Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1 Read online

  Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

  Leo Tolstoy

  LEO TOLSTOY

  COLLECTED

  SHORTER

  FICTION

  (in two volumes)

  Written over a period of more than half a century, these stories reflect every aspect of Tolstoy’s art and personality. They cover his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his cult of truth and simplicity, and, above all, his growing preoccupation with religion. Ranging in scope from novellas like The Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad to folk-tales only a few pages long, they provide a marvelous opportunity to become closely acquainted with Russia’s great novelist. Aylmer and Louise Maude’s classic translations are supplemented by new translations by Nigel J. Cooper of six stories, including two that have never before appeared in English.

  EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY

  EVERYMAN,

  I WILL GO WITH THEE,

  AND BE THY GUIDE,

  IN THY MOST NEED

  TO GO BY THY SIDE

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  First included in Everyman’s Library, 2001

  Introduction, Bibliography and Chronology Copyright © 2001

  by Everyman’s Library

  Translations in the Appendix Copyright © 2001 by Nigel J. Cooper

  Typography by Peter B. Willberg

  Fifth printing (US)

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT, and distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.

  US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828–1910.

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  The collected shorter fiction/Leo Tolstoy; translated by Aylmer Maude and Nigel J. Cooper; with an introduction by John Bayley.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80665-9

  1. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828–1910—Translations into English.

  I. Maude, Aylmer, 1858–1938. II. Cooper, Nigel J. III. Title.

  PG3366.A13 M3 2001 00-053487

  891.73’3—dc21

  v3.1

  CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology

  The Raid (1852)

  The Wood-Felling (1855)

  Sevastopol:

  Sevastopol in December 1854 (1855)

  Sevastopol in May 1855 (1855)

  Sevastopol in August 1855 (1856)

  A Billiard-Marker’s Notes (1855)

  The Snow Storm (1856)

  Two Hussars (1856)

  A Landlord’s Morning (1856)

  Meeting a Moscow Acquaintance in the Detachment (1856)

  Lucerne (1857)

  Albert (1858)

  Family Happiness (1859)

  Three Deaths (1859)

  Strider: The Story of a Horse (1861–86)

  The Porcelain Doll (1863)

  Polikúshka (1863)

  Tales for Children (c. 1872)

  (1) God Sees the Truth, but Waits

  (2) A Prisoner in the Caucasus

  (3) The Bear-Hunt

  What Men Live By (1881)

  Memoirs of a Madman (1884)

  About the Translators

  About the Introducer

  INTRODUCTION

  Tolstoy was not a particularly precocious young man, although from an early age he had vague ideas about becoming a writer. But he detested the artificiality and the hypocrisy which, as he felt, were an integral part of the way writers went about making things up. His ideal was an absolute simplicity and a straightforwardness which would describe people just as they were, and events exactly as they happened. Soon after he had written Childhood, Boyhood and Youth he came to dislike everything in it except the original childhood section. The later parts, he said, were ‘an awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, and it was the fictional element that repelled him.

  Some time even before Childhood he had begun an experimental piece which he called ‘A History of Yesterday’. It is indeed just that; and as nothing much happened to Tolstoy on that particular yesterday it cannot be said to hold the reader’s attention very closely: indeed it is almost a refutation in itself of its author’s view that if the writing is simple enough it is bound to be of interest to all. The story is of interest none the less, because of its startling affinity with fictional experiments, like those of Virginia Woolf, in our own century, although Tolstoy’s manner is too precise and too beady-eyed to give the impressionist effect so important to a sketch of hers like ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

  Tolstoy greatly admired the first part of Dickens’ David Copperfield, which was appearing in the Russian periodical Sovremennik while he was meditating his own book. At least one touch in Dickens – David’s curiosity about his own grief after his mother’s death, and his pride in it before his schoolfellows – may have suggested to Tolstoy his own kind of unremitting analysis of the same state of mind. But at times Childhood can remind us of the flatness of the ‘History of Yesterday’, although it has become an inspired kind of flatness.

  At first I felt sorry for her, I wondered whether I ought not to try and console her, and how to do it: but finally I became vexed that she should place me in such an awkward situation.

  ‘Oh God, how absurd it is to keep on crying! I loved your mother so, we were such friends … we … and …’

  She found her handkerchief, covered her face with it and continued to cry. My position was again an awkward one, and continued to be so for a good while. I felt vexed and yet sorry for her. Her tears seemed sincere, but I felt that she was not crying so much about my mother as because she herself was not happy now, and things had been much better in those days.

  The bereaved boy is sorry for this old friend of his mother’s as he has been sorry for himself, but Tolstoy goes on adding to the list of other considerations that come into question. The writing, though so simple, is wonderfully accurate, as Childhood itself is wonderful, but Tolstoy is still a very young writer who has not yet the strange power, which will take hold of him in the composition, on its epic scale, of War and Peace, of seeming both to comfort and to inspire the reader, even while he is insisting on a multitude of extraneous and sometimes tedious details. We see the remarkable shrewdness and truth of the narrator’s perception; but the scene also brings, as it has done in real life, a dull feeling of discouragement and discomfort. It is precisely because the thing is so like life that our interest droops and our curiosity seems futile, even impertinent. Tolstoy has not the knack in his stories, as Chekhov has, of raising what is random and hapless and inconsolable to the level of art. In order to understand people with love, and to present them so that they are understood in the same way by us, he needs a story on the scale of War and Peace, or Anna Karenina.

  And yet Tolstoy’s stories, varied as they are, have their own brand of unique fascination. Some are long and on the scale of nouvelles, like The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad. Some are very short, like ‘The Wood-Felling’, from Tolstoy’s own army experiences, or his brief parables like ‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits’. All are distinguished b
y the same sense of a subject worked away on, made to reveal the utmost of itself that it can. And yet one could say that Tolstoy had a light touch. Turgenev, who admired his youthful tales, none the less displeased their author by telling him ‘My dear Leo, you really shouldn’t spend quite so long telling us the exact way the hero puts his hand in his pocket.’ An exaggeration, but a telling one. The stories do spend a disproportionate time going into such details. And yet so compulsive is Tolstoy’s method, and so penetrating and powerful the mind and observation at work, that he manages not to forfeit the reader’s attention for a second.

  Irtenyev, the ‘hero’ of Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, has a good deal in common with Olenin, the young officer who is the centre of consciousness in The Cossacks. That is to say of course that both have a good deal in common with the author himself, though by no means everything. Tolstoy kept just as beady an eye on his own failings and vanities as he did on those of other people; and at the same time he could present, as he does in the character of Ivan Ilych, a man who is like all men, whose suffering and fate are inseparable from the smallness of his outlook and the necessary triviality of his life. But by the time he wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych the preacher in Tolstoy had got the upper hand. The life of Ivan Ilych is remorselessly chronicled: Tolstoy seems determined that it should appear as ‘unexamined’, in Socrates’ sense, as he can make it, and his death correspondingly without dignity or redemption. But Tolstoy cheats in the manner in which he finally presents that death itself. It is a black bag into which Ivan Ilych is being thrust, but at the bottom of that black hole there is a light. Characteristically Tolstoy produces an odd metaphor for what he sees as the process, drawn from everyday life:

  What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.

  Well, maybe. Tolstoy, the expert on physical being, ‘the seer of the flesh’ as the critic Merezhkovsky called him, has no hesitation in projecting his knowledge into the last moments of a dying man. Undeniably the effect is strangely impressive: everyone who has read the story remembers that black bag and the moment of light that follows. And – who knows? – perhaps Tolstoy is not cheating here after all.

  The Russian historian Prince Mirsky used to say that up to the time he wrote War and Peace Tolstoy saw life as an enchanted ballroom: afterwards it seemed to him like Ivan Ilych’s black bag. Certainly the experiences he underwent, and afterwards wrote about in A Confession, changed not only his outlook but his manner of writing. But this too it is possible to exaggerate, at least where the stories are concerned. Hadji Murad is one of his last, his finest and in a sense one of his most epically tranquil tales: one would not guess that the man who wrote it had become a religious crank and a fervent disbeliever in literary art. The way in which Tolstoy describes Hadji Murad’s death in action is in sharp contrast to the way he concludes the story of Ivan Ilych: but at the same time he claims the right of a ‘seer of the flesh’ to know how the flesh dies.

  Surrounded by his enemies and wounded by pistol-shots and sabre-cuts, Hadji Murad is on the very verge of physical extinction:

  He did not move but still he felt.

  When Hadji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murad that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.

  Survival after death? Tolstoy probably never believed in it: his consciousness as a writer was too absorbed in his own being, and in the awareness of the body. But of course he was intensely curious about it, and often gives the impression that he cannot really believe death can possibly take place or at least that he himself can die, although he is careful not to make any such claim on behalf of Ivan Ilych.

  As he dies Hadji Murad recalls the moment in babyhood when his mother washed him and shaved his head; a memory of Tolstoy’s own, of which in the story he makes an austere but touching use. He virtually claimed to remember the moment of being born in the same spirit in which he claims knowledge of the body in its last moments. It is touching too that in his last moments he kept repeating ‘I do not understand what it is I have to do.’ It was as if he could not believe that his will and being and power of action were about to be taken away from him, and that he had to do nothing now but cease to exist.

  Certainly death has a surprisingly prominent part in the stories, almost acting as if it were itself a narrative device. One of the most powerful, Master and Man, was written in 1895, years after the spiritual crisis which had caused him to renounce art, and to reject the great novels he had written twenty years earlier. I feel it to be the most impressive story that Tolstoy ever wrote, and for that reason worth choosing for a detailed commentary. Part of the interest lies in its exemplification of his own theory of art, developed in this later period. His dogmatic essay What is Art? is perverse in many ways, even absurd; but the main point it makes, that all good art has to be simple, in order to appeal to the simplest people, is brilliantly exemplified in Master and Man and justified by its total success as a story.

  And the story it tells is indeed very simple. Brekhunov, a merchant proud of his ability to drive a hard bargain, sets out by sleigh on a business trip with his servant Nikita. A snow storm blows up, and the pair take refuge with a well-off peasant family. The writing is as vivid here as it ever was in Tolstoy’s younger days, and amusing too. The son of the house who is sent to guide them keeps shouting lines from Pushkin’s poem ‘Winter Evening’, which he has learnt in school. On that snowy evening poetry and reality unexpectedly coincide, and the comedy of this (Tolstoy’s humour, though uncertain and cautious, is always to be reckoned with) is deadpan. His view of poetry, even Pushkin’s, was never high, but ‘Winter Evening’ is both a wonderful and a simple poem, and the boy’s pleasure in it shows that it meets Tolstoy’s requirements as set out in What is Art? Tolstoy is setting out to write a story as simple and as effective as Pushkin’s poem. One that is not ‘a lie’. ‘But why did I write a lie?’ the narrator in Childhood asks himself when he has had to write a birthday poem for his grandmother; and in War and Peace the essential falsity of the relations between Boris and Julie is exemplified by the album verses they write to each other.

  Pushkin’s snow-storm verses pass the test because their young guide who keeps reciting lines about ‘snowy circles wheeling wild’ finds they ‘described what was happening outside so aptly that it cheered him up’. Having set the travellers on the high road he bids them farewell and goes off home. But soon they lose their way again in the blizzard; and now poetry contrasts with the terrifying starkness of Tolstoy’s prose as he calmly describes what happens. When Nikita decides it is futile to travel through the night, Brekhunov leaves him and goes on alone. He has in fact gone blindly round in a circle, but seeing a dark patch ahead he thinks he has come to a village:

  But the dark patch was not stationary, it kept moving; and it was not a village but some tall stalks of wormwood sticking up through the snow on the boundary between two fields, and desperately tossing about under the pressure of the wind which beat it all to one side and whistled through it.

  The reader feels the terror of the lost moment almost as vividly as Brekhunov did. No wonder Tolstoy commented scornfully to a friend that a story by the young Andreyev, a fashionable writer in the 1890s, always seemed to be saying hopefully to its reader ‘Are you frightened? – Are you frightened now?’ when the reader was merely bored by the author’s attempts to make him so. Tolstoy’s accumulation of telling detail really does make the reader feel frightened. So does the unobtrusive way in which he gives us portraits, as the tale goes on, of the master who has so much to live for and the servant who has nothing, and so accepts their increasingly d
esperate situation with stoic fatalism.

  The travellers are reunited. Nikita, poorly clad, is soon nearly dead from exposure, and Brekhunov seems to come to a decision. ‘Suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase’, he sets about organizing what shelter he can for both of them. Then putting the servant in the sledge he lies down on him in his heavy fur coat. He is surprised by the pleasure he feels in looking after another human being. He sheds tears, and longs to share his joy with someone else, so he tells Nikita, who only answers drowsily from below that he is getting nice and warm. But Brekhunov is being far from selfless. ‘Nikita kept him warm from below and his fur coat from above’, a calculation that he made just as he used to strike a bargain.

  When they are found next day the merchant is dead, but Nikita is just alive and recovers. ‘When he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on both his feet were frozen.’

  Tolstoy’s early story The Snow Storm is almost equally vivid, but it lacks the quiet accumulation of telling detail which is so effective in Master and Man. The moral of the story works without strain, because the personality of Brekhunov is fully established, and he remains true to it throughout. Mirsky remarks that ‘his is a horrifying death’, but this is surely wrong. One feels on the other hand that Ivan Ilych is not, so to speak, allowed to die in his own way, but is thrust into the black bag by Tolstoy, as into his final moment of tranquillity and brightness. One can quote Tolstoy’s own rather portentous words against him: ‘When characters do what in their nature they are unable to do it is a terrible thing.’