My Life with Tolstoy

One morning X and I were having breakfast in the upstairs bar. I was spooning honeyed yogourt into my mouth with a greedy urgency.

“I don’t mean to be insulting,” X said with a strained smile, “but you’re making quite a racket over there.”

That, for those who don’t recognize it, is the sound of a woman who no longer wants you. It reminded me—with the suddenness of someone smashing a hammer on the table—of a scene I had read only days before where Anna views her husband’s ears (they stick out) with revulsion.

A few days later, the sun was setting over the river. Such a melancholy time, the boats with little bow lanterns, like fireflies, drifting downstream with the current. I was caught midway in that famous scene where Anna, having fled her family, sneaks back to her former house to visit her nine-year-old son. Her husband is asleep downstairs. She bribes a servant, she starts up the stairs—.

I knew that this was a one-time moment in literature, that I would never again get to experience the unfolding of this scene without knowing its outcome. Would she get to see the little boy or not It felt as urgent as a crisis in my own life and I feared, I actually feared, that X, with her blond hair and sharp features, those beautiful eyelashes, would wander into the room at that very second and spoil everything. I leapt up from the bed and locked the door to the room.

The end of a love affair comes in different ways. For X, it was the spectacle of me wolfing down a dish of yogourt (as if someone might steal it); for me, it was the moment I decided to shut her out of the room and all the things inside it.

Pretty much everything Tolstoy wrote after Anna K. is so top-heavy with pedantry or moral instruction that you can’t finish it. The danger signs were there even in the divine War and Peace—that dull section where Pierre joins the Freemasons, or the novel’s last, dreadful chapter. (Surely the real ending comes forty pages earlier with Prince Andrei’s son eavesdropping on a favourite uncle downstairs.) There’s trouble brewing here and there in Anna Karenina, too, in Levin’s tiresome reflections on rural agriculture. How I long to stop strangers when I see these books under their arms, to implore them to skip those sections so that they won’t leave such magnificent works on a note of anticlimax.

From 1881 onward, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis that was characterized by great, some would say insane, extremes: a disgust with sex, a disdain for literature, an abandonment of secular pleasures, even of riding his bicycle. (” Daddy loves giving things up,” one of his daughters wrote snidely in her diary.) His unforgiving embrace of Christianity (with a few suggestions for its improvement, naturally) made him a kind of holy figure in Russia and attracted devotees and lunatics from all over the country, many of whom stayed at the house, much to the fury of Madame Tolstoy. But even when he was out in the barn dressed like a peasant, making his own boots and calling his wife a whore, there remained a few dazzling literary turns in the by-now-old coot. It was as if every so often Tolstoy couldn’t stop being Tolstoy, couldn’t stand in the way of his own nagging genius.

People know The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but for some reason almost no one I’ve talked to has read the extraordinary novella Master and Man, which he wrote when he was seventy-two years old. I came across it by accident years after I thought I knew all the Tolstoy hits, when, out of a nostalgia for a more excitable time in my life (literature leaves fainter traces as the years go by), I sat in on an undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century Russian novel at the University of Toronto. (I had time as well as nostalgia on my hands.) Master and Man, I discovered, is the great Tolstoy buried treasure. It’s a very simple story indeed. A peasant, Nikita, and his master, a lumber merchant, set off on a winter afternoon to conclude a deal in a neighbouring village. A storm comes up; they lose their way; night falls. As the two drift through a zone of lunar frigidity (” It sometimes seemed that the sledge was standing still and the countryside was rolling away behind them”), what the reader experiences may well be the best description of winter in literature.

Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya, who looked after the business end of things, was away when Tolstoy finished Master and Man. In her absence he sold it to a magazine for next to nothing. Big trouble when she came back. Raging through the house (the servants cringing behind the furniture), she accused him of sleeping with the editor and raised such a row that Tolstoy declared the marriage over and went to his room to pack. Not to be outdone, Sofya ran outside into the Russian winter clad in only a nightdress and a dressing gown. Wearing underpants and a vest, with no shirt, Tolstoy chased after her. Once rescued, the distraught wife took to her bed. Unable to endure her unhappiness, Tolstoy relented and cancelled the magazine deal. But two days after the rights were formally returned, their seven-year-old son, Vanichka, a gifted, sweet-natured boy, developed scarlet fever and died. His parents, the quarrel over the manuscript suddenly forgotten, sat together on the sofa, “almost unconscious with sorrow.”