Tolstoy's Stories
Having Faith in Fiction
In What is Art? Leo Tolstoy notes that in biblical narratives, “there was no need to describe in detail, as is done nowadays, Joseph’s blood-stained clothes, Jacob’s dwelling and clothes, and the pose and attire of Potiphar’s wife…” Tolstoy sees in a work that attends to such detail a failing that limits the tale’s universal appeal. Yet this suggests a paradox and a contradiction. The contradiction rests on Tolstoy himself being a producer of the very thing he decried. When he says that modern art cannot satisfy “the demand of universality”, with the work “spoiled by what is called realism”, the 19th century was the great period of the realist novel, and Tolstoy wrote a number of them, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. These are works temporally antithetical to the stories of Joseph and Jacob as Tolstoy fills them with ‘superfluous’ details that “would hinder the conveying of the feeling…” (What is Art?) The paradox rests on the universal Tolstoy sought in shorter works, found, for example, in Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales. In their very brevity, they can seem less universal than didactic, pushing a Christian ethos that may be resisted by enough people to counter any universality Tolstoy believes he is offering. While Tolstoy sees universality in the removal of specifics, others might see proselytising for a particular cause that becomes all the more evident, and thus resistible, in the absence of detail.
We will look at a handful of Tolstoy stories of varying length — ‘Happy Ever After’, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’, ‘Master and Man’, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Require’, ‘Neglect a Fire and It Will Not be Quenched’, ‘Where Love is, There God is Also’, and ‘God Sees the Right, Though He Be Slow to Declare It’. In doing so, we want to rescue Tolstoy from both the apparent contradiction and the ostensible paradox. It is to see in these shorter, often later works, a different emphasis that needn’t negate realism and not just in Tolstoy’s work but in so many other 19th-century writers as well, and to insist that works closer to the parable or the fable are still valid forms. They may not contain the absolute wisdom Tolstoy insists; they do, however, possess truths that could be diluted, even obliterated by over-extension. It isn’t so much that realism is disastrous, but that over-elaboration happens to be. Yet how to define what constitutes over-elaboration? ‘Master and Man’ is a brilliant story that runs to sixty-five pages; ‘The Penitent Sinner’ is a very good one that runs to three. Both have a point to make, but one relies on extension, the other on contraction. In ‘Master and Man’, Vassili, obsessed with making money, takes off in terrible weather conditions, determined to secure a business deal. He and his servant get lost in the snow and, in an uncharacteristic gesture, after trying to save himself to the detriment of his employee, he saves the other man’s life and sacrifices his own. In ‘The Penitent Sinner’, the title character has lived a life of sin and then, at the end of it, determines to gain access to the kingdom of heaven when he bursts into tears and hopes for acceptance. He knocks on Peter the Apostle’s door, but he isn’t allowed in, and then at King David’s door, and again fails to gain entrance. Finally, he tries John the Divine and sees that while Peter and David might have allowed him into the kingdom of heaven based on the weakness of man, John will surely let him in on the basis that he abounds in love. It isn’t man’s weakness he comprehends but God’s boundless affection, “Dids’t not thou, Oh John the Divine, write in thy book that God in Love, and that whoso liveth not, the same known not God?” To refuse the penitent entry would be going against John’s own words, and John admits him into the Kingdom of Heaven.
In both stories, Tolstoy wants to extract a moral, and this isn’t so very different in each tale as they share similarities with many of Tolstoy’s shorter narratives. What the great Russian writer usually proposes is a love for others greater than oneself, the rejection of money and land, an awareness of a misguided sense of religion, and the realisation that egotism needs to be eschewed. One comes away from Tolstoy’s shorter and often later works, well-aware that a moral can, even must, be extracted. Yet Tolstoy believes this must be done universally. He notes that one of the risks of religious art is that it can be too specific, despite the broad number of people it can incorporate into the faith. He says “non-Christian art, by uniting certain people with each other, thereby separates them from other people, so that this partial union often serves as a source not only of disunity but of hostility towards other people.” (What is Art?) He proposes that only good Christian art that is “accessible to all people without exceptions, and which therefore unites them” matters. This isn’t quite the ethnocentric position it might seem, as Tolstoy was dismissive of Russian Orthodoxy and what he called Patriotic art with its “icons, statues, services, churches.” (What is Art?) But he does believe good art based on Christian teachings would be fine and notes the importance of God’s teachings in the Gospel. This is exactly what we find in ‘The Penitent Sinner,’ where a knowledge of the different saints is important for its comprehension. The story may be brief, but the comprehensibility is based on a biblical awareness that isn’t required when reading ‘Master and Man’. Maybe the gospels have to go as well as icons, statues, etc of organised religion if a story is be understood as simply as Tolstoy would wish. While he isn’t impervious to some of the great works of the 19th century, he notes that while he can make sense of earlier 19th-century art, he struggles with work closer to the 20th, and wonders if, since many cannot understand the work he so admires, then he is potentially in no position to judge what is incomprehensible to him. It is work awaiting comprehension that some appear to have grasped and others, including Tolstoy, have not. Yet he also thinks this is different, with artists at the turn of the century producing works that needn’t make sense for more than a few. The artist now says, Tolstoy believes, “I create and I understand myself; if others do not understand me, so much the worse for them.’’ (What is Art?)
This problem has hardly gone away, and a market economy does little to solve the problem. If anything, it exacerbates it in a different direction. The artist who produces with little interest in whether his work can be understood might appear antithetical to the one who produces with only an interest in the work designed for mass consumption. But they are the two poles that can be joined to make a vicious circle: the incomprehensible and the too readily comprehensible. After all, one may comprehend without much difficulty any number of blockbuster films predicated on box-office success, and find incomprehensible numerous modern artworks. But in their way, they can seem to have the same financial imperative. As Robert Hughes says in an essay in Nothing if Not Critical: “Never before have the visual arts been the subject — beneficial or victim, whatever your view of the matter — of such extreme inflation and fetishisation.” The contemporary artwork needn’t be comprehended — it needs to be inflated and fetishised. Its meaning becomes vacuously tautological - it is a great work because to purchase it costs a lot of money. If it makes a lot of money, it must be a great work. Its meaning doesn’t reside in its affect but its effect: in its ability to function in a money market. As Hughes says, “in this way, the disinterested motives of the scholar go hand in hand with the intentions of the art market, to resurrect something, to study and endow it with a pedigree, is to make it salable.” (Nothing if Not Critical) The principle becomes financial, not aesthetic. The Hollywood blockbuster and the obscure artwork find their own way to make large sums of money.
Tolstoy seeks from the artwork a principle that isn’t aesthetic either, but is the inverse of the economic. He wants art to be closely allied to the good, and sees that much art convinces us of non-values, and believes even if many insist that the work is good, it isn’t justifiably so. Tolstoy would be inclined to see in such statements analogous ones that are equally invalid. If someone insists that “…in order to understand one must read, look at, listen to the same work over and over again. But this is not to explain, it is to make accustomed” (What is Art?), Tolstoy reckons the majority have been able to appreciate the highest works of art, as he insists that these are those simple stories from the bible and elsewhere: the fables, folk legends, fair tales, etc. If the majority has lost that ability, is this a problem of the people or of the art? While for Tolstoy this might seem like a rhetorical question, let’s address it as a complicated one, seeing in the Russian writer’s desire for simplicity, the risk of ahistoricity, while noting in the overly historical a zeitgeist-complacency that leaves the work looking no more than of its time. Tolstoy may have had good reason to reject various works he thought could only be comprehended by accustomisation, but this needn’t have caused him to reject his own earlier novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The difference between such works and a fable or parable rests on the combination in the former of comprehension, accustomisation and contextualisation. It is useful in War and Peace to know a little about the Napoleonic period, far from irrelevant to know about a woman’s lack of freedoms next to a man’s in late 19th-century Europe in Anna Karenina. We can still extract from both the importance of a simple life, but the circumstances of the time are pertinent to each book. They insist a little on historical details, as the parable and fable usually do not. It needn’t make one inferior to the other; only significant in different ways. If part of the appeal of the earlier moral tales lies in their relative timelessness, many a work of literature since has rested on its timeliness. The work helps us to understand our moment, while at the same time possessing a purpose strong enough for it to transcend its own immediacy. If art only needed timelessness, then why bother creating anything new at all? The fables and parables, fairy tales and folk myths, would serve our need from one century to the next, and people could get by living practical lives underpinned by the most ancient of wisdom.
Few but the most aesthetically conservative would propose that no new art should be made, or only art that can enter the timelessness of earlier works. And how would the latter be defined? The earlier ones have stood the test of time that newer works couldn’t claim. What sort of arrogance would require an author to write and publish on the assumption that they have created a work of value for many centuries? We might half-agree with Tolstoy that works that can only be understood based on accustomisation, risk less the sort of Maieutics proposed by Socrates, where the individual possesses the notions in principle but that need to be teased out in practice, than the qualities of a charlatan guru who convinces people of a dubious set of values based on brainwashing.
But, of course, aesthetic accustomisation is usually much greater than looking over and over again at the same work of art, no matter the famous William Faulkner remark when, after an interviewer asked him what if a person reads his work two or three times and doesn’t understand it. “Read it four times.” (Paris Review) Many a modernist work does seem to require rereading, as the complex narrative techniques, with unreliable narrators and stream of consciousness, leaves us wondering who is speaking, and might have us going back over material to comprehend it. Yet it is more the awareness of the techniques that matter, and the acclimatisation of a range of works as readily as accustomisation to one text. In an amusing passage from Alasdair Gray’s The Fall of Kelvin Walker, the titular young man looks at a contemporary artist’s work and sees paintings on the wall and another on the canvas, and says, “I cannot understand how a man capable of painting these should waste his time on that.” The painter replies that “the two on the wall are reproductions, the one on the easel is mine.” When Kelvin asks what the artist’s painting is about, he says black and white, and the two men exchange a few words, as Kelvin can see that though in the two reproductions there is a lot of brown and blue in the work, they aren’t about brown and blue — “they’re about God creating man and about the birth of Venus…” They are about the things they represent, not about the tools that are being used. To understand the art the young artist wishes to create is to understand the formal questions it is asking.
Tolstoy would see such questions as settled and pointless, as he works through the various arguments made theoretically for art by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kant, Voltaire and Diderot, and looks at questions of disinterest, beauty and taste, before concluding that “art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experiences, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.” (What is Art?)) From one angle, this seems a profound claim and resembles the young Kafka’s wish that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” (Letters to Family, Friends and Editors) From another, it is an odd belief: an artist needn’t experience anything in their wish to convey it as artistic expression. One needn’t have grieved to write an account of grieving, nor have loved romantically to write about a love affair. The artist has only to understand grief and romantic love to write about them, not to experience them, even if experience would be a very good way to comprehend them. But many who experience these feelings have no wish, or lack the ability, to express them artistically. The wish and the ability to explore grief and romantic love are far more important than the experience of them.
Yet what we might agree with Tolstoy over is the directness of expression: with the need to see artistic tools as simply the means to convey thoughts and feelings as directly as possible, or at least agree that this is what Tolstoy very successfully achieves in his short stories. Some might insist that the moral to be found in many of them is repetitive, with the writer again and again returning to self-abnegation and Christian decency. Whether it is Vassili in ‘Master and Man’, the literally angelic Simon in ‘That Whereby Men Live’, or the central character Aksenoff in ‘God Sees the Right Though Slow to Declare It’, who forgives a man who ruined his life, Tolstoy offers a consistent angelicism, believing that man mustn’t seek material self-improvement and must refuse retribution. Yet rather than seeing repetition in the message, better to see variety in the narrative exploration. Tolstoy may want to convince us of Christian values over materialistic and retributive ones, but what makes him an important writer, even in minor works next to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, is the variety in the telling.
This is, nevertheless, where the story must develop, as if there is a necessary tension between the brevity of the tale and the exploration of its theme. If the story is too brief, the moral can appear too assertive, and this is why we are inclined to disagree with Tolstoy’s claim about an experience conveyed. When someone relates an experience or expresses an opinion, it is often with brevity greater than when they explore a feeling or an idea. They know what they have experienced and know what they think - or at least assume they do. But imagination is an elaborate activity, and while it wouldn’t be true to say that Tolstoy’s stories are often inadequate next to his long fictions, the most memorable are usually those that elaborate on the theme, rather than quickly stating it. If ‘The Penitent Sinner,’ as well as ‘Labour, Death, and Disease’ and ‘How the Little Devil Atoned for the Crust of Bread’, are limited works next to the longer stories (let alone the longer novels), it rests on missing this elaborative, imaginative quality.
Before saying anything about the limitations of the latter two stories, having already addressed ‘The Penitent Sinner’, it is important to state this isn’t necessarily about length. There are fully imagined stories that are as short or shorter than these three, including Hemingway’s ‘A Clean Well Lighted Place’ and ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, Borges’ ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Lottery of Babylon’, and Carver’s ‘Fat’and ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ They are not propped up by moral certitude, but contained by the limits of their physical or metaphysical worlds. ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ takes a moment in a couple’s life and asks to elaborate around an unspoken but clear deed (an abortion), ‘Fat’ muses how an enormous man a waitress serves in a diner may have changed her life, and ‘The Circular Ruins’ explores the infinite possible existences of a dreamer dreaming a dreamer dreaming a dreamer. The stories are interludes in a life or the limits of our epistemological worlds, and what we can know.
But some of Tolstoy’s short stories make perhaps too clear a point in the brevity of their expression. In ‘Labour, Death, and Disease’, God creates men who do not need to work, have access to clothing, food and shelter, and are immune from disease and fretting over death, aware of their deaths, at a hundred. But this didn’t make people happy, and so God forced upon them labour, but they divided it into groups and engaged in various disputes over God. He removes the designated time of death and sees no improvement, as many are scared they might die at any moment, and instead of being aware of their potential impending mortality, some exploit others and live idle lives. Eventually, God allows man to contract diseases, but this doesn’t help much either, with people failing to unite in the prevalence of the ill. The poor are exploited by the wealthy to look after them, over their own sick relatives. Eventually, God leaves humanity to it, and over time, they adjust to their lives and even start to become happy as they live in concord with each other, aware that death could take them at any moment and see that it is best to live in harmony with their fellow humans.
Tolstoy’s point would seem to be twofold, keeping in mind what he says in What is Art? and what keeps coming up again and again in the stories. Love conquers all, and assertive interventions are of little use — even God’s. But the story also contains a potential irony that it would seem Tolstoy wouldn’t wish us to entertain. If God is more useful leaving people to it, over intervening in their lives, why do we need God at all? Tolstoy’s quietist claim — a Christian notion based on the tranquil and the passive — makes potential sense from a human perspective. But it can seem self-defeating when it incorporates the deity into it as well. The story potentially gets caught between the assertive and the philosophic, between arriving at a moral claim and the questioning of an ethos. If we insist that it isn’t chiefly an issue of length that makes Tolstoy stories like ‘The Penitent Sinner’ and ‘Labour, Death, and Disease’ weaker than the Borges, Carver and Hemingway ones we have invoked, it rests partly on the Tolstoys being caught between the form and message they insist upon (and the reliance in the former on the presence of the Gospels), and in the latter, the ambiguity that cannot be suppressed, but isn’t quite acknowledged. Tolstoy may understandably have wanted to produce fables for his time, but the time might not be so readily amenable to the tales Tolstoy wished to press upon his moment. In different ways, the stories by Borges et al acknowledge limits that the stories exist within, while in ‘The Penitent Sinner’ and ‘Labour, Death and Disease’, Tolstoy wishes to impose on the age a morality that demands an ethos, and either insists too strongly on the biblical, or arrives at a potential contradiction the work would rather not entertain.
To explain this further, we can examine ‘How the Little Devil Atoned for a Crust of Bread’, all the while acknowledging that Tolstoy, even in the most minor of works, is a significant writer. In this story, the little devil of the title steals a crust of bread from a plough worker who accepts it goes missing, and is accepting of its absence, believing if somebody has stolen it then they may well have needed to eat it far more than he did. The chief Devil is annoyed by the little devil’s failure and threatens to douse him in Holy Water, unless within three years he succeeds in destroying the tranquillity of the peasant. Instead of this time indulging in a cruel deed, the little devil returns as a pilgrim and helps the peasant grow his crops. While other farmers sow their seeds on low ground where their corn is ruined by the heavy rains, the little devil suggests to the peasant that he plant on higher ground and, in time, he thus has an abundance of corn. The pilgrim proposes that with the excess grain, the peasant makes vodka and,soon enough, the excessive drinking ruins not just the peasant but others in the community. The chief devil is impressed by the seeds of discontent sown and asks him how he did it, and the little devil says he did so with fortune rather than misfortune, allowing the peasant to create an overabundance of grain and turning it into the vodka that divided the community.
Tolstoy makes clear that one has to be wary of one’s good fortune, that abundance is a curse, and that man has a propensity to exhibit his dark side given an opportunity. It would be a great tale to tell someone boasting of their success in life, and can be compared to ancient fables like the Midas touch and the goose that laid the golden egg. In each instance, the reader is better accepting their lot, rather than pursuing any more than they need. Yet if we already have Midas and the golden egg, do we need further variations on, and more recent renditions of, the story? The answer might be yes if the newer versions create complexity or elaboration in the telling. ‘Master and Man’ isn’t so very different from ‘How the Little Devil…’ but takes elaborate form as Tolstoy immerses us in Vassili’s and his servant Nikita's predicament. Tolstoy conveys very vividly how wilful Vassili is and how dutiful his servant is expected to be. But rather than this being a story about greed and its comeuppance, which it contains, it is more an account of a realisation: Vassili has lived under the assumption that making money makes him happy, only to find that what makes him happier still is helping another person survive. The story isn’t just a lesson to be learned but also a drive to be converted, transformed. Rather than a transcendental tale about how easy it is to destroy a person like the peasant when he has a bit of luck, the story conveys to us the importance of the transformative as Vassili’s drive shifts from selfish to selfless. In itself, this wouldn’t be of much importance — and is there in countless tales telling us we need to live more selfless lives. But one of the advantages of paying such attention to the wilfulness of Vassili, is to illustrate that what matters isn’t the accumulation of wealth, but the difficulty in finding a subject for one’s will.
“At present I am certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men” (Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1: 1847-1894), and such a claim might reside in Tolstoy’s awareness that characters like Vassili think they wish for greater wealth when they could just as readily seek greater purpose. Wealth is merely amongst the most obvious manifestations of the wilful, but that doesn’t mean one needs to reject wealth for Christian ends — to see it is easier for that camel to pass through the needle’s eye than for a rich man to get into heaven. For a rich man to discard his wealth would be another version of manifestation: he gives up his money for an executive suite in the afterlife. It is too clearly in the realms of representation, no matter if it happens to be in the arena of the immaterial. It will have a representational cause and effect: a person forgoes money and gains a place in paradise. But all there really is, is a will willing. As Schopenhauer says, “that human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieve nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom, and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is itself valueless.” (Essays and Aphorisms) Schopenhauer doesn’t see particular acts as sinful but that being itself is sinful - yet in a very perverse variation of original sin: “all the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified, and thus merely a commentary on the affirmation of the will to live.” (Essays and Aphorisms)
Survival is itself sinful, but this only leaves suicide or self-sacrifice: the first destroys the self to destroy the will; the second protects the Other and subsequently destroys oneself. The advantage of the latter is that the will wills life even if it isn’t one’s own, and this is exactly what happens to Vassili. He moves from the self-serving to the self-sacrificing; Tolstoy needs the sixty pages of the story to show the will following its path, and changing its representational purpose within its willing. The Russian writer may wish us to read in Vassili’s act redemption, but its success as a work of art isn’t to convince us of his faith in God, but in the character’s willingness to apply his will to a task different from the self-serving. Vitally, the question becomes can the will will differently? Perhaps Tolstoy would insist that only God can make us will contrary to our apparent goals, and nobody would deny that many a work of transformation has contained within it the religious: Crime and Punishment, The Razor’s Edge, Brideshead Revisited, and a few of Tolstoy’s own works, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Transformation hints at or confirms transcendence. But what if transformation is enough; if a person can acknowledge the limitations of their ambitions without finding a still higher one in faith? Rather than seeing Vassili finding God, he finds in helping another human a pleasure greater than he found in accumulating money and land. It is as though he discovers it through the hardships his body endures during the increasingly arduous journey. He can see, through his own difficulties, those of his employee and wants to save the servant’s life over his own.
While at the beginning of the story, he is thinking chiefly of a good deal on some timbre and which is why he sets out with Nikita in the first place, and why he still insists pressing on, even as the weather conditions get worse, by the end it, it is as if the vivid conditions of life have taught him that the wealth he has extracted is the same environment that is now to kill him. He finds himself in the world much more than when he was accumulating wealth in it, and Tolstoy shows Vassili passing through still greater selfishness before his determination to save Nikita’s life. He reckons he might be able to survive alone and thinks, “it would be nothing for him to die…what can his [servant’s] life matter to him? He has nothing much to lose with it, whereas I have much to gain with mine.” While Nikita lies there shivering on the point of agony, he has faith in God and knows he isn’t alone. Vassili takes off on his own with the horse, only to find himself getting nowhere and returning to Nikita and the sledge. When he finds Nikita saying he is dying of cold, he takes it upon himself to save him. Though he says with the same boastful tones he would use when speaking of sales or purchase, now he does so in the interest of saving his fellow man rather than competing with him. He feels no greater joy than keeping his servant alive. “Nikita is alive…and so therefore am I.” He then thinks about his money and his store, his house and his sales, and “he could not understand that man whom men called Vassili Brekhunoff could bear to interest himself in such things as he did.”
He is a man transformed, and while the reader might wish to see in this transformation a transcendence, all that matters to us is that he can be very different from who he thought he was, and only believed this was all he could be. While in many of the very short stories, Tolstoy wishes to convey to the reader the importance of God, here he illustrates the importance of a fellow human being. Vassili may die helping another man live, but he is never more alive than when doing so. In common parlance, he is no longer himself, but that was just a representation, and he finds another one to live by in the warmth that he literally brings to Nikita as he lies on top of him, using whatever body heat he has left in him, keeping another man from freezing to death. The story ends with Nikita terribly frost-bitten but alive, while Vassili and the horse are dead. One may insist that Vassili has found the meaning of life before dying, as he says of his former self: “he can never have known what I know. Yes, I know it for certain now. At last I KNOW!” But Schopenhauer might claim instead that he has found its meaninglessness, which isn’t the same as saying this need be despairing. After all, Vassili acknowledges a feeling of joy, and that isn’t a world away from the philosopher’s claim, according to Robert Wicks “…that the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being inherently meaningless.” (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)
Meaningful joy perhaps lies in representation, and this can include anything from the accumulation of wealth to a belief in God, but what if it means no more than the end of strife for oneself, and leaving the choice of its possible continuation for another? Vassili chooses to sacrifice himself to keep Nikita alive, but what matters, as much as the gesture of helping another, is Vassili’s willingness to see the meaninglessness of his existence both materially and spiritually, as though aware that they have always been one and the same. Just as he has questioned the importance of his house and his sales, so he a few pages earlier has noted, thinking back to the Thanksgiving service the previous day, “all the time he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that, although that blackened face and golden vestment, as well as the candles, the priest, and the thanksgivings, were all of them very important and necessary there in the church, they could do nothing for him here…” We might say that by the end of the story, he sees how easily the church and wealth aren’t countervailing forces, with the church allowing people meaning while the accumulation of goods creates purpose, but so intertwined that the church becomes central to that accumulation, and not at all contrary to it.
This isn’t quite to say that Vassili doesn't find God in that moment when he says he knows, and it would be unfair to Tolstoy to say that God is absent because the writer rules it out a few pages earlier when discussing the church. In What is Art?, we noted the writer differentiating between church art and proper Christian art. He sees in the former “essentially depraved [religion], accessible only to people who oppress others, people of the idle, wealthy classes.” Yet it wouldn’t be unreasonable to claim we don’t quite know what Vassili discovers when he is willing to offer his life for Nikita’s. Tolstoy gives to his ending a fruitful ambiguity that is finally much closer to the universal than the categorical claims to be found in ‘The Penitent Sinner’ and ‘Labour, Death and Disease’. Detail gives ‘Master and Man’ an aesthetic much closer to the universal than in the other stories, as Tolstoy illustrates Vassili’s attempts at the self-interested and the self-preserving before he concludes on the self-sacrificial. What we know is that his striving has come to an end, and there appears to be joy in that — whether this is because he finds a higher power, or is aware of the pointless limitations of his own, is moot.
There are similarities between ‘Master and Man’ and ‘How Much Land Does a Man Require’, but also comparisons can easily be made with ‘Labour, Death and Disease.’ In ‘How Much Land…’ we have an ambitious man, but also the devil’s presence. When the peasant Pakhom says that he has worked hard since a child but has too little land, the devil knows he can play on his greed and, sure enough, as Pakhom starts to gain some wealth, he wants more. A great opportunity arises when he speaks to people who have odd customs, and they tell him that he can have as much land as he likes for a 1000 rubles — as long as he returns at dusk in the same place where he started at daybreak. Pakhom, of course, wants to purchase as much land as possible and gets further and further away from his starting point. Then he realises, as time is running out, and increasing exhaustion is setting in, that he could lose all that he has gained by failing to arrive back by nightfall. He overexerts himself and, while he gains the land, he loses his life. The devil is less directly invoked than in ‘Labour, Death and Disease’, but it is clear that the devil will be happy with creating greed in another man’s soul. After Pakhom dies, his servant buries him: “he dug a grave the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels — three Russian ells — and buried him.” That is all he requires dead, but how much land did he believe he needed when alive?
Tolstoy offers enough detail in the story for this to be more than a rhetorical question. He takes into account the exploitation of the peasantry, rivalry among fellow farmers, and the reality of crop rotation. After a good yield one year, Pakhom wants another the following one but he doesn’t have enough land to leave it fallow. Nevertheless, the story implies Pakhom’s death is the devil’s work. Yet does that make the story more universal than if the devil had been absent? ‘How Much Land Does a Man Require’ is about a third as long as ‘Master and Man’, and possesses some of the same immediacy. However, it is also contained by the parabolic dimension that, in a strict sense, makes it less universal than a story that proposes the absence of higher forces. This isn’t an argument for pure realism in literature; it is to see that its universal form could be undermined by the assumption of God in a world full of atheists. An atheist as readily as a believer would feel that Pakhom pushes his luck when trying to gain too much land, just as an atheist would feel, too, that Vassili is allowing his selfishness to get the better of him once too often as he takes Nikita on a journey in treacherous conditions. But it is ‘Master and Man’ rather than ‘How Much Land…’ which allows for a non-theological reading.
Tolstoy’s purpose in What is Art? rests on how to find meaning in literature and a universal application of it. This is why he attacks late 19th-century fiction. “For my work on art I have spent this winter reading, diligently, and with great effort, the famous novels and stories of Zola, Bourget, Huysmans and Kipling.” He finds far more universal meaning in a short story by a peasant, F. F. Tischenko, where a mother wishes to make some white bread and leaves her kids in charge of the yeast. The kids forget about it and go out and play, and a mother hen destroys the yeast. The mother is initially distraught and scolds the kids, but in time decides to make bread from rye, and eventually everybody is happy. The story is like an elaboration of the proverb “don’t cry over spilt milk”, and is easy to narrate in just a few words. But part of the importance of literature is that it cannot be summarised so readily. If it could, then why bother with narrative elaboration, character psychology, scenic development and so on? The problem Tolstoy addresses may reside not in many writers foregoing simplicity, but failing, in their need to attend to the psychological, the scenic and the narrational, to find a point. The work becomes art for art’s sake, and Tolstoy wants art for humanity’s sake. He then often adds God to the mix, all the better to make the moral clear.
‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ ends similarly to ‘Master and Man’. The title character is on his deathbed, feels he has lived an erroneous existence, and, as he is about to die, realises he doesn’t fear dying as in place of “death there was light.” “‘So that’s what it is’, he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy’” As in ‘Master and Man’, the story can be read religiously but, too, can be viewed with a Schopenhauerian acceptance of the will’s willingness to let go. Illyich suffers a terrible, extended death as he determines to hold on to a life he didn’t much like in the first place. His demise is also the absence of pain, and few writers more than Schopenhauer emphasised how much more suffering there was in life than pleasure. “If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distress, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline condition.” (Essays and Aphorism) When Ivan thinks of his life, he admits “his pleasures where his work was concerned lay in the gratification of ambition, his social pleasures lay in the gratification of his vanity; but his real delight was playing whist.” That isn’t so much of an existence, and certainly one hardly worth the pain that he goes through to continue it. Why wouldn’t he feel joy at his demise, and why would there need to be an afterlife for him to feel he is entering? To escape the misery of this life might seem enough.
That would, of course, be a pessimistic reading of a story that is in many ways very bleak, but that doesn’t mean one cannot extract from it a more positive value, one indicating there is a better life than the one we live in this world, and after various difficulties, Ilyich finds it. However, whether we choose to read the Tolstoy stories under discussion as Godly or otherwise, what does seem to matter most is a faith in the simple life. This Tolstoy explores in the much earlier, ‘Happy Ever After’, which he published in 1959, and almost twenty years before Anna Karenina, a text it resembles. Yet Anna Karenina is by far the bleaker tale, with Anna ruining herself over an officer, and ending under a train. In the first-person Happy Ever After, Mashechka marries young, even as the very man she weds warns her of the difficulties to come, as Sergie Mihailovich is almost twenty years her senior. Those future complications can best be comprehended in Mashechka’s thoughts early in the story: “he was no longer the fond old uncle who spoiled or lectured me: here was my equal, a man who loved and was in awe of me as I loved and was in awe of him.” The story suggests that while the state between them was different before, we might wonder if, in turn, things will be different all over again soon enough. If Maschechka was too young to have been an object of desire for Sergey, then the risk is that Sergey will soon be too old to be an object of desire for Maschechka. As he says: “You are young…I am not. You want a gay time, but I must have something else. Have your gay time, only not with me, or I shall take you seriously, and that would make me unhappy and you sorry and ashamed.” There is a large age gap between them, but it is as though it’s been closed by her burgeoning maturity while he is still in the prime of life. This can perhaps last as long as he remains so, and that they also remain where they are: in the countryside. But soon Masha yearns for the pleasures of city living: its balls and its gowns, its theatres and its parties. After a few weeks in St Petersburg, she doesn’t want to return to the estate, and a chasm becomes increasingly apparent between the young wife and the older husband. She notices that his “face suddenly struck me as old and unpleasant”, and being alone together no longer appealed: “when I was alone with Sergei Mihailovich…I felt that the gulf which now separated us had widened still further.”
Yet unlike Anna, Masha doesn’t quite succumb to the charms of a man, a marquee, who claims to be obsessed with her, and believes “there was something coarse and animal in place of my husband’s charming expression of kindliness and noble serenity.” She also finds that, for all the attention she receives in society, there are others who are given far more, including a woman called Lady S, a renowned English woman: “she and her beauty were the sole topic of conversation.” She finds that for all the woman’s beauty, a self-satisfied expression on the woman’s face, and this robs her of an aspect of her loveliness. Is this Masha’s envy as she starts to find society dull, or a healthy realisation that this is a world of little lasting value? Yet still she is tempted by the Marquis if only for a second, as desire mingles with hatred, abandonment with responsibility towards her husband and child.
By the end of the story, the couple are back living in the countryside, and they settle into marital life, as Masha, still young, accepts the limits of conjugal bliss. Yet not before a fiery exchange between the couple, with Masha angry that Sergei allowed her to fall into the hands of society when he could have used his experience, authority and marital role to control her. But he wanted her to discover the world on her own, even if it meant he had to kill off a part of his love towards her. “I spent horrible sleepless nights trying to shatter and destroy the love which was a torment to me. I did not destroy it but I destroyed that part of it which gave me pain.” He still loves her, but in a different way, and Masha is dismayed by this realisation and believes he could have still loved her in the same way if he had stopped her acting in a different way. This is suspect, and rests partly on that age gap, which meant that Masha had to learn for herself what Sergei already understood. However, the story ends happily as Masha acknowledges that their romantic love has died, but that a new one becomes available, “…a new kind of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness which I am still enjoying at the present moment…”
‘Happy Ever After’, like ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and ‘Master and Man’, accepts the complexity of feeling and the simplicity of life, and tries to navigate one’s deepest needs with one’s likely desires, and creates a complex tale that needn’t leave us thinking too much about the afterlife, but about how best to live in the one we are in. The fable and parable were rarely concerned with characters but chiefly situations, and in Tolstoy’s admiration for the tale about the rye bread, and in many of his own shorter works, he, too, wishes to produce a literature based on the latter, without the density of the former. However, the consequence is risking the aridity he sees in much modern literature, but from a reverse perspective. If modern writers fail to make a clear point that many can understand, would a writer who insistently works with traditional forms, reproducing ancient verities, flatten characterisation in the process? In most of Tolstoy’s very short works, a truth is illustrated, yet character is eschewed, as the narrative throughline trammels on the idiosyncrasies of personality, the complexity of a being’s lived world. We have insisted this isn’t about length, and to prove it, we will conclude on ‘God Sees The Right But is Slow to Declare It’, despite the already noted angelicism, and the assertiveness of the title. Here, a handsome and robust fellow, who was a bit of a drinker and brawler, becomes a faithful and decent husband after marrying, yet one day his wife frets over a trip Aksenoff is going to take to a fair, and sure enough, the terrible takes place. He ends up framed for a murder that another commits and spends decades imprisoned. Many years into his term, a man jailed for a minor crime admits he could have been locked up many years earlier for a major one, and Aksenoff suspects this is the man who framed him. The other man plans to escape and builds a tunnel, saying to Aksenoff that if the tunnel is discovered by the authorities and he tells them who is responsible for it, he will kill him. The tunnel is discovered, Aksinoff stays quiet for various reasons and not especially out of fear. He doesn’t know for sure that the man framed him, and doesn’t wish to see another man flogged. And will making someone else feel worse really make Aksinoff feel any better? Before the end of the story, the man will confess to his earlier crime and seek Aksinoff’s forgiveness. If Aksinoff is reluctant to give it, this isn’t out of understandable resentment but a deeper sense of forgiveness. When the man says he will admit to the crime and Aksenoff will be released, Aksenoff responds with a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. “My wife is dead and my children will have forgotten me. I should have nowhere for the sole of my foot to rest. “ But he also says when the man pleads with Aksenoff to pardon him: “May God pardon you! It may be that I am a hundred times worse than you.” This latter remark may resemble passages from the bible, from John and Matthew: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye. Yet it can seem perverse when offered to a man who has ruined one’s own life.
It is this perversity meeting the forgiving that makes the story more than an illustration of the above biblical remarks. Aksenoff, in the strict sense, is without sin if we consider who committed the crime, and the beam is in the other man’s eye and no more than the mote in his. Yet if we return to the beginning of the story, he appears to have wronged others in the years before his marriage, and also ignores his wife’s advice when he ventures out to the fair, leading to his imprisonment, and leaves his wife and children without a father. He is not without sin and halfway through the story notes, “it is clear that God alone knows the truth. To him only must I pray, and from Him only expect mercy.” However, rather than seeing this as simply a revelation of God’s significance, it can also be read as an act of necessary faith by a man who cannot trust in human justice. After all, it led to his lifelong imprisonment. In turn, when he has the chance to offer this hard justice to the man who has destroyed his life, he refrains from doing so. If one has spent years believing that the best way to survive the horrors of imprisonment for a crime you haven’t committed is relying on the other-worldly, then better perhaps to trust in this other-worldly force than the puny justice of the human, even his own.
One can, of course, read the story as a religious tale, but it can also be seen as a work of psychological nuance. God may or may not exist, but he existed very strongly for Aksenoff in times of immense hardship. To take justice into his own hands, and out of God’s, wouldn’t be making amends, but hubristically taking back control of his life when he has already given it over to the deity. It is religious but isn’t only so, and the complexity rests on the ambiguity of Aksenoff’s understandable need to believe in God and a desire for human vengeance. His love of God is far greater than the need for revenge. The story ends on Aksenoff’s acceptance of the other man’s guilt and the man’s acknowledgement of his culpability. In some of the stories we have addressed, Tolstoy comprehends the balance between accustomization and acclimatisation, aware that a work too obscure may need attention far greater than its meaning, as the reader tries to fathom the intricacies of plot and character, as opposed to a story so straightforward that it can offer very little to us that ancient tales haven’t already provided. Tolstoy may believe that “the purpose of art in our time consists in transferring from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that people’s well-being lies in being united among themselves…that Kingdom of God — that is, of love — which we all regard as the highest aim of human life.” (What is Art?) But while this is a wonderful sentiment, it might not be useful for the best of art. Such a statement is sometimes evident in the lesser stories, but in the better ones, Tolstoy remains a man of his time, and not merely a throwback to an earlier period he wished to resurrect in prose.
© Tony McKibbin