Tea at Trianon: Tolstoy’s Conflicts and Contradictions

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Tolstoy’s Conflicts and Contradictions

From Los Angeles Review of Books:

Zorin’s book achieves the ultimate expectation set by the biography genre — he creates a consistent representation of Tolstoy’s integral personality. To begin with, he does not revisit the familiar dichotomy of Tolstoy the artist versus Tolstoy the thinker. According to this narrative, the writer turned to excessive moralizing after completing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, gradually suffocating his artistic genius. In the colorful words of Tatyana Tolstaya, the writer’s distant descendent and a popular author in her own right, once he turned to preaching the “quill fell out of his hand.” Tolstoy himself was very much aware of this inner conflict and in later life “resolved” it by condemning much of European art and literature, his own fiction included. Whereas many scholars have been all too eager to assimilate this binary paradigm, Zorin writes his biography against that trend. He presents Tolstoy as a sum total of all of his various activities — fiction, nonfiction, correspondence, oral teachings, religious writings, direct action, and even family squabbles — seamlessly integrated into the text of his life. While Tolstoy’s path seems full of unexpected shifts from one extreme to the other (from a dissolute lifestyle to near-chastity, from hunting to vegetarianism, from fiction to preaching, from luxury to asceticism), Zorin’s book shows that every juncture was just another manifestation of the inner logic of his existence. In this light, the spiritual crisis of 1878, when Tolstoy appeared to have rejected nearly all of his former values, was nothing sudden: this “conversion” became a culmination of a lifelong quest for the meaning of life and death, deep self-reflection and religious skepticism.

Preoccupation with sexuality and death are conventional topics of Tolstoy biographies, and the present one fits broadly within this narrative while introducing some nuances. Zorin shows the writer as a sexual predator who hated himself for his own carnality and was at pains to eradicate it. He introduces the theme of Tolstoy’s infatuation with men through lines from the writer’s diary and recalls that, at the very end of his life, his spurned wife Sofia, infamously accused her old husband of having a homoerotic relationship with Chertkov, his closest disciple. As for the theme of death, Zorin shifts the accent from the horror of death to Tolstoy’s awe and fascination with it. While he came in close contact with the death of his relatives and children, which drained him emotionally, Tolstoy saw his own eventual passing as a transcending moment of ultimate revelation and stated his wish to remain conscious while dying, despite possible physical discomfort. This wish was not to be granted. Indeed, the uniqueness and solemnity of the moment was undermined by a scandalous lack of decorum. On October 31, 1910, the writer ran away from home with a small group of companions, but got sick during a train ride and could not continue his barely planned journey. The party disembarked at the small station of Astapovo, where he soon passed away in the stationmaster’s house. The last hours of his earthly existence resembled a tragic farce. The news of his flight and subsequent illness immediately spread not only all over Russia but also reached the most remote corners of the world, from Japan to the Americas. Scores of journalists, photographers, admirers, and random gawkers flocked to Astapovo. Information about Tolstoy’s condition was reported in newspapers all over the world, almost in real time. A victim of his own fame, he was denied privacy when he needed it most. (Read more.)