The "Immeasurable Granduer" of Tolstoy

These are a few excerpts from Chapter 5, "Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother," of Paul Johnson's 1989 book The Intellectuals. This should not be taken as a critique of Tolstoy's literature--only his personality. Beautiful writing is beautiful writing, but imbecility is likewise imbecility.

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[Tolstoy’s] dairies reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny. ‘Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work.’ ‘I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.’ He felt in his own soul ‘immeasurable grandeur.’ He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: ‘Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.’ – 107

There were times when Tolstoy seemed to think of himself as God’s brother, indeed his elder brother. – 108

He had the assumptions & attitudes of a Russian imperialist. On being accepted by the army and assigned to a gun-battery (the natives had no artillery) he wrote to his brother Sergei: ‘With all my strength I shall help with my guns in the destruction of the predatory and turbulent Asiatics.’ Indeed, he never repudiated his Russian imperialism or the chauvinist spirit, the conviction that the Russians were a special race, with unique moral qualities (personified in the peasant) and a God-ordained role to perform in the world. – 110

…Tolstoy, by his own account, was also chasing Cossack women, gambling and drinking. – 111

‘To write stories,’ he told the poet Fet, ‘is stupid & shameful.’ Note the second adjective. This was an intermittent theme, that art was an outrageous misuse of God’s gifts… – 114

In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him & brought the usual consequences. One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for ‘gonorrhea, obtained from the customary source.’ … But he continued to patronize whores, varies by gypsies, Cossack & native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. – 115

When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. – 116

At a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. … So Tolstoy’s son Timofei was put to work in the stables; later, on the grounds of bad behavior, he was demoted to woodsman. – 116

ON 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote: ‘Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc., if not women?’ The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life. – 117

He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: ‘[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. The she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.’ Or again: ‘It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.’ He disagreed strongly with the emancipationist views expressed in J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women, arguing that even unmarried women should be barred from entering a profession. Indeed, he regarded prostitution as one of the few ‘honorable callings’ for women. – 117

‘Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse, as many “liberals” wish to do? Impossible! It would be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a “golden bridge” in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes! What would become of decency and morality, how would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No, I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family.’ – Tolstoy – 118

His wretched brother Dimitri, for instance, was surely an object of compassion: he sank into the gutter, married a prostitute and died young of tuberculosis in 1865. Tolstoy could barely bring himself to spend an hour at his deathbed and refused to attend the funeral at all—he wanted to go to a party instead. – 125

As a rule, Tolstoy took, his friends gave. – 125

[Turgenev] had been generous and thoughtful in helping the young writer [Tolstoy]. In return he received coldness, ingratitude and Tolstoy’s brutal habit of insulting, often brilliantly, the ideas which he knew his friends cherished. – 126

Knowing himself to be dying, Turgenev wrote his last letter to Tolstoy in 1883: ‘My friend, great writer of the Russian land, listen to my appeal. Let me know if you receive this scribble and allow me to embrace you once more hard, very hard, you, your wife, and all you family. I cannot go on. I am tired.’ Tolstoy never replied to this pathetic request, though Turgenev lingered on another two months. So one is not impressed by Tolstoy’s reaction when he got the news of Turgenev’s death: ‘I think of Turgenev continually. I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with him.’ It has the ring of an actor, playing the public role expected of him. As Sonya [his wife] noticed, Tolstoy was incapable of the privacy and intimacy needed for person-to-person love, or real friendship. Instead he embraced humanity, because that could be done noisily, dramatically, sensationally on the public stage. – 126

Far more serious, however, was Tolstoy’s authoritarian view that only he had the solution to the world’s distress, and his refusal to take part in any efforts at relief which he did not plan and control personally. – 128

He hated democracy. He despised parliaments. …It is a fact of somber significance in Russian history, that for half a century her greatest writer set his face like flint against any systematic reform of the Tsarist system and did his best to impede & ridicule those who tried to civilize it. – 129

Tolstoy was a determinist and an anti-individualist. The notion that events were shaped by the deliberate decisions of powerful men was to him a colossal illusion. Those who appear to be in charge do not even know what is happening, let alone make it happen. Only unconscious activity is important. History is the product of millions of decisions by unknown men who are blind to what they are doing. – 129

The fact that Tolstoy spoke of ‘God’ and called himself a Christian made much less difference than one might suppose. The Orthodox Church excommunicated him in February 1901, not surprisingly in view of the fact that he not only denied the divinity of Jesus Christ but asserted that to call him God or pray to him was ‘the greatest blasphemy.’ The truth is he selected from the Old and New Testaments, the teachings of Christ and the Church, only those bits he agreed with and rejected the rest. He was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Whether he believed in God is more difficult to determine since he defined ‘God’ in different ways at various times. At bottom, it would seem, ‘God’ was what Tolstoy wanted to happen, the total reform. This is a secular, not a religious concept. As for the traditional God the Father, he was at best an equal, to be jealously observed and criticized, the bear in the den. – 130 to 131

The real enemy were the Western-style democrats, the parliamentary liberals. They were corrupting the whole world with the spread of their ideas. …The greatest danger to the world was the ‘democratic system’ of Britain and the United States. …Russia must turn her face from the West, renounce industry, abolish the State and embrace non-resistance. – 131

On smallpox inoculation: ‘There is no point in trying to escape death. You will die anyway.’ – 132

‘It would be a much better world if women were less talkative…It is a kind of naïve egoism, a desire to put themselves forward.’ – 133

But it is the habit of intellectuals, who write everything with an eye to future publication, to use their diaries as pieces justificatives, instruments of propaganda, defensive & offensive weapons… -- 134