My cancer - "It can’t be true! It can’t, but it is."

 

Liver cancer.  That was a surprise.  I knew something was wrong, but I was not expecting that.

Since the diagnosis last summer, since it was known for a fact that I had something serious, things have moved fast.  It has been like boarding a train.  Once in motion there is no way off.  I guess I have seen plenty of movies where people get off of moving trains, often with bad results.  I am going to stay on and do what my doctors tell me.

Monday is my liver surgery, a major change of direction.  When I wake up, my tumor will be in the hands of the researcher who expressed almost too much interest in getting a look at it.  He can have it.  The subsequent year of immunotherapy treatment is to keep the tumor from returning.

I have great doubts about sharing personal information of any kind, much less medical information, with the internet, but my cancer is no secret in my real life, and I wanted to explain why the schedule of my Greek philosophy reading – no, not the reading, the writing – fell apart.  How fortunate to be reading Greek philosophy – Cynics, Stoics, and others – at just this time.  The perfect companions.  But my energy was not so good, and a lot of what was left went to health care appointments.  So, so many appointments.  My writing suffered, and will likely do so for some time.

My doctors, by the way, have been superb, as have the nurses, technicians, and everyone else.  The insurance company has behaved itself.  No medical horror stories, or even irritation stories, not yet.  My greatest suffering, at this point, has been the 900 calorie per day liver-softening diet that I am currently enduring, although not for long.  Have pity on this poor glutton.

Ivan Ilych, in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886), worries about the cause of his illness.  The illness, which involves, the appendix, or maybe the kidney, sure sounds like cancer.  I wish he had had my doctors.  He once heavily bumped his side while hanging a curtain:

‘It really is so!  I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort.  Is that possible?  How terrible and how stupid.  It can’t be true!  It can’t, but it is.’  (Ch. VI, tr. revised Maudes)

Of course, however comforting it would be to know, poor Ilych has no idea.  I had a brief discussion with the surgeon about the cause of my cancer, ending in a shrug and a laugh.  Who knows?

Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece is the only work on illness I have deliberately sought out.  I owe a debt, though, to Nanni Moretti’s 1993 anthology film Caro Diario, specifically to the extraordinary third part where he recreates his frustrating, circular experiences with the Italian medical system (which does save him in the end – he is now 70, with a new movie out).  It’s because of Moretti’s film, backed by some family history, that led me to push hard on my doctors to look for cancer.  “Be your own advocate” is the phrase people use.  Yes, do it.

I will be out of touch – out of everything – on Monday, and I have never been a recovering patient before so I have no idea when I might respond to any well wishes, kind thoughts, crackpot advice, or angry scoldings.  Many thanks, then, in advance for any of that.

Now back to the problem that makes me fret the  most: which books to bring to the hospital?

 

Gorky's Tolstoy, Gorky's Chekhov - He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.

Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences (2008) is translator and editor Donald Fanger’s replacement for an older collection titled Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev.  The Tolstoy section dates from 1919 and made it into English in 1920.  Gorky was a celebrity author.

Is something wrong with the old translations?  Fanger says no, but the old texts were incomplete.  These are the first English translation of the complete texts.  Fanger added some additional biographical portraits of writers and other oddballs Gorky knew, as well as four portraits of Gorky, by Khodasevich and Zamiatin and so on, plus plenty of commentary and notes.  The whole thing is still under three hundred pages.

This is a useful book.

It is easy to find the “Lev Tolstoy” section described as “like a novel.”  I don’t know what novels these folks were reading.  The “Leonid Andreyev” portrait is much more like a novel.  The long night where a drunken Andreyev wants to pick up girls while Gorky tries to get him sobered up, that scene appears in a lot of novels.

The Tolstoy memoir is all anecdote and talk from about six months in 1901 and 1902.  The old literary celebrity enjoying the company of the young one.

Suddenly a hare started under our feet.  L. N. jumped up in excitement, his face flushed, and whooped like some ancient animal-hunter.  Then he looked at me with an indescribable smile and laughed a wise, very human little laugh.  He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.  (69)

That is not always the case.  “The subjects he talks about most often are God, the peasant, and woman” – just the subjects to drive Gorky crazy.  “About literature he speaks seldom and grudgingly, as if literature were something alien to him” (35).  Still:

One evening, at dusk, squinting, his eyebrows twitching, he read us a version of the scene in “Father Sergius” where the woman goes to seduce the hermit.  He read it clear through, raised his head, closed his eyes, and said with great clarity:

“The old man really could write!”

He said it with amazing simplicity – his delight at the beauty of what he’d written was so sincere – that I will always remember the thrill I felt then, a joy I could find no words for, and one that cost me an enormous effort to control.  (64)

“Lev Tolstoy” is immensely humanizing, remembering that humans are strange beasts.  The subject of “Anton Chekhov,” by contrast, is a saint, a member of a higher species.  In his presence, people’s falseness, posturing, and vulgarity drop away.

He had fine eyes.  When he smiled they became warm and caressing, like a woman’s.  And his laughter, almost soundless, was somehow particularly fine.  Laughing, he was enjoying the laughter, rejoicing.  I don’t know anyone else who could laugh so – if one could put it that way – “spiritually.”  (103)

When Tolstoy praises Chekhov’s story “The Darling” – “with real emotion. There were tears in his eyes” – Chekhov responds with:

For a long time he said nothing.  Finally, with a sigh, he murmured in embarrassment:

“It’s got misprints in it…”  (105)

The portraits are also self-portraits, by contrast, Gorky’s differences from and exasperations with Tolstoy, Andreyev, and Blok revealing his own character.  But he was mostly interested in other people more than himself.  This was true in his own childhood memoir, and even more so here.

What an enjoyable book.

Yes, it was the same flesh - some War and Peace death

War and Peace is full of Tolstoy’s unoriginal ideas about history in essay form, and his original ideas about death in novel form.  Tolstoy is among the greatest writers about death – sudden or prolonged, in combat or illness, actual or threatened.

If you are bothered by learning about the deaths of characters in a book you have not read and with whom you have no associations whatsoever, skip this post, I guess.

A combat death, Petya Rostov.  His death in XIV.2. is preceded by his great musical dream, where a whetstone, horses, and snoring are somehow combined into a “harmonious orchestra playing some unknown, sweetly solemn hymn.”  Seven hundred pages earlier, Tolstoy suggested that Petya’s sister is synesthetic; perhaps Petya is, too.  I mention the dream because it shows how intensely subjective the point of view has become.  Everything is interior.  To make the text work, I am identifying with Petya, whether he is observing other soldiers, sleeping, or riding into combat.

His charge alongside the Cossacks is chaotic, a breathless blur:

“Wait?...  Hurrah-ah-ah!” shouted Petya, and without pausing a moment galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the smoke was thickest.

A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed against something. (ellipses in original).

Tolstoy plays a terrible trick here.  The “something” is or includes Petya, but for two more headlong sentences I do not know that the perspective has shifted to the other cavalrymen.  Something has gone wrong.  “Petya fell heavily to the ground.  The Cossacks saw…”  Now I know the truth.  What a masterful use of a perspective shift.

A number of the best death scenes are attached to Prince Andrew, over and over – he is thinking about death, he is wounded in combat, etc.  Here he is part of the hot, dusty retreat towards Moscow, before the battle of Borodino:

The dust always hung motionless above the buzz of talk that came from the resting troops.

That by itself is an interesting sentence, isn’t it?

As he crossed the dam Prince Andrew smelled the ooze and freshness of the pond.  He longed to get into that water, however dirty it might be, and he glanced round at the pool from whence came the sounds of shrieks and laughter.  The small, muddy, green pond had risen visibly more than a foot, flooding the dam, because it was full of the naked white bodies of soldiers with brick-red hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing about in it.  (X.5.)

Tolstoy emphasizes the “health” and pleasure of the soldiers (“joyfully wriggling his muscular figure and snorted with satisfaction”), but bathing himself Andrew can only imagine them as the corpses that many of them will soon be:

“Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!” he thought, and he looked at his own naked body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust and horror he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that immense number of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.

Later, wounded, the bodies in the hospital remind Andrew of the bodies in the pond – “Yes, it was the same flesh” (X.37.).  All of 120 pages later, almost adjacent for this book.

Maybe it is a paradox of War and Peace, of much of Tolstoy, is how exhilarating so much of this material about death can be.  Or not a paradox – the reason is art.

like a hare surrounded by hounds... he tried to continue reading - hunting wolves and hares in War and Peace

The prose in War and Peace is generally plain, often repetitive – more so in Russian than in the Maude translation – and rough.  Anna Karenina is more finely worked at the sentence level and its beauties depend more on the motifs that Tolstoy runs through the novel.  There are exceptions, though, like Book VII of War and Peace, the wolf hunt and the Christmas party, a couple of days in which two characters move into a state of sublimity.

In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples, and wolf and fox skins hung about.  (VII.7.)

It is a thickly described part of the book.  More smells.

Nicholas and Natasha Rostov are siblings, but Nicholas is quickly off in the cavalry, so they rarely meet.  Book VII, with everyone at the country estate, is where they finally get some scenes together.  Amusingly, they barely speak to each other.  They’re siblings; they communicate plenty.

They go hunting for about twenty pages – those poor wolves – and celebrate Christmas for about thirty.

The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent drops which fell on the freshly fallen leaves.  The earth in the kitchen garden looked wet and black and glistened like poppyseed and at a short distance merged into the dull, moist veil of mist…  There was a smell of decaying leaves and of dog.  Milka, a black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch with prominent black eyes. got up on seeing her master, stretched her hind legs, lay down like a hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and mustache.  (VII.3.)

Those fine similes are one evidence of the difference in this section.  In War and Peace, similes frequently describe the character or behavior of people, but rarely things.  “Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life.”  The hunt needs horses, dogs, landscapes, wolves, clothes; the later party food, music, costumes, folk customs, and it all has to be precise, and precision demands metaphor.

The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly, like a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying from side to side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail disappeared into the skirt of the wood.  (VII.4.)

For the first time, I even get some precision about how the Rostovs are spending themselves into bankruptcy: “there were about a hundred and thirty dogs and twenty horsemen.”

Soon enough the dog Milka is in a race with some of the others after a lively hare.  The scene with the hare is a little hunt within the larger wolf hunt, a battle within the battle.  In a sense, much of the point of the hunt is to include a “battle” in the middle of the book, between the big early Austerlitz scenes and the later Borodino section.

Oddly, on the eve of Borodino, Pierre Bezukhov sees a “brown hare with white feet” on what will be the battlefield (X.23.).  A third hare, the hare that saved Russia, leads the Russian army to discover, and ambush, a French army (XIII.1.).  Much, much earlier, Nicholas Rostov, injured and losing his horse in his first combat, runs “with the feeling of a hare fleeing from the hounds” (II.14).  Pierre Bezukhov at one point “like a hare surrounded by hounds who lays back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before her enemies, he tried to continue reading” (IV.6.) – hilariously, here the battlefield is his study, and the enemy combatant his wife.  Yet this scene is also directly related to Pierre’s first experience of combat, a duel.

I wanted to look at the wolf hunt scene in part because it is extraordinarily good, but also because those hares make me wonder what else is in the novel that its size conceals from me.

This is how it happened - Les Misérables makes Tolstoy's thoughts swarm

From the “Chronology” of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002):

1863, February 23: reads Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – “Powerful”; “I went through my papers – a swarm of thought and a return, or an attempt to return to lyricism.  Lyricism is good.” (p. 10)

Leo Tolstoy was planning – actively writing – a historical epic about, eventually, the Napoleonic Wars that is meant to demonstrate an argument about the functioning of history.  Along comes a model by the “best nineteenth-century writer” (p. 31, quotation is a paraphrase of Tolstoy by the editor) that shows you can just plop your essays into the middle of the story.  The digressions account for maybe a third of the novel?  That’s fine.

I saw a strong “influence” of Les Misérables on War and Peace, but what do I mean by that?  (certainly not “lyricism”).  After all, “1863, June 2: ‘I’m reading Goethe, and thoughts swarm.’”  When you’re a genius like Tolstoy, that’s what your thoughts do.  Maybe I should be arguing for the influence of Elective Affinities on Tolstoy, too.  Now that I mention it – no, one at a time.  Much later, Tolstoy says that the influence of Hugo’s novel was “Enormous,” but that could mean anything.

I mean two things.  Not anything to do with battles.  Tolstoy had been a great war writer for a decade already.  The first influence is on the use and structure of the essayistic material.  I don’t think Tolstoy is nearly as good with this stuff as Hugo.  The French giant writes as a sage, so everything he writes is an expression of pure Hugoness.  Every aspect of the novel is suffused with hugolité.  Tolstoy write as if he is trying to invent social history or sociology or some other social science.  He struggles in the didactic sections.  Hugo does not.

If I remembered the arguments better – I have already forgotten Tolstoy’s, much less Hugo's – I might be able to see how or if Tolstoy adapts Hugo’s ideas about Napoleon and the chaos of the battlefield and the role of individuals in mass action and so on, but I don’t.  Instead, what felt like Hugo was Tolstoy’s use of epic similes as argument, such as the comparison of burned, looted, empty Moscow to a beehive (XI.11.) with a dead queen, a comparison that is clear immediately but goes on for a couple of pages, developing its own characters.

What really caught my attention, though, were moments in the narrative, not the essays, that sounded so much like Hugo, places where Tolstoy adapted Hugo’s signature devices, like the chapter-ending revelations of identity: “This man was registered under the number 9430, and his name was Jean Valjean” (Hugo, III.3.).  Even the long, essayistic Waterloo section ends with one of these.  In Tolstoy:

That night another wounded man was driven down to Povarskaya…  Mavra Kuzminichna concluded that he was a very important man…  He was conveyed… [Etc.]

This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski.  (XI.8.)

Another example: simple transitional sentences, like Tolstoy is telling the story: “This is how it happened” (XI.9.).

Another is the use of a series of blunt, single-sentence paragraphs.

Yet another is the transformation of Pierre Bezukhov into Jean Valjean, including his superhuman strength, in the section where Pierre is out in Moscow rescuing little girls from fires.  “Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his strength increased tenfold” (XI.16.) – then he goes to prison!

Why are all of these quotations from Book XI?  Not just because that is where I started to write them down.  No, I think much of the Hugo flavor is concentrated in this book, which contains the evacuation, occupation, and destruction of Moscow.  No battles as such, no parties, no ordinary daily life, but rather nothing but extraordinary events, one after another.  It is the most melodramatic part of War and Peace, the most ordinarily novelistic, where Pierre’s thread becomes something of an adventure story.  Thus it is here that Tolstoy turns to a great master of this kind of novel, to the example that has been on his mind for a number of reasons.

That is my guess.  The problem points to the solution.  It is interesting to witness.

Tomorrow, 100% Tolstoy.

busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious - Tolstoy moves the point of view

I wonder how many thinking parts there are in War and Peace.  The major characters all have scenes shown from their point of view, and long passages describing their private thoughts, but Tolstoy is, in this novel, also a master of the sudden shift and quick dip into the mind of anyone else.  The Cossacks (1863) is a good place to see him use the technique.  That character has a single, obvious protagonist, but when he goes to the Caucasus the point of view flits away from him, landing in a number of interesting places.

The cinematic analogy is strong, even if the camera can’t do much with a train of thought.  But it accompanies a character, flies up in the air, wanders around, finally returning to the doe-eyed fellow with whom it started.  It is curious how naturally we attach and detach the point of view from characters, even knowing perfectly well that we are watching an edited series of filmed sequences.

Tolstoy’s technique is similarly natural.  Much of the first of the fifteen volumes is spent at parties, with a couple dozen characters almost flung at me, the perspective freely wandering among them and back to Tolstoy.  At the Rostov’s the characters have paired off to go to dinner.  They are all new, or were when I first read the book.  Mostly the camera just looks at them, records them.  “Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces, and ate a great deal.”  Sometimes there is more interpretation.  “Sonya wore a company smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy.”  And sometimes, the point of view moves inward:

The German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.  (I.9.)

Good comedy from a character who is never mentioned again (occasionally a crowd of “tutors” is mentioned).  But I am only on page 65 of 1,351!  How do I know that this is the poor tutor’s only scene?  The Maudes cheat a bit early on, with footnotes like “Natasha Rostova, the most important female character in War and Peace” (I.5.).  So pay attention!  But for the novelist, everyone is available.  Everyone:

The Emperor’s horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had carried the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the field of Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and pricking its ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the Empress’ Field, not understanding the significance of the firing, nor of the nearness of the Emperor Francis’ black cob, nor of all that was being said, thought, and felt that day by its rider.  (III.13.)

Actually, maybe not everyone.  It is possible that Emperor Alexander is only observed, except in the sense that his interiority is the negative space of his horse’s, or vice versa.

The extreme example, near the novel’s end, closing a scene featuring ordinary soldiers around a campfire:

They all grew silent.  The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious to each other.  (XV.3.)

War and Peace is for the most part written in a plain style.  Not always.

I am to blame, not he - Tolstoy's "complicated task" in War and Peace

I previously read War and Peace (1869) for a Tolstoy class, mixed undergraduate and graduate, mixed language – I was in the easy division, under- and English – twenty-six years ago, using the Norton Critical Edition of the Maude translation, the same book I just finished.

The professor, a Nabokov scholar, wanted the entire text available for class discussions, so we had double reading for the first third of the class – reading and discussing the novellas in The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy while simultaneously reading War and Peace, then reading Anna Karenina while discussing War and Peace, and finally re-reading for our papers while discussing Anna Karenina.  The bare minimum reading load for a respectable literature class, yes?  That was a good class.

War and Peace is hardly the piece of worked-up art that Anna Karenina is, and how could it be?  It is so big.  That Leo Tolstoy could handle the mass of material as he did was his first achievement.  Many subsequent writers of historical fiction have written books – or series – of comparable, or greater, size and complexity, paralleling and criss-crossing the lives of a small (or large) number of characters across a big historical landscape, having them wander into “real” scenes populated by Napoleon Bonaparte and the equivalent.

Tolstoy only had the one example in front of him.  This was my single great “discovery” about War and Peace, the influence of Victor Hugo.  Save that for later.  The bigness of the book is a real achievement, and a real difficulty for me, since it is hard to remember so many details across so many pages.

Vladimir Nabokov called War and Peace “a rollicking historical novel written… specifically for the young” (1969 interview in Strong Opinions, p. 148 – he also says it’s “a little too long,” snort), which is dismissive but insightful.  The beauties of the novel – or, more accurately, my guess is that the beauties of War and Peace – do not depend so much on the kind complex motifs of which Anna Karenina is built, but on a more direct feeling for the reality of the characters, even on an identification with them.

As languagehat wrote in 2009, after he had completed the novel in Russian, “I get mad at Prince Andrei with the same sort of exasperated affection I direct at my own brothers, not with the distanced feeling of irritation I experience with, say, Proust’s Marcel.”  Oh, let’s not get into Marcel – that guy gets on my last nerve.  Maybe Tolstoy’s novel is best read with the immersive identification of childhood.  I am not just watching Natasha Rostov at her first ball or Nicholas Rostov at his first battle, but for a time I am Natasha, I am Nicholas.  Not that the identification is always that close.

Two characters, Nicholas and Prince Andrew Bolkonski, are if anything too empty, too generic, early in the novel, their characters kept a bit blank to allow me to more easily wander around the Battle of Austerlitz in their bodies, akin to the officer in Sevastopol Stories (1855) who gives me a semi-fictional tour of the besieged fortress.

[Prince Andrew] is monotonous, boring, and merely un homme comme il faut in the whole first part.  That is true, but I am to blame, not he.  I intend not only to depict characters, their actions, and their encounters, but also to work history in.  This greatly complicates my task, and I’m not succeeding at it, or so it seems.  (letter to the poet Anafasy Fet, 1866, p. 1361 of the Norton edition)

But this all gets fixed pretty fast.  All five main characters – or six, counting His Supreme Highness General Kutuzov? – are good company.  I never cared which thread of the story I was reading – was never eager to get back to someone else’s story – as long as it wasn’t a section featuring that blowhard amateur historian Leo Tolstoy.

I feel that given the bulk of the thing, I ought to be able to spend a month with War and Peace, but I think it will just be the rest of the week.  My notes say: point of view, Victor Hugo, the wolf hunt, death.

Tolstoy's "Father Sergius" & it's Chekovian interlude - Unkindly relations between people caused her actual physical suffering

Leo Tolstoy I think of as almost beyond influence, and the older Tolstoy would seem particularly settled in style, yet reading his novellas of the 1890s, “Master and Man” (1895) and “Father Sergius” (finished 1898, published 1911) I saw traces of Anton Chekhov.  The first could almost have been by Chekhov; the second is unmistakably Tolstoy but takes a Chekhov-like turn in its last episode, as if the title character must journey through a Chekhov story to reach his goal.  Maybe this is all an illusion, caused by the lingering flavor of Chekhov.  Tolstoy has a strong taste, too, though, right?

“Father Sergius” is the most bearable of a kind of lust trilogy, along with ethically dubious “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil” (both 1889).  In this case, the title character is a monk, a vowed celibate, so his struggles with lust are an ordinary part of his vocation, less important, usually, than – a part of – his struggles with pride.  He enters the convent in large part out of pride; he becomes a hermit out of pride; he becomes a miracle worker, healing the sick, which leads to more pride.   His constant lunges at humility control his pride, but are also perhaps sources of pride.

The most memorable scene is one of Father Sergius’s struggle with lust.  A rich woman tries, on a dare, basically, to seduce the monk, and in his struggles with lust he – if this story were really written alongside “The Kreutzer Sonata” he would murder her – he does something similarly shocking, but only to himself.  As for the shocked woman, “[a] year later she entered a convent as a novice” (Ch. III).

In a later moment of suicidal despair, Sergius for some reason remembers a girl he knew and bullied as a child, Pashenka.  As an act of contrition he makes a pilgrimage to visit her, an ordinary woman.  “She presented herself to him as a means of salvation” (Ch. V).  How a poor grandma who gives music lessons to get by can save him is a puzzle, but he cuts his hair and tramps “as a beggar” to her home, confesses his sins, and then – well, it is still a puzzle.

This is the Chekhovian section, Chapter VI.  “Unkindly relations between people caused her actual physical suffering.”  But she is no saint:

“Mamma!” – her daughter’s voice interrupted her – “Take Mitya!  I can’t be in two places at once.”

Praskovya Mikhaylovna shuddered, but rose and went out of the room, stepping quickly in her patched shoes.  She soon came back with a boy of two in her arms, who threw himself backwards and grabbed at her shawl with his little hands.

“Shuddered” is a tough, fine touch.  Grandma can’t have one minute alone with the holy man.  It is not exactly that this episode sounds like Chekhov, but rather that I can imagine the story from the family’s point of view – the day the famous monk dropped by – that would be the Chekhov story.

The monk’s story is that he is somehow converted to ordinary life.  “’I lived for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining that she lives for men.’”  It is hardly clear that this is true, but it sets Sergius on a new path.  “And little by little God began to reveal Himself within him.”  I suppose this gets him where he wants to go.

The quotations are from the Maude translation, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy.

standing still as if in thought - Tolstoy's "Master and Man"

Since I was commenting on Anton Chekhov’s struggles in the early 1890s with Leo Tolstoy, I should note a contemporary Tolstoy story, “Master and Man” (1895) that could almost be a Chekhov story.  By the end it is clearly Tolstoy, but if someone had printed it up as a Chekhov story it could have fooled me.

A merchant and one of his peasants – and a horse, itself a fine character – head into a blizzard.  The merchant wants to buy a piece of land, that’s all, so fighting the blizzard is just the usual short-sighted human idiocy.  There is a long tradition of Russian man-versus-blizzard stories, going back to Pushkin’s “The Blizzard” (1831) at least, and Chekhov wrote some himself.

Tolstoy wants the threat of the blizzard in order to write a variation on “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) where death approaches quickly, but still slowly enough that the characters have a little bit of time.  A selfish man has the chance to do one selfless, meaningful act, that is the ethical core of the story.  Oddly, it has some close resemblances to Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” where the selfless act is the creation of a melody.  Here it is more basic, the saving of another’s life.

Some of Tolstoy’s later stories are ethically dubious, especially when he is writing about sex, but I think this one is straightforward.  The style is straightforward, too, although not plain.  A lot of non-fussy detail.

Picking his way out of the dung-strewn stable, Mukhorty frisked, and making play with his hind leg pretended that he meant to kick Nikita, who was running at a trot beside him to the pump.

‘Now then, now then, you rascal!’ Nikita called out, well knowing how carefully Mukhorty threw out his hind leg just to touch his greasy sheepskin coat but not to strike him – a trick Nikita much appreciated.

After a drink of the cold water the horse sighed, moving his strong wet lips, from the hairs of which transparent drops fell into the trough; then standing still as if in thought, he suddenly gave a loud snort.  (Ch. 1)

Some of this matters later in the story – the relationship between the peasant and the horse, or the exact details of his coat – but the last paragraph would have been easy to omit.  But Tolstoy wants to get the horse right.

Those short paragraphs are characteristic.  “Master and Man” is a kind of adventure story.  It moves.  Even at the climax, with everything frozen in place, Tolstoy has to keep time moving.

Only in the final paragraph does the narrator accelerate, covering twenty years, bringing the story up to date (the survivor of the story died “only this year”).  The last line is unmistakable Tolstoy:

Whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.

I read the Maude translation in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy.

It's moving! It's alive! - Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness combats evil and good taste

With “The Kreutzer Sonata,” I was visiting an old enemy.  Completely new to me was Leo Tolstoy’s most famous play, to the extent that they have any fame at all, The Power of Darkness, published in 1886, the same year as “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

At first the play looks like it might be a kind of peasant “Ivan Ilych.”  The father of a well-off peasant family is mortally ill at age 42, likely with some kind of cancer.  To my surprise he dies at the end of the second act; with three acts left, this is not a peasant “Ivan Ilych.”

He does not merely die at the end of Act II.  He is in his deathbed, and could die any minute, but his wife – his second wife, who married him for money and is having an affair with Nikita, one of their farm laborers – poisons him, or has Nikita poison him, at the urging of Nikita’s evil mother.  The widow can marry Nikita and they can all live off of his money.  Nikita celebrates by beginning an affair with the daughter of the peasant’s first marriage, who is now technically his step-daughter.  Another of the cluster of stories about lust, maybe.

This may sound a little soapy.  The difference is that it is hard to enjoy the outrageousness of the affairs and betrayals.  These characters are endangering their souls.

All taste of soap dissipates in Act IV:

Enter NAN (Nan is 10 years old).

NAN.  Mother!  Grandmother’s calling!  I think sister’s got a baby!  I’m blest if it didn’t scream!

ANISYA.  What are you babbling about?  Plague take you!  It’s kittens whining there.

Nikita’s mother and wife tell him that the baby died at birth.  Just bury it in the cellar. No one will know.  The baby is, in fact, alive, so while Nikita is offstage digging a grave, the two women argue about whether they should baptize the baby before burying it alive.

ANISYA.  Take it, I tell you! [Throws the baby to him.]

NIKITA [catches it]  It’s alive!  Gracious me, it’s moving!  It’s alive!  What I am to do…  [ellipses in original]

ANISYA [snatches the baby from him and throws it into the cellar (offstage)]  Be quick and smother it, and then it won’t be alive!  [Pushes NIKITA down]  It’s your doing, and you must finish it.  (Act IV)

Then follows an offstage – but just barely offstage – infanticide that is described in detail onstage, by character who are looking into the cellar and then again by Nikita when he returns to the stage.  I could barely believe what I was reading.  The scene is so awful that it is followed by an alternative scene (“the one usually acted”) that is still quite horrible, but at least the infanticide does not take place immediately offstage.

I am not used to reading Tolstoy writing about peasants, I am not used to him writing so clearly, beginning with the play’s title, about his sense of evil, and I am certainly not used to him writing in such bad taste.

No idea whether The Power of Darkness is a good play.  Any opinions about Tolstoy's other plays?

I am quoting from the Maude translation.

I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible - Tolstoy is some of one, some of the other; also something else

“The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) is accurately titled and is a work of great somberness, mostly.  Yet it begins satirically, even farcically.  The judge Ivan Ilych has just died.  His colleagues wonder who will get his job, and dread having to pay condolences.  Tolstoy follows one who does, a special friend of the deceased.

In a scene where he comforts the widow, the friend sits

on a low pouffe, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his weight…  on her way to the sofa the lace of the widow’s black shawl caught on the carved edge of the table.  Peter Ivanovich rose to detach it, and the springs of the pouffe, relieved of his weight, rose also and gave him a push.  The widow began detaching her shawl herself, and Peter Ivanovich again sat down, suppressing the rebellious springs of the pouffe under him.  But the widow had not quite freed herself and Peter Ivanovich got up again, and again the pouffe rebelled and even creaked.  (Ch. 1, tr. Louis and Aylmer Maude)

This is almost literally a farce, like a scene from a Jacques Tati movie, with the material world appearing to openly rebel against the characters, both of whom are at least alive and well.  In subsequent chapters, the life of Ivan Ilych is told from his own point of view, and again, the material world fights back, as it always does, although not always so early and so fiercely.  I was selfishly relieved to note that I have now outlived Ivan Ilych.

The illness transforms the character into a giant vermin, effectively.  James Chester notes that “Ivan Ilych’s experience of illness is quite like Gregor Samsa’s transformation.”  His illness detaches him from everyone else, even from his family, who in their health can never understand what he has become.  Nor does he, until the very end, when he understands – now, if nowhere else, are we in didactic territory – that illness and death are illusions (“’Death is finished,’ he said to himself. ‘It is no more,’ Ch. 12) and I understand that I have been mislead by the title, which could as easily have been “The Life of Ivan Ilych.”

The two contemporary stories about the torments of the male sex drive, “The Devil” and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” more didactic and less universal, by which I do not just mean that we all die and are not all tormented by the male sex drive, but that Tolstoy never figures out how to tell the stories without making the protagonists seems merely nuts.  The stories, especially their violence, seems arbitrary.  “The Devil” even has two endings, one with a homicide and one with a suicide, suggesting that Tolstoy himself realized that the story had become disconnected from whatever argument he was trying to make.

My favorite part of “The Kreutzer Sonata” is when the lunatic protagonist, crazed by jealousy, discovers his wife with her possible lover – they are playing the piano.  The lover runs off.  “’I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible’” (Ch. 27).  To the extent that “The Kreutzer Sonata” can be saved as either a work of art or as an ethical argument, and I am not sure that it can, it is because the devil at the center of the story is merely ridiculous, however much harm he does.

But mostly I think, “You renounced Anna Karenina as trivial for this?”

All right, tomorrow, that crazy play.  

Tolstoy's Confession - so what?

While Leo Tolstoy was writing the greatest novel of all time, Anna Karenina (1877) he was passing through a period of personal religious crisis that led him to renounce the artistic impulse that led to that novel and to War and Peace and so on as worthless.  As he writes in Confession (1884):

In spite of the fact that during these fifteen years I regarded writing as a trivial endeavor, I continued to write.  I had already tasted the temptations of authorship, the temptations of enormous monetary rewards and applause for worthless work, and I gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material situation and as a way of stifling any questions in my soul concerning  the meaning of my life and of life in general.  (Ch. 3, pp. 25-6, tr. David Patterson)

At some point, the crisis overtakes his life:

It happened with me as it happens with everyone who  contracts a fatal internal disease.  At first there were the insignificant symptoms of an ailment, which the patient ignores; then these symptoms recur more and more frequently, until they merge into one continuous duration of suffering.  The suffering increases, and before he can turn around the patient discovers what he already knew: the thing he had taken for a mere indisposition is in fact the most important thing on earth to him, is in fact death.  (p. 26)

I would not say that Confession is essential reading for a student of Tolstoy’s fiction.  It is obviously central for the Tolstoyan, like a religious text.  Much of it covers the basic issues of a loss of faith – is there a god, why do we die, does the Church have the answers?  Tolstoy works his way to the kinds of answers these questions lead to.  Rhetorically, Tolstoy’s book is superb, but people have been working on these questions for a long time.  Does life have any meaning?  Confession is a deeply Ecclesiastian book.  Is all vanity?

Or in the middle of thinking about the fame that my works were bringing to me I would say to myself, “Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world – so what?”
And I could find absolutely no reply.  (p. 27)

As the previous passage, the metaphor about terminal illness, suggests, Confession casts a lot of light on the literature Tolstoy wrote soon afterwards.  Just naming what I have read:  “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886), in embryo in those lines, the nightmarish play The Power of Darkness (1886), and the two problematic novellas about the torments of the male sex drive, “The Devil” and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (both 1889).

The latter two are recognizably Tolstoy, although he has simplified his language and despite throwing every distancing device he has at them – frames, unreliable narrators – they are unappealingly didactic and unpleasant, to me, at least.  The play is beyond belief, bonkers.  “Ivan Ilych” is an astounding masterpiece.  All the product of the same shift in aesthetic ideas.

The snouts of the horses were wet. - "A Prisoner in the Caucasus" and Tolstoy's plain style

Now, a direct descendant of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, somewhat arbitrarily chosen, “A Prisoner of the Caucasus,” one of Leo Tolstoy’s many tales of military life, unusual in that it is not from early in his career but rather dead center between War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1873-77), so what I mean is, we are perched atop the peak here.

I read the story in Volume XIII of a 1913 set of the collected works of Leof N. Tolstoï.   No idea who the translator might be, so let us just assume that the English text is full of blunders of all kinds.  The text as is nevertheless tells a fine story.

An officer is captured by Tartars and held for ransom.  He is soon joined by another prisoner.  There will be no ransom, since his mother has no money.  He kills time in the village, befriends a Tartar girl, and plans his escape, or perhaps prepares for his death.  Reasonably exciting.

How does one of the great prose writers of all time begin?

A Russian gentleman was serving as an officer in the army of the Caucasus.  His name was Zhilin.

One day a letter from his home came to him.  His old mother wrote to him:-

Well, if the narrator’s prose is like this, the mother’s letter won’t be any more exciting.  I mentioned that Pushkin, in his fiction, approached a plain style; Tolstoy’s style is there.  It starts plain and stays plain.  Tolstoy is not out to dazzle, not this way, at least.

Not that Tolstoy tells the story like a fairy tale.  The world, especially once the prisoner reaches  the mountain village, becomes pretty solid:

Then two children on horseback came along on their way to the watering-trough.  The snouts of the horses were wet.

Inessential details, or inessential if Tolstoy were writing a summary of the story for an encyclopedia rather than a work of art.

Although the point of view is firmly fixed on Zhilin, and by any ordinary sense of sympathy the tension of the story lies in our hope that he can escape his captors, Tolstoy simultaneously creates some sympathy for the Tartars, who in another kind of story would simply be the  enemy.  This is a funeral – the “red-bearded Tartar”’s brother has been killed, presumably by the Russians.

They smoothed the earth over, and again sat around the grave in rows.  There was a long silence.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!”

They sighed and got up.  The red-bearded Tartar gave money to the old men, then he got up, struck his forehead three times with a whip, and went home.

It does not seem like much, but these people  and their culture become convincingly full.  This is one of Tolstoy’s greatest gifts.  What appears to be distance or an attempt at objectivity is the result of his great human sympathy.

I had meant to read this story for years because it is the source of a superb movie, Sergey Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), which makes surprisingly – horribly – few changes in order to update the story to the then-current Chechen war.  If I were a more experienced film blogger I would plaster the post with stills of the mountain scenery and the Chechen village.  There is a scene where the prisoners tinker with a radio (in the story, a watch), and finally tune in – something – Louis Armstrong performing “St. James Infirmary,” which somehow sets the camera spinning.  The moment is ecstatic and sublime, and the effect unavailable to the literary artist, even to Leof N. Tolstoï.

The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

Ah, what do we know about time and space? - Schnitzler loots Tolstoy

Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dying reminded me of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in its insightful depiction of the thoughts over time of a dying man, and Schnitzler impressed me by giving equal attention to the thoughts and fears of his wife or girlfriend or - I’ll just say wife for today’s purpose.

In his recent Anna Karenina hatchet job, obooki singles out the well-known passage in which Anna is in a carriage, turning over recent events but being distracted by shop signs.  Here is a sliver of Anna’s thoughts:

Office and warehouse … Dental surgeon … Yes, I will tell Dolly everything. She doesn’t like Vronsky. [I’ll skip a bit]  I won’t give in to him. I won’t allow him to teach me … Filippov, pastry cook – I’ve heard he sends his pastry to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good.  (Pt. VII, Ch. XXVIII)

And so on.  The ellipses are in the original, an orthographic feature, although different translators treat them differently.  They signify Tolstoy’s pauses, not obooki’s omissions.  This is an early example of stream of consciousness used for a specific purpose, (I am quoting obooki) “to show a disordered human mind – a mind pushed to emotional extremes – rather than the everyday state we find ourselves in.”

The dental surgeon is foreshadowing, and the pastry cook's pancakes – but I am not writing about Tolstoy.

Schnitzler’s dying Felix and the faithful Marie have been in the mountains, hoping to improve Felix’s health, and are now returning to Vienna by train.  Felix's mind is understandably disordered:

She looks so pale, or is that just the light? ... Ah, yes, the overhead lighting is on.  But it isn’t entirely dark outside yet …  And now autumn is coming … autumn, such a sad, quiet time …  We’ll be back home in Vienna this evening …  And then I’ll feel as if I’d never been away …  [I gotta skip some of this]  There are a great many passengers in a worse way than me on the train …  It’s good to be alone …  How has this whole day passed?  Was it really today that I was lying on the sofa in Salzburg?  It’s so long ago …  ah, what do we know about time and space? ...  the mystery of the world, perhaps we’ll solve it when we die …  And now a melody sounded in his ear.  He knew it was only the sound of the moving train, yet it was a melody …  A folk-song, a Russian song …  monotonous …  very beautiful …  (67)

He is asleep by the end.  Ellipses again in the original.  Somewhere in the middle I was thinking, gee this sounds, and even looks, a lot like that part of Anna Karenina, and then Schnitzler drops in the Russian folk-song, out of nowhere.  The previous scenes in Salzburg had taken place in the midst of “a great festival of vocal music” (53), but there was nothing Russian until this moment.

“Russian” is like a signature or seal – “yes, dagnabit, I have been reading Tolstoy!”

Why I do not write reviews – just look at these:  Winston’s Dad, Lizzy’s Literary Life, John Self, and Pechorin’s Journal, all enjoying Arthur Schnitzler’s Dying.

I gotta million ideas about The Cossacks

A friendly anonymous commenter asked if The Cossacks has any relation to Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, published over twenty years earlier.  It’s a good question.  By the time Tolstoy was writing, Russian literature was already thick with Cossack literature:  Lermontov in the novel and some poems, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and a number of shorter works, Gogol’s Taras Bulba.  In other words, all of the major writers of the generation before Tolstoy had written about Cossacks in one way or another.   What was Tolstoy adding to the tradition?

I am not sure.  For one thing, there was surely a shelf of non-canonical Cossack novels that I know nothing about.  Any element of parody or imitation I see in Tolstoy is as likely to be about some book I have never heard of.  Oh well.

Tolstoy does give some clues.  Olenin, the naïve young Russian nobleman, enters military service as part of a search for a meaningful life and an escape from his tailor (he is ashamed to face his Moscow tailor):

The farther Olenin travelled from Central Russia the farther he left his memories behind, and the nearer he drew to the Caucasus the lighter his heart became.  "I'll stay away for good and never return to show myself in society," was a thought that sometimes occurred to him.  "These people whom I see here are not people.”  (III)

Olenin will be our point-of-view character for a tour of the exotic Caucasus where he will learn his Important Life Lessons.

But Tolstoy pulls off a nice surprise by abandoning Olenin.  Rather than approach the village with him, Tolstoy switches to the kind of God’s-eye description I described yesterday, then to an old Cossack woman, and then to the young Cossack soldier Lukashka.   Olenin vanishes for twenty eventful pages.  These “not people” are people, Tolstoy insists, and he is not going to wait for Olenin to figure that out.  They are going to be people immediately.

Completely convincing people, too, not exotic, but different.  Their culture is taken seriously, meaningfully.  Tolstoy’s capacity for imaginative sympathy is astounding.

Another touch that may or may not be a parodic response to his predecessors is that Tolstoy’s Russian protagonist, while indulging in some classic Romantic self-pity, is in no way Byronic.  He’s a bit of a wet noodle, even.  His Cossack double, Lukashka, is the Byronic hero, although his story takes an ironic anti-Byronic turn or too as well.

Yet another amusing irony is that with two exceptions all of the combat in this novel of soldiering on the frontier is kept offstage.  The exceptions are admittedly pretty important.  But mostly I kept expecting War but kept getting Peace.

There’s also a dangling, unresolved plot line that has a surprisingly modern feel.  Now I’m rambling.  Just enjoying an evening stroll with Tolstoy.

Here’s an idea: read some of the Cossack classics, Tolstoy and Pushkin and so on, and then read Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926), a quite different anti-Romantic take on the subject narrated by an outsider, and then write a series of penetrating and original blog posts.  This is my gift to you.

Clusters of them, crushed by the wheels, lay in the dirt - invisible, distant Tolstoy

A fair amount of The Cossacks sounds like this:

It was August.  For days the sky had been cloudless, the sun scorched unbearably and from early morning the warm wind raised a whirl of hot sand from the sand-drifts and from the road, and bore it in the air through the reeds, the trees, and the village.  The grass and the leaves on the trees were covered with dust, the roads and dried-up salt marshes were baked so hard that they rang when trodden on.  (XXIX)

A new section begins with some establishing shots, some landscape.  Kinda plain.  Two sentences later some people enter the scene, generic ones, though, “the shouting of girls and boys bathing,” along with cattle and wild boars.  Mountains, air, sun.  Then activity, the grape harvest, and the sentence turn into close-ups:

Along the dusty road from the vineyards the creaking carts moved slowly, heaped up with black grapes.  Clusters of them, crushed by the wheels, lay in the dirt.  Boys and girls in smocks stained with grape-juice, with grapes in their hands and mouths, ran after their mothers.

The shot of the crushed grapes in the road is perhaps the first detail in the long paragraph that seems especially artful, that the more attentive writer thinks to include.  Now these little bursts of sensory detail proliferate with descriptions of clothing or movement or odors (“the smell of the emptied skins filled the air” or animals, all circling around the grapes.

This is not really all that cinematic but has something in common with a montage.  Or perhaps it is like watching a painter at work, putting down a base, working in some shapes, filling them in, adding lines, and finally getting out the finer brushes.  Thank goodness we do not have to enjoy paintings in this fashion.  Tolstoy’s page about the grape harvest is not that tedious, thankfully, although the method does require some patience.  Well, it is only a page – a minute and a half of patience – what am I complaining about – and then the characters and story wander back in.

This is the distant narrator, the Flaubert-like invisible narrator.  Objective is not a bad word, either, but of course the author is not really a camera or even a painter but is choosing every image from whatever possibilities his imagination can produce.  He likely observed most of this himself during his own time in the Caucasus, but he observed a million things he did not put in the book.  He makes himself visible as he goes along, just as he makes his setting and characters take shape by adding this piece, and now this one, and now this one.

The other mode of the novel is a clean limited third person, the other Flaubert-like narrator, but I am sure we are all tired of hearing about that.  To my knowledge, Tolstoy owes no debt at all to Flaubert but was working out similar aesthetic ideas on his own.  His powers of observation were so strong that they may not have seemed like ideas at all, just the obvious way to turn what he experienced and thought into fiction.

Had he been drunk one might understand it! - Tolstoy and The Cossacks

Have I played the What If He Had Died game before at Wuthering Expectations?  Not once, in all these years, I believe.  It is just another way of thinking about the reputation of an artist.  Maybe I should make it less morbid – if the artist had given up his art, if he had entered a monastery before writing whichever gigantic masterpiece casts shade on his other works.

I am rambling towards The Cossacks (1863), the short novel that would have been Leo Tolstoy’s best book if it had been his last.  After its publication he spent the next six years writing War and Peace (1865/1869); Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych and many more significant works would follow.  Tolstoy would be seen as an innovative writer about war and the life of Russian officers, a theme he pursued from his first published short story (“The Raid,” 1853) through the rest of his career, on to the end of his life, actually, and the sublime Hadji Murad (written 1904 or so).  The emphasis on war would have been even more pronounced, though, if The Cossacks were the end of the bibliography – a mix of stories, The Sevastopol Sketches, and this.  Hemingway still could have picked up his strong Tolstoy influence, assuming Constance Garnett still translated The Cossacks for him.*

So now The Cossacks looks like a dry run for the later books.  Here is the combination of cold description and hot interiority that marks his later war writing; there is a young man tormented by a search for meaning and happiness, Anna Karenina’s Levin in embryo (or, really, in a late adolescence).

The book is a little hard to read on its own, now, is what I am saying.  I have been corrupted by knowledge.

Young Olenin, at risk of gambling away his estate in decadent Moscow, joins the cavalry in search of adventure and purpose.  He is stationed in the Caucasus, living amongst the Cossacks; he spends his time hunting, going on punitive raids against the Chechens, and mooning after his landlady’s spectacular daughter, Maryanka.  She has been promised, more or less, to the dashing, heroic Lukashka, which gives us a love triangle and a story; I have made the book sound a bit soapy, is a violation of its tone which is ironic rather than melodramatic:

'But what desires can always be satisfied despite external circumstances?  What are they?  Love, self-sacrifice.'  He was so glad and excited when he had discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth, that he jumped up and began impatiently seeking some one to sacrifice himself for, to do good to and to love.  'Since one wants nothing for oneself,' he kept thinking, 'why not live for others?'.  (XX)

Olenin has this revelation of selfless purposefulness while lost in the woods, alone, so his impatience to do good is amusingly pointless.  And when he finally does make a sacrifice a bit later, giving a horse to Lukashka , the results are misunderstood (“Had he been drunk one might understand it!” Lukashka thinks) and eventually destructive.

Another day or two with The Cossacks, I guess.  The translation is by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

*  Or perhaps Tolstoy’s first book, the pseudo-memoir Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-7) would be best known.  It is awfully good, too.

You know the shell is heading in your direction - Tolstoy's early war writing

I had the idea that I was going to somehow balance Early Tolstoy week between Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-7) and the exactly contemporary Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), three stories about the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.  In the 1850s, Tolstoy began his career by writing War and also Peace, but in separate books.

The Sevastopol Sketches at times resemble some form of reporting, and are certainly based on Tolstoy's own observations.  My understanding is that they were treated as reporting, as dispatches from the front.  But they are fictional, obviously fictional.  The first sketch, "Sevastopol in December" takes "you," a young officer like Tolstoy, on a tour of the city, all the way to the battlements, with detours to a field hospital and a tavern.  The hospital scene not much less grisly than it would be in a novel today, so fair warning to the squeamish.  Let me just swerve around that section and pull out a bit of Tolstoyan battlefield psychology:

At the moment you know the shell is heading in your direction, you are bound to think it is going to kill you; but a feeling of self-respect will sustain you, and no one will observe the knife that is lacerating your heart.  When, however, the shell sails past, leaving you unscathed, you will recover your spirits and be seized, if only for a moment, by a sense of relief that is unutterably pleasant. (199)

The second story, "Sevastopol in May," hops around among a group of officers - the main characters in the Sevastopol Sketches are all officers - on a more or less ordinary day.  I was startled by how much Tolstoy's officers are motivated by vanity.  Sometimes they want to be brave, but mostly they want to look brave, to expose themselves to as little danger as possible while maximizing their visibility.  And, as one might guess, the importance of looking, or being, brave varies from one moment to the next when the officer is actually in battle.  Tolstoy is insightful, so perhaps my surprise is that this unflattering portrait of the Russian officers was so easily published.

The center of this story is an extraordinary scene in which two officers take cover just before a shell explodes.  Both expect to die; one does, one does not.  If there is any doubt that the Sketches are fiction, the detailed interior thoughts of a man just before his death should remind us that, however truthful the story seems, Tolstoy is making it up, since he did not experience dying in battle.

'Thank God, I'm only contused,' was his first thought, and he tried to touch his chest with his hands - but his arms seemed to be bound fast, and his head felt as though it were caught in some kind of vice.  Soldiers flickered past his gaze - and he found himself unconsciously counting them: 'One, two, three - ah, that one in the tucked-up greatcoast is an officer,' he thought; then there was a flash, and he wondered if it had been a mortar or a cannon; a cannon, more likely; and now there was some more firing, more soldiers going past - five, six, seven. (242)

The bald declaration at the end of the chapter, by the plain old omnisicent narrator, that the officer "had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter," seems entirely unnecessary, a bit of clumsiness that Tolstoy will learn to excise.  Many passages, though, would not seem out of place in War and Peace.  It all sounds like Tolstoy.  What a powerful writer.

Quotations from The Cossacks and Other Stories, tr. David McDuff, Penguin Classics, 2006.

Are there blue hares? - Tolstoy looses the bindings

A couple of bits from Childhood (1852), not presented for any particular reason besides their existence:

The collection of books on his own shelf, if not so large as ours, was even more miscellaneous.  I remember three of them: a German pamphlet on the manuring of cabbages in kitchen-gardens (minus a cover), one volume of a History of the Seven Years' War, bound in parchment with a burn at one corner, and a complete course in hydrostatics.  Karl Ivanych spent most of his time reading and had even injured his eyesight doing so; but except for the Northern Bee he never read anything else. (Ch 1).

I had only blue paint; but for all that I took it into my head to draw a picture of the hunt.  After representing in very lively style a blue boy on a blue horse, and some blue dogs, I stopped, uncertain whether one could paint a blue hare, and ran into papa's study to consult him.  Papa was reading something and in answer to my question 'Are there blue hares?' replied without lifting his head, 'Yes, my dear, there are.'  (Ch. 11)

Young Nikolai watches ants, and bars their way with a twig.  His father and the estate steward do the accounts on an abacus.  Nikolai, leaving the estate, kisses the servants goodbye "and the smell of tallow from their heads excited in me something like the annoyance irritable people feel" (Ch. 14).

I could go on and on, and perhaps already have.  All of this occurs in the course of a little more than a day, before anything at all happens in Childhood.  The day is, in fact an extraordinary one - it is the day before ten-year-old Nikolai leaves his country home to live in Moscow.  A hunt is organized, and a picnic.  The tutor, that reader of the course in hydrostatics, will be dismissed (there are a few very funny scenes about him), but on second thought, he can come with.  The hourly existence of the boy, though, is just as it is, no more or less real or interesting than on any other day.

James Wood recently needed an example of a "reality-artist," whatever that is, and reached for Tolstoy:  "When one first reads Tolstoy, one feels the bindings being loosed, and the joyful realization is that the novel is stronger without the usual nineteenth-century appurtenances—coincidence, eavesdropping, melodramatic reversals, kindly benefactors, cruel wills, and so on." 

I have no stake in the argument Wood is making, or not making - I am currently enjoying Robert Louis Stevenson's improbable Kidnapped (1886) about as much as I enjoyed Childhood, Boyhood, Youth - but that description is right, and it fits Tolstoy from his very beginnings as a writer.  He makes peers like Balzac or Dickens, whatever their strengths, seem so convention-bound.  Tolstoy wrote in the service of Truth.  His integrity is bracing.  Thank goodness, though, not everyone writes like him.  We, or I, need fantasists and pranksters, too.