05.02.2009
Tolstoy's literary estate
The last in our series of previously untranslated works by Rosa Luxemburg shows a different side of her output. It was first published in Die Neue Zeit 1912-13, Vol 2, pp97-100
Tolstoy’s literary estate, which has been published in German in three volumes by Ladyschnikow in Berlin, encompasses (alongside several sketches and fragments) the great historical story Hadji Murat, which depicts Russia’s subjugation of the Caucasus around the middle of the 19th century; three stories, The devil, The forged coupon and Father Sergius; two dramas, The fruits of enlightenment as well as The living corpse; and finally two depictions of Russian village life during serfdom, An idyll and Tichon and Malania.1
Apart from the last two novellas, written at the beginning of the 1860s, all the great works listed above were written in the last two decades of his life. The freshness, the radiance and the wealth of the intellectual creations of a man between 60 and 80 would by themselves be astounding enough, if the works were at the same time not also the best explanation for the inexhaustible fruitfulness of Tolstoy’s genius.
Common bourgeois opinion tends to sharply distinguish between Tolstoy, the artist, and Tolstoy, the moralist; the former is allowed a place amongst the greatest creators of world literature; the latter is banished to the Russian wilderness, a sinister and vulgar fellow with a ‘Slavic’ tendency to pensiveness and other such nonsense, bemoaned as part romantic, part anarchist and definitely as an enemy of art in general and his own art in particular. Ivan Turgenev made his well known invocation to Tolstoy from this point of view, begging him for god’s sake to turn away from the moral-philosophical musing and to once again concentrate on his glorious pure art, which was floundering because of his prophetic fads. This displays a complete lack of understanding of Tolstoy, because whoever does not understand his ideology is also closed off from his art, or at least from the real source thereof.
This is probably what makes Tolstoy a unique figure in world literature - there is complete identity between his own life and his art. Literature is merely an instrument with which he expresses his thoughts and his internal struggle. And because his enormous work and harrowing struggle completely fulfilled this human being until his very last breath, Tolstoy became such a tremendous artist who produced a wellspring of art, unlimited in richness and in ever greater clarity and beauty.
Without a grand personality and broad world view there can be no great art. Tolstoy sought the truth from the very first awakening of his conscious mind. Yet, for him, seeking the truth is not a literary occupation that has nothing to do with his private life, as with the other ‘truth seekers’ of modern literature. For him it is a personal life problem that fulfils all his conduct and all his feeling, completely dominating his way of life, his family life, his friendships and loving relationships, his working methods and also his art.
Nor is this search confined to the dwarf-like world-weariness of an ‘individual’ who, trapped in a cage of petty bourgeois existence, cannot act out his male or female ego - as in Ibsen or Bjornson. Tolstoy’s eternal search is for ways of living and existence which would be in harmony with the ideals of morality. Yet his moral ideal is of a purely social nature: equality and solidarity of all members of society, based on a general obligation to work, which is what the heathen people of his works relentlessly strive for: Pierre Bezukov in War and peace, Levin in Anna Karenina, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection as well as in Father Sergius and finally Saryzniev in The fruits of enlightenment.
The history of Tolstoy’s art is the search for the solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the existing social relations. He never parted with this aim right up to the moment of his death, as he did not want to compromise a hair’s breadth with the existing order. Yet, nebertheless, he never adopted the only path towards realising this ideal - the world view of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle - because, as a genuine son of pre-capitalist Russia, he could not adopt this view. From there evolves the particular tragedy of his life and his death.
Torn from the soil of history, his ideal society floats in the air of the individual, moralistic ‘resurrection’ of an ancient Christian colouring; or, in the best case, of a confused agrarian communism. In solving his problem, Tolstoy remained a utopian and a moralist all his life. But it is not the solution, not the social recipe, that makes art effective - but the problem itself, the depth and the sincerity of its depiction. Here, Tolstoy has achieved the highest level in thought process and internal struggle, and this made it possible for him to accomplish the highest in art.
The same relentless honesty and thoroughness which led him to critically measure the whole of society on the basis of this ideal, also allowed him to artistically grasp life in its great construction and its correlations. Thus he became the untouchable epicist, who showed himself in his maturity in War and peace and as an old man in Hadji Murat and in The forged coupon.
Tolstoy’s genius is of the original nature of an inexhaustible golden vein. Yet, the recent example of the Danish writer, Jensen, shows how little creative effect even the greatest artistic talent may have if it is without the compass of a great, serious world view. His fine, colourful and ingenious grasp of the plot and his confident mastery of the technical methods of narration make him a born epicist of the highest order. And yet what else did he deliver in his Madame D’Ora or his Wheel2 than a tortured, gigantic distortion of modern society, a garishly coloured fairground booth with abnormalities, which half comes across as brash colportage and half as a spiteful mockery of the reader himself. He lacks a unified world view, which he could group the details around. He lacks the holy seriousness, honesty and truthfulness with which Tolstoy approaches all things.
In his literary estate, all of Tolstoy’s characteristics are displayed to the full. He no longer makes even the slightest of compromises with the beauty of form, the reader’s sensationalism or his need for calm. He puts every padding aside and reaches the most disciplined self-control, the greatest honesty and the most succinct means of expression. His art is now so identical to the subject that it can hardly be noticed. And thus in his last works Tolstoy has reached the peak of art, which becomes so natural to him that everything he touches blossoms, immediately takes shape and lives. In Father Sergius, for example, he follows the life of an atoning man of the world; in The forged coupon a false banknote’s journey through different layers of Russian society - these are themes and ideas which, written in pure prose, would kill every weaker form of art and anything which is not so completely honest as this. With the most simple methods of unaffected storytelling, Tolstoy creates a terrific painting of human destinies of the highest artistic efficacy.
This very same depth - one could almost say unprecedented honesty - transforms both of his dramas into experiences of deep, harrowing effect - although they lack pretty much everything that is commonly expected of a theatre play in terms of ‘dramatic plot’ and ‘resolution’.
It is particularly interesting and informative to observe the yawning gap between these two creations of a great poet and the bourgeois audience during a performance. The fruits of enlightenment is nothing but Tolstoy’s own life drama. The struggle of a lonely titan, who is trying to escape the daily clutches of compromise, is for the bourgeois audience nothing but a moving ‘marriage tragedy’, a conflict between ‘motherly duties’, ‘husbandly duties’ and other such tribulations of the German philistine’s bedroom.
There are some very harrowing scenes, such as that in front of the military commando, where a lad expresses his disgust with militarism by resolutely refusing to serve and as a result has to endure endless psychological torture. In another, we see the final attempt of the fighter for social equality to escape from his family and a tragic confrontation between him and his wife. In front of the German bourgeois audience - which has been corrupted by the widespread mendacity of contemporary theatre - all these deeply serious and honest words seem completely inappropriate, embarrassing, almost like an indecency.
There is no intellectual bond either between the audience and Tolstoy’s other drama, the Living corpse. The preened audience of the German theatre, which is probably rushing to the performance in order to see a gipsy choir or some gruesomely juicy ‘marriage trouble’, does not even suspect that it is raining invisible slaps from the stage, where the upright, honourable society is depicted in its entire pitifulness, narrowness and cold egomania, whereas the only beings with human emotions and generous feelings are to be found amongst the so-called ‘lumpens’, the castaways and the depraved.
The corrupt bourgeois audience, made insensitive by the protective armour of triviality, only goes to the theatre to take its mind off things. It does not even notice that it is they who are being referred to when the ragged hero of the drama - stuck in his last sanctuary, a dirty inn - explains his life story with a few simple sentences: “The man who is born into the circles from which I come has only three possibilities. Either he can take up office, earn money and add to the dirt in which we live - that was too repugnant for me, or maybe I didn’t understand it, but above all I found it repugnant. Or he can fight the dirt, but in order to do that he must be a hero, and I was never one of those. Or finally he could do a third thing: he can attempt to forget, become slovenly, drink and sing - that’s what I did, and this is how far it has got me.”3
Those “who take up office, earn money and add to the dirt” enthusiastically applaud the miming actor, yet the intellectual empire of the poet remains sealed off to them, as does the intellectual life of the modern workers’ movement and the hero of the masses who “fights the dirt” and who will forever remain to them a book with seven seals.
This is why Tolstoy’s literary estate, both the stories and the dramas, needs to be seen by a working class audience - even more so than his earlier works. Of course, Tolstoy had no understanding of the modern working class movement, but it would be a terrible sign of the intellectual maturity of the enlightened proletariat if it in turn did not have any understanding of Tolstoy’s great art, which breathes the purest and most genuine air of socialism.
As the death enemy of the existing society, as the unflinching fighter for equality, solidarity and for the rights of those without property, as somebody who is incorruptibly exposing all hypocrisy and dishonesty in state, church and marriage, Tolstoy is - in his essence - intellectually thoroughly related to the proletariat, in spite of the utopian-moralising form of his work.
His art belongs in front of a working class audience - but a revolutionary, enlightened working class audience, which is able to raise itself above all prejudice and every belief in authority, and which also has the courage to internally free itself from all cowardly compromise. In fact, there can be no better reading material for the education of working class youth than Tolstoy’s works.
Notes
1. I am unable to find any reference to the last two works, given by Luxemburg as Ein Idyll and Tichon und Malania.
2. I could find no reference to The Wheel, ‘Das Rad’ in German.
3. L Tolstoy The living corpse Leipzig 1948, p59-60.