{"id":564,"date":"2024-08-05T16:44:32","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T13:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/?p=564"},"modified":"2024-08-05T16:44:50","modified_gmt":"2024-08-05T13:44:50","slug":"is-it-time-to-stop-treating-leo-tolstoy-as-a-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/tolstoy1.html","title":{"rendered":"Is it Time to Stop Treating Leo Tolstoy as a Novelist?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Essay by Ted Gioia<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I hate to say it, but I\u2019ve gotten Leo Tolstoy wrong for most of my adult life. I have legitimate<br>excuses, of course\u2014I was simply adhering to the consensus view. I accepted the<br>conventional wisdom. I trusted what was said about Tolstoy over what he said himself, even<br>when the texts (not to mention his actions) should have made me suspicious of what I&#8217;d<br>been told. In short, I abdicated the most essential responsibilities of the reader, namely<br>critical thinking married to a healthy skepticism about received opinions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I saw Tolstoy within a framework, as an exponent<br>of the nineteenth century realist novel. Indeed, he<br>stood at the pinnacle of this tradition. Tolstoy wasn\u2019t<br>just a novelist, but perhaps the greatest novelist of<br>them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that wasn\u2019t how Tolstoy saw himself. Nor was<br>that how the world saw him during the final decades<br>of his life. People flocked to him as a guru, and<br>many changed their way of lives as a result of his intervention\u2014distributing land to the<br>peasants, giving up meat, abstaining from sex. Communes were set up to put his teachings<br>into action (some still survive today). Schools implemented his pedagogical methods.<br>He corresponded with Gandhi, who set up the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa to put the<br>Russian\u2019s cooperative principles into practice. &nbsp;At the dawn of the twentieth century, Tolstoy\u2019s<br>impact could be felt everywhere, from politics to religion, even as his literary influence waned<br>in the face of more overtly experimental and modernist approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consider the following forgotten achievements of Tolstoy, the so-called novelist:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy\u2019s educational primer the\u00a0<em>New ABC<\/em>, released in 1875, did more to expand<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy communes were formed all over the world. In addition to the Gandhi-founded<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy was the most influential pacifist of his era, promoting concepts of non-violence<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy laid the groundwork for modern humanitarian response efforts, mounting<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy\u2019s radical reinterpretation of Christianity,\u00a0<em>The Gospel in Brief\u00a0<\/em>(1902) shook the<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Tolstoy explicitly linked his advocacy of anti-violence with vegetarianism, and<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>In an age where religious intolerance was endemic, Tolstoy laid the groundwork for<br>ecumenical dialogue, corresponding with everyone from Shakers to Quakers, seeking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Isn\u2019t it puzzling that an activist who had such far-ranging influence should get labeled as a<br>novelist? &nbsp;Even as a writer, Tolstoy was closer to Rousseau\u2014the dominant influence over<br>his life\u2019s work\u2014who may have written novels but will always be remembered primarily as a<br>philosopher and social thinker. And Rousseau, for all his many achievements, can hardly<br>match Tolstoy in inspiring fervent disciples committed to genuine change and concrete<br>results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Russia turned to communism seven years after Tolstoy\u2019s death, many saw him as the<br>root cause of the upheaval, perhaps even rivaling Karl Marx in setting it in motion. \u201cTolstoy<br>began it, and Lenin finished it off,\u201d announced poet Dmitry Merezhkovsky. &nbsp;Even Lenin<br>called Tolstoy the \u201cmirror of the Russian Revolution\u201d despite his deep reservations about<br>the religious and pacifist aspects of Tolstoyan worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet Marxist ideology is also the main reason<br>why Tolstoy is considered a novelist nowadays<br>rather than a social activist. The Soviet Union<br>couldn\u2019t live without Tolstoy\u2014he was, after all,<br>the single most prominent cultural icon in all of<br>Russian history\u2014yet his followers posed a<br>major threat to the regime. Even though<br>Tolstoyans accepted the broad tenets of<br>collectivism, they held on to their Christian<br>beliefs and refused to serve in the military.<br>As early as 1919, the Bolsheviks were already<br>executing Tolstoyans who requested conscientious<br>objector status. Eventually more than one hundred<br>were killed by firing squad. The regime eventually<br>found a middle ground, a way to take advantage of<br>Tolstoy\u2019s prestige without validating his dangerous<br>views: namely, focusing on his skills as a novelist<br>and storyteller while keeping his seditious works of<br>social criticism out of print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From this point on, the final thirty years of Tolstoy\u2019s<br>life were downplayed, eclipsed by his middle years<br>and his two most famous novels&nbsp;<em>War and Peace<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Anna Karenina<\/em>. Tolstoy\u2019s last big<br>novel,&nbsp;<em>Resurrection<\/em>, had been a global phenomenon when published in 1899, and for a<br>time outsold it famous predecessors. But this book was an ardent manifesto for social<br>change, infused with spirituality and calls for judicial and prison reform. The Soviet Union<br>finally allowed a film version of Resurrection during the Khrushchev thaw, and the movie\u2019s<br>director Mikhail Schweitzer complained of the compromises necessary to bring this story<br>to Soviet theaters. &nbsp;But even the sanitized version presented scenes that were \u201cstaggering\u201d<br>for audiences, according to fellow director Alexander Mitta. \u201cFor the first time on the screen<br>the lack of people\u2019s rights in Russia screams out candidly and fiercely.\u201d This was the same<br>era that saw the release of Solzhenitsyn\u2019s first works, and the authorities no doubt saw<br>both moves as ways of channeling anger at abuses of the Stalinist era. But it was clear that,<br>even more than a half-century after his death, Leo Tolstoy needed to be handled with<br>extreme care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet there were other signs that Tolstoy\u2019s social teachings still flourished in the underground,<br>despite decades of oppression and strict censorship. A handful of devoted followers still<br>held on to their core values, and in a milestone event a Tolstoyan named Dmitry Morgachev,<br>who had been exiled to Siberia back in 1936, applied for formal rehabilitation and received<br>it from the Soviet Supreme Court in 1976. In essence, the highest powers in the land were<br>admitting that they had lost their battle against a long-dead authority. With Gorbachev and<br>the rise of Glasnost, the return to a more accurate view of Tolstoy proved surprisingly rapid<br>and robust. Schools following the author\u2019s pedagogical methods were launched in the<br>1990s, and in many instances used texts Tolstoy had created for students back in the<br>1870s. In 1991, a Tolstoy-inspired church known as Spiritual Unity gained approval from the<br>Russian government. In each of these instances, Tolstoy wasn\u2019t gaining followers for his<br>literary powers or storytelling skills, but as a visionary and social thinker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many readers are surprised to learn that Tolstoy refused to consider War and Peace as a<br>novel\u2014the storytelling was a vehicle for something far larger, a vision of human life and<br>historical evolution. When Tolstoy began work a few years later on Anna Karenina, he<br>claimed that this was, in fact, the first time he had ever tried to write a genuine novel. But<br>even here, his social concerns enter into the story. The character Levin in this novel is a<br>stand-in for the author, and concerned with all the same issues of land reform and human<br>rights. &nbsp;And when the novel was first published, a controversy resulted\u2014not about the story<br>line, but over pacifist sentiments Tolstoy highlighted in the book\u2019s closing pages, and which<br>would emerge as a major focus of his activism in the years ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I should have seen the signs when I first read Tolstoy. Back in college, I plowed through all<br>1,300 pages of&nbsp;<em>War and Peace<\/em>&nbsp;during a whirlwind two-week period over winter break.<br>Even then I should have noticed the lopsided manner in which the narrative advanced\u2014or,<br>rather, sometimes refused to advance, given how much Tolstoy insisted on offering his<br>distinctive philosophy of history and radical notions of leadership and military strategy. His<br>goal was nothing less than the debunking of Napoleon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around this same time, I read Tolstoy\u2019s treatise&nbsp;<em>What is Art?<\/em>, and once again I should have<br>paid more attention to how strange this book really is. No novelist or literary critic would<br>ever construct a theory of art so hostile to aesthetic principles and prevailing cultural<br>practices. Tolstoy dismisses Shakespeare, Dante, Wagner and other masters with a<br>cavalier disregard that will remind you more of a cranky mystic than an esteemed novelist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The same is true of my first encounters with&nbsp;<em>The Death of Ivan Ilyich<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>The Kreutzer<br>Sonata<\/em>, two short novels by Tolstoy that shook me deeply. I had some vague sense that<br>these made an impact on me in ways that went beyond their literary merits. They seemed to<br>possess a prickly, visionary quality that resisted the usual interpretative techniques I applied<br>to fiction. To this day,&nbsp;<em>The Death of Ivan Ilyich&nbsp;<\/em>is the most powerful piece of writing I\u2019ve ever<br>read about mortality and facing the end of our own existence. By any measure it is a work of<br>philosophy and ethical guidance. But I was reluctant to see it in that light until many years<br>later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20220309103123\/fractiousfiction.com\/tolstoy4.html\"><br><\/a>It wasn\u2019t until I tackled the least well-known Tolstoy novel,&nbsp;<em>Resurrection<\/em>, that I realized that I<br>needed to recalibrate my whole perspective on this canonic Russian author. I saw that this<br>book only made sense as meditation on the human condition and manifesto for social<br>change. On the surface level, it resembled a novel, but no perceptive reader could miss the<br>bigger issues at stake here, beyond any concern with plotting, character development or<br>narrative arc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this late stage in my studies of Tolstoy I was forced not only to revisit the earlier<br>masterworks\u2014but even more the life and times of their author. By gradually piecing<br>together the story of his posthumous reinterpretation as a literary figure, and grappling with<br>his prickly social views, I came to realize that this misinterpretation was not happenstance.<br>Tolstoy\u2019s legacy had been deliberately twisted and distorted, and for the very reason that it<br>inspired people to take his views seriously and put them into practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And ask yourself, which of these two sides of Tolstoy do we need the most nowadays? Is<br>there a scarcity of big novels? Do we need his example to give a kick in the butt to lazy<br>MFA students or participants at writer workshops who should aspire to match his massive<br>page count? Or is there, rather, a more pressing need for a current-day counterforce to<br>operate against violence, intolerance, ignorance, the ravages of natural disaster, a culture<br>that celebrates brutality, and government oppression? Those issues have not disappeared,<br>far from it. The inescapable verdict is that Tolstoy not only dominated Russian life in the<br>nineteenth century, but he also\u2014sad to say\u2014grasped almost every tragic flaw in modern<br>sociopolitical stances that would ravage the world in the many decades following his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So admire the great storytelling and the literary style on display in&nbsp;<em>War and Peace<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Anna<br>Karenina<\/em>, and other works by this seminal figure in nineteenth century culture. But don\u2019t ever<br>think you can capture even a fraction of Leo Tolstoy\u2019s legacy under the label of novelist. He<br>was, rather, a gadfly like Socrates, a living exemplar of moral principles in the mold of<br>Gandhi, and a philosopher in the tradition of Rousseau. From that perspective, even those<br>massive novels he left behind can merely be considered as brief introductions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Essay by Ted Gioia I hate to say it, but I\u2019ve gotten Leo Tolstoy wrong for most of my adult life. I have legitimateexcuses, of course\u2014I was simply adhering to the consensus view. I accepted theconventional wisdom. I trusted what was said about Tolstoy over what he said himself, evenwhen the texts (not to mention<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link\">\n\t\t\t\t <a href=\"http:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/tolstoy1.html\" class=\"btn theme-btn\"><span>Continue Reading <\/span><i class=\"icofont-thin-double-right\"><\/i><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"The author of War and Peace\r\nwas one of the great visionaries,\r\nsocial thinkers, and activists in\r\nhuman history. His reclassification\r\nas a novelist was a calculated\r\nstrategy to sanitize his image and\r\nmarginalize his supporters in the\r\naftermath of the Russian\r\nRevolution. It\u2019s time to bring\r\nTolstoy outside the literary canon\r\nand deal with his legacy as a seer\r\nand radical reformer.","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":567,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions\/567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}