#5 Tolstoy: A Life

Today marks the first episode of this new format I am trying out. In today's episode, we dive deep into the life and mind of Leo Tolstoy, the genius writer behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 

We’ll discuss the makings of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's origins, and his ever-complicated relationships with Russia, women, and God. 

I hope you enjoy this new format. 

Feel free to email me: to.chrisdiaz@gmail.com

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@christopherdiazz

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

His isolation and the privilege of his birth partly explain why in the second half of his career Tolstoy managed to get away with being such a trenchant and violent opponent of the government. At various points in the last two decades of his life, it seriously began to look as though Tolstoy's was the only voice which the Russian government did not dare to muzzle. The socialist revolutionaries had very largely been locked up or killed or sent into exile. Many of the religious dissidents were breaking salt in the minds of Siberia, or silently cowering before the censor. Tolstoy, with a simplicity which seems almost childish, mysteriously got away with denouncing the cruelty of the army, indeed the unlawfulness of war itself, the inequality of the social hierarchy, the squalor and oppression of the urban poor, the destitution of the starving, the criminality of the censor, he got censored, but as will inevitably happen unless the government actually takes the step of killing a writer, his hand went on steadily moving across the page. Even though the solutions which he preached to the problems of the 19th century were ones which only a small proportion espoused pacifism, vegetarianism, reading the gospels, and knitting your own clothes, he stood for something much bigger and more important than just himself or his ideas. So long as he was there, huge numbers of Russians felt that it was not quite impossible to believe in the prospect of individual liberty, the survival of individual dignity in the face of a cruel, faceless, bureaucratic tyranny. It was for this reason that when he died, there were demonstrations all over Russia, students rioted, anarchists were rounded up by the police, thousands of people followed his coffin to the place of burial, and after the death of Tolstoy, Russia looked for more desperate solutions to its difficulties. But the chief reason why the government had left him alone is to be found in the reverence which the Russians feel for literary genius. The word has power in Russia, which is why its greatest exponents have nearly always ended up behind bars or dying in exile. In Tolstoy, successive Tsars and their advisors recognized that they had a literary monument too large to dislodge. He had begun his career gently, with a few semi-autobiographical scenes from childhood, with short stories based on his experience in the army, and with sketches of the suffering at the siege of Sebistoul, his fellow writers such as Turchenev and Dostoevsky recognized that a great practitioner had arrived in their midst. But nothing was to prepare the world for his two greatest achievements, War and Peace and Anna Karanina. In the latter novel, he wrote one of the great love stories of the world, but in War and Peace there was something much grander. The novel, in fact, evolved out of Tolstoy's purely private preoccupations and fantasies with his own family. But its first episodes had no sooner appeared than his readers knew that he had done something much more. He had created a national epic to which all Russians could respond. In telling the story of Napoleon's invasion and retreat from Moscow, Tolstoy had become a national institution. It was a story to which every patriotic Russian could and does respond. In the accuracy of its portraiture and all its emotional faithfulness, in its abundant vivacity, it is also one of the great works of literature of the world. That was an excerpt from AN Wilson's amazing biography of Leo Tolstoy, which is the book we'll be discussing on today's podcast. In this episode, we'll discuss the makings of War and Peace and Anna Karanina, Tolstoy's origins, and his ever complicated relationships with Russia, woman, and God. For over a year now, I've been obsessed with Leo Tolstoy. And not just his monumental works like War and Peace and Anna Karanina, but I've been obsessed with him as a person. And I found the deeper I go into his life and in the times in which he lived, the more captivated I am by the genius writer Leo Tolstoy. And on today's episode of the podcast, I want to share my obsession with you and see what lessons we can learn from Tolstoy's life and mind. My name is Chris, and this is the Lasting Literature Podcast, a podcast where we dive deep into the life and minds of great writers. If you enjoy this episode, please consider following, subscribing, commenting, but most importantly, share it with a friend who you think would enjoy. Back to the episode. So from that passage I opened with in the forward of A.N. Wilson's biography, we can already see from the beginning of Wilson's biography, Tolstoy's massive impact on Russia and on the world. He was a national hero of his time and frankly of our time, and he was devoted to truth. And it's important to say that a devotion to truth was not common in the Russian literary world at the time he was living. Later on in the biography, Ann Wilson quotes Tolstoy, saying, quote, The hero in my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I've tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is truth. And then Wilson comments in the next paragraph saying, The last hero you should choose in Russia if you want to get in on the literary world is truth. Yet Tolstoy devoted his life and his work to truth, anyways. He devoted his life to a a sort of timeless excellence that I find utmost inspiring. And I'm just so enthusiastic about this biography and about his devotion to truth. So let's get into some more biographical details of Tolstoy, starting with page 11, Origins. Tolstoy was born on August 28th, 1928, and he died in 1910. And if you're anything familiar with Russian history, you'll see that he was cocooned between two revolutions, that of December 1825, and of course of October 1917. His mother died on August 4th, 1830, and he was too young to remember her. He lost his mother when he was barely two years old. He can never remember her face, and no portrait of her survives. It's important to note how much of an impact this has on Tolsto's inner life throughout the rest of his life and all of his work. Just imagine for a second losing your mother at the age of barely two. You're not old enough to remember her. And in Tolstoy's time, there was no picture of her. He wouldn't be able to recognize her face. It's heartbreaking and it affects Tolsto's inner life and all of his work for the rest of his life. His mother's name was Maria Volkonskaya. And forgive me for I'm just gonna say it now, forgive me for my Russian pronunciation of these names. It's gonna be bad for the rest of the video. Just bear with me on that. And if you've read Warren Peace, that name might sound a bit familiar. In Warren Peace, you'll of course know of the Bolkonsky family living at Bald Hills, a family which Tolstoy depicted after his mother's side of the family. Flipping to page 14 of Tolstoy's biography, Wilson says, All this has small enough importance in terms of the book's plot, but the personal significance for Tolstoy is obvious in depicting her, speaking of Tolstoy's mother, in his novel, he changed one letter in his mother's surname and left her Christian name unaltered. What he was contemplating in the grand military sweep of his epic were huge questions such as the cause of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the past of Europe, the future of Russia. But as he reconstructed Prince Bolikonsky's selfish reflection, Tolstoy was contemplating the no less important historical mystery of his own birth. And then flipping a couple of pages ahead in the biography. For Tolstoy, always the destiny of Russia and the destiny of his own family were inseparable, and both are not merely ingredients of his art, they are its primary force, motivation, and inspiration. Okay, so now going ahead a bit to when Tolstoy was nine in 1837, he and his siblings lost their father. His father had gone into town on business and dropped dead in the street. And interesting enough, some of the family thought he was murdered by the servants. Which, again, if you're familiar with Russian literary history, it parallels the death of Dostoevsky's father. But in in Tolstoy's case, the spec this speculation was groundless and there was no evidence of anything of the sorts. It's just interesting that that parallel exists. Like all aristocratic children of the period, they saw very little of their father and had a closer relationship with their old grandmother, who was to die the following year. So she was to die in 1838. And then after the death of two pre I guess three previous guardians, their mother, their father, and then their old grandmother. The children were then to be under the guardianship of their father's sister, Alexandra, who was, as Wilson puts it, a character out of a Dostoevsky novel. But then after not too long, she died too. And once again, the children were displaced and put under another guardianship to their to their father's only surviving sister. Um quoting from page 28 of the biography. None of them, meaning the Tolstoy and his siblings, understood at once what the significance of Aunt Alexandra's death was to be. It was the fourth major death in Tolstoy's first 13 years of life, and in terms of his destiny over the next six years, it was the most crucial. The losses of his parents and his grandmother were incalculable, but the loss of his mildly mad Aunt Alexandra actually displaced him, his brothers, and his sister. It uprooted them from their familiar scenes at Yasnaya, Polyana, and Moscow, and it wrenched them away from the one person for whom they they all felt the warmest affection. For their aunt, Tatiana was in fact only a very distant relative, and she had no legal right over the children. Their guardianship passed naturally to their father's only surviving sister, who we'll call Countess Pelgaya. So the differences between these three aunts, just to make it clear, is Aunt Alexandra was the aunt that died. Aunt Tatiana is an informal aunt. She's she's not a relative, she's basically just a close family friend. But the children were deeply attached to her. And when Aunt Alexandra died, the children were removed from Aunt Tatyana's presence because she had no legal rights for guardianship of these children. And then they were moved to this third aunt, Aunt Pilklaya. So, needless to say, Tolstoy's entire childhood was surrounded by death and rearrangement from new guardian to the next. And you can imagine how displacing this might feel as a young child who is constantly moving from one parent, one parent to another, one guardianship to another. You're feeling displaced, you're feeling like you can't plant your feet. It must be extremely disorienting. So now we're now we're moving on to chapter two, which Wilson opens with Tolstoy lived in Kazan from 1841 to 1847. Though there were visits to various family estates during this period, his teens were a kind of exile. So when Tolstoy was in his teens and living in Kazan with his aunt Pelt Glaya, he must have been feeling very displaced. It was during this time in Kazan the 16-year-old Tolstoy discovered the writer who had the single greatest influence on Tolstoy's thought. That writer was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tolstoy used to say later that as a young teenager, he so idolized Rousseau that he wished he could have worn his portrait round his neck in a locket like a holy icon. In other conversations, he would imply that this actually had been his practice. If so, neither the locket nor anyone else's memory of it survives. Also, as an old man, he liked to say that he had read the whole of Rousseau many times, even his dictionary of music, but it is hard to establish how much of the Jinvan philosophy Tosto had managed to get a hold of in Kazan. Rousseau's appeal to him need not be labored. The acceptance of the near ungovernability of sexual passions, the idea that though the dogmas of the old religion be false, the kernel of moral truth contained within them can be rediscovered and made new. The love of simplicity, rural life, and the idea that virtue is best practiced in retirement from society. How exciting all this must have seemed when he read an upstairs room in Aunt Pelgaya's household. Rousseau, early associated in Tulso's mind with his mother, was the exact opposite of everything Aunt Pelgaya stood for. Her household and her way of life emphasized social distinctions in the crudest possible manner. Rousseau taught the equality of all men. Aunt Pelgaya's soires, where you could hardly hear yourself speak above the silly chatter, were full of loud, noisy, happy people. The gloomy adolescent Lev Nikolaevich read in Rousseau that wisdom was best learnt in solitude. Aunt Pelagaya believed that religion consisted in obedience to the church and a love of her rituals. Rousseau, that true religion consisted in a rejection of church dogmas and a contemplation of one's own inner soul and conscious. So as we can see, Aunt Pelgaya's household was not aligned with what Tolstoy was learning through Rousseau. And one can imagine Tolstoy having these observations in his youth, seeing again as we as we read at the soires or the balls, or I guess the parties of Aunt Pelgaya's household didn't align with what Rousseau was teaching and his line of thought. So it's you can see these like contradicting one another and pushing up against each other. And Tolstoy eventually, and as we know, chose Rousseau's line of thought, thankfully. And as Tolstoy grows older, he then enrolls in Kazan University. And initially he does well. One of his professors at the time noted down his impressions of the boy. The professor says, quote, I gave him an exam today and noticed that he had no desire to study at all. He has such expressive facial features and such intelligent eyes that I am convinced that with good will and independence he can develop into a remarkable person. But then as his time goes on at university, he was then physically isolated into the university clinic, which is when Tolstoy first begins to keep a diary, which is very exciting for us as readers. He writes, quote, It is six days since I entered the clinic. I've had gonorrhea. From the source, you usually get it. And then in the next paragraph, Wilson says, It is on the day that he wrote those words that the true history of Tolstoy may be said to have begun. After all, the reason we value him and find his story of interest is as in imagination. Tolstoy was to have some adventures. He saw a man's head being chopped off in Paris. He took part in the Crimean War. But for the most part, the out the outward circumstances of his life were no more interesting than any other Russian nobleman of the 19th century. What singles him out is what happened when he began to keep a diary, a record which was to develop eventually into the practice of fiction. With many gaps, he was to remain a compulsive diarist until the last days of his life. The diary was confessional, a notebook, a catalog of moral laws. It was never to be the chatty, observant sort of diary. It was not a diary which focused much attention on other people. Center stage, always, and for the rest of his life, was Tolstoy himself. Because of this, the diary is a vehicle less of self-record than of self-projection. He is not giving an account of what he is actually like so much as projecting a version of what he would like to be like. It is in the process of projection and transformation that the origins of Tolstoy's fiction are found. And then on April 17th, Tolstoy asks himself in his diary, What is the purpose of a man's life? And he decided that it was development, the development of everything that exists. It appears to mean that Tolstoy felt that he must realize all his potential and talents. For he adds, quote, I would be the unhappiest of men if I could not find a purpose for my life, a purpose both general and useful. Useful because my my immortal soul, when fully mature, will pass naturally into a higher existence and one that is appropriate to it. So my whole life will be a constant, active striving to achieve this one purpose. I really like this passage because as I'm reading through these biographies of the great writers of our world, um, I notice they all keep diaries, they all keep journals of some sorts, and it's always and they always keep it before they begin writing, whatever their main work is. These diaries are supposed to be meant as preparatory work. I think it's extremely important to be keeping a diary and to carry your life about with you. Because again, it's preparatory work for what your main body of work will be. So that's just uh, I guess a an action point is to keep a diary, keep a journal, whatever you want to call it. And so Tolsto ends up leaving university after the inheritance from his parents was made formal, which I mean I don't blame him. Part of his inheritance included Yesnaya Paliana, which would be his forever home. And this is the and I'm quoting the last two paragraphs of chapter two. Inheritance was made formal on April 11th, 1847, shortly after Tolstoy left the clinic. The exams still loomed up and he had resolved to work hard for them, but his resolution lasted precisely a week. On the 19th, he asked for permission to withdraw from the university and leaving his older brothers still studying there, he left Kazan for Yasnaya Pollyana. To speak of Tolstoy deciding to abandon his university studies or making up his mind to leave Kazan implies both a finality and a rationality which were not present. The only rational explanation for his departure is that there was no explanation. On impulse, he decided to go back to Anti, not for the last time in his tempestuous existence, inner crisis was resolved by flight. And so as we continue on in the biography of Tolstoy, Tolstoy isn't entirely sure what to do with his time at Yesnaya Paliana now that he's left university. It's around this time where he writes the following in his diary. I have often heard it said of me, hollow man, he lives without an aim. And I have even often said it of myself, not just so as to reiterate the words of someone else, but I feel in my soul that it is bad to live like this and that one needs to have an aim in life. But what is one to do in order to become a man of action and live with an aim? One can't give oneself an aim. I've already tried countless times and it did not work. One needs not to invent an aim but to find one which is already in existence and which I have but to recognize. I think I have found some sort of aim, universal knowledge and a development of all my faculties. And one of the best means of attaining this is to keep a Franklin journal in the diary every day. I write down what I have done wrong. One can't give oneself an aim. This idea that you don't choose your passions, but your passions choose you, I've found to be entirely true for the great writers of the Western world. It's an important idea and one that I think every human being should discover for themselves and aim to find out. It brings me back to high school. I hated literature and writing while it was shoved down my throat. I hated it. I couldn't stand it. No matter how much I tried to force myself to like it, it didn't work. My teachers couldn't get through to me, my parents didn't get through to me, and of course I had to be willing to accept it. And the funny part and honestly very interesting part about all great writers is that they all come to it and under different circumstances, different ways of approaching it and tuning into their genius. What I'm trying to say, and what I think Tolstoy was saying, is that there is no universal map to finding one's true passion. You'll hit dead ends and make a whole lot of U-turns where that is absolutely necessary. Because there's no such thing as wasted endeavors. It's all leading you to something grand and unique. And so after a few years of idleness at Yasnaya Polyana and racking up debts, Tolstoy joined his brother in the Caucasus Mountains and entered the military service. And this is from page 77. It was the Caucasian situation which immediately affected Tolstoy. It is somehow emblematic of what the future would hold, that his literary career which really began in the Caucasus should have come to birth far from the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is also somehow typical that though there were strong political reasons for his brother's fellow soldiers to be in the Caucasian mountains for Tolstoy, it was a purely personal journey. Of all the Russian writers in the last century, he is the one who fits least easily into any intellectual circle or political category. From the beginning, he is alone. And so now flipping to page 97, we get a glimpse into what the literary world thought of Tolstoy's first published piece of fiction. Turjinev read childhood in the comparative comfort of his internal exile, having been arrested some months before his injudiciously adultery obituary of Gogol, Dostoevsky also. Read the September issue of the contemporary in his place of exile in Siberia. The thing was just signed LNT. Initially, Dostoevsky was overwhelmingly impressed, but then the irresistible awkwardness and jealousy, which were always the characterize the two writers' refusal to have any relations with one another, overrode his literary judgment. I like Lev Tolstoy enormously, he wrote later. But in my view, he won't write much of anything else. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Dostoevsky's instinct must have told him. From now onwards, Tolstoy was a writer. That is a man whose life is defined by what he is or is not writing. Okay, so Tolstoy has now published his first work of fiction and is now identifying as a writer. So let's can let's continue on in the biography. But before we do that, an important idea I want to discuss is a practice that all great writers share, and one will see again and again as we continue this podcast. That's the practice of carrying your life with you. So here's from page 105. Tolstoy, like all true writers, carried his life about with him, created the very cocoon of observant detachment, indolence, and sensuality in which a creative mind flourishes. And so again, we'll we'll be seeing this idea, and as we've already seen with Tolstoy's life, that a writer carries their life with you. To be a great writer and thinker, we have to have a diary or a journaling practice. It's it's necessary. Carry your life with you. Observe, imagine, create. Oscar Wilde, who will be doing an episode on in the future, famously said, quote, I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. Carrying on, Tolstoy then finds himself in the Crimea War and finds it repulsive. And we'll see how this shapes Tolstoy's pacifist thought throughout the rest of his life. Tolstoy was immediately confronted with the fact that warfare is a natural enemy of his hero, truth. Few would fight in the wars if at the time they knew the full truth about them or could foresee the consequences of them. And again, it's during this time, during this war, where Tolstoy begins to identify as a writer and his whole worldview is being shaped. So here's from the next page on 117. Already Tolstoy had recognized and obeyed his vocation to become a writer, but he still could not possibly have known what sort of a writer he was going to be. War and peace lies in the future, but it is here that the seeds of it are sown. He was not so much collecting material, a phrase which implies conscious research, as mopping up an experience which was to be intensely fruitful. Okay, cool. So let's keep moving. Um Tolstoy leaves military service in 1856 and returns to Russia to pursue his literary career. He befriends other writers of his time, most notably Ivan Turjinev, again, who we'll be doing an episode on in the future of this podcast. And let's touch on their relationship a bit more. The relationship between Tolstoy and Turgenev was bound to be volatile, two literary giants, both ambitious and talented. Ivan Turgenov is most known for writing the novel Fathers and Sons, which was published in 1862. And in 1861, Turgenev presented this novel as a manuscript to Tolstoy, and it's a very funny story that I want to read. Turjinev proudly produced a newly completed manuscript of his novel Fathers and Children, and placing his friend on the drawing room sofa, put the masterpiece into Tolstoy's hand. Then he left his guests to savor the experience of reading it alone. When Turjinev returned to the drawing room to see what impression the novel was making upon Tolstoy, he was disconcerted to see the young man stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep. Since both the participants in his marvelous scenes were novelists, that is to say, falsifiers, it is hard to know how much of it actually took place and how much was a fiction in their own brains. Tolstoy improves the story by saying that he opened his eyes and was just able to see Turjinev's back slinking through the door of the room and trying not to be noticed. The animosity between the two writers was real and deep. Those who witnessed it must have hoped that it would all blow over because they had no reasonable grounds for hating one another. But they had something much stronger than that. Grounds enforced by the mysterious jealousy, which is as strong as sex, literary rivalry. Tolstoy went away, but the quarrel nagged at him, and at the first stop on his journey he posted a note to Turgenev reminding him that he had behaved improperly. At the next post station along the road he awaited a reply from Turjinev. There was none. Tolstoy immediately ordered pistols and sent a second letter announcing that he challenged Turjinev to a duel. He hoped that Turjinev would meet him in the woods at the edge of Boglaslova, a place whose name means the word of God. Obviously, this duel never happened, thank God for it, because otherwise we would have been robbed of either one of these literary geniuses. And now the next page. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think that my request would have an effect on you. For I am a doomed man. I can neither walk nor eat nor sleep. It is even wearisome to repeat all this. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my request. Let me know if you receive this bit of paper and permit permit me once more to embrace your heartily, heartily and your wife and all yours. I can write no more. I am weary. Two months later, Turjinev was dead. Okay, so another relationship that we can't avoid talking about is that of Countess Tolstoy. Although their relationship was extremely turbulent over the course of their marriage, a thought that kept repeating in my head while reading this book is how big of a role Countess Tolstoy played in Leo Tolstoy's commercial success, even as their marriage deteriorated into open warfare. Wilson says that something changed in the year Tolstoy was married. What changed in 1862, which was the year of his marriage, was his own life. He was now able to grasp with his imagination that he had a future also. Shakespeare in Sonnet 114 remarks on the extraordinary fact that his love has taught him in alchemy. Tolstoy's marriage was what produced the Shakespearean alchemy in his imagination. Wilson Knight, commenting on Sonnet 114, wrote, Intellectually, Shakespeare is himself baffled. But it has happened. The universe has in fact been stamped with God's signature, and that is how the works of Shakespeare were born. That is also how War and Peace was born. Reading it, we feel the universe stamped with God's signature, but it is doubtful if it would have got written at all had not the manuscripts been copied and stamped with the signature not of God nor of Tolstoy, but of his wife. If you're interested in Countess Tolstoy's side of the story and the select bibliography of this book, which by the way is a great way to explore and get to get new quality recommendations, which I use all the time in my reading. But Wilson sources, the autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoy, and then the diary of Tolstoy's wife, and among others in the select bibliography. Cool. So now we're gonna flip on to page 231 and we're gonna talk about the making of war and peace. Destiny had not allowed Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy the chance to be a man of affairs, meaning he didn't partake in local government or ministries as most aristocratic men of his time did. Okay, continuing. But this did not prevent him with his imagination from fashioning, shaping, and describing the whole story of modern Russia. Nothing less was his ambition as he planned the great epic history of 1805 to 1812, of eighteen twenty-five and of eighteen fifty-six. So though there were periods of great idleness, even during these, the most creative years of his life, such idleness should not be mistaken for literary indifference. A writer is not just at work when he holds a pen in his hand, he needs to allow the work to gestate. And when the work is of proportions of war and peace, the gestation will often be long and apparently idle indeed. So a great lesson to be learned here is that Leo Tolstoy, while writing war and peace, allowed himself to gestate and ruminate on his ideas and on his novel. He put space and time in between when he sat down at his desk and when he lived his life. And what I'm getting at here is that the whole business of writing a novel in a month or even a year is to expect, or rather, to set yourself up to produce a mediocre book. Of course, there are outliers, but if you want to write something great, something that lasts, you need to allow yourself to take time with what you're producing. Which is why I'm not a fan of all these write a novel in a month or write a novel in a week. It's it's not going to create something that lasts. So let the ideas marinate and allow yourself time to think and sit with your what you're working on. Another crucial part of the making of war and peace is, of course, Countess Tolstoy. On page 235, we read Countess Tolstoy's brother Stefan calculated that by the time the book was finished, Tolstoy's wife had written out the equivalent of seven fair copies of the whole work. And she wasn't a mere copyist, for at every stage she advised and commented upon the work, giving intelligent reflections not only upon the content, but also its manner of presentation and publication. All this was squeezed in between her duties as she and her husband both conceived them as a mother and housekeeper. It is one of the most impressive partnerships in literary history. Given Tolstoy's habits of self-doubt and indolence, it is improbable whether without his wife's help and guidance, the work would ever have reached a conclusion. And carrying on, what I find so interesting and even iconic is that while War and Peace was being published, so was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. At the time, novels were serialized, so published in parts. And so both of these novels were released at the same time in the same magazine by the same editor. It looks like this. January of 1866 contained the first 12 chapters of Crime and Punishment, then followed in February, March, and April was 1805, which was the initial title of War and Peace, which took the readers to the end of part two, volume one, and then more crime and punishment, and so on and so forth. So flipping to page 238, biographers and literary historians have made surprisingly little of the fact that Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's masterpieces were both published at the same time in the same periodical and by the same editor. Surprisingly little, too, has been made of the fact that there are distinct echoes each of the other in both the great books. How could they ignore each other? Each writer must have felt as he was writing his novel that he was bringing to birth a masterpiece such as Russian literature has never seen. But there in the selfsame publication, there was something of at least comparable greatness. They could not but be astonished. The fact that they were silent about it has allowed their biographers to ignore the singular importance of this literary dog, which does not bark in the night. And then flipping to the next page, there's a good example here of how one senses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky straining to disagree with one another through the medium not of overt public controversy, but through the different artistic presentation of an idea. The differences reveal so much about both men, both as individuals and as writers. Dostoevsky, who is by now preoccupied with an apocalyptic dread of socialism, made the Napoleonic theme an occasion for meditating first on the nature of personal evil, and secondly, something of a prophecy about the shape of things to come. Breskolnikov, who before his redemption through the prostitute Sonya, scorns personal morality and has decided that all the great men in history could be described as criminals, is both a terrifying emanation of a Dostoevskyan idea of human nature and a prophetic figure. Tolstoy's hero in War and Peace, Pierre Bazukov, is completely unlike the crazed murderer Raskolnikov of Dostoevsky's imagination. Pierre, who is to become the Decemberist in the finished novel, is an idealistic fellow who believes in the initial stages of the book that Napoleon is a great deliverer of mankind and gets so carried away with his imagination that he actually imagines himself to be Napoleon. But no one could be further from Raskolnikov. Here we have a case of Tolstoy making one of his characters adopts his own habit of so identifying with a character that he almost imagines himself to be that person. What is most striking of all is that Dostoevsky fundamentally accepts the Napoleonic idea. He accepts, that is to say, the cant that there are men of destiny who change history. Tolstoy, as he labored at his book, was to distance himself further and further from that point of view, and indeed to rewrite history in order to establish his point of view. His idealization of Kutuzov, who appears to sit back and let things happen, who allows the French into Moscow, who allows it to burn, knowing that the great Russian winter and the spirit of the Russian people will eventually be too much for the Napoleonic armies, is only a small part of Tolstoy's Prolox's attempt to distance himself from any point of view which might have come to readers' way when perusing crime and punishment. It is obsessive. In the finished version, we have two appendices and numerous asides assuring us of the falsehood of the Napoleonic idea and grinding on and on about the forces that move nations. And so if you haven't read Crime and Punishment, I highly recommend it. And of course, I recommend reading War and Peace 2. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy never met, though when Tolstoy hears of Dostoevsky's death in 1881, we get an inst an interesting response. And so flipping to page 327, Tolstoy writes after he heard the news of Dostoevsky's death. He wrote, I never saw the man and never had any direct relations with him. And suddenly when he died, I realized that he was the very closest, dearest, and most necessary man for me. I was a writer, and all writers are vain and envious. I at least was that sort of writer. But it never occurred to me to measure myself against him. Never. And then Wilson comments, This is the best commentary on relations between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There was probably no literary rivalry in the vulgar sense between the two giants, but there was an acute consciousness in each of the other, an acutely strong desire on both their parts not to be like each other. Okay, so flipping back in the book to the beginning of chapter 11, titled The Shadow of Death, Wilson opens with this. War and peace was published. Finished. Most writers feel, having completed a book, a sense of imaginative depletion. How can they ever repeat the act? The greater the book, perhaps, the greater the sense of letdown. To be in full physical vigor and have completed at the age of 41 the greatest masterpiece in prose fiction inevitably produced a generalized feeling of gloom. Although I have not been through this state of deflation, Tolstoy's feeling after producing war and peace, I don't doubt that after you feel like your best work is behind you, that you would it would cause a state of gloom and unsureness of what to do next. What's crazy to think about though is the fact that Tolstoy still does have a masterpiece in him, which would be Anna Karanina. But of course, he does not know this yet. Tolstoy spent 1869 deep in reading Schopenhauer, telling his friend Fett, quote, I'm certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant man in the world. End quote. The pessimist philosopher matched his mood perfectly. Also in August 1869, Tolstoy was traveling to look at a new estate where he stopped for the night at an inn in a town called Erasmus. Again, forgive me for my pronunciation. He couldn't sleep, and in the middle of the night, without any warning, he was seized by a terror unlike anything he'd ever experienced. An overwhelming dread of death and of existence itself. On page 251, Wilson writes, The Erasmus experience was a confrontation with the hideous and inescapable fact of death. Life and death somehow merged into one another. He was now unable to think of anything in life without realizing that all action, all feeling, all achievement, all desire would one day be swallowed up and rendered pointless by death. So then he wrote to his wife two days later. I was suddenly overcome by a sadness, a fear and a horror such as I had never before experienced. God grant that no one else should ever experience this. In 1869 to 1872, we can definitely see Tolstoy trying to find what he wants to work on. And like all great and ambitious writers and just people, he can't just sit there in his idleness. He needs to be intellectually stimulated somehow. He tried playwriting. He read voraciously. He read people like Pushkin, Gogel, Molire, Goethe, Shakespeare. He then threw himself into learning ancient Greek. Within three months, he claimed to be able to read Homer. And it's a funny story is that a Greek professor challenged him. He found a Homer text and tested him. And Tolstoy passed, though he stubbornly argued back on every correction. Tolstoy's wife's opinion on the obsession is the following. She says it's called the dead language because it turns one into a dead soul. And then his next obsession was he wrote a children's book known as Azukba, which is translated into alphabet, which is one of his most underrated achievements. He wrote fables, Bible stories, folk tales, an original short fiction designed for peasant children learning to read. On these obsessions, Wilson writes, the artist was unknowingly trying on new masks. Another thing Tolstoy was working on is he made 17 separate attempts to start a novel about Peter the Great. He read widely, filled notebooks with period costume details, and declared it a quote, a magnificent era. The whole secret of Russian life is there. End quote. Unfortunately, the book never came. And so Wilson's diagnosis is precise. Tolstoy could only write from the inside. Peter the Great represented precisely the thing Tolstoy couldn't understand. The psychology of a people who accept tyranny, who seem to want it. Tolstoy finally admitted defeat in March 1873. He says, The era is too remote for me. I cannot put myself in the place of these people. They have nothing in common with us. So a lesson I grasp from this is Tolstoy stays in motion. He doesn't know exactly what he wants to work on or what his calling is, but he keeps moving. He keeps trying new things. This is important for great writers and can be put into practice before writing a novel like War and Peace. And I think it's even more practical before we write something amazing. Try everything. There's no wasted time for the writer. Every endeavor, every false start leads you to something grand and unique. And then following on in Tolstoy's life comes the seeds that would sprout Tolstoy's next novel, which would be Anna Caranina. A quick note there are gonna be spoilers for Anna Caranina that are implied here. Skip ahead if you don't want to know what happens in the plot of Anna Caranina. A neighbor's mistress named Anna was abandoned for a German governess and threw herself under a train. The locomotive shed where her body was taken was close to Yasnaya Paliana, and Tolstoy went to look at the body. And Wilson is blunt about the darkness. In this, most people could not have done it. I know I could not have done that. Wilson compares it to Tolstoy voluntarily watching a guillotine execution in Paris. And then to Charles Dickens habit of visiting morgues to stare at the grotesque corpses. Tolstoy left no record of what he felt standing there. Within a year, he was writing a novel about a woman named Anna who throws herself under a train. Now we're going to move on into the writing of Anna Caranina. So now moving on to the opening of chapter 12, which is titled Anna Caranina, Wilson opens with, What am I frightened of? Of me? Answer the voice of death. I'm here. The voice which he had heard at Erasmus haunted Tolstoy and all his family in the middle of the 1870s. So Tolstoy again is dealing with a lot of death in the 1870s. And in 1874, his beloved Aunt Tanya died after 50 years at Yasnaya Polyana. And then baby Nikolai died of meningitis at 10 months. And then another one of their babies died just hours after birth. On top of that, his elderly aunt Pelgaya followed. Countess Tolstoy was perpetually pregnant, perpetually exhausted, and writing in her diary about, quote, a bestial indifference to everything. She watched her husband and the old aunt play endless card games each evening while she sat knitting. Wilson quotes her, I see in him a kind of emotional death, and it grieves me. This is the kind of life that the Tolstoys were living in while Leo Tolstoy was writing Anna Caronina. The novel's obsession with boredom, marital disappointment, and the closeness of death wasn't a theme Tolstoy chose. It was the air he was breathing. Okay, so then Wilson takes us back to the summer of 1865, the year in which Tolstoy confided to his fan friend Fett he felt at the height of his powers as a writer. Tolstoy had written a remarkable statement on his artistic beliefs. He writes a letter to another author who had sent two of his novels to Tolstoy that were both thinly disguised pieces of autobiography and contemporary propaganda for the reformist point of view. So here's the letter that Tolstoy writes on page 267. Both your novels are written on contemporary themes. Problems of the Zemstavo, literature, and the emancipation of women, etc., obtrude with you in a polemic manner. But these problems are not only not interesting in the world of art, they have no place there at all. Problems of the emancipation of women and literary parties inevitably appear to you important in your literary Petersburg milieu. But all these problems splash about in the little puddle of dirty water, which only seems like an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle. The aims of art are incommensurate, as the mathematicians say, with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seems to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours to such a novel. But if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about 20 years' time by those who are now children and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life and all my energies to it. And so Wilson points out that it's that this letter, although how how profound we may find it, that Anna Karanina itself is the arena in which Tolstoy's self-conflicts and dramas are being fought. So Tolstoy is kind of abandoning his own advice or maybe just not following it, but it turns out to be one of the greatest works of art ever produced. So we kind of question what Tolstoy was thinking back in 1865. And because of Tolstoy's initial belief that art should have nothing to do with contemporary or social problems, in the initial draft of the novel, there is no Levin and no Kitty. The story only revolved around Anna. Therefore, in the first draft, there was no reference to the social and spiritual problems which so preoccupied Levin in the finished book. Tolstoy added Levin about a year into writing in the summer of 1874. Wilson cites critic John Bailey's verdict who says it is Levin who saves the novel. And I would agree with this. Levin does save the novel. While I was reading Anna Caranina, it was Levin's side of the story that I was so preoccupied and just obsessed with reading. It's interesting because Levin is Tolstoy with almost no disguise at all. Levin's dying brother is a portrait of Tolstoy's brother Dmitry. The scene where Levin makes Kitty read his diaries and weep is the exact scenes Tolstoy staged with his own wife before their marriage. His anxieties about peasants and land ownership are Tolstoy's current anxieties barely transposed. A lot of people who read Anna Karanina at the time, such as Turgenev and Henry James, who called the novel loose baggy monsters, complained about the character Levin's portion of the story. Which is fair because Tolstoy completely contradicted himself from his letter on art that we read. But to me, and I found to most readers I've talked to, Levin is what makes the story great. In my opinion, he's what makes the story timeless. Which again is crazy because it completely contradicts Tolstoy's when he said that art should not be used as a use for contemporary social aims. Tolstoy told Fett in September 1873 he was nearly finished, but he was not. The book wasn't completed until 1877. Four years later, there were many interruptions and distractions during the process of writing his novel. In the summer of 1875, he even described Anna Caranina as boring and vulgar and said his only wish was to get it done quickly as possible so he could just move on. But finally, after many years of hard work and distraction, he finally published in serialized form in the same journal and with the same editor who had published War and Peace and Crime and Punishment simultaneously a decade earlier. The coherence the novel projects, especially on our first reading, comes entirely from Tolstoy's pure egotism. Both Anna and Levin are Tolstoy himself. He poured himself into all them simultaneously. The guilty sensualist Steva at the start, the morally earnest Levin at the end, and Anna in the middle, living so intensely that living becomes impossible. So after Anna Caranina was behind him, Tolstoy again was emotionally worn out and had no idea what direction his life should now turn. The author of War and Peace and Anna Caranina was tired. And where else to turn than basically starting to preach your own religion, which is the stories and adventures Tolstoy then goes on after writing his masterpieces. But for now, that's where we're gonna end it. And if you'd like another episode on the rest of Tolstoy's life, which just gets weirder, let me know and I'll make it happen. But for now, before we end this episode, I'd like to give a recommended reading list for those who want to dive further into Tolstoy's sphere. So here's what I would recommend. The obvious one is the biography that this whole episode was based off of, which is A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy. And then out of Tolstoy's work, I would recommend, of course, Anna Karanina, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ivelich, and then I would also recommend of Tolstoy's work, A Confession. A confession is very interesting to read after reading Anna Karanina because it hits on Tolstoy's beliefs and his relationship with religion and the church. And it's interesting because you'll notice that while he was writing Anna Karanina, he was kind of hiding through Levin his own beliefs, but then in a confession, it all just pours out of him. And then next, I would recommend the Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. This has complimentary essays and all of Tolstoy's major works that are a great guide while you read through his novels and religious writings. Next, I would recommend Tolstoy or Dostoevsky by George Steiner. This is a literary criticism book detailing the differences between the two great writers. I found it very interesting. And if you're a fan of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, you probably will too. Next, I would recommend The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin. I'd recommend this book alongside War and Peace. It's a small but dense essay on Tolstoy's belief of the movement of history, which you'll find in the whole of War and Peace, but mainly in the second epilogue. Finally, I'd recommend another credible biography that is titled Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamond Bartlett, which I recommend just as another option for a biography of Tolstoy, depending on if you come across the one we covered today, or this one by Rosamond Bartlett. And so to end off this episode, I want to first thank you for listening. It really means the world to me as I kind of start this pivot on this podcast. But let's end off with a quote from the biography: a pen may not be mightier than a sword, but it reaches more people, and the effects of its wounds can still be felt, like those of a nuclear weapon for generations after the sword has rusted. That's the quote I want to leave you with. A pen is mighty. It might not be, it might not do the initial damage that a sword will do, but its effects are timeless. I would encourage you to keep writing, keep building, and keep striving for timeless excellence. Thank you so much for listening. Our next episode will be on Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I will see you then.