The Financial Times is getting into the mood, announcing that
A hundred years after his death in a small railway station, Leo Tolstoy’s eloquent responses to life’s big questions, as one of history’s great truth-tellers and as the first of his country’s dissidents, are more relevant than ever.Let's be brave and demur, just a little.
In an indulgent review of new works and reprints A N Wilson, once known for his satirical bite, lauds the heroically self-involved and often extremely silly Sage of Yasnaya Polyana
To such deceptively simple questions as how should we live, the answers he gave caused tsars, armies, secret police and church inquisitors to shake in their souls. By the end, millions of people worldwide were hanging on his words. A week after he died, a woman in a Moscow railway cafeteria made a slighting remark about Tolstoy. The café workers rounded on her and the waiter refused to give her tea.I'm with that woman, and with sceptics who ask whether the "tsars, armies, secret police" etc shook in their souls. Some, presumably shook with laughter at simplistic solutions or unintelligible questions. Some people saw the Sage as an unfortunate expression of escapism that inhibited small-scale, achievable and meaningful action to alleviate injustices and build a better society. Better a change to the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) than a day of national repentence, self-flagellation and investment in coloured wristbands.
The anniversary of a writer's death is usually a chance to reassess and re-read their work but it is rarely a provocation to ask the most searching questions about the world as it is now, and about ourselves. Yet Tolstoy's death still challenges us to ask the deepest political and personal questions. It is hard to think of any of the great public questions facing the world today that Tolstoy did not anticipate and address in some way, whether we speak of the environmental crisis, religious debate (creationist versus atheist) or the anti-war movement.Apart from questioning puffery about Tolstoy's omniscience, we might disagree with both his answers - often incoherent, absurd or inhumane - and ask whether the guru is a better model than more modest and moderate contemporaries such as Chekhov or Turgenev.
Wilson notes that after Anna Karenina -
Tolstoy had a mid-life crisis and became a fervent Orthodox Christian. Changing again, he decided that the Church was teaching mumbo-jumbo. What mattered was what Jesus himself had taught. And what Jesus taught, in Tolstoy's version – he actually rewrote the gospels – was pacifism, anarchism, no government, no army, no upper classes, no quest for wealth. To this was added Tolstoy's own increasingly obsessive vegetarianism.A Russian Jihadi with all the answers and an indifference to those around him (inevitable among those who confuse the person of Jesus with that of themselves) is not exactly my idea of a positive role model.
Wilson acknowledges criticisms by Tolstoy's biographers that the "gigantic presence" was "an impossible husband and ... unattractively humourless". Never fear, it seems, for he was "godlike". Alas, like Mao, Stalin and other godlike monsters he wan't kind to small children or dogs. Don't be deterred by my cavill about the godlike, for Wilson indicates that -
From the first reading of War and Peace, it becomes clear that Tolstoy writes with the breadth and scope of Homer. Nowhere outside the Iliad do we find such a prodigious combination of artistic detachment from joy and suffering and yet at the same time such passionate engagement and sympathy. It is a paradoxical truth in these two European masterpieces, and Bartlett's book gives us the sense of how both these godlike qualities, of indifference and empathy, were constantly present in Tolstoy’s soul.He goes on to comment that -
Briggs quotes something I wrote at the end of my own biography of the great man: that "the more evidence we possess about Tolstoy, the less he makes sense". I wrote those words more than 20 years ago, and the intervening years have changed my view. Tolstoy does now make very clear sense to me. The anniversary gives us the opportunity to realise that there are not two Tolstoys, the novelist and the sectarian anarchist. There was one. War and Peace is not just a great national and family saga, it is a novel about personal and national regeneration. He was one of history’s great truth-tellers, the first of the great dissidents, and their patron saint. In a world dominated by crooked rulers, unjust wars, malice and corruption, and, above all, lies, Tolstoy became what Dante called a “one-man party” and struck out to right and left.Perhaps, to adopt the characterisation in The Life of Brian, he was instead "just a naughty boy".
Wilson admits that -
True, Tolstoy’s embrace of Christian anarchism was inconsistent on many levels but when the enemies in his sights included the grossly selfish Russian royal family, and an Orthodox Church that supported one of the most unjust political regimes in European history (and blessed field guns in the name of Christ), it is hard not to cheer the old bearded prophet and overlook any unkindness he might have displayed towards his wife.That's that for Sofya Tolstoy. Let's not, it seems, acknowledge the unkindness and gross inconvenience inflicted by the guru on other people or quibble about the shallowness of the historical judgment (several regimes featured blessing of battle kit and most featured self-indulgent elites, dynastic, academic or ecclesiastical).
Cue the sound of Christmas cheer, with Wilson concluding that -
The recent conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan do not suggest that war has ever been a solution to human problems. Tolstoy’s rejection not merely of war and violence, but of the very concept of government, still has a great deal of potential to change our world. At least, I have come to hope so. ... I have also, like the crowds in 1910, been overwhelmed with a sense that, if we could only live as he urged us to live in his later prophetic writings, we would find sanity in the midst of chaos.Become a vegetarian, wear hand-spun clothing, spout incoherent prescriptions for groupies, mutter about a profound desire for a private life while basking in front of the camera? The self-involvement, lack of modesty and nuance, and escapism is not a recipe for sanity in the midst of chaos ... it is instead something fitted for the world of Perez Hilton, Gawker.com and Who Weekly.
