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. In his process of writing this fiction, Leo Tolstoy was searching for something more truthful than a historical text could ever give him. Constant throughout his fiction works but specifically salient in War and Peace, is a staunch attention to the experience of the human— of being among nature, of loving, of laughing and dancing. Tolstoy believed central to our experience as sentient beings is our knowledge of our inevitable death. This knowledge personally impacted the author’s psyche and thus his prose teems with a measured reverence for death. In a world where we shy away from the conversation of death—that which is our most connective force—Tolstoy’s work operates to take the hood off the reaper, to demystify and find the humanity of our end.
Undoubtedly, truth is the guiding light in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. If the story is the vehicle through which his characters travel, much like the troikas raced by Dolokhov and
8 Denisov, then the pursuit of the truth is the force by which this story is propelled. This force is like a pair of strong-legged mares trotting through the Russian winter; by them, we, the readers, are carried through the story—through moments of lust and love, from battlefields to ballrooms.
Of the reading experience, Richard Freeborn, a former scholar and professor of Russian literature at the University of London, says, “One lives through it, rather than reads it” (Freeborn 266). The same way Pierre lived through his day on the battlefield, or how Andrei lived through the wound he suffered under that “lofty sky,” we live through each moment of the characters’ lives as effortlessly as they do. Through glorious births and existential deaths, as each glass of wine is tasted, as each cannon shot echoes in our chests, the soul of each reader is deeply affected.
The work, which Tolstoy himself called, “…not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle,” was written about events which took place in history some 50 years before he ever first put ink to the page (Tolstoy 1217). This obsession with the past (deduced from his tireless effort, seeing as he spent upwards of 7 years on the project) caused backlash in the literary world. Some said he merely reiterated what Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837), a
Russian poet who is widely regarded as the “Father of Russian Literature,” had already managed to say in the proper moment. Tolstoy’s enterprise in writing such a massive piece of seemingly irrelevant literature was questionable for many critics of the time. Tolstoy was self-concerned, as well as interested in the creation of historical texts, and especially curious of the extent which those historical accounts stem, or deviate from the truth. While beginning the manuscript he had recently moved into what would become his life-long estate at Yasnaya Polyana; he and his wife had started their family and turned their land into a home; they had peasants whom Tolstoy educated and worked with, as well as plenty of dogs and horses—he was a settled man. What
9 was he brooding over which struck and ignited the fire in his soul, the one which fueled his ceaseless work?
When turning the last page and ending the second epilogue, the reader of War and Peace becomes fully away of Tolstoy’s almost obsessive investment with the pedagogy of history and the attribution of immense historical movement to the trivial actions of one or two men.
Prevailing in his creation of intimate moments, exemplifying the larger human truths through his fictional characters, the sole product of his desires, the truth, is shown to be principal in his prose. In 1855, before beginning War and Peace, Tolstoy announced, “My hero is truth”
(Sevastopol Sketches). There is no hero in War and Peace in our 21st century understanding. This quote from Tolstoy, even though it came several years before he began writing War and Peace, proves to be upheld by the author throughout his subsequent work. He was deeply invested in his personal truths and he laboriously kept diaries. He wrote so often that he had a standing desk made for himself when he could no longer sit; when he would tire of standing he would lay down and write; when he could not write he would ask his wife, or his daughter, to transcribe what he would dictate. He was a tireless, obsessive worker who never lost sight of that which was most important to him: the truth.
Those who write do so with a strong regard to that which they know. There is no doubt that Leo Tolstoy had a keen eye for the nuances of mankind as well as the influence of nature on the human and every other minute particular in the world around him. This was a talent which forecasted his ability to create truth through fiction; he wrote with an immediacy which mimics reality. Boris Pasternak, the poet and author of the novel Doctor Zhivago, once said about
Tolstoy: “All his life, at every moment, he possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare
10 occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory,” (Pasternak 74). Pasternak was born when Tolstoy was 62, into a much different Russia than Tolstoy wrote of in War and Peace, but Tolstoy’s genius was still clearly understood by this young writer to be boundless and inspiring.
When Leo Tolstoy was a young man he first saw warfare under the guidance of his older brother, Nicholas, in the Caucasus. Here he was exposed to the nuances of manhood, the tenuous fiber separating life from its inverse, and the impact nature has on the soul. In his recognition of nature, shown in his diary, we can see Tolstoy’s literary promise even at this young stage of his life. One night, after all the men in his regiment had fallen asleep, Tolstoy wrote in his diary:
“The night is clear. A cool breeze passes through the tent and makes the candle flame waver. Far away, the aoul dogs are barking and the sentries are calling out to each other. The air is full of the fragrance of the oak- and the plane-tree leaves used to thatch the tent. I sit on a drum in a little shed adjoining the tent…Everything in there is dark, except for one bar of light falling across the end of my brother’s bed. But just in front of me, in full light, a pistol, sabers, a sword and a pair of underpants are hanging on a partition. Silence. A gust of wind. A gnat buzzes past my ear. Close by, a soldier coughs and sighs,” (Troyat 99). There is nothing in this passage which relates to the larger concerns which his later works would center upon, yet those later works would not have been truly Tolstoyan, had they not been filled with the sensory, the immediate, and the physical world we see Tolstoy was innately so talented in painting. Henri
Troyat went on to say in his biography of Leo Tolstoy, “He is like a painter trying to cover a wall with a three-haired miniaturist’s brush,” (Troyat 386). Even from a young age we can see his ability to paint such intricate pictures with his language; from the movement of the air, the calls
11 of the dogs, to the underpants hanging, the young Tolstoy gave his reader, to whom, at the time this was written, he was unaware he was speaking, the full line of his sight.
Tolstoy defends the form of War and Peace in “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace” (Tolstoy, 1868). In it, regarding the difference between the historian and the artist, he says, “…for the artist, considering the correspondence to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people,” (Tolstoy 1219). Then why would a man who would go on to write essays on the nature of art, write this novel in which Napoleon was one of the largest forces governing the movement of the story?
Capturing the world which rushes by us in fleeting moments, the writer recreates the past.
Tolstoy chose the years 1805 to 1812, when Napoleon was invading Russia, because it gave him the ability to write of ordinary Russian people under extraordinary circumstances. The characters are faced with heart-wrenching departures, un-promised futures, mortal wounds, enemies, affairs, the stifling weight of solitude, and the burning of their beloved Moscow. Tolstoy’s inaccurate portrayal of historical figures, like Kutuzov and Napoleon, may be the most prominent reason he received backlash regarding this work. They read as the most fictitious of his creations, almost as if they were wooden puppets, not only talking and acting inorganically, but also as if in accordance with a higher, inevitable power, like that created by the fingers of the marionettist.
“War isn’t courtesy, it’s the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war,” said Prince Andrei on the eve of the battle of Borodino, the battle where he would be fatally wounded (Tolstoy 775). As any human knows, with war comes death and with death comes the most profound and unanswerable questions known to man: What do we experience as we die? What comes next? Will I still exist as I do now? This wheel endlessly
12 turns, fueling the artistic journey, the fatalistic anxieties, and the pursuit of happiness in the individual; if death is nothing, life is everything. In order to properly document his own accounts of death, as a young, healthy man, Tolstoy established a code of eye movements he would use on his deathbed to signify his feelings in his last moments. However, the drama of Tolstoy’s death did not allow for an adherence to the rules which he set forth (Beard, “Facing Death with
Tolstoy”).
I believe Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, among many reasons, to explore his notions of life, the truth, and the role which death plays in this mix. As he searched for the truth necessary to properly create the death of his Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, part of Leo Tolstoy died along with his character. It is possible, however, that part of him was uplifted, and possibly saved with his
Pierre Bezukhov. Tolstoy feared death, and the death he created for Prince Andrei deeply affected him. No stranger to death though, Tolstoy, beginning this book at the age of 35, had witnessed it firsthand through his time as a soldier. Not only in this great work, War and Peace, do we see this intrigue with death. Also in his next work Anna Karenina, which he called his first novel, as well as some of his shorter works, like The Death of Ivan Ilych, and his more dogmatic essays on religion and philosophy, specifically A Confession, we see Tolstoy, as he ages, slightly ebb, but never does he stray from his original themes present in War and Peace. Examining his own life through his biographies, we can see that Tolstoy had several moments when he believed he came close with the entity of death itself. One night in particular, as he was travelling through a city named Arzamas, Tolstoy was terrified by some inanimate presence—this night had a great effect on the literature he wrote afterwards. Tolstoy’s own death, coming in the year 1910, also has several parallels to the death of some of his characters, to an extent in several cases where it seems as if he wrote in his own death into existence. Through an exploration of War and Peace,
13 as well as a few detours into his other works, this investigation will serve to highlight the accessibility of humanity in these works of prose. The modern reader may be confused by the breadth of his work, but it is this breadth which allowed him to pontificate on the largest brush strokes of human life: love, war, and that which lingers in the back of all of our minds, the inevitable, the inescapable: death. Regarding the quote which heads this section, we know nothing of death, and thus this is our only truth. To ask for more is a pursuit which goes beyond the wisdom given to us as humans.
14 Chapter II
Death and the Living
“Whatever the artist depicts—saints, robbers, kings or lackeys—we seek and see only the artist’s own soul.”
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
On the eve of the battle of Austerlitz, as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky sits, dejected over the danger to which tens of thousands of innocent Russian lives will be subjected the next day by the flippant decisions of their leaders, he thinks to himself, “Yes, I may very well be killed tomorrow,” (Tolstoy 264). With that thought came the most incongruous menagerie of memories, impressions and recollections. Thinking of his pregnant wife, and the last farewell he had with her and his father, he reflects, “Tomorrow, maybe everything will be over for me, all these memories will be no more…,” (Tolstoy 264). In this scene in Volume One, as we are still acquainting ourselves with the characters, Tolstoy peels back the coarse exterior of Prince
Andrei and reveals his anxieties and vainglories. With his talent for switching back and forth from the minds of his characters to the omnipotence of his narration, Leo Tolstoy not only brings the readers into the world of 19th Century Russia, but also into the minds of its people. Prince
Andrei is convinced of his inevitable death the following day, but instead of obsessing over the life he may lose, by holding onto those memories of his young wife and ailing father, he falls into an obsessive fit over glory, “…I’d give them all now for a moment of glory, of triumph over people, for love from people I don’t know…,” (Tolstoy 265). As we are alive, and especially in the fervor of youth, we not only act, but think as if we are invincible; because we feel so far from it, death does not frighten us.
15 When he first thought of his seemingly inevitable death, as his loved ones appeared in his mind’s eye, Andrei rejects their importance and claims he would rather be hailed as the sole victor of the battle than live to see them. He is a soldier under the impression of this “mysterious power and glory hovering over [him] here in this mist,” (Tolstoy 265). This mysterious power which Andrei is referring to is not something particular to his character; we see this in almost every solider whose mind Tolstoy allows us to glimpse. As Pierre walks across the battlefield, clumsily yet astonishingly missing every mortar explosion and whizzing bullet, we see that he, a nobleman, the anti-soldier, feels that same flush of indescribable momentum. “Pierre did not look ahead at the battlefield and was not interested in knowing what was going on there: he was entirely absorbed in contemplating this fire flaring up more and more, which (he felt it) was also flaring up in his soul,” (Tolstoy 777). Death could have seized upon Pierre at any moment, but yet, it doesn’t, nor does he see the imminence of the end. This unknowing allows him to step around it, as if he was tip-toeing purposefully away from the mortar fire, in front of and behind each bullet.
In these examples, Andrei is the pensive, glory-seeking soldier who sees death as inevitable but glory as a necessity. Pierre ignores that which is around him; not even the cannon fire upheaving the earth and tearing men apart, nor their screams of agony can bring him into consciousness. He only moves from place to place, surviving as by luck and nothing else. These two men show such proximity to death, yet such different incentives to live. Pierre obliviously walks amidst the fire as if it cannot burn him; Andrei vows to, “…show all [he] can do,” in order to obtain the glory he so desires, even if his death comes a moment later (Tolstoy 265). These scenes are formative for the development of both of these individuals. Yes, Pierre walks on the field at Borodino some 400+ pages after the battle of Austerlitz, but couldn’t we say that Pierre’s
16 character, although he does plenty of moral ebbing and flowing throughout the novel, when compared to Andrei, takes longer to grow into the character as Tolstoy initially pictured him to be? The proximity to death which both of these men experience creates strikingly different thoughts on life. Tolstoy masterfully writes of the differences between men, yet their similitude is unavoidable, and he showcases this through Pierre’s character. As he gives his speech to the
Masons, Pierre thinks, “no truth presents itself to two people in the same way,” (Tolstoy 436).
However, when we see Andrei actually in the battle, even closer to death, we see a much different man than the night before. On the battlefield, Andrei does not know what to make of the shifting hordes of the men in front of him. With his vision clouded by thick white smoke and his ears ringing from the explosions, he follows Kutuzov as if he is the tail on the back of the general’s horse. Andrei’s glory may have come when seizing the staff of the standard, but it is short-lived when he is wounded and collapses under that famous Russian sky.
These initial examples showcase the naiveté of Tolstoy’s characters towards the entity of death. Death was a chief worry for Tolstoy and such is seen in his literature as well as his personal diaries. Even before writing the first volume of War and Peace, he saw death firsthand, in the Caucasus and Sevastopol, as a soldier; with the same hand which penned this great work,
Tolstoy pulled the trigger of his musket and ended the lives of several men. He was deeply affected while travelling abroad in Paris when he witnessed a beheading. In his dogmatic essay on the meaning of life titled A Confession, which he wrote about 10 years after completing War and Peace, Tolstoy went on to say: “So, for instance, during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress
17 could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I”
(Tolstoy 11). As we see, this gruesome sight drastically changed the ideologies held by Tolstoy.
He was 29 when he witnessed the execution, some 10 years before War and Peace was finished.
The death of his brother Dmitry also left a mark on Tolstoy’s soul. In A Confession he says,
“Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding what he had lived for and still less why he had to die,” (Tolstoy 11).
Dmitry Tolstoy died in the year 1860, which was also the year Tolstoy began writing War and
Peace.
Writing the death of his self-mirroring character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, was also said to have a deep impact on Tolstoy and I believe there is a strong relation between the death of
Prince Andrei and a special night in Tolstoy’s life which has been written about extensively. This was a night in the early 1870s. Tolstoy was lodged in the small village of Arzamas, where he was overcome by some intangible presence he felt near him. He attempted to flee after becoming deeply disturbed by this certain feeling, and meeting an entity which identified itself as “Death.”
About this moment, Tolstoy later went on to say, “My whole being ached with the need to live, the right to live, and, at that same moment, I felt death at work. And it was awful, being torn apart inside,” (Troyat 391). Tolstoy ended his terror by quickly falling asleep after stirring his sleeping servant, and ordering him to pack the carriage. When Tolstoy awoke, his servant was standing over him, saying that he didn’t want to wake his master once he had fallen asleep. This night took place after both War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written. The death of Andrei
Bolkonsky and Tolstoy’s horror story are eerily similar.
18 Andrei was the half of Tolstoy which was innately Russian: stern, prideful, well-read and well-spoken. Tolstoy pulled this character from his own ribs, animating him, making him living and breathing, and over the course of his manuscript, the artist and his creation became intimate.
Before Andrei is wounded and falls under the care of his newly reconciled love, Natasha,
Tolstoy brings him even closer to death than he did at the battle of Austerlitz. The day before the battle of Borodino, Andrei confronts death unlike he had previously; then, he brushed it to the side and preoccupied himself with the vanity of glory and the desire to be known by those who are anonymous to him. Now, on the day before the battle of Borodino, Tolstoy describes his thoughts by writing: “He knew that tomorrow’s battle would be the most dreadful of all he had taken part in, and the possibility of death presented itself to him, for the first time in his life, with no relation to the everyday, with no considerations of how it would affect others, but only in relation to himself, to his soul, vividly, almost with certainty, simply, and terribly” (Tolstoy 769).
Seven years has passed since the battle of Austerlitz, and in that time Andrei has grown closer to
Pierre, he now has a son and has fostered a changed relationship with his own father; Andrei has also grown skeptical of his sister’s strictly religious ideology. This can be shown later on his pre-
Borodino monologue when, regarding the death of their father and the imminence of the French army’s invasion of Moscow, he says, “And Princess Marya says it’s a trial from on high. Why a trial, when he’s no more and never will be? Never will be again! He’s no more! So for whom is it a trial? The fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I’ll be killed…” (Tolstoy
770). Here we see Andrei in a passionate state, elevated in his emotions to an extent we have not seen previously. From now until his final breath he is a man undergoing much change, and I believe this is due to his recognition of the inevitability of death.
19 After completing the final volume of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy gave himself completely to the glutinous reading of philosophical text. Filled with this new knowledge, the pride of completing his first opus, and the satisfaction of family life, Tolstoy was very much alive; being at this peak of his mental, physical, and economic ability. He was, however, crippled by attacks of fright regarding death. Being so alive he feared very much the inverse of his experience among the living—the only thing he had ever known. Perhaps to expand his roots, to send them down deeper into the world of the living, to obtain more of the Russian land he so loved, Tolstoy journeyed to fortify himself against the death he so feared. He went to buy more land.
While riding along in the middle of the dark, passing by the ghostly bodies of the bare trees, Tolstoy became excited and agitated inside his carriage; he asked his servant to get him into the closest lodging for the night. He now had doubts of his mission, he felt as if Yasnaya
Polyana, his wife and children, were all on the other side of the Earth. He was plagued by the thought of falling ill so far from home, so far away from his family. In the quiet town of
Arzamas, the bells of his carriage rang into the cold, empty night, and Tolstoy, settling into the inn at the end of the main street found himself solace; or so he thought.
After settling into the rooms, he quickly and unintentionally fell asleep stretched out on a couch with a rug over his legs. Upon waking, he, being the only conscious one in the inn, was flushed with the same anxious feelings he had experienced in the carriage, “Where am I? Where am I going? What am I running away from?” (Troyat 391). These questions sped to the forefront of his mind. He became more frightened every passing minute within the complete darkness—he could not find a single candle to light. Tolstoy questioned the feelings he had; what was it which was tormenting him? what was he afraid of? Then he got his answer: “‘Of me,’ answered Death,
20 ‘I am here’” (Troyat 391). Tolstoy scrambled to awaken his servant to prepare for their immediate departure as gooseflesh rippled across his skin, sweat broke out on his forehead and he fumbled to finally light a candle. He flew into a frenzy which eventually ended in his dozing off on the same couch from which he had initially stirred.
Andrei, on the battlefield of Borodino, the battle which would prove to be his last, faces death, similarly to the way Tolstoy did: blatantly. Amidst the mortar fire and the cannonade which rang through his senses, he stared, lifelessly, at the inanimate object, the grenade, which would inevitably be his “Death.” “‘Get down!’ cried the voice of the adjutant, throwing himself to the ground. Prince Andrei stood undecided. The shell was smoking, spinning like a top between him and the prone adjutant, on the border between the field and the meadow, near a brush of hardwood,” (Tolstoy 810). In his diary, Tolstoy’s writing is more terse than his prose; time does not slow and hesitate in his journals the way it does in War and Peace. In this scene it feels as if hours pass while the shell lays in the grass, smoking, spinning, almost taunting Andrei.
As his own personal “Death” looks him in the face, he thinks, “Can this be death?” and then later, “I can’t, I don’t want to die, I love life, I love this grass, the earth, the air…,” (Tolstoy
811). Here we see the life-loving Tolstoy come to the foreground of his prose. Through his character, he makes the assertions that love is the essence of life. It is the overlooked which we love with our soul; the forgotten, the grass, the sky, but before he has the ability to say anymore, because he cannot stretch time any further, the shell explodes, and Andrei is sent flying, falling onto his chest, and as a large stain of blood spreads across his torso, the surrounding officers rush towards him.
When Tolstoy was overcome with this fear of death, he could think only of his family and his land: the loves of his life. When Andrei faces the smoking shell he is reminded of the
21 moment he spent under the sky at Austerlitz, and he remembers that true love for the world is divine love; it is a collective love. Both of these men seem to find some notion of a concentrated life-meaning when face-to-face with death. Tolstoy abandoned the desire to purchase more land and simply wished to be home with his family. Andrei does not think of Natasha, or his dead father, or his sister; he thinks of the world around him that he loves so dearly, a love which he has only recently come to realize, one that completely eclipses his love for glory, which he sought so completely at Austerlitz as a younger man.
Andrei looked at death the way Tolstoy did during his night at Arzamas. However,
Tolstoy experienced death with his main character, Andrei, before this particular night. It is interesting to think of the impetus of such thoughts in Tolstoy’s mind (the mortal ones which left a horrific impression on him). Did he have this attack because of the proximity to death he brought not only Andrei, but himself while writing War and Peace? To have a mind, such that it may create the intricacies of the final scenes of Andrei’s life, Tolstoy had to place himself in that bed, under that white sheet, beside the loving Natasha, as if he himself were Andrei, dying. The soul of Leo Tolstoy was tormented in its most blissful processes, those of creation, those of discerning the truth from all else.
In this section I have looked at Andrei’s, and briefly, Pierre’s, experiences with death as characters created by Tolstoy. I am interested in the comparison of the lives of Tolstoy’s fictional characters to his own life; I am interested in how the creative writing process influences the life of the author. The following section will bring us even closer to death; where I will discuss the last moments of Andrei’s life, as well of those of Leo Tolstoy himself.
22 Chapter 3
Death and the Dying
“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.” Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych
At the age of 82, Leo Tolstoy, ill and bedridden, from within an inn lent to him by the
Astopovo station master, spoke his last words to his daughter Sasha. Throughout his life he had written of this moment extensively, but these proceedings were fictitious. The moment of transition from life to death exists in almost every story written by Leo Tolstoy, but no matter how talented the writer, or how obsessive they are regarding the necessity of the truth, reality is always different than the words on the page. Reality possesses some indescribable momentum which renders its truth undeniable. The writer only tries their best to write as clearly as life appears in front of us—if clarity and honesty can be held equally in each hand by the writer, and then if both can be placed onto the page properly, only then does the writer become the artist.
Prior to his last moments, Tolstoy had fled his home and his wife in the middle of the night. In a chilly letter written to his wife while fleeing, he said, “My departure will cause you pain, and I am sorry about that; but try to understand me, and believe that I could not do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming—has already become—intolerable. Apart from everything else, I cannot go on living in the luxury by which I have always been surrounded, and
I am doing what people of my age very often do: giving up the world, in order to spend my last days alone and in silence,” (Troyat 806). Foreknowledge seems to have been one of Tolstoy’s many tricks; he kept it up his sleeve his whole life, and pulled it out often while writing both his
23 letters and his prose. In his 82nd year, laying under that white sheet, much like Andrei, in that square room, described similarly to the room in Arzamas, using just the bare tip of his finger, he scrawled a new manuscript across the top of his sheet. With his eyes flicking under their lids, and his lips pursed, the tireless laborer made one final entry into the diary of his soul. There is no record of what he was trying to write; no one attempted to translate his motions into symbols, so we will never know if his last moments were like that of Andrei, or even of Ivan Ilych.
In 1886, almost 25 years before his death, Tolstoy published the short story The Death of
Ivan Ilych, which centers upon the last few weeks of a law clerk’s life. Ivan struggles to make sense out of his life, and he feels that all his hard work is for nothing, and that death destroys all which we work for in life. As he grows closer and closer to his death, brought about by an unknown cause, with his pain rising, he begins to see death for what it truly is. Initially, it is described as a black bag which he is being pushed into by some unknowable force, but only as he makes his transition into the bag does he see the light at its bottom. The conclusion Ivan Ilych makes is that death is a process which ends as life ends. As life ends, something new and full of light begins. Perhaps Tolstoy, laying in the Astopovo train station, was experiencing something similar to Ivan Ilych, and in his last moments, without the strength to voice it to those around him, but with the desire to capture the feeling as it passed through him, he did what he did best: he wrote.
The Death of Ivan Ilych was written almost 30 years after War and Peace, but that is not to say these stories are strikingly different. After all, before Tolstoy died, one of his last statements was, “The truth…I care a great deal,” (Troyat 833). And after concluding War and
Peace, in order to counter criticism and defend his masterpiece, he claimed, “My hero is truth.”
In that same defensive essay, where he discusses the divergence between the roles the historian
24 and the artist serve in defining the individual, he goes on to say, “For the historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people,” (Tolstoy 1219). There is no argument whether or not
Ivan Ilych is a hero—he’s not. But he is a person, frankly, a very normal one, which is precisely what Tolstoy was interested in presenting. In War and Peace, we are shown the maneuvering of military “heroes” like Napoleon and Kutuzov, but these scenes only constitute a fraction of the text.
Thinking back to the battlefield at Borodino, the shell, which spun and smoked in the grass in front of Andrei, blew, and the impact, full of shrapnel and heat, tore through his midsection, sending him to the surgeon’s tent where he would see the man he despised most:
Anatole Kuragin. It was here, lying next to Anatole, as the surgeon amputated Kuragin’s leg, that
Andrei fully recognized a new sort of love brewing inside of his soul. This new love was an absolute love, one which Tolstoy believes we have even for our enemies—it is an unchanging, divine love. This was the first register for the climactic change which takes place in Andrei towards the end of his life; the next was his reconciliation with his love, Natasha.
Andrei, who quickly fell in love with Natasha Rostov, decided against his own heart, to honor his father’s wishes and withhold their marriage until the time was proper. Natasha was also quickly swept off of her feet by Andrei, but she became deeply affected by the distance, and tormented by the thought of Andrei’s more interesting life abroad. Jealousy and imagination worked together to fuel the eventual infidelity and annulment of their engagement. Andrei, on the eve of Borodino, prior to be being wounded, had threatening thoughts for Anatole Kuragin, who became the new love interest of Natasha: “He saw none of it and understood none of it. He
25 saw in her a pretty and fresh girl; with whom he did not deign to join in his fate. While I?...And to this day he’s alive and cheerful,” (Tolstoy 777). Andrei’s thoughts change quickly and we know the force of this change to be the proximity to death which he is brought by his injury.
Later travelling from Moscow, he thinks of this stroke of change, saying to himself: “Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love I experienced for the first time when, as I lay dying, I saw my enemy and loved him all the same. I experienced the feeling of love, which is the very essence of the soul and which has no object,”
(Tolstoy 921). Unlike the frightening nature of death when flirting with the living, such as what
Tolstoy himself experienced at Arzamas, death among the dying is formative, and all-renewing; it has a transitive property which allows for forward movement of the soul.
Marya, the character created in the image Tolstoy held of his mother, operates in this novel to see things for what they truly are: she is a truth seeker. As she talks to her dying brother, reflects, “In his words, in his tone, especially in that gaze—a cold, almost hostile gaze—there could be felt an alienation from everything in this world that was frightening in a living man”
(Tolstoy 979). Marya sees that he is detached from the reality of the world. This renewal of the dying man’s soul cannot be understood by someone so far from death as Princess Marya. She sees death as inevitable, yet out of her hands and in those of a divine power. Tolstoy pushes this idea further, saying, “He clearly had difficulty now in understanding anything living; but at the same time it could be felt that he did not understand the living, not because he lacked the power of understanding, but because he understood something else, such as the living could not understand, and which absorbed him entirely” (Tolstoy 979).
How did Tolstoy know of this shift in understanding? Did he not, and so he manifested it in himself? Was this born out of a need to create an effectively saddening death of his beloved
26 character, one which would have readers feel as if they were dear to him, like Marya, or Natasha, or Nikolushka? I do not think Tolstoy was concerned with plucking at the heart strings of his readers, necessarily; I do think, however, that he was concerned with influencing the soul of each reader, and whether he did this or not in the majority of his readers, I think he deeply affected his own soul in doing so.
When Leo Tolstoy left that godforsaken inn in Arzamas where he met death, he was less- so affected by this experience, but he acknowledged the residue it had left on his soul. After travelling back to his wife and his children, the land and home which he had so dearly missed, he wrote, “I felt that some misfortune had befallen me; I might forget it for the moment but it was always there, at the back of my mind, and it had me in its power…I went on living as before, but the fear of this despair never left me again” (Troyat 393). We can see here that Tolstoy was moved by this experience in a way he knew would be permanent. While saying he might momentarily forget what befell him speaks to our tendency to make subconscious some of our deepest truths; these deep truths often come out of our darkest moments, and the images and sensations associated with them are purposefully forgotten, but they are the truths which we cannot forget.
As Andrei lay dying, falling in and out of consciousness, shifting from dream-like clarity to a wakeful delirium, his thoughts are presented, “And the more imbued he was with the principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that dreadful barrier, which without love, stands between life and death. When in that first time, he remembered that he had to die, he said to himself: ‘Well, so much the better’” (Tolstoy 982).
Here one sees a change in Andrei similar to the rapture which occurred in Tolstoy after he encountered death. However, while Tolstoy’s change was negative and apprehensive, worrisome
27 even, Andrei’s was hopeful, almost excited: rapture occurred in both of their characters. The differences between them remind us of Pierre’s thought following his speech to the Masons. The truth of each soul is of its own unique makeup.
Moments before Andrei takes his last breath he thinks, “Love hinders death. Love is life.
Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love” (Tolstoy 984). Andrei thought this as he talked with Natasha, and wished he could live as if only to love her. When Tolstoy wanted to flee Arzamas in the middle of the night he felt so because he was alone. His family, those he loved and cherished, were not with him, and he felt this crushing entity in their absence—he deeply feared to die so far away from them. Had they been there he may not have felt Death, or maybe not to the extent to which he did; a lack of love makes us weak, vulnerable—love makes us stronger, farther from death, or as Andrei said, “Love hinders death.”
While dreaming, feverishly, Andrei focuses on the door to his room, feeling that death looms behind it, waiting for the perfect moment to enter and take him to whatever awaits him.
“Everything depends on whether he does or does not manage to lock it,” and after realizing he cannot lock it no matter how much force he strains his dying body to create, he can’t, and so,
“…a tormenting fear seizes him. And this fear is the fear of death: it is standing behind the door”
(Tolstoy 985). From within his dream, Andrei believes he dies, but at that phantasmal moment, the living Andrei wakes and says, “Yes, that was death. I died—I woke up. Yes, death is an awakening” (Tolstoy 985). In the quote prefacing the chapter from The Death of Ivan Ilych, we see an older, pithier Tolstoy than he was as he wrote this final scene of Prince Andrei.
In the inn in Arzamas, Tolstoy faced an entity the same way Andrei did, and the human curiosity of the inevitable cannot let us push aside the thought that Tolstoy may have felt
28 similarly to his own main character, whose life Tolstoy had recently ended in his manuscript.
Andrei admits his fear of death, and does seem to have the same revulsion and disturbance to which Tolstoy does, but Andrei is accepting of death. Perhaps this stems from Andrei’s proximity to death, seeing as Tolstoy was in his 40’s when in Arzamas, and far from his real death; what may have been integral to Andrei’s acceptance was his weakness; there is a tying of the physical human to the incorporeal soul. Tolstoy was not accepting of his unwelcomed visitor, as we know, he woke his servants in an attempt to load the carriages, all before falling asleep on a stray couch. Despite the occasion, Tolstoy’s encounter or Andrei’s, there is a blurring of the line between wakefulness and unconsciousness; where Tolstoy had seemingly just awoken,
Andrei had just fallen asleep but was apparently aware of being asleep. Death, in both cases, is felt as a “presence” which is near to them, looming. Tolstoy is surrounded by it, he feels it on his skin, and he describes it as “seeping into his pores,” but Andrei is distanced from the entity by the door to his room. The goal of his dream is to close and lock the door, so in this, we see, no matter how satisfied Andrei is with dying, there is still an innate, reflexive human rejection of death.
Tolstoy had seemingly grown paranoid in his later years, and this is why some believe he fled—out of hysteria and anxiety. However, I believe he was involved so deeply with his own emotions and moral voyaging, that he was aware of the imminence of his life’s end.
The sentiment of “giving up the world” especially when reading Andrei’s bursting love for the world, the air, and the grass, as he watched that shell smoke and spin. Aside from this, we can clearly see the foresight which Tolstoy had of his imminent death. Henri Troyat, a French biographer of Tolstoy, does not hint that he was ill when he fled Yasnaya Polyana, only provides the fact that he fell ill while travelling. I believe Tolstoy possessed an almost unnatural self-
29 prudence, which allowed him to leave this world in a manner perfectly aligning with the lives of his characters. Tolstoy lived a life which seemed as if he had written it himself.
The room in which Andrei dies, a spare room along the path away from the burning
Moscow, reminds me of the description of Tolstoy’s room as Henri Troyat gives it. Even though
Tolstoy died 40 years after his character, whom he modeled in his own image, Tolstoy seemed to have written the death of Andrei with foresight to his own death, as well as the experience he would have at Arzamas. Did Tolstoy find truth in his last moments the way Andrei did? Was the death of Andrei written faithfully to his actual experience? Was the writing of Andrei’s death the way it was, all-renewing and revelatory, a harbinger for Tolstoy’s death? For now, these questions seem unanswerable, but maybe one day, when we reach our final moment, when we come to that, “half-waking state in which the superficial agitation dies away and the soul begins to speak clearly,” maybe then, the truth will be revealed to us, the same way it was revealed to
Count Leo Tolstoy (Troyat, p. 393).
30 References
Beard, Mary. “Facing Death with Tolstoy.” The New Yorker, 5 Nov. 2013.
Freeborn, Richard. The Rise of the Russian Novel: Studies in the Russian Novel from Eugene Onegin to War and Peace. University Press, 1973.
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich and Edward Crankshaw. An Essay in Autobiography. Collins Harvill, 1959.
“The Last Station,” SONY Pictures Classic, 2010.
Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession, trans. David Patterson (New York: Norton, 1983).
Tolstoy, Leo. "Sevastopol : Leo Tolstoy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming." Internet Archive. N.p., 30 Mar. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2020.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2007)
Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
“War and Peace,” BBC production, 2016.
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