Jourdain, M.

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GORKY'S NOTES ON TOLSTOY.BY M. JOURDAIN.THE Russian men of letters appear to be careless with theirmanuscripts. One of Tolstoy's friends wrote down what Tolstoysaid in conversation about the "degrading- impulses of the flesh."but burnt it in the spirit lamp when making coffee, and also lost thenotes of a conversation in which Tolstoy said "very pagan thingson the symbolism of the marriage service." Gorky's notes which,bound together into a book, are among the most vivid things inliterature,' were carelessly jotted down on scraps of papers, lostand fortunately found again ; I say fortunately, for it would not beeasy to overrate this rough material, which is so much more vitalthan official l)iography. As Tchekov once said, "Goethe's wordsare all recorded, but Tolstoy's thoughts are being lost in the air.That is intolerably Russian. After his death they will bestir them-selves, will begin to write reminiscences and will lie."Gorky's notes have the merit of being written during Tolstoy'slife, and for himself alone. There is no attempt to touch up andcreate an imaginary type or to tread in a well-worn literary track.He is telling the truth, as he sees it ; his book is an outpouring,not a compilation : and a record of little restraint and sophistication.The pictures of Tolstoy come and go, flash and disappear likefigures on the screen, or like the remembered scenes presented bythe consciousness and sensibility of childhood. The places in whichthe old man is present, the flaunting scenery of the Crimea or thedamp autumn woods of Yasnaya Poliana, are no less sharp andclearly defined, whether Gorky wrote directly from nature as in thenotes, or let his memory sift the subject as in the letter which con-cludes the book. All Tolstoy is to be found in it, his sense of sin.his pessimistic mood, his ascetic dread of women, the obsession ofdeath and his condemnation of modern culture.1 Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nicolaycvitch Tolstoy, London, 192G,p. 20. [This book is .referred to hereafter as Gorky.]GORKV'S NOTES OX TOLSTOY. 729In his attempt to understand Tolstoy, ("lOrky (who has thead\antag^e of heing himself a Russian ) sees him as a great emhodi-ment of all the defects of his nation, marked with all the stimataleft by the ordeals of the national history and fermenting with the"unhealthy ferment of the old Russian blood."- The old earth-man,as Merejkovsky calls him, stands before us in his very form andpresence as he appeared sometime between September, 1901, whenhe settled at Gaspra. in the \illa in the Crimea lent by the CountessPanin, and the autumn of the following year when he returned toYasnaya Poliana. There is no eftort at an artificial synthesis, thebroken lights and sharp refractions of the scattered notes piercelike the noonday light into his subject. Gorky's feelings are strongand excessive, and the record is also strong and excessive, indi-cating, as in the greatest biographies, the essential of his subjectby some outward detail.We see Tolstoy, after his illness, "very lean and small and gray,sitting on the stone bench in the shade of the cypresses in thewarmth of the Crimea, smiling at times so broadly "that even hischeek-bones beamed." His sharp little eyes, the most eloquenteyes Gorky has ever seen, seemed "a thousand eyes" under hisshaggy eyebrows : his hands were wonderful, also, and intense withlife, "not beautiful, and knotted with swollen veins, and yet fullof a singvdar expressiveness and the power of creation—hands thattrembled with eagerness when he held cards as if he were holdinglive birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard."^ With onetouch after another Gorky fills in this portrait of the old man,sitting in a corner, tired and gray "as though the dust of anotherearth were on him," looking at everything with the air of a foreigneror a dumb man. He is alien to all around him. seeking rest andassurance and finding none, a monk who should have made his cellalone in the caverns of the desert, not in the comfortable house atYasnaya Poliana.In one lui forgettable passage Gorky brings the old man beforeus. "I was." he writes, "walking over to him at Gaspra along thecoast, and behind Yussupor's estate, on the shore among the stones Isaw a smallish angular figure, in a gray crumpled, ragged suit andcrumpled hat. He was sitting with his head on his hands, the windblowing the silvery hairs of his beard through his fingers. He waslooking into the distance out to the sea, and the little greenish wavesrolled up obediently to his feet and fondled them as though they,- Ibid., p. 36.3 Ibid., p. 27.730 THE OPEN COURT.were telling something about themselves to the old musician. Itwas a day of sun and cloud, and the shadows of the clouds glidedover the stones, and with the stones the old man grew now brightand now dark. He, too, seemed to me like an old stone come tolife, who knows all the beginnings and ends of things."* Gorkyis not alone in recognizing Tolstoy's kinship with nature. Naturewas always his best friend, as he used to say—"She is cold andexacting, repulses me and hinders me, yet nature is a friend whomwe keep until death and into whom we shall enter when we die."He shared in the life of nature : he was born anew in the spring."March and April." he wrote, "are my best months for work" .toward the close of autumn he became torpid : "To me it is themost dead of all seasons, I do not think, [ do not write; I feelagreeably stupid."'But Gorky did not only take notes of the old man's bearing,habits and appearance in these astounding fragments. He shows usthe inner Tolstoy, like a god, it is true, but not a god of Greeceor Judea, "a kind of Russian god, who sits on a maple throneunder a golden lime-tree, not very majestic, but perhaps more cunningthan all the other gods,""—a god, but also a man raised above theherd, and with the instinct of his class to compel and dominate stillstrong in him."What he himself did not need." says Gorky, "he gave to peopleas though they were beggars : he liked to compel them, to compelthem to read, walk, be vegetarians, love the peasants and believein the infallibility of the national-religious reflections of Leo Tol-stoy."' In spite of his communist theories he remained to the lastan aristocrat. "Peasant to him means merely—bad smell"; he al-ways felt it and involuntarily had to talk of it, as Gorky (thepeasant) notes. "If any one contradicted him, then suddenly, underhis peasant's beard, under his democratic, crumpled blouse therewould rise the old Russian barin, the grand aristocrat; then thenoses of the simple-minded visitors, educated and all the rest, in-stantly became blue with intolerable cold. It was pleasant to seethis creature of the purest blood, and to watch the noble grace ofhis gestures, the proud reserve of his speech, to hear the exquisitepointedness of his murderous words. "^* Ibid., p. 47.3 Letters to Pet, May, 19, 1861 ; rnrthcr Letters to Pet, October, 1869.^' Gorky, p. 7." Ibid., p. 43.^Ibid.,-p. 50.GORKV'S NOTES OX TOLSTOV. ' 731The Manichee Tolstoy of the Kreiitccr Sonata shows discon-certingly through Gorky's pages, and here are shown not Tolstoy'stheories alone but his own deep personal feelings. The feeling ofhostility to women is no new thing in him. for he warned himselfas early as 1847 "to look upon the society of women as upon anecessary unpleasantness of social life, and as much as possibleto keep away from them."" Woman, as (jorky saw, he looked atwith implacable hostility,"^ and he loved to inmish her. 'Ts it thehostility of the male who has not succeeded in getting all the pleasurehe could, or is it the hostility of the spirit against the 'degradingimpulses of the flesh,' " Gorky asks ; but leaves his cjuestion un-answered. But of one thing he is quite certain : that is, Tolstoywas never a hapi)y man. In Tolstoy's own words. "The CalifAbdurrahman had during his life fourteen ha])py days, but I amsure I have not had so many."" The fact frequently mentionedby Gorky that Tolstoy's conversation was coarse with the coarsenessof a Russian peasant ;'- his resentment against the flesh which isnot the "obedient dog of the spirit" but its master ; his half-seriousproposal to tell the truth about women only when he is safe in thecoffin with the lid over him,' all point to a deep disillusion, a hiddencomplex.Gorky will have nothing to do with the canonization of iiismaster. "He is great and holy because he is a man, a madly andtormentingly beautiful man, a man of the whole of mankind, "^^sometimes coarse, inconsistent, intolerant as a \'olga preacher, butyet in the next breath the "sounding bell of this world, "^"' thegreatest of the Russians. "There is something in him," he cries,which makes me desire to cry aloud to every one : 'Look what awonderful man is living on this earth.' '""'To Gorky. Tolstoy's silence was more signihcant and greater'* Quoted in P. Birukoff, Bioqraphx of Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work(Eng. tr.), Vol. I, London, 1906.'^'^ Gorky, p. 20." Ibid., p. 43.'- "Of women he talks readily and much, like a French novelist but alwayswith the coarseness of a Russian peasant. I remember my first meeting withhim and his talk about Varienka Oliessova and Tzvcnty-six and One. From theordinary point of view what he said was a string of indecent words." Gorkyp. 18.'3 /&/(/., p. 55.J* Ibid., p. 45.'''Ibid., p. 27.''''Ibid., p. 35.732 THE OPEN COURT.than his conversation ; he has "some thoughts of which he is afraid."And this only occasionally and in hints slipped through into hisconversations, though hints of it were also to be found in the note-books of his diary which he gave Gorky to read. It seems to havebeen negation of all at^rmations. the deepest and most evil nihilismwhich has sprung from the soil of an infinite and unrelieved despair,from a loneliness which, probably, no one but he had experiencedwith such terrifying clearness. "I often thought him to be a manwho in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people,"says Gorky, "he has gone too far away from them into somedesert."^' He had, as Gorky said in another connection, isolatedhimself from the life of Russia, and was no longer listening to thevoice of the people, but "hovered over Russia at too great a height."He was raised above the people like a pillar-saint, perhaps to hisown imdoing.Tolstoy, like his. contemporaries Gogol and Dostoyevsky. hadbeen seized after his moral revolution by the fever of religion. Asearly as 1859, Turgenieff had exclaimed. "If only Tolstoy wouldnot philosophize all might yet be well." and in his later years, inGorky's phrase, "the thought of God incessantly gnawed at him."^**as he traveled through the deserts of thought in search of an all-embracing truth which he never found—*'One of these pilgrimswho all their life long, stick in hand, walk the earth, travelingthousands of miles from one monastery to another, from one saint'srelics to another, terribly homeless and alien to all men and things.The world is not for them, nor God either. They pray to him fromhabit and in their secret soul they hate him :—Why does he drivethem over the earth, from one end to the other ?"''His religion was not Christianity. In his later years the feelingof the unity of religious truth in history and the kinship of Christwith the line of sages, Buddha, Laotse and Isaiah, became moreaccentuated until he denied that he had any predeliction for Chris-tianity. In a letter written in 1009 to the painter Jan Styka,'-'^ "Thedoctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one of the beautifuldoctrines which we have received from the ancient civilizations of1^ Ibid., p. 40.1^ His preoccupation met with little sympathy from Countess TolstoyTolstoy felt obliged to apologize to her when he spoke of God in his letters"Do not be vexed, as you often are, when I mention God, I cannot help it, forHe is the very basis of my thought" (quoted in Romain Rolland, Tolstoy, Eng.translation, London, 1911, p. 135).^° Gorky, p. 11.20 Printed in Lc Thcosophc. Jan. 16. 1911.GORKV'S NOTES ON TOLSTOY. 733Egypt, Israel, Hindustan. China and Greece. .. .Truth, moral andreligious, is everywhere and always the same." "I think," writesGorky, "he regards Christ as simple and deserving of pity, andthough at times he admires him, he hardly loves him. It is as thoughhe were uneasy, if Christ came to a Russian village, the girls mightlaugh at him."-^Tolstoy's flight Gorky assumes to be exclusively a desire on hispart to create a legend, a despotic inclination to "turn the life ofCount Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoy into the saintly life of our blessedFather. Boyard Leo." The unfinished letter written under the in-fluence of Tolstoy's flight and death, which concludes the book, waswritten at white heat, and does not allow for determining factorssuch as Tolstoy's position in his own household,'-- and his real wishfor isolation. The wish to leave his Yasnaya Poliana had beenripening for a long time, for in a letter to his wife in July. 1897,he gives his reasons for his going away. "As the Hindus, who atthe age of sixty retire to the forests, as every religious old mandesires to devote the last years of his life to God, and not to jokes,games, gossip and tennis, so T, reaching my seventieth year, with allthe strength of my soul am seeking rest, isolation, and if not abso-lute harmony, at least not a lying contradiction of my life with myconvictions and conscience." What is surprising in Tolstoy's lifeis not his final going away, but his long endurance.21 Gorky, p. 10.-- With his children the rift was wide. M. Leroy Beaulieu, who saw Tol-stoy with his family at Yasnaya Poliana, says that "when the father was speak-ing the sons barely concealed their weariness and unbelief." "His faith hadonly slightly affected two or three of his daughters of whom one, Marie, wasdead. He was morally isolated in the heart of his family." "He had scarcelyany one but his youngest daughter and his doctor to understand him."-—Revuedes Deux Moncies, Dec. 15, 1910.

Gorky\u27s Notes on Tolstoy.

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Gorky\u27s Notes on Tolstoy.

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