Books: Tolstoy Plain

REMINISCENCES (213 pp.) — Maxim Gorky—Translated by S. S. Koteliansky, Leonard Woolf and others — Dover ($2.75).

The grey old man was surely “the sounding bell of this world,” wrote Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky. “Surely he is great and holy, [although] sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant, like a Volga preacher.” Sometimes it was “painfully unpleasant” to hear his comments on women: “a string of indecent words . . . unspeakably vulgar. . . . He is really a whole orchestra, but not all the horns are playing in unison. … It is terribly stupid to call a man a genius. It is quite impossible to understand what genius is. It is far simpler and clearer to say—Leo Tolstoy.”

Gorky’s extraordinary Reminiscences of Tolstoy, written a generation ago and long out of print in the U.S., are now republished in a single volume with his Reminiscences of Chekhov and Andreyev and a few minor items translated for the first time. In 1900, when he was a young and promising writer of stories, Gorky went to call on the great novelist, later spent some time near Tolstoy’s home in the Crimea. Perhaps he had expected to find a dull old vegetarian disguised in a peasant’s smock and spouting platitudes. He found instead a henpecked, shriveled, electrifying man with “shaggy” eyebrows, “wonderful” hands, a passion for card games, a “shocking” coarseness of speech.

God, Peasants, Woman. “The thought of God . . . gnaws at him. . . . He talks most of God, of peasants, and of woman. . . . Yet his silence is impressive . . . surely he has some thoughts of which he is afraid. . . . In the evening, while walking, he suddenly said: ‘Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be—the tragedy of the bedroom.’ ” “How do you like.” he asked Gorky, “Sophie Andreyevna [his wife]?” Not many years later the aged Tolstoy ran away from home because of Sophie Andreyevna, fell ill en route and died in a stationmaster’s dwelling a hundred miles away.

Gorky saw disciples flocking to tell the Master how pure they had become since following his teachings. To Gorky’s mind they all had “boneless perspiring hands and lying eyes”; Tolstoy himself rose above them like a “noble belfry.” Once when a disciple was discussing the state of his soul, Tolstoy “leant over and said to me in a low voice: ‘He’s lying, all the time, the rogue, but he does it to please me.’ ” The state of Tolstoy’s own soul puzzled Gorky greatly. “I could never believe that he was an atheist,” he wrote Chekhov, “although I felt it, but now . . . I know that he is indeed an atheist and a confirmed one. Am I right?” Gorky, godless himself, was hardly right, but in many respects he saw Tolstoy plain—his “misty preaching” rising from “the unhealthy ferment of the old Russian blood,” the man himself “madly and tormentingly beautiful . . . a man of the whole of mankind.”