May 9, 2004

As a human being and a writer, Tolstoy’s two greatest assets were his love of originality and a strong desire for discovering and illuminating the truth

LEO NIKOLAEVICH Tolstoy, who died almost 93 years ago on November 20, 1910, is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of all time. He was also a world-renowned social activist and moralist whose ideas influenced a diverse group of people that includes luminaries such as Gandhi and Lenin. While his work in art serves as a milestone for others to emulate and surpass, his moral teachings led him to become the latter-day Christ who took on the State and the Church in his struggle for the advocacy of the principles of non-violence and brotherly love, and the rejection of all authoritarian institutions.

Tolstoy the artist is, without a shred of a doubt, the ultimate master of his field. It is only after having read Tolstoy that one can comprehend the incredible range of subtle nuances in the art of writing. The customary accolades for writers — powerful, classic, dazzling, etc, — seem too trivial and ill-suited for Tolstoy whose novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina vie with each other for the title of the greatest novel of all time. Such accolades don’t correctly enlighten one about the unbelievable heights to which Tolstoy carried the realistic tradition of literature, using his insightful imagination and love for humanity.

In Tolstoy, one doesn’t get the feeling that the writer has painted an elusive, stirring idea out of a multitude of ideas or jiggled together a beautiful mixture of a wide range of colours. Furthermore, Tolstoy doesn’t produce burning, moving, constructs such as Dostoevsky nor does he weave a story in the way of a master craftsman like Charles Dickens. Tolstoy doesn’t use colours and canvas, which is infinite, as is life itself. In short, he doesn’t paint at all.

Instead, with inconceivable ease, he picks up his huge canvas in his majestic hands, analyzing it with acute observation, using his unbound imagination where the limited powers of human senses for observation fail; outlines occasionally and with great hesitation areas which are invisible to others and finally after having thoroughly completed his examination, blows on it powerfully to remove the obscuring specks of dust, and puts it back down. Dust starts to accumulate again. He sees this but doesn’t attempt to blow it away; he simply smiles. It is not a joyous smile nor is it a smile of sorrow. It is a smile of pity, a smile of accepting sympathy, a smile which understands, yet hopes.

The bestowment of this sympathetic smile, from the artist to the canvas, which permeates much of the 19th century Russian literature, is nowhere to be seen as powerfully as in Tolstoy’s. Tolstoy’s hesitancy in painting anything is due to the fact that he abhors being an inventor; he wants to remain true to life. Thus, Tolstoy’s art lies neither in craftsmanship, which when he wants to show it off is impeccable, nor in the use of the ‘tricks of language’ — something alien to his style, but which again, where he has even hinted at using them, proves himself second to none. Rather, his ability to handle with skill and ease the huge and weighty dimensions of his canvas of life, specially in viewing it with an exalted degree of insight and sympathy, is beyond the reach of other writers. Tolstoy’s creations are not powerful, romantic, shocking or tragic; they are simply true, wholesome and comprehensive reflections of life, sprinkled with love and pity and pulsing with a spirit that has very seldom been achieved in the history of art.

As explained, Tolstoy’s mirror to life is just that: a mirror. Its reflections aren’t deliberately darkened or brightened and it doesn’t produce grotesque or distorted images. It is true to nature and this is nowhere more accurate than in Tolstoy’s psychological analysis of his characters. In his psychological evaluation, like a patient cameraman who catches the elusive moment when a bud blooms into a flower, he notes even the slightest, imperceptible changes in the human consciousness and captures those intangible moments when people come to their decisions. Be it the masterful depiction of Karenin in Anna Karenina who wants to do the right thing but is prevented from doing so by society and his inner demons, by brutal life force or the portrayal of fun-loving, adulterous Oblonsky, who at one moment weeps for the wrong he has done to his wife, but in the very next rejoices in the thought of an irrelevant joke and decides that “things will right themselves.” Tolstoy’s psychological report is always thorough and demonstrates his unparalleled insight into human nature.

Tolstoy’s psychological account is not confined to humans. Once, during a walk with his contemporary, the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, on coming upon an old washed up horse, he began to describe its feelings, later used in his short story Strider: The Story of a Horse, with such brilliance, that it prompted an ecstatic Turgenev to declare that Tolstoy “must at one time have been a horse.”

Anton Chekhov is generally regarded as the father of modern short story. On an occasion when an old Tolstoy had fallen severely ill, Chekhov confessed that he was terrified of Tolstoy’s death because “so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the moods and tendencies of literature. Without him, they would be a flock without a shepherd, or a hotch-potch in which it would be difficult to discriminate anything.”

Since Tolstoy’s death Chekhov’s fears have been confirmed, manifested in the vain, subjective tendency of literature, in general, and in particular in the generally useless material churned out by the existentialists and the trashy gobbledygook of present-day post-modernists.

Tolstoy as a social and moral thinker gained many followers all over the world. He greatly influenced Gandhi and his non-violent civil disobedience movement, which in turn influenced Martin Luther King and his politics. In Russia, his homeland, he came into direct conflict with the Church and the Tsar because of his criticism of war, the aristocracy, religious dogmas, private property and other basic institutions of society, which in his view were the cause of the misery of the majority of the people of the world, on whose very labour and resources these institutions flourish.

He was criticized by the Church as an “anathematized atheist and anarchist revolutionist” and finally excommunicated by the Russian Holy Synod. He declared the state to be the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. His criticism of war and Tsarist tyranny led to the persecution of his followers by the state. Lenin, whose brutal authoritarianism Tolstoy would have hated and who himself did not agree with Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-violence as a means to change, praised his struggle against the monarchy and admitted it to be an important part of the budding revolutionary movement.

As a human being and a writer, Tolstoy’s two greatest assets were his love of originality and a strong desire for discovering and illuminating the truth. In fact he himself said, “The one thing necessary in life as in art is to tell the truth.” And it was the pursuit of truth, eternal and pure, that makes his life and art so compelling as to make one to “stop a moment, cease our work, look round us”, to appreciate the beauty of life and to make efforts to improve ourselves and the world round us, things which Tolstoy dearly desired of his fellow human beings.

Today’s anti-war, anti-globalization and other activists seeking to make the world a better place can draw immense courage from Tolstoy’s words delivered at the 18th International Peace Congress in 1909, “They have millions of money and millions of obedient soldiers; we have only one thing, but that is the most powerful thing in the world — truth.”

Remembering Leo Tolstoy on the occasion of his 93rd death anniversary, the man who was the sounding bell of humanity, one can’t help but marvel at his genius and his courage and feel what Maxim Gorky, when he was listening to this great man’s profound words, once felt: “This man is God-like.”

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)