The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories Page 3

  Two other early stories, ‘The Raid’ (1853) and ‘The Woodfelling’ (1855), foreshadow later works by Tolstoy that will look realistically at warfare and cast doubts on its glory; the former is particularly strong in its depiction of soldiers doing what they are paid to do, which includes killing and being killed. These tales have a painfully enduring relevance because they describe military events in an area on the border between Europe and Asia which for generations has known nothing but a feuding and tribal conflict that is still alive today. The region was then, and is now, also at the interface been two great religions, Islam and Christianity. We are speaking of Chechnya, that arid, mountainous enclave which could be a beautiful homeland to take pride in, but for the warring antagonism that no one seems able to transcend or dispel. The military town of Grozny, a fearful name even in today’s newspapers, was at the centre of things in Tolstoy’s two stories, though they both take place in the same nearby countryside. In each case an order is received by a military detachment, which marches off to do its duty, taking with it a shrewd and articulate observer who will give us the atmosphere and tell us what happens. The assignment is achieved, but at severe cost; lives are lost on both sides, and particularly poignant are the deaths of two young men, Alanin in the former story and Velenchuk in the latter. The individualized tragedies of these youngsters, so poignantly described, are more eloquent than the piles of corpses littering the field on Tolstoy’s broader military canvases (The Sevastopol Stories and War and Peace). These small narratives are among his masterpieces. They both tell a compelling story, filling it out with topographical detail from mountains to midges, warm portraiture based on close psychological observation, and a modicum of gently delivered moral instruction. There are strong underlying contrasts between brutality and civilization, youth and maturity, simple local people and more sophisticated intruders, the beauty of the natural scene and the horrors of soldiery, but these are not pressed upon us by too earnest a teacher. You will take pleasure from the telling of the story, but you will probably also be persuaded to think over some serious ideas, about honour and glory, self-dramatization and sincerity, egoism and courage - the whole meaning of going to war, and how it affects both the guiding political minds and the lads who do the fighting and dying. Our present-day war correspondents still tell the same tales, some of them set in the same region.

  The preoccupation with violence and death shown in these early stories is still in Tolstoy’s mind half a century later, as we can see in two very late works, ‘After the Ball’ (1903) and ‘The Forged Coupon’ (1905). The first of these is a remarkable story that was written in a single day. The critic A. N. Wilson ranks it with the very greatest things Tolstoy ever wrote.5 Its power is drawn from the shocking contrast between two opposite personalities displayed by an elderly colonel, seen first at a ball dancing serenely with his daughter and charming the company, and then, the following morning, enthusiastically directing a gruesome ceremony in which an army deserter is made to run the gauntlet, and beaten so viciously that his death seems certain. Needless to say, the narrator’s love for the colonel’s daughter does not long survive this ghastly experience. ‘The Forged Coupon’ is a morality piece with strong narrative interest, in which a small transgression - the forging of a banknote — leads inexorably to a series of much more serious crimes, including multiple murder, and then, less convincingly, to salvation for the main characters. The neatness of construction and the simplicity of Tolstoy’s writing are strong features of this work; it has been disregarded not for any real faults, but because its posthumous publication went largely unnoticed.

  One of Tolstoy’s most accomplished and moving novellas is Polikushka, written in 1863, at the end of the long literary apprenticeship that was about to produce two of the world’s greatest novels. It tells the story of Polikey (also known as Polikushka), a peasant horse doctor given to drunkenness and petty crime, who reforms himself with great effort and is rewarded by his mistress when she excuses him from the military conscription that he seems to deserve. But he then loses a large sum of money entrusted to him, and the results are catastrophic. The build-up of suspense in this tale is painful because there is so much at stake for so many people. The village is required to provide men for military service, and Polikey ought to be sent because he has a bad record. But the mistress supports him, so they must send someone else. The choice is an agonizing one: conscripts could be retained for long periods, up to twenty years, and many never returned. So we have two things to worry about: whether Polikey will continue to withstand temptation and become a good member of the community, and how the conscription problem will be solved. The stakes are high, the characters — mostly from the peasant class — are among Tolstoy’s most memorable portraits, and the undeserved outcome has a terrible twist of ironic inevitability. Best of all, Tolstoy has built up a powerful case against warfare, conscription and violence, without our really noticing what he has been up to. This is one of his short masterpieces.

  THE DEATH OF LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

  Considering the time and effort expended by this famous man in an effort to confront death and prepare himself for the end, the death of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a disastrous shambles. The apostle of love and charity ran away from his devoted wife in a spirit of bitter malevolence and fell ill at a railway station, where he died a few days later, surrounded by six doctors, a police chief, government officials and an elder from the nearby monastery, even though he had rejected all the institutions they represented. His wife was excluded from the company until the very end, when he was unconscious. One or two of his hardline disciples were present, but they failed to carry through an experiment which Tolstoy had thought up in anticipation of a lingering death. Ten years before, he had written in his diary, ‘When I am dying I should like to be asked whether I still see life as ... a progression towards God, an increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes. If it is no I shall look up.’6 They knew of this, but no one asked him.

  The sad truth is that, throughout his life, Tolstoy wanted to tell us all how we should conduct our lives, how we should love other people as a first priority, and how we should learn to die well. But the only way to do any of this would be to treat his life story like one of his cautionary tales, as an object lesson in how not to love and how not to prepare for death. On the subject of love, he behaved like Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s rationalist ideologue who found it easy to love the whole of humanity but had great difficulty in loving his next-door neighbour. Tolstoy’s uncharitable treatment, over many years, of his wife and of all those close to him (except a few devoted disciples) remains as a stain on his reputation. On the subject of death, his oblique and unintended lessons are that we should not become obsessed with dying and death as he did, and that there is little point in raging incessantly against the dying of the light.

  However, his art is so powerful that it frequently achieves a didactic purpose by dispersing it in a strong solution of distracting entertainment. At its (frequent) best, Tolstoy’s writing sharpens our sense of being alive, even if our lives are rather ordinary ones. This accords with his claim (in a letter of 1865) that the first aim of art is to make people love life in its countless manifestations, which applies even when the subject matter is death. At the same time he persuades us also to consider the deeper issues that interest him, thus raising our perceptions and aspirations. It may not be quite what the master wanted, but we remain thankful for his existence and achievement, first because of the wonderful storytelling and portraiture, and then the thoughtful provocation and the inspiring affirmation of the life spirit as presented in War and Peace, Anna Karenina and a broad range of Tolstoy’s stories, some of the best of which are represented in this volume.

  NOTES

  1 Diary of Countess S. A. Tolstoy, 14 February 1870, cited in Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (London: W. H. Allen, 1968), pp. 317, 726.

  2 Letter to S. A. Tolstoy, 4 September 18
69, cited in A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 249 — 50.

  3 Troyat, p. 319.

  4 See L. N. Tolstoy, Smert’ Ivana Ilyicha (Letchworth: Bradda Books, 1966), introduction by Michael Beresford, p. 14.

  5 See Wilson, p. 471.

  6 See Troyat, p. 691.

  Further Reading

  Bayley, John, Tolstoy and the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966).

  Benson, Ruth Crego, Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

  Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953; reprinted, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).

  Bloom, Harold, ed., Leo Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986).

  Christian, R. F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

  Donskov, Andrew, ed., Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood (Ottawa: Legas, 1996).

  Egan, David R., and Melinda A. Egan, eds., Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources to 1978 (Netuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1979).

  — , Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources from 1978to 2003 (Lanham, Toronto and Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005).

  Eykhenbaum, Boris, The Young Tolstoi, trans. and ed. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1972).

  Gifford, Henry, ed., Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

  Gustafson, Richard F., Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

  Jones, Malcolm, ed., New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  Knowles, A. V., ed., Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

  McLean, Hugh, ed., In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy, California Slavic Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  Matlaw, Ralph E., ed., Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

  Maude, Aylmer, The Life of Tolstoy, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1908 — 10; reprinted in I vol., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  Mjøor, Johan Kare, Desire, Death, and Imitation: Narrative Patterns in the Late Tolstoy, Slavica Bergensia 4(Bergen: University of Bergen Press, 2002).

  Orwin, Donna Tussing, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847 — 1880(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  — , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  Rowe, William W., Leo Tolstoy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986).

  Sankovitch, Natasha, Creating and Recovering Experience: Repetition in Tolstoy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  Shestov, Lev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969).

  Shklovsky, Victor, Lev Tolstoy, trans. Olga Shartse (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978).

  Silbajoris, Rimvydas, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1991).

  Simmons, Ernest J., Leo Tolstoy (New York: Vintage, 1960).

  Sorokin, Boris, Tolstoy in Prerevolutionary Russian Criticism (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1979).

  Steiner, George, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

  Tolstoy Studies Journal, 1988 — present. In addition to many articles, the journal (published annually) contains an annotated bibliography. For a list of the articles published in TSJ, see its website at www.tolstoystudies.org, which also contains many other materials related to Tolstoy, including a list of film versions of his works.

  Wasiolek, Edward, Tolstoy’s Major Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

  — , ed., Critical Essays on Tolstoy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). Wilson, A. N., Tolstoy (London: Penguin, and New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

  THE RAID

  A Volunteer’s Story

  1

  On July 12th Captain Khlopov came through the low door of my mud hut, complete with epaulettes and sabre. This was the first time I had seen him in full dress uniform since my arrival in the Caucasus.

  ‘I’ve come straight from the colonel’s,’ he said in reply to my quizzical look. ‘Our battalion is moving out tomorrow.’

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘To N — . All the forces are to assemble there.’

  ‘And from there they’ll make some sort of attack, will they?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But in which direction? What do you think?’

  ‘What should I think? I’m telling you what I know. Last night a Tartar galloped over from the general with orders for the battalion to move out with two days’ biscuit rations. As to where, why and for how long - well, we don’t ask such questions, my friend. Orders are orders and that’s that.’

  ‘But if you are taking rations for only two days, that means the troops won’t be away longer than that, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t mean a thing ...’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, very surprised.

  ‘Because that’s how it is here. When we went to Dargo we took a week’s rations, but we were there almost a month!’

  ‘Can I go with you?’ I asked, after a brief silence.

  ‘Yes, you can, but I wouldn’t advise it. Why run risks?’

  ‘Well, please allow me to ignore your advice. I’ve been waiting here a whole month just for the chance of seeing some action and you want me to miss it!’

  ‘You must do as you think fit, but in my opinion you should stay behind. You could do a spot of hunting while you’re waiting for us, while we would go and do what we have to. That would be splendid for you!’

  He spoke with such conviction that for a moment I really did think it would be splendid. But then I bluntly told him that nothing would induce me to stay behind.

  ‘But what do you expect to see there?’ the captain went on, still trying to dissuade me. ‘If you really want to know what battles are like, read Mikhaylovsky-Danilevsky’s Description of War1 — it’s a fine book and you’ll find all you want there, where each corps was positioned, how battles are fought.’

  ‘But it’s just that kind of thing that doesn’t interest me!’ I replied.

  ‘What does interest you, then? Want to see how people are killed? In 1832 there was a civilian here, like you ... I think he was a Spaniard. He accompanied us on two expeditions and wore a kind of blue cloak ... well, the poor fellow got killed. But that’s nothing new here, my friend.’

  However humiliated I felt at the captain’s misinterpretation of my motives I did not start arguing with him.

  ‘Was he a brave man?’ I asked.

  ‘God knows! He was always riding out in front and where the fighting was, there he’d be!’

  ‘So he must have been brave,’ I said.

  ‘No. Poking your nose in where you’re not wanted isn’t what I’d call brave.’

  ‘Then what would you call brave?’

  ‘Brave? Brave?’ the captain repeated with the air of someone asking the question for the very first time. ‘The man who behaves as he ought to is brave,’ he replied after some thought.

  I remembered that Plato had defined bravery as the knowledge of what should and what should not be feared and, despite the looseness and vagueness of the captain’s definition, I felt that in their basic ideas the two definitions were not so different as they might appear and that the captain’s was even more accurate than the Greek philosopher’s since, had he been able to express himself as well as Plato, he would most probably have said that the brave man is the one who fears only what ought to be feared, and not what should not be feared.

  I wan
ted to explain my idea to the captain. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it seems to me that in every danger there is a choice, and the choice that springs from a sense of duty, for example, is courage, while a choice made under the influence of base feelings is cowardice. Therefore, the man who risks his life from vanity, curiosity or greed cannot be called brave. Conversely, the man who avoids danger from an honest sense of responsibility to his family, or simply out of conviction, cannot be called a coward.’

  The captain looked at me with rather a strange expression as I spoke. ‘Well, I’m not much good at arguing about such things,’ he said, filling his pipe, ‘but there’s a cadet here who’s fond of philosophizing. Go and have a chat with him. He writes poetry too.’

  It was only when I was in the Caucasus that I got to know the captain, but I had heard about him before I left Russia. His mother, Marya, has a small estate less than two miles from mine. Before I left for the Caucasus I visited her. The old lady was absolutely delighted that I would be seeing her Pashenka (her pet name for the elderly, grey-haired captain) and that, like a ‘talking letter’, I could tell him all about her and deliver a small parcel. After treating me to some excellent pie and smoked duck, she went to her bedroom and returned with a rather large black leather pouch containing an amulet with a black silk ribbon attached to it.

  ‘This is the icon of our Lady of the Burning Bush,’ she said, crossing herself and kissing the icon as she handed it to me. ‘Please give it to him. You see, when he left for the Caucasus I said prayers for him and vowed if he remained alive and unharmed I would have this icon of the Mother of God made for him. For eighteen years Our Lady and the saints have been merciful to him: not once has he been injured - and when I think of the battles he’s taken part in! What Mikhailo, who was with him, told me was enough to make one’s hair stand on end! You understand - all I know about him is only through others. The dear boy never writes back about his campaigns for fear of frightening me.’