tolstoy trying to get into the station master's house

at Haas Tarpapa or have he pronounced the place where he died. Yeah. But I'm interested just finally that he ends up being the sort of great man

whom in war and peace he'd dismissed as being of no real account. I think he was quite honest about that, because I think that's essentially what Father Sergis is about. It's about somebody who becomes a guru and then has to escape from himself. And he had illusions. I mean, the trouble is that, I mean, physically speaking, I mean, even tell Stoy, who throughout his life had a sort of stonking constitution, after all, had got to be 80 years old and just a bit past going off.

He'd also never been on his own. There's actually, there is a feeling, slightly around this table, perhaps I'm wrong, that the truth of Tolstoy is in the great fictions, and after that he had very... I don't think we must have... I don't think that's... No, no, he was... And also, although we've been ribbled about him on occasion,

he was a very great man. I think one wants to hold on to that, and his vision of life as a serious business where we are trying to get to the truth of matters, is retained both in the fiction and in his life as a leader. Yes, yes. I mean, he's one of two Russian writers,

certainly of the 19th century, who's a serious philosopher, and the other one being Dostoevsky, and I mean, these people are, by any standards, worthy thinkers, superlatively challenging. Those later books that you say are bats still have the past yet under your skin. Well, no, I didn't say his later books of Bats, A.N. Well, I said one or two of his later ideas could be called. All right, sorry, I generally think. Bats is an awful word to end on with thoughts. Can't we do better than that?

I mean, I think the quotes a sonata to come back to that is the most difficult one to defend, but what he's saying in that is that sex is important. Well, we're ending with sexes is appalling show. Oh, well, that's a message to the nation. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.