Books: Billy-Goat Pining for Purity

TOLSTOY by Henri Troyat. Translated by Nancy Amphoux. 762 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Making statements about Leo Tolstoy is like pouring a fifth of vodka into the Volga. Academic theses, the complex configurations of criticism, even psychology’s intimate probes are quickly engulfed by Tolstoy’s turbulent, enigmatic genius.

Henri Troyat, Russian-born novelist, biographer of Dostoevsky and Pushkin and member of the French Academy, is well aware of the dangers of attempting to “explain” Tolstoy. Instead of offering absolute answers, he approaches his immense task with unflagging respect and fascination for the conflicting variety of ideas and emotions that filled Tolstoy’s 82 years. His exhaustive but never exhausting chronology provides a picture of Tolstoy the man, as complete as can be found in any one book. What gives the biography its great stature, however, is not so much its bulk as the masterly stance Troyat takes in the wings while the material he has collected is allowed to dramatize itself.

The character that emerges is not altogether attractive, especially for those whose image of Tolstoy is based solely on reverential readings of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The ideas and emotions that clashed in those masterpieces warred within Tolstoy himself, sending him into cycles of sublime creativity and profound depression. To Tolstoy, reality always differed from hopes and dreams, and it was axiomatic to his art that life would be most disappointing to those characters who had the highest qualities. In his own life, that same axiom became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Improving on Descartes. Although Tolstoy was constantly hounded by feelings of doubt and inadequacy, he accepted the fact of his genius and singularity without question. He was a born taker; as a youth, he amended Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” to “I want, therefore I am.” And why not? Rich, landed and titled in a country where rural life still turned on the relationship of serf to master, Tolstoy could indulge his appetites without fear of rebuke. As a 22-year-old volunteer, he fought rebel tribesmen in the Caucasus, wenched, gambled, and tossed off cocktails made of vodka, gunpowder and congealed blood. But he also kept a list of puritanical Rules of Life, which he usually updated during the tormented periods of guilt that almost always followed his revels. Even his searing self-rebuke often seemed gluttonous. He was, says Troyat in one of the book’s few sprightly phrases, “a billy-goat pining for purity.”

It was that constant striving for purity that fed his artistic and spiritual life. While carousing in the Caucasus, he wrote Story of My Childhood—which was instantly accepted for publication and drew praise from Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Later, in the Crimea, Tolstoy served bravely as an artillery officer and wrote Sevastopol Sketches, which, in their fidelity to the sweep and detail of battle, rank as some of the best war correspondence of all time. The very flaws and inconsistencies that he displayed during those years would, as Troyat notes, “later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters in turn with equal sincerity.” Indeed, contradiction was a pattern that grew and intensified throughout Tolstoy’s life: he was a great artist who denounced art, a nobleman who yearned to be a peasant, a preacher of humility who considered himself only once removed from Christ, a seeker of praise who dismissed it with an almost superstitious fear, an antimaterialist who never stopped acquiring land.

In addition, he extolled the virtues of family life at the same time that he neglected his own. And it is this contradiction that Troyat documents with special warmth—particularly the love-hate relationship between Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. Troyat’s portrait of Sonya is considerably more sympathetic than that drawn by most other biographers. During 48 years of marriage, which started with a brutal wedding-night struggle that left the inexperienced bride sexually unresponsive for the rest of her life, she bore his children, efficiently managed Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, transcribed his chicken scratches into legible manuscripts and nursed him through illness.

After 25 years of marriage, Tolstoy repaid her by publishing The Kreutzer Sonata, a combination novel of manners, tract against sexual relations, and confession. On the surface, there is nothing in The Kreutzer Sonata to link Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev, the protagonist. But Tolstoy did reveal many incidents of their private lives—the young bride being shocked at his frankly lustful diary, a quarrel about whether or not to move to Moscow, his resentment over her refusal to nurse their babies. More important, Pozdnyshev’s theories and feelings reflected Tolstoy’s. Having exalted marriage and condemned adultery in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, cursed women in general and Sonya in particular.

Some trivial incident involving Pozdnyshev’s wife—like drinking her tea too noisily—makes him “loathe her as though she were committing some hideous crime.” In passage after passage, The Kreutzer Sonata reveals Tolstoy’s disgust with marriage, which he felt was Sonya’s way of gaining power over him. It is nothing but “legalized prostitution,” says Pozdnyshev. Sonya’s anger and humiliation were compounded by the fact that she had just borne her 13th child.

Time to Go Home. The pathetic irony of Tolstoy’s life is that, having sought the “happiness of simple souls,” his last years were a mire of family squabbles and nasty intrigues about his legacy. Enfeebled by strokes and driven to distraction by his household, he ran away from home in search of solitude. On Oct. 31, 1910, at the Astapovo railway station, he was overtaken by pneumonia, put into the stationmaster’s bed, where he died seven days later, as throngs of reporters, photographers, curiosity seekers and vendors surged about waiting for the death rattle.

In his autobiography, Vladimir Nabokov recalls how his mother responded when news of Tolstoy’s death reached her in Germany: “Good gracious. Time to go home.” To millions of Russians, titled landowners and tethered peasants alike, Tolstoy the Homeric artist, the splenetic social critic, the mystic, the eccentric and the hypocrite, personified the restless soul of a nation soon to undergo its own travail. His death was a death in the family. One simply had to get home. Troyat’s monumental biography now makes that trip possible for everyone.