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“BURIED AS a WRITER and AS a MAN” 3 “Buried As a Writer and As a Man” the Puzzle of Family Happiness

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“BURIED AS a WRITER and AS a MAN” 3 “Buried As a Writer and As a Man” the Puzzle of Family Happiness “BURIED AS A WRITER AND AS A MAN” 3 “Buried as a Writer and as a Man” The Puzzle of Family Happiness Tolstoy fi nished writing Family Happiness in the spring of 1859. On April 9 he wrote in his diary, the fi rst entry since February 19, “Worked, fi nished Anna. But not good.”1 Earlier, however, he had been quite enthusiastic about this offspring. The diary entry for February 19 reads, “All this time I worked on the novel and accomplished much, although not on paper. I changed everything. It is a poem. I am very pleased with what is in my head.”2 Tolstoy’s friend Vasily Botkin also testifi es to the author’s early affection for Family Happiness, an emotion Botkin did not then share.3 In March Tolstoy took the story with him to Petersburg and there read it aloud at least twice, once in Botkin’s circle of friends and later in the salon of his relative and close confi dante, Countess Aleksandra Andreevna Tolstaya. The Botkin group apparently thought the story “rather unsuccessful,”4 but the loyal “granny” (babushka) (Countess Tolstaya), as Tolstoy fondly called her, found it “charming,” “full of the highest comedy.”5 1 PSS 48:20. “Anna” was presumably one of the proposed names of the heroine/narrator, called Masha in the fi nal version, sometimes, as here, used as an appellative for the story itself. 2 PSS 48:20. 3 Botkin to Tolstoy, 3 May 1859. Переписка Л. Н. Толстого с В. П. Боткиным, 70. 4 Botkin to A. V. Druzhinin, 5 April 1859. Письма к А. В. Дружинину, 57. 5 From her unpublished diary, quoted in N. N. Gusev, Летопись 1818–1890, 199. G. Less- kis thinks Tolstoy read an early version of the story to “Granny” as early as the summer of 1857, in Switzerland, but there seems to be no documentary foundation for this claim. G. Lesskis, Лев Толстой (1852–1869), 261n. 4 TOLSTOY THE ARTIST Back at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy revised the story again. He wrote to “Granny,” “I am absorbed in work eight hours a day. Anna is reworking her notes, and I hope that her grandmother will like them better than in their fi rst, ugly form.”6 Tolstoy gave the story one more thorough revision, seeming to feel at least hopeful of the outcome: “I keep thinking that something will come of it,” he wrote to his friend Aleksandr Druzhinin,7 and Botkin quotes him as say ing, “If my story is not appreciated now, it will receive its due in fi ve years’ time.”8 However, when Tolstoy read proofs for the second part, a startling emotional revolution occurred. He was overcome by shame. He now pro claimed that Family Happiness was a “disgraceful abomination” (по- стыдная мерзость).9 To Botkin he wrote on May 3, What have I done with my Family Happiness! Only now, here in the country, have I collected myself and read the proofs sent me of the second part, and I saw what shameful shit it is, a stain, not only authorial, but human. It is a vile work. [ . ] I am buried as a writer and as a man. This is defi nite. The more so that the fi rst part is still worse. [ . ] There is not a live word in the whole thing. And the ugliness of language, which stems from ugliness of thought, is indescribable.10 He wrote just as despairingly to “Granny”: “When I arrived in the country, I reread my Anna, and it proved such a disgraceful abomination that I cannot collect myself from shame, and I think I will never write any more.”11 How are we to understand this extraordinary revulsion? True, Tolstoy often had a negative reaction to work he had just fi nished. In 1871 he famously referred to War and Peace as “verbose rubbish” (многословная дребедень) and vowed never to write in that vein again.12 But surely, this passionate repudiation of Family Happiness is something quite different, not only in degree, but in kind. It is a puzzle that calls for more than an offhand explanation. Tolstoy scholars have offered a variety of different solutions to the puzzle, none of which seems to me fully satisfying. They fall into two large classes: the literary-aesthetic and the biographical. 6 Tolstoy to A. A. Tolstaya, April, 1859. PSS 60:283. 7 Tolstoy to Druzhinin, 16 April 1859. PSS 60:291. 8 Botkin to I. S. Turgenev, 6 April 1859. В. П. Боткин и И. С. Тургенев, неизданная пере- писка, 1851–1869, 152. 9 Diary entry of 9 May 1859. PSS 48:21. 10 Tolstoy to Botkin, 3 May 1859. PSS 60:296. 11 Tolstoy to A. A. Tolstaya, 3 May 1859. PSS 60:295. 12 Tolstoy to A. A. Fet, 1..6? January 1871. PSS 61:247. “BURIED AS A WRITER AND AS A MAN” 5 Proponents of the literary-aesthetic explanation essentially agree with Tolstoy’s revulsion, if without his passion. They do not like the story and consider Tolstoy’s repudiation of it a sign of the sureness of his innate artistic sense. The leading exponent of this position is perhaps the greatest and most original of all Tolstoy scholars, Boris Eikhenbaum. Though usually circumspect about passing aesthetic judgments, Eikhen- baum decisively turns thumbs down on Family Happiness: it is “schematic and poor in material,” he asserts. Eikhenbaum is simply irritated by the ambiguity of the title: are we to take it as descriptive or ironic? “It is unclear,” he continues, “why the novel is written from the point of view of a woman and in the form of notes,” and concludes that the progression from Masha’s initial subjugation to her husband through frivolous fl irtations to the fi nal “love for my children and the father of my children” was an artifi cial intellectual construct, a scheme predetermined by Tolstoy’s reading of Michelet’s L’Amour (1858) and Proudhon’s De la justice dans la revolution et dans l’église (1858). Eikhenbaum also discerns a pernicious infl uence of the “English family novel,” especially its female variety (the Brontes). He also faults Tolstoy for using initials instead of names — Princess D., Lady S., etc — as if the author lacked the creative energy to invent complete names, although of course Eikhenbaum knew very well that the use of initials was an old device of illusionism, designed to give the reader the impression that the characters were drawn from real persons whose identities had to be protected. His “failure” with Family Happiness, according to Eikhenbaum, made Tolstoy realize that he was on “some sort of false path or rather at a crossroads.”13 R. F. Christian, one of the most distinguished Western Tolstoy scholars, is in full agreement with Eikhenbaum: Family Happiness, he too avers, is a failure. Christian does concede that it contains fi ne lyric descriptions of nature and an occasional “quiet fl ash of humour” in the fi rst part, but in the second the dialogue becomes at times inept, and there are some embarrassing passages which might have been culled from an old-fashioned schoolgirls’ magazine.[ . ] There is a fl avour of Turgenev at his most wistful — the past is gone, youth is over, there is no excitement in store, but only the desire for a quiet life in which passion is replaced by habit.[ . ] But the story breaks off where it should really start. Towards the end it shows all the signs of hasty composition.[ . ] It has no complexity or natural growth; and while its beautiful evocation 13 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Толстой; книга первая, 50-ые годы, 361–63. 6 TOLSTOY THE ARTIST of the raptures of youthful, romantic love more than compensates for its sketchiness and didacticism, the story as a whole left Tolstoy so dissatisfi ed that he did not wish to publish it.14 Henri Troyat likewise fi nds Family Happiness “uneven, clumsily con- structed, and lacking in originality,” though he too qualifi es these stric- tures by noting the “remarkable feeling for nature.”15 Another common complaint against Family Happiness, especially by Russians in the Soviet period, is its narrowness, in particular its failure to grapple with social issues. By choosing to write from the point of view of a naïve seventeen-year-old gentry girl, a baryshnia, whose whole life had been spent on a country estate, Tolstoy cut himself off from the larger world and from the kind of perceptions and refl ections he deemed suitable for mature male characters. Under Sergei Mikhailovich’s guidance Masha does come to the belated realization that the peasants among whom she lives are real people with feelings like her own, but the topic of serfdom and the impending Emancipation does not impinge on her consciousness at all. G. A. Lesskis believes that the limitations of the female narrator were intolerably constricting for the real author. Tolstoy could not ascribe to Masha the deep perceptions of other people that were Tolstoy’s stock-in-trade as omniscient author.16 V. Ia. Lakshin concurs: “By isolating his characters from everything that did not impinge on their personal psychology and private life the writer excessively narrowed his enterprise and thus doomed his novel to failure.”17 The same point is made by S. P. Bychkov, adding that Tolstoy was then under the noxious infl uence of aesthetes like Druzhinin and, paradoxically, Botkin, though Botkin initially disliked the story.18 Perhaps the most signifi cant negative judgment of Family Happiness was this initial reaction of Botkin, since it may have infl uenced Tolstoy himself and helped to undermine his confi dence in his work.
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