Tolstoy: An Incomplete Conversion
Although he descended from nobility on both his mother’s and his father’s sides, the Russian aristocrat Count Leo Tolstoy came to renounce his life of privilege, pleasure, and material excess. At fifty-seven years old, having already achieved great literary success and fame, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual and philosophical conversion experience. This conversion caused Tolstoy to renounce his fame as an artist, to recant his work in literature, to reject Russian church orthodoxy, and to embrace an ascetic life. He came to believe that the path to true holiness was through self-denial and physical hard work. But Tolstoy never gave up his title, his home, or his notoriety. Essentially, he never gave up his security. Although he dressed as a peasant, the peasants still knew him as Count…not as one of them. And although he worked alongside the peasants, he still lived in his home. And although he gave up writing fiction, he used his fame as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina as a platform for his post-conversion message of social reform. In reviewing H. Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy, Richard Gustafson notes that Tolstoy “was a man who would sacrifice all to correct the world’s evil—all but his own comfort and security” (Gustafson par. 2). The inconsistencies of Tolstoy’s moral position indicate a deficient conversion experience.
Born into a prominent Russian aristocratic family with vast landholdings, Tolstoy grew up enjoying the advantages of his class and spent two-thirds of his life as a student, soldier, sensualist, venerated writer, and happy family man. But becoming increasingly discontent and disillusioned with the life of the privileged, Tolstoy came to believe “that, like the rest of his class, he was but a social parasite, living a pampered and unreal life on the toil and bloody sweat of multitudes who yet were happier than he…” (Adams 85). As Tolstoy’s love for the Russian peasants grew over the years (A. Tolstoy 151), he did not refrain from castigating the minority upper class for wielding its power over the peasant masses in the form of slavery (Abraham 113).
Having lived the “usual dissipated life of a man of his class” (Charney 536), Tolstoy turned to studying the teachings of Jesus and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his search for a paradigm of true selfless living (Taylor par. 2). As a result, he rejected the life of the Russian aristocrat to which he had been born and to which he had adhered until he was fifty-seven. “He cast aside convention, position, and worldly fame, and turned lovingly to share the life of toil and self-renunciation” (Adams 86).
Tolstoy journaled from his early days about his feelings of insecurity within his own class. Ann Hruska notes that he had a “cloudy conception” of what it meant to be a Russian aristocrat. This lifelong struggle with his own position in life is chronicled in his early work Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. The main character, Nikolenka, “simultaneously identifies with and is repulsed by members of the lower classes—a tendency shared by Tolstoy himself” (Hruska 64). Citing an example from Tolstoy’s Youth, she examines “Nikolenka’s obsession with comme il faut, a set of rules about proper aristocratic behavior. They include long and perfectly clean nails, excellent French, the ability to bow, dance, and converse, and most importantly, indifference to everything, and an ‘air of elegant, supercilious boredom’ (chapter 31)” (Hruska 71). In noting the long fingernails and using words as “indifference” and “supercilious boredom,” Tolstoy displays his contempt for the upper class and comme il faut.
Hruska recognizes that identifying Tolstoy’s feelings toward the classes has been a subject of controversy for scholars. While she notes that Russian critics usually see Tolstoy as “the champion of the peasantry, who rejects the corrupt and oppressive aristocracy” (Hruska 67), she also points out that Western critics interpret Tolstoy “as a self-proclaimed upholder of the standard of the aristocracy” (Hruska 67). Hruska maintains a middle position of interpreting Tolstoy as having a conflicted allegiance with the nobility. Hruska acknowledges that Tolstoy, “despite his rank of Count…sometimes expressed uncertainty about the degree to which he belonged to the aristocracy” (Hruska 66). Tolstoy’s attitude toward the aristocracy and rising middle class and the peasant class is evident in other pre-conversion fictional work also. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy has one of the peasants say to Levin, “People are different…some live only for themselves, only to fill up their bellies—others—the honest ones, live for their souls, they remember God” (A. Tolstoy 153).
As Tolstoy aged, his conflicted allegiance to the upper class definitely waned. He became less sympathetic and much more cynical toward the nobility. James Olney also recognizes Tolstoy’s struggle to embrace a meaningful and selfless life, and that he did not find it in the occupations of the socially elite: “indulging in parties, cards, pleasure every night, or tastefully decorating an apartment, or lying in bed reading French romances and eating gingerbread and honey” (Olney 102). In Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy satirizes the haute bourgeoisie. His attack is consistently ironic as he “effectively destroys the pretensions of this dominant but hollow social caste” (Olney 109) to which Ilyich belongs. Ilyich’s character is representative of Tolstoy before his conversion. With this understanding, Ilyich’s conversion as he dies physically and rejects “that false and unreal, socially-selfish and immoral life” (Olney 109), can be understood to represent Tolstoy’s conversion and rejection of the same.
In My Confession, Tolstoy describes how, as a youth, he abandoned himself to ambition, lust of power, selfishness, voluptuousness, pride, anger, revenge” (L. Tolstoy 8). Writing after his conversion, he says that he looks back on that life and its practices with “dread, loathing and anguish of heart” (L. Tolstoy 8). Having examined so closely his own feelings about his ties to a pretentious and selfish nobility, Tolstoy created the fictional Ivan Ilyich as an example of an egocentric and self-serving social class. Just as Ilyich finds meaning for his life when, through the approach of death, he perceives and rejects the hollowness of his selfish life, so Tolstoy found meaning for his life in renouncing the luxury and privilege to which he had been born and embracing a career as an ascetic. It troubled him that the peasants worked hard all day in the fields “while the landowners enjoyed wealth, luxury, and leisure. So he began to labor with them” (A. Tolstoy, 152).
Tolstoy idealized this path of labor and sweat as the path to salvation. “‘Labor to earn one’s bread,’ Tolstoy wrote, ‘is a panacea to save humanity. The law that a man must work in order to eat should be regarded as a blessed law of life, an obligation for everyone…’” (A. Tolstoy 154). For Tolstoy, the Russian peasant came closer to God than the other classes (A. Tolstoy 151); because intimacy with God was what Tolstoy craved, he lived and worked among the peasants to gain this same access. He wrote that the peasant’s soul “is still enlightened with true Christianity, which promises so much to those who know how to understand it” (A. Tolstoy 156). Thus, Tolstoy wholeheartedly embraced the “rural peasant lifestyle” (Taylor par. 3).
My Confession chronicles Tolstoy’s spiritual journey from a self-consumed, Russian Orthodox aristocrat who “had never believed in earnest” (L. Tolstoy 5), to a morally self-justified, earnest believer in the peasant religion and lifestyle. “In contradistinction to what I saw in our circle, where all life passed in idleness, amusements, and tedium of life, I saw that the whole life of these people [the peasants] was passed in hard work, and that they were satisfied with life” (L. Tolstoy 59-60). It is clear from Tolstoy’s post-conversion fiction and non-fiction that he had formulated a religion of self-abnegation. His primary doctrine was that of “the destruction of private ownership and in the distribution of land to the people who work manually” (Stanoyevich 751). But we see a serious inconsistency in Tolstoy’s practice of his religion life: that he never disowned his own land and estate, or eschewed his title. Stanoyevich allows that “To this criticism of…private property there were cogent objections. Tolstoy was called an inconsistent author who speaks one thing and does another…a charlatan” (Stanoyevich 751). This ambiguity of Tolstoy’s moral position raises the question of the thoroughness of his conversion. While he abounds in candor, he lacks in action.
F. J. Abraham writes, “The infinite labor [Tolstoy] took in propagating his ideas was no more than a constant reiteration in varying language of just a few extraordinary, simple doctrines expressible in a few sentences” (Abraham 106). He was well-known, after his conversion, for his vegetarianism, for living in a small room on his estate, for wearing peasants’ clothing, for giving up sex with his wife, and for laboring alongside the peasants on his estate. He also descries the pursuits of science and the arts. These self-imposed denials of luxury and ease seemed to assuage the conscience of a man who felt guilty about having so much while witnessing the want of the peasant masses. But Tolstoy was never able to bring himself to let go of the security that his worldly position, his noble birth, gave him. This particularly sets him apart from the peasant masses. They could never be certain of their food, their shelter, their rights, and their comfort. They must work for everything, yet never be guaranteed anything. Tolstoy, as a nobleman, however, could always count on these necessities as certain. The difference between the two positions is enormous. While Tolstoy’s “zeal and loftiness” cannot be doubted—his writings are “passionate, sincere, and uplifting” (Stanoyevich 759)—his conversion seems to be incomplete.
The inconsistencies of Tolstoy’s moral position stand out even more when he is compared to other Russian writers of the nineteenth century. Like Tolstoy, both Pushkin and Turgenev descended from noble, wealthy families. They, however, both lived fully aristocratic lives, enjoying all the privilege that their birth accorded them. They comprised the group which Tolstoy expurgated and satirized in his novels. Compared to their indulgent lifestyles, Tolstoy’s self-abasements shine as examples of selflessness. In contrast, Dostoevsky and Chekhov had more plebeian roots. Dostoevsky, while descended from nobility, experienced great hardship in his life. Chekhov emerges as a man who made the most of what he had and who spent his life compassionately. Chekhov is known for his service to the poor. As a doctor, he donated his medical services to the poor throughout his life. As man who accumulated some financial success, he built schools and a medical clinic in his town. “With Chekhov the willingness to serve was much more than a ready-made polite formula; it was one of the dominant traits of his character” (Aldanov 87). Chekhov’s unproclaimed life of service contrasts greatly with Tolstoy’s passionate, hypocritical castigations of landowners and the nobility.
It is not known what held Tolstoy back from completely abandoning himself to the moral principles he ardently preached and propagated. Taylor relates “his dichotomy of personality…to the influence of his aristocratic childhood and its sharp contrast with the rural peasant lifestyle…Tolstoy sought to emulate” (Taylor par. 3). In the last months of his life, Tolstoy thought of leaving “what he considered to be a luxurious life” on his estate to live in a peasant hut in another village. His daughter writes that “at the last moment he changed his mind and decided to join friends in the Caucuses” (A. Tolstoy 155). Ironically, in contrast to his protagonist Ivan Ilyich who dies at peace with his family in his home, Tolstoy died a lonely death, estranged from his wife, at a stationmaster’s house in a railway town.
