This is a Leo Tolstoy entry, but a patently unusual one, taking the reader off the beaten track of the standard Tolstoyan fare, and following a line that is very seldom followed. Yet, it is the untrodden path that I always find of greatest interest to me, and I hope that the reader, especially one with a previous knowledge and a particular interest in Leo Tolstoy, will appreciate the surprise of its novelty.
Like so many Russians, Count
Leo Tolstoy was larger than life in more ways than one. In his younger days he
was already a great writer and still a promiscuous rogue. They said, with complete
credibility, that at his family estate Yasnaya Polyana, not very far
from Moscow, most of the villagers below a certain age were either his children
or his grandchildren, and that his wife Sofia happily welcomed his “peasant
ties” because these were taking his insatiable appetites off her poor exhausted
body.
It
is also known that in his mature years he began to suffer very severe fits of
guilt, on account of his carnal incontinence, but, being unable to cease and
desist, satisfied his conscience by perpetual repentance and by writing about
the sinfulness of carnal sins. It was only at a very advanced age that his
habitual repentances were no longer accompanied by sinful acts, which fact
perhaps accounted for his loss of interest in living, his famous flight away
from home, and a thoroughly penitent death, at the age of eighty-two, at a
travelers’ horses-changing station.
His
most ambitious novel War and Peace (which, incidentally, uses
concurrently three languages: Russian, French, and German, in the original)
makes, among other better-known things, an attempt to demythologize the ghost
of Napoleon, whose influence on the minds of Russian aristocracy had kept
growing in Tolstoy’s time, especially, after the posthumous repatriation of his
body in 1840, and his enthusiastic reinstatement in France as that nation’s
greatest hero. Tolstoy thus had a specific agenda here to counter Napoleon’s
legend with his own unattractive depiction of the man behind the legend. In
that sense, Tolstoy’s monumental novel was a total failure, as Napoleon’s
supernatural halo had by no means been extinguished by Tolstoy’s effort to
bring him down to earth, from the heroic heights of a monumental history in the making.
Tolstoy’s
perpetual state of repentance, noted earlier, was not limited to his sexual
promiscuity. Here is a fine example of his social penitence, bringing
his argument uncannily close to the case made by the detractors of “capitalism
with a human face”:
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and
yet assure myself and others that I am so sorry for him and wish to ease his
burden by all possible means except by getting off his back.” (This superb specimen of socialist agitprop is quoted
from Tolstoy’s 1886 pamphlet What Must We Do?)
It
is a great pity that Tolstoy had not lived to welcome the Russian Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917. I am sure that he would have become a sort of Russian Philippe Égalité, but only in so far as
his repentful enthusiasm goes. It is most unlikely that he could ever be harmed
by the Soviet regime, the way his French predecessor had been harmed by the
French perpetrators of State Terror. After all, both Lenin and Stalin were
endowed with an acute sense of aesthetic appreciation, and with good taste too.
I think that Leo Tolstoy would have fared just as well under the Soviet regime
as his relative Alexei Tolstoy fared in actuality. Besides, Tolstoy and Lenin
shared a singular passion for Beethoven. Tolstoy immortalized the Kreutzer
Sonata in literature, while Lenin made the Appassionata a household
word all around Soviet Russia…
The
following is an added bonus, which deviates from the subject of Tolstoy’s repentfulness
into the fragile world of aesthetics, where, as the reader will see,
Tolstoy has something interesting to say, as well. And so, two more
exceptionally insightful and highly provocative thoughts of his on the nature
of art and aesthetics are now winding up the short list of the unusual Tolstoy
selections that I have chosen for this entry. Please, do compare them with the
other entries on aesthetics in this section!---
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is
goodness.” (The Kreutzer Sonata.)
Talking about the two types of beauty: outward and inward, would have been
rather trite, but Tolstoy’s well-taken point concerns the delusion of mistaking
outward beauty for goodness, while ignoring or shunning away from the inward
kind of beauty, if it is not accompanied by the outward kind.
“Art is not a handcraft. It is a transmission of the feeling,
experienced by the artist.” (From Tolstoy’s
1898 pamphlet What is Art?) This is quite a remarkable definition of
art, which Schopenhauer would have appreciated. If only Nietzsche could have
commented on it, too!.
(Very
few people otherwise familiar with the name and work of Leo Tolstoy are aware
of his impressively deep inroads into the subject of aesthetics, as represented
by these last two selections…)
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