'The Lights of History Go On'

The saddest, most comic and melodramatic domestic scene in all of literary history: Tolstoy, Lear-like at age eighty-two, secretly flees his wife, Sophia Tolstaya, and his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and lies dying in a railway station in the provincial town of Astapovo. I remember reading Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy (trans. Nancy Amphoux, 1967) and getting angry and impatient with the old man (as I did with Lear). Why are you behaving like this? You’re a great writer, one of the greatest. Why the tantrum? I was sixteen and had a lot to learn about human nature. 

In Complete Collected Essays (1991), V.S. Pritchett’s review of Troyat’s book is titled “The Despot.” Like many of us, at least in the past, Pritchett had an admirable weakness for the great Russians, as all writers and readers should. His review’s opening sentences suggest why Pritchett may have been the last century’s finest English-language critic:

 

“The life of Tolstoy is a novel that might have been written by Aksakov in its beginning, by Gogol in the middle and by Dostoevsky in the years following the conversion. He was not so much a man as a collection of double-men, each driven by enormous energy and, instinctively, to extremes. A difficulty for the biographer is that while we grin at the sardonic comedy of Tolstoy’s contradictions and are stunned by his blind egotism, we are also likely to be infected by his exaltation: how is this exclamatory life to be brought to earth and to be distributed into its hours and days?”

 

Somehow, it’s reassuring to know that Tolstoy, that embodiment of human contradiction at the level of genius, when he died at Astapovo had two books with him – The Brothers Karamazov and Montaigne’s Essays. Pritchett quotes a marvelous passage from Troyat’s biography: “Impenitent old Narcissus, eternally preoccupied with himself, he blew on his image in the water, for the sheer pleasure of seeing it come back when the ripples died away.” Pritchett glosses the observation by noting that only during the “rippling stage” is Tolstoy an artist. In his poem “The Death of Lev” (Elegy for the Departure, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1999), Zbigniew Herbert writes:

 

“above the small station

the lights of history go on

 

“Lev close his eyes

no longer curious about the world”

 

Tolstoy died on this date, November 20, in 1910.