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.
2 comments:
I forgot to mention this before but, speaking of literary deaths, Marcel Proust died 100 years ago as of two days ago, November 18th.
I too have Pritchett's Collected Essays on my shelf, and I return to it frequently. He could tell you more about an author in five or six pages than Harold Bloom could in twenty or thirty. (Bloom always would up telling you mostly about himself. I'm sorry, sir - I really wanted to know about Conrad, Austen, Dickens etc.)
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