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Living with Death: the Humanity in Leo Tolstoy's Prose Dr. Patricia A. Burak Yuri Pavlov

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Living with Death: the Humanity in Leo Tolstoy's Prose Dr. Patricia A. Burak Yuri Pavlov Living with Death: The Humanity in Leo Tolstoy’s Prose A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University Liam Owens Candidate for Bachelor of Science in Biology and Renée Crown University Honors Spring 2020 Honors Thesis in Your Major Thesis Advisor: _______________________ Dr. Patricia A. Burak Thesis Reader: _______________________ Yuri Pavlov Honors Director: _______________________ Dr. Danielle Smith, Director Abstract What do we fear so uniquely as our own death? Of what do we know less than the afterlife? Leo Tolstoy was quoted saying: “We can only know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” Knowing nothing completely contradicts the essence of human nature. Although having noted the importance of this unknowing, using the venture of creative fiction, Tolstoy pined ceaselessly for an understanding of the experience of dying. Tolstoy was afraid of death; to him it was an entity which loomed. I believe his early involvements in war, as well as the death of his brother Dmitry, and the demise of his self-imaged major character Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, whom he tirelessly wrote and rewrote—where he dove into the supposed psyche of a dying man—took a toll on the author. Tolstoy took the plight of ending his character’s life seriously, and attempted to do so by upholding his chief concern: the truth. But how can we, as living, breathing human beings, know the truth of death? There is no truth we know of it other than its existence, and this alone is cause enough to scare us into debilitating fits and ungrounded speculation. The following will be an exploration of the effect which death had on Tolstoy’s major characters as well as the author himself. 2 Executive Summary There is an Eastern fable about a traveler overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. He escapes the beast by jumping into a nearby well, however, as he hangs from a branch growing from the inside of the well, he looks down and sees the upturned, open mouth of a dragon. The traveler does not dare to journey out of the cave for fear of the enraged beast circling the well. He clings tightly to the branch as he smells the rancid breath of the dragon rise from below. Understanding himself to be stuck, the traveler hears scurrying by his hand and notices that two mice, one white and one black, take turns nibbling away at the branch he is clinging to. His grip wanes as he grows weaker and weaker, but still he clings out of an incommunicable, almost animal desire to live. It is here that the man notices honey on the branch. He reaches out, tastes it and for a moment, all he holds in the palm of his mind is not the danger surrounding him, or the inevitability of his death, but the sweetness of the honey. Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer who penned the famous works War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wrote about this fable in his dogmatic essay, A Confession. Tolstoy harkened this story to his own life, where he found his knowledge of the assuredness of death to be so unbearable, the sensation to be so great and inescapable, that he contemplated ending his own life to become void of this knowledge. “I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of the day and night gnawed at the branch by which I clung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet” (Tolstoy 17). The honey was his family, his land, his serfs and his writing, however, affairs in these realms dulled for Tolstoy as he wrote this small book. He completed the work at 57, several years after finishing the books which had made him internationally famous. 3 Dying at the age of 82 of natural causes, we know that Leo Tolstoy did not take his life under the pressure of those thoughts expressed in A Confession. As a young man he was even of a much different ideology; he was full of a love for life and he expressed this as he settled into the habits of marriage with his young wife Sonya. “I lived for thirty-four years without knowing it was possible to love so much and be so happy,” he wrote in his diary (Troyat 313). Here Tolstoy expresses an abounding love, similar to the love Prince Andrei, regarding Natasha, goes on to think of in War and Peace. “Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand because I love. Everything is connected only by that” (Tolstoy 984). Tolstoy uses his characters to push outward and into the world his love for life and a recognition of the role to which love plays in our world and in our minds. “One can only live when one is intoxicated with life…,” says Tolstoy in A Confession; we can understand this intoxication to which he refers to be the feeling of elation created by love (Tolstoy 16). To know love as the light of life, Tolstoy had to know the inverse. He had seen darkness in war; not only had he witnessed the death of his comrades, he felt a guilt weighing on his soul for ending the lives of other men with his own hand. Tolstoy witnessed the deaths of his older brother and several of his own children over the course of his life; as he grew older he fostered a changed, almost intimate relationship with death. As we age, we come to know the end of our lives to be a fact, just an anonymous one, unknown to not only us, but to everyone else. We share a commonality in our unknowing. Through the literature of Tolstoy, especially though his opus War and Peace, we modern readers can come to know the commonality in our everyday experiences. Whether across time or space, language or dialect, the only prerequisite for fully experiencing the truth in Leo Tolstoy’s prose is to be human. 4 Tolstoy’s personal life mirrored the lives of his characters, and the question arises whether he was tormented by the onerous process of writing the deaths of characters to an extent that the entity of “Death” began to haunt the author. The entity of “Death” does not shy away from Tolstoy’s work; the distance an individual has from it greatly affects their relationship with death. As a soldier views his comrade torn to ribbons of flesh by a mortar grenade, he sees the insidious and ravenous nature of death. All while another man may lay in a quiet room, next to his loved ones, knowing his death may come at any moment, and that in his life he did what was asked of him: he grew, he fought, he learned, he loved. This dying man sees death not as the soldier did; this man sees it as restorative and peaceful. 5 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 Executive Summary…………………………………………………………………………… 3 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….. 7 Chapter I: Introduction……………………………………………………………………….. 8 Chapter II: Death and the Living……………………………………………………………. 15 Chapter III: Death and the Dying………………………………………………………….... 23 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………... 31 6 Acknowledgements I must first acknowledge and thank my mentor and advisor, Dr. Patricia Burak. Your intelligence and passion for this work are both undeniably palpable. Thank you for allowing me to live with this literature—your faith in me gave me the courage to follow a thread of passion. I have pulled on that thread continuously and am proud, as well as surprised, as to what I have found within myself. It has been a complete honor to work with you. To Yuri Pavlov, I wish to thank you dearly for your keen eye on this manuscript, as well as your willingness to take time from your busy schedule to work with me. Your expertise and knowledge are greatly appreciated. To Naomi Shanguhyia and Karen Hall, thank you both for encouraging my curiosity and allowing this project to come into existence. It has been a pleasure to conduct this work. To the man himself, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, may you continue to rest easy knowing your tireless work was not done for naught. Some 100 years separate your life from mine, yet still, there are passages you have written which affect me in ways unlike anything else. When my moment comes, may we meet, in order to discuss a few questions I still have. Lastly, to my parents, without your constant and endless love and encouragement none of this could have been possible. And I mean none of this. Liam Owens Syracuse, New York April 17, 2020 7 Chapter I Introduction “We can only know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” Leo Tolstoy War and Peace, finished by Leo Tolstoy in 1869, may leave the 21st century reader confused. What were those 1200+ pages really about? The story takes us to battles and to bedsides, where characters may take their last breath, or where some may take their very first. To one who has not read the book previously, some names within will be as indistinguishable to the ear as Platon Karataev, yet some will be as recognizable as Napoleon Bonaparte. We are shown the intricacies of love and the complexities of war—throughout every line there is one constant among this amalgam: the pursuit of the truth. This pursuit is not so much done by the characters, but by the writer himself.
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