Tolstoy spent most of his 30s writing War and Peace and most of his 40s writing Anna Karenina. The concluding installment of Karenina was published in 1877, the year he turned 49. He then spent his early 50s in a state of near suicidal depression. The most interesting document pertaining to this period was, not surprisingly, written by Tolstoy himself--the essay, or we would now probably say memoir, called "Confession." Begun in 1879, it runs about 65 pages in my Portable Tolstoy, and wasn't completed until 1882. It's hard to overstate how startling it is to read Tolstoy explaining, in the simplest possible way, that he saw no means of escape other than to do himself in. He doesn't quite say it himself, but it seems his problem was akin to the malaise that currently goes by the name "affluenza." It wasn't a case of too little but of too much. He had been born into one of the leading families of Russia. He was very wealthy. By the time he was 50, he had published two of the best novels ever written. It was not a case of his genius being unrecognized in his own time, for his early works met with critical praise, and the lofty reputation enjoyed by his two great long works has not really grown very much in the 150 years or so since they were created. They were commercial successes, too. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy--his contemporaries placed him in that company already, and while they were thinking of him like that, he was thinking of killing himself.
The thought of death--that's what really sunk him. Its leveling effect has the potential to make its strongest impression on the most fit and fair among us. You can see perhaps how Tolstoy would be horrified at the thought of being swept into oblivion right along with people who beat their horses and couldn't read. "Confession" makes clear he thought that's where all were headed, into the common void. His advantages and superlative achievements didn't change that. You're going to die, like everyone else, and then there's nothing, so what's even the point in staying alive? That is pretty much how Tolstoy, age 50, felt about things, and in "Confession" he says it in pretty much that way.
You could say that "Confession" is a sort of spiritual autobiography that begins with Tolstoy's orthodox upbringing, proceeding then to his rejection of the Christianity of his boyhood (on the ground that it did not stand up to rational scrutiny), and, subsequent to that, the soul's dark night I tried to describe above, the search for meaning, and finally the fruit of the search. It's a curious fact that what he found seems anticlimactic, and I think this is because what precedes seems more vivid and convincing. Reading it over again now, the conclusion is sufficiently shadowy to make me think it's really from other sources that I know how the story ends. Tolstoy accepted no received system of thought, did not convert to some other religion or sect. Instead, focusing on the gospel narratives, especially the parts "more honored in the breach," he formed a version of Christianity that moved him out of the big house on the family estate and into the servants' quarters. He ceased eating meat and eventually renounced the copyrights on his books, which decreased his income substantially. His wife was alarmed, and indeed it was rising tensions on the home front that finally set off the last sorry events of his life, the subject of a recent movie. He had contemplated killing himself and the remedy he devised led indirectly to his death.
The great fictional work of this last period is the long story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych." It was begun in 1882, the year he finished "Confession," and not completed until 1886. As the story opens, there is a recess in "the Melvinski trial," and, amid some overheard courthouse chit-chat, a newspaper reader interjects, "Gentlemen, Ivan Ilych has died!" The blunt title, followed by this blunt opening, removes all question about what is going to happen once the story of Ivan Ilych and his illness gets going. Whatever interest the story has will not arise from the reader's glimmering hope that maybe Ilych isn't doomed. The story is death-infused from the beginning, and it's also shot through with life's triviality, the telling detail here being "the Melvinski trial"--too famous to need identification, apparently, though of course the point must be that no one remembers it now.
Someone said, of the famous double plot to King Lear, that it seems to have been devised as a deliberate attempt to assault the audience: it's not enough that there should be one wretched old man wandering the earth in misery and despair--there must be two. Though there's no double plot in "Ilych," the story has a similarly battering effect, as if the author were determined to bludgeon happy, contented, cheerful people. Exhibit A would have to be the way in which the details of the disease and of Ilych's suffering are emphasized, relentlessly, in plain detail.
Ivan Ilych went out slowly, seated himself disconsolately in his sledge, and drove home. All the way home he was going over what the doctor had said, trying to translate those complicated, obscure, scientific phrases into plain language and find in them an answer to the question: "Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet nothing much wrong?" And it seemed to him that the meaning of what the doctor had said was that it was very bad.
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Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same familiar loathsome taste in his mouth. His heart sank and he felt dazed. "My God! My God!" he muttered. "Again, again! And it will never cease!" And suddenly the matter presented itself in quite a different aspect. "Vermiform appendix! Kidney!" he said to himself. "It's not a question of appendix or kidney but of life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. . . . There was light and now there is darkness. I was here and now I'm going there. Where?"
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He slept less and less. He was given opium and hypodermic injections of morphine, but this did not relieve him. The dull depression he experienced in a somnolent condition at first gave him a little relief, but only as something new, afterwards it became as distressing as the pain itself or even more so.
Special foods were prepared for him by the doctors' orders, but all those foods became increasingly distasteful and disgusting to him.
For his excretions also special arrangements had to be made, and this was a torment to him every time--a torment from the uncleanliness, the unseemliness, and the smell, and from knowing that another person had to take part in it.
In making this point, one quotes almost at random, because it's mainly what the story is made of, except for the perfect villainy of his family, especially his wife, and the perfect goodness of the servant Gerasim. The story is deeply affecting but we are also at a very great distance from the characters in the two long novels. "The people in Anna Karenina seem more real than the people I know in real life, and when I finish the book I feel sad about not being able to be with them for awhile." Versions of this have been expressed so many times by so many readers that it is almost a cliche, only without the negative connotations, since it's true. But no one says that about Ilych, or his family, or the saintly servant, Gerasim. The story is almost unbearably realistic and also has aspects of a moral fable.
The moral fable is Tolstoy's preeminent mode in his late fiction. The goal is instruction, not a representation of life. Many of the stories seem meant for young readers, and the titles alone convey the author's high-mindedness: "What Men Live By," "Where Love Is, God Is," "God Sees the Truth, but Waits." The best of them is called "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" It was written in 1886 and concerns a small landowner who acquires more and more property but can never be content. No matter how much he has, there are always neighbors who trespass or allow their animals to graze his land or do not keep bargains. Hearing that in a distant region there is so much land that the residents give it away, he travels there and discovers it's true: he can have all the land he can stake off from sun up to sun down, but he must get back to his starting point before the sun sets. So when the sun rises he sets out. He cannot believe his good fortune. The land is so rich that he can hardly bring himself to plant a stake and turn, for what lies just ahead is always even more desirable than what's been traversed. You can probably see where this is headed. The sun rises higher in the sky, the day turns hot, fatigue sets in, he's far from where he began and in danger of losing it all by not getting back to the start. Expending the last of his strength, he falls exhausted at his starting point just as the sun sets, and dies. His servant digs a grave to lay him in. The last sentence of the story is, "Six feet from his head to his heels was all that he needed"--the answer to the question asked in the title, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"
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