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The Meaning of Life According to Lev Tolstoy and Emile Zola

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The Meaning of Life According to Lev Tolstoy and Emile Zola Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 Pessimism, Religion, and the Individual in History: The Meaning of Life According to Lev Tolstoy and Émile Zola Francis Miller Pfost Jr. Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES PESSIMISM, RELIGION, AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN HISTORY: THE MEANING OF LIFE ACCORDING TO LEV TOLSTOY AND ÉMILE ZOLA By FRANCIS MILLER PFOST JR. A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2005 Copyright ©2005 Francis Miller Pfost Jr. All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Francis Miller Pfost, Jr. defended on 3 November 2005. Antoine Spacagna Professor Directing Dissertation David Kirby Outside Committee Member Joe Allaire Committee Member Nina Efimov Committee Member Approved: William J. Cloonan, Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii To my parents, Francis Miller Pfost and Mary Jane Channell Pfost, whose love and support made this effort possible iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: LEV TOLSTOY AND THE SPIRITUAL APPROACH INTRODUCTION 2 1. EARLY IMPRESSIONS AND WRITINGS TO 1851 3 2. THE MILITARY PERIOD 1851-1856 17 3. DEATHS, FOREIGN TRIPS, AND MARRIAGE: THE PRELUDE TO WAR AND PEACE 1856-1863 49 4. WAR AND PEACE 1863-1869/1873 61 5. THE ARZAMAS HORROR AND ANNA KARENINA 1869-1879 72 6. A CONFESSION 1879-1882 83 7. RELIGIOUS WRITING, LATER FICTION, AND AN UNFINISHED MADMAN 1882-1910 91 8. THE UNFINISHED MADMAN’S QUEST: NOT A CONCLUSION, JUST AN ENDING 146 PART TWO: ÉMILE ZOLA AND THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH INTRODUCTION 150 1. YOUTH, CAREER, AND WORKS BEFORE THE ROUGON-MACQUART 1840-1868 151 2. THE ROUGON-MACQUART NOVELS 1868-1893 174 3. THE LAST NOVELS, DREYFUS, AND A PREMATURE END 1893-1902 185 CONCLUSION 190 APPENDIX - TOLSTOY TRANSLATIONS 191 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON L. N. TOLSTOY 201 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ÉMILE ZOLA 210 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 218 iv ABSTRACT Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their life-long search for answers to humanity’s greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history or even his own fate. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), after a self-admitted privileged existence full of hedonism and nihilism, at the age of fifty came to the conclusion that the purpose of an individual’s life was to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, that is, to struggle to achieve the highest state of personal and individual morality, love, and faith within one’s capability to do so, whatever the desperate circumstances of history or one’s own existence. Tolstoy’s entire creative work, from his earliest philosophical writings to his last, from Childhood to The Cause of It All, was dedicated to the didacticism of this spiritual premise, and like the main characters in his works, Tolstoy came to understand that the meaning of human life is based on Christ’s message of selfless love, which alone comes from God and distinguishes the individual immortal soul from each mortal, animal person who inhabits this earth. Émile Zola (1840-1902), in the era of Charles Darwin, scientific discovery, and exploration of the earth environment, took a scientific, naturalistic, and deterministic approach to the same problem. A youthful life dominated by crushing poverty and grief led the main focus of Zola’s creative work, the twenty-novel saga of the Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893), to deal in mostly pessimistic and graphic terms with the hopeless lives and fates of individuals of the lower classes of the French Second Empire (1851-1870) and its fall. His last two series of novels, the Trois villes [Three Cities] (1894-1898) and the Quatre Évangiles [Four Gospels] (1899-1902), have a more optimistic, sometimes utopian outlook as they treat the moral and religious problems of ordinary people in the latter nineteenth and future twentieth centuries as well as the conflict between science and religion. In the latter part of his life, especially with the advent of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, Zola became more concerned with the moral progress of individuals, especially as examples and leaders for the spiritual and social development of humanity. For Émile Zola reason guided by science and the continual discovery of natural truths was to provide the way to the meaning of life based on the true Christian teaching of pure, or selfless love. v INTRODUCTION Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their life-long search for answers to humanity’s greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history or even his own fate. How these two great writers and thinkers of yesteryear approached the fundamental question of the meaning of human life and what they discovered present an instructive guide for people of any age, of any epoch, of any era, of any time. 1 PART ONE LEV TOLSTOY AND THE SPIRITUAL APPROACH INTRODUCTION Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), after a self-admitted privileged existence full of hedonism and nihilism, at the age of fifty came to the conclusion that the purpose of an individual’s life was to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and to achieve the highest state of personal and individual morality, love, and faith within one’s capability to do so, whatever the desperate circumstances of history or one’s own existence. Tolstoy’s entire creative work, from his earliest philosophical writings to his last, from Childhood to The Cause of It All, was dedicated to the didacticism of this spiritual premise, that of the individual struggling, sometimes gallantly, sometimes not, for the high standard of personal Christian morality despite crippling pessimism and doubt, a poor environment, great calamities, or unjust societal exigencies. Like the main characters in his works, Tolstoy came to understand that the meaning of human life is based on Christ’s message of selfless love, which alone comes from God and distinguishes the individual immortal soul from each mortal, animal person who inhabits this earth. This enlightenment came about as the result of his own quest to discover the purpose of human existence, a struggle which began in earnest very early in the life of one of the world’s greatest writers. 2 CHAPTER ONE EARLY IMPRESSIONS AND WRITINGS TO 1851 In his earliest memories of his life, it is significant that Lev Nikolaevich remembers a struggle. In his First Reminiscences Tolstoy records: “Here are my first reminiscences, which I am not able to arrange in order, not knowing what came before and what after. Of some of them I don’t even know whether they happened in a dream or in reality. Here they are: I am bound, I would like to free my arms and I cannot do it. I scream and cry, and my cries are unpleasant to myself, but I cannot stop. Somebody bends down over me, I do not remember who. All is in a half light, but I remember that there are two people, and my cries affect them. They are disturbed by my cries, but they do not unbind me as I wish, and I cry still louder. They think that this is necessary (that is, that I should be bound), but I know it is not necessary, and I want to prove it to them, and I am overcome with cries, distasteful to myself but unrestrainable. I feel the injustice and the cruelty, not of people, for they pity me, but of fate, and I feel sorry for myself. I do not know and never will find out what it was, whether I was swathed as a baby at the breast and tried to get my arm free, or whether I was swathed when I was more than a year old, so that I would not scratch myself, or whether, as it happens in dreams, that I gathered many impressions into this one memory. But it is certain that this was the first and most powerful impression of life. It is not my cries that I remember, nor my suffering, but the complexity and contrast of the impression. I would like freedom, it interferes with no one else, and they torture me. They are sorry for me, and they bind me, and I who need everything, I am weak, while they are strong.”1 1Lev Tolstoy, L. N. Tolstoy:Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [L. N. Tolstoy: Complete Collection of Works], 91 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1928-1964), vol. 23, pp. 469-470. This authoritative work was begun under the general editorship of V.
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