TLS on Tolstoy

Good Music

THE KREUTZER SONATA THE LAST STATION

Various cinemas When Leo Tolstoy was aged sixty, in 1888, he heard a performance of Beethoven's Opus 47 Sonata for Violin and Piano at his house in Moscow. Also present were the distinguished painter Ilya Repin, whose portraits of Tolstoy recall the Old Testament Prophets, and the actor Vasily Andreyev-Burlak. The music so impressed Tolstoy that he proposed that the three artists should create works inspired by the music to be presented together. Only Tolstoy completed his part of the bargain.
The story he wrote, The Kreutzer Sonata, represented, in the words of his biographer Aylmer Maude, the fact that "he had returned to art". After years in which he had written and published nothing but pacifist or vegetarian tracts, "his train has at last come out of its tunnel". It was an age since the man who wrote War and Peace had given up art in favour of preaching. In that time, Tolstoy had slowly turned himself and his family into characters not from his own fiction but from Dostoevsky, eaten up with irrational passions and hatreds and religious obsessions. The Kreutzer Sonata, being the frenzied account of a wife-murderer muttered aloud during an overnight train journey, is the most Dostoevskian of Tolstoy's writings, though naturally the way it was written, and the gospel it preached, were flavoured with his own unmistakable pungency.
The publication caused a tremendous scandal. It is unimaginable that such a book would have found a publisher in England in 1890. Although admittedly the monologue of a homicidal maniac, the story's frank discussion of sex is electrifying even today. In Russia, publication was forbidden, and the story circulated in lithographed copies. Tolstoy's readers were by now used to him taking up extreme positions. He had renounced the eating of meat. He fulminated against the use of alcohol and tobacco. He was openly anarchist in his political views, and in a country where the Orthodox Church was allowed to censor all publications, he openly denounced Church Christianity, mocked the idea of salvation through Christ's blood and defended his own highly edited version of Christian ethics against the teachings of the ecclesiastics.
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Yet, when The Kreutzer Sonata appeared, with all its misogyny, its claim that married women are really whores, its candid reflections on abortion and birth control, its nihilistic claim that all married love is a confidence trick, that no married people really love one another, his long-suffering wife Sofya Andreyevna petitioned the Emperor to lift the ban. "Tell me, Countess", said Tsar Alexander III, "why you make such persistent efforts to obtain permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata? It seems to me that this work, directed against marriage and family should be quite alien to you. To you as Lev Nikolaevich's wife it should be unpleasant."
(The Emperor might have added, if he had read the book, that he took personal exception to the claim that the morals of his own court were indistinguishable from those of the lowest Moscow brothels.) "Your Majesty", replied the Countess, "I ask your permission to print The Kreutzer Sonata, not as Lev Nikolaevich's wife, but as the publisher of his works." At the end of his life, Tolstoy rejected her in both roles, making a will which placed the publication of his works in the hands of his fanatical follower Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, and running away from Sofya to die in a remote railway station in southern Russia - Astapovo. Two new films revisit the old Tolstoyan themes. One is a remaking of The Kreutzer Sonata in a modern American idiom and the other a much more stately, old-fashioned drama - called The Last Station - about Tolstoy's flight from wife and home.
The former (released on March 12) is a bold reconstruction by the English director, Bernard Rose. On reading that it concerns Edgar Hudson (Danny Huston) from Beverly Hills, who seduces a pianist (Elisabeth Roehm) away from her boyfriend, and gets her pregnant, you might wonder how seriously the screenplay has been, as it claims, "based on the novel" by Tolstoy. But the clever script (written by Rose and Lisa Enos) in fact uses many of Tolstoy's more striking lines and presents the essence of the story in modern clothing. By the end we feel it has stomach-churningly explored many of the same uncomfortable themes. Yes, there are scenes here of copulation, masturbation and hotel-television pornography. Yes, these characters travel by plane not train, car not troika, and they plunder one another's secrets by email and cell phone. But in a modern setting it is more disconcerting than ever to discover that Tolstoy's lines have such a powerful dramatic effect. "We've been told a lie", says Bernard Rose's maniac. "We've been told sex is so wonderful ... look into my soul. See the devils who love tearing it apart and tell me it's all so fucking wonderful." Give or take the odd expletive, this is Tolstoy's line, and as delivered by the smug, middle-aged, plain, rich man of Beverly Hills, who has developed the morbid conviction that his pianist wife is conducting a sexual liaison with the violinist (Matthew Yang King) who accompanies her in Op 47, it is devastating. "Evidently the sound of the piano is purposely made to drown the sound of their voices, their kisses." That is a direct quotation from the story. So, too, is the narrator's appalling description of his wife as "a fresh, well-fed horse, whose bridle has been removed". When the murder takes place, there is a great spurt of blood from Aby - it comes up like a fountain. Turn back to the book and you find "the blood rushed from under her corset".
Tolstoy's narrator-murderer, Pozdnyshev, is a more disconcerting figure than Rose's Edgar, however. The film resolves itself ultimately into a horror story, seen through the eyes of a man who is clearly deranged. And while it would be simple-minded to think of Pozdnyshev as a self-portrait (Tolstoy did not, after all, murder his wife), many of the views expressed by the maniac are reinforced by Tolstoy himself in his afterword - "The Christian ideal is that of love of God and one's fellow man ... whereas sexual love, marriage, is a service of self".
Moreover, Pozdnyshev's arguments in the story are advanced with the same blunderbuss lack of subtlety as Tolstoy at his most infuriating. Both Pozdnyshev and his creator feel untroubled by inconsistency. They argue that abortion and birth control are profoundly sinful. But their grounds for doing so seem less than sound when set beside their belief that one good consequence of total abstinence would be the eventual elimination of the human race itself. "According to all the teaching of the Church the end of the world will come, and according to all the teaching of science the same result is inevitable."
And yet it was that generous-minded, subtle doctor, Anton Chekhov, who could write of The Kreutzer Sonata, When reading it one can hardly refrain from exclaiming, "True, it has very annoying defects - namely the audacity with which [Tolstoy] treats matters he has no knowledge of, and from stubbornness does not wish to understand. For instance, his remarks about syphilis, Foundling Hospitals, women's aversion to contraception, &c. are not merely open to dispute, but frankly reveal an ignorant man who during his long life has not taken the trouble to read a couple of books by specialists. But for all that the defects are blown away like feathers before the wind. The quality of the story obliterates them . . . ." Irritation with Tolstoy's slapdash - one is almost tempted to write slapstick - methods of argument rises to the surface every few pages when one reads a new Penguin - Last Steps: The late writings of Leo Tolstoy. (It is put together by the American Jay Parini, whose fictional account of Tolstoy's final year forms the loose basis of Michael Hoffman's film of The Last Station.) An English reader might well like to begin with Tolstoy's notorious essay "Shakespeare and the Drama" (1906). Tolstoy blames Shakespeare's high reputation on Goethe. Because Goethe was "the dictator of philosophic thought", his enthusiasm for the great Shakespeare was taken up by "the great European public". It is not enough for Tolstoy to try to persuade us that Shakespeare had a grossly inflated reputation as a dramatist. Tolstoy's supposedly dispassionate account of King Lear, for example, tells us that Lear talks in an "inflated characterless style, like all Shakespeare's kings". (Characterless? "Rumble thy bellyful, spit fire, spout rain ..."?) No, Tolstoy has to assert that as well as being a bad writer, Shakespeare was also a bad man. The reader - who, very characteristically, Tolstoy imagines to be "a young man" - "having assimilated the immoral view of life which permeates all Shakespeare's works", will lose "the capacity to distinguish between good and evil".
It is hardly surprising that a critic who can be so cavalier with the truth, and whose reading of Shakespeare could be so grotesquely wrong should have an equally skewed picture of other texts and histories. If Shakespeare stood in Tolstoy's way as a serious rival for title of Greatest Writer in the World, then the Orthodox Church was another rival which needed to be kicked into touch, once he had decided that he was the only authentic interpreter of the words of Jesus. Since his spiritual awakening in late middleage, Tolstoy had come to the conclusion that his own reading of the Gospels was irrefutable. In An Appeal to the Clergy (1902), he used the same rhetorical tricks as he used against Shakespeare. Rather than the crude (and only semi-accurate) summary of the plot of King Lear we have a crude and semi-accurate account of Christian doctrines. It is then followed by the completely false historical statement - "How have you preached this truth? From the time a society calling itself the Church was formed, your predecessors taught this truth chiefly by violence". It would spoil Tolstoy's vision of himself as the sole interpreter of the Gospel if he were to admit that for the first few hundred years of the Church's history, it too had insisted upon pacifism, as he did, and for most of its history (with painful aberrations, naturally) it had distrusted the concept of personal property - witness the Apostles holding all things in common, the rise of monasticism, and later the Franciscan movement. It would do Tolstoy no good at all to admit these things because by now he had turned into the leader of a cult.
Why, then, do we bother to read late Tolstoy? Some of the answer is provided in the film The Last Station, sentimentalized as it sometimes is. For it reminds us of Tolstoy's importance historically to the people of Russia in those last days. It does not ultimately matter (or not as much as his disciples supposed) whether we accept his views on vegetarianism, or on sex. He had become the focus of protest, dissidence, hope in the oppressive latter days of the Tsars. If some of his arguments are reductive, and indeed ludicrous, they had potency in their time. What was the alternative to Tolstoyanism in Russia? History answers Leninism. What was the alternative to his universal gospel of pacifist-anarchism? The First World War. Given these stark choices, his gigantic stature remains, in spite of (perhaps partly because of) his capacity to make us shout with annoyance. He could not have been so effective a dissident if he had been wholly reasonable: this was a lesson which Solzhenitsyn surely took to heart.
Everyone who has ever meditated on Tolstoy's death at a remote railway station in 1910 has been conscious of it as a novelistic flourish. Having spent the first part of his creative life fashioning experience into story, he spent the second half making his own life into a sort of grotesque parable. At the end of The Last Station, the crowds gather on the platform in a village whose name each member of the cast persistently mispronounces.
(It should be "AsTAHpuvver", not "Aster-po-vo".) The world's press are anxious to hear of his every last gasp. John Sessions, playing the doctor, comes out with news bulletins of the kind which today would be delivered outside a hospital where lay a dying monarch or president. It was the first event in world history captured by M Pathé on his famous movie newsreel - a fact which for some reason Hoffman omits. Instead, he makes an almost static tableau of mourners as the coffin is borne from the stationmaster's house, followed (can this be right for the excommunicate Tolstoy?) by a priest, and his rejected widow.
The camera draws back and we look at the crowd assembled on the platform rather as we should see the chorus of an opera on stage. They are all standing still and looking towards the lens. It is a bold way to end the film, but not entirely successful. For one thing, anyone who has read about the real funeral of the novelist, would want a much bigger crowd. Hundreds and hundreds of people followed that coffin - not because they had read Tolstoy's novels but because they saw in him a figure of titanic moral authority who could stand out against the insane militarism which was about to engulf the world in destruction and against the horrible inequalities which allowed a few to wallow in luxury while the poor remained so poor. The faces of the crowd in Hoffman's film were recognizably the pudding visages of East Prussian or Silesian extras, for the film was made in Germany. The crowds who followed Tolstoy's coffin in real life were, of course, Russians. I wanted more Slavic chaos in those last frames of The Last Station, and something a bit more like the opening scene of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago, which evokes that haunting opening sentence by Pasternak - "And on they went, singing eternal memory". (They really did sing that hymn following Tolstoy to the last resting place.) And it would have been good if, in addition to its departure from the railway station, we had seen the coffin coming home to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana where, at his request, it was buried, not in consecrated ground (that would not have been allowed in any event by the church) but in the wooded glade where, during Tolstoy's childhood, his brother had buried that Green Stick which, as he supposed, contained the secret of how all men may cease to be angry with one another, and how they may live together in brotherhood.
The grave, a little green mound in the middle of the birch wood, is a place of pilgrimage to this day - and always was, even in the worst days of Soviet repression.
You cannot stand beside it without being reminded of Tolstoy's indomitability - and of human indomitability. One is reminded of the opening paragraphs of Resurrection, in which the power of Nature is stronger than the industrialized grime of paving stones and politics. It is surely right to see in the best of Tolstoy's Peace Essays, such as "The Kingdom of God Is Within You", just such a recipe for sanity and peace as was carved on the Green Stick. Last Steps contains the long letter he wrote to Gandhi, and the life of Gandhi is perhaps one of Tolstoy's greatest legacies.
One of the slightly surreal things about the film is that all the chief protagonists (except perhaps the unfortunate Chertkov, Tolstoy's self-appointed Vicar on Earth) are sexually active. Valentin Bulgakov, the intelligence through which the narrative is seen, is having a delightful romance with the beautiful and largely invented figure of Masha (played by Kerry Condon) who says that the reason she left Moscow to join the Tolstoyan commune of Telyatenki was in order to practise free love. This is more or less plausible but much less so is the continued gerontic lovemaking of Lev Nikolayevich and Sofya themselves back at Yasnaya Polyana. (The house they have chosen, by the way, is too stately: what a pity it was not filmed at Yasnaya Polyana itself, with its fretwork verandas and feeling of folksy intimacy). No one looks for consistency in Tolstoy's behaviour, and it was an oft-repeated jibe in his lifetime that he had preached the virtues of sexual abstinence while fathering his last few children. Tolstoy was candid, even boastful, about his lapses in old age from his own high calling to abstinence .
When he was nearly seventy, he told Aylmer Maude, "I was a husband last night, but that is no reason for abandoning the struggle". But this film is meant to be happening in 1910, when, as Tolstoy told Maude, for the first time in his life he was no longer troubled by desire.
The absence of sex gave both Tolstoys time to concentrate with an insane venom on their final great quarrel - concerning the ownership of his copyright. By now, poor Sofya Andreyevna had to all intents and purposes gone mad, and the flavour of his attitude towards her is well conveyed by a letter penned on May 13, 1909, which he left for her to open when he was dead - "I write to you from beyond the grave in order to tell you what I wanted to tell you many times and for so many years and for your own good, but was unable to tell you while I was alive. I know that if I had been better and kinder I would have been able to tell you during my lifetime in such a way that you would have listened to me, but I was unable to". The letter appears to be generous enough to concede that "I have nothing to forgive you for; you were what your mother made you; a kind and faithful wife and a good mother", but the sting is in the tail: Just because you were what your mother made you and stayed like that and didn't want to change, didn't want to work on yourself, to progress towards goodness and truth, but on the contrary clung with such obstinacy to all that was most evil and the opposite of all that was dear to me, you did a lot of evil to other people and sank lower and lower yourself and reached the pathetic condition you are now in. This terrible letter conveys the atmosphere in which they were both living in the last year of Tolstoy's life. She was indeed in a pathetic condition. Was he also mad, or simply a monster? He had now reached the point of believing that, because Sofya did not want to hand over the copyright of his works to Chertkov and the Tolstoyan movement, and because she still went to church, she was "evil".
The letter is a good example of how the Tolstoys by now conducted many of their deadliest assaults on one another in writing. They did not want their disagreements to be things of the moment, or their marital rows to evaporate in the air. On the contrary, every slight and expression of hatred was on the record. And one of the comically deft things about the Hoffman film is that in most scenes someone or another is keeping notes, or writing the conversations down. At several points Sofya bursts out in protest or tries to snatch the notebook from the copytaker's hand.
This film, in common with most sensible people, glows with sympathy for poor Countess Tolstoy's position. Helen Mirren plays her, most of the time, as little more than mildly exasperated. Perhaps Mirren has still not entirely shaken off the frozen habits of good behaviour of Queen Elizabeth II, her last triumphantly successful film role; perhaps she is simply too reasonable a person. But she hardly ever suggests the real streak of mania in the old Sofya. This really matters in terms of the plot, because the film does not create enough of a sense that Tolstoy's life had become intolerable in his own home. Even the scene in which she fires a gun at a photograph of the hated Chertkov has a sort of calm about it - more the shooting party at Sandringham than an insane outburst.
Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, is likewise far too genial. (And far too handsome - could not the make-up people have shoved a blob of putty on to Plummer's fine nose?) As the letter just quoted shows, Tolstoy had, in relation to Sofya, a real malignancy.
"You poison the very air we breathe!" he once exclaimed to her, before turning back to dictate some tract on the necessity of universal love.
Aylmer Maude, guided by Tolstoy's son Ilya, saw that the crucial factor in Tolstoy's decision to leave home was his having decided, in a moment of supreme folly, to change his will, cutting out his wife of fortyeight years and giving the control of his estate to Chertkov. By abandoning any claim on his copyrights, as Maude sharply points out, Tolstoy merely allowed a lot of unscrupulous people to profit from his works, and to rush out bad translations in all languages without having to pay for them. He knew that he had made a mistake as soon as he had signed the will, according to Maude and Ilya. "To tell his wife" - this is his son Ilya speaking - "was out of the question; it would grievously have offended his 'friends'. To have destroyed the will would have been worse still, for his 'friends' had suffered for his principles and had been exiled from Russia, and he felt bound to them. And on top of all this were his fainting fits, his increasing loss of memory, the clear consciousness of the approach of death, and the continuing growing nervousness of his wife, who felt in her heart of hearts the unnatural estrangement of her husband and could not understand it."
This is the fairest possible summary of the situation, and it is one to which the film is very largely faithful. I do not want to end on a cavil about the film. It is beautifully shot; the music by Sergey Yevtushenko is perfect, in its subtle allusions to nineteenth-century composers and its evocative modernity; and the low-lying (in fact Prussian) fields on to which a computer has cleverly superimposed the distant view of an onion-domed church, makes the heart race faster - it looks so authentically like the scenes evoked by Tolstoy himself in his greatest fiction - for example, the mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Moreover, and this is why I salute the film, it never loses sight of Tolstoy's greatness. If he were merely an opinionated old beardy who did not like Shakespeare or women, we should have no interest in him. But he carried off the twin trick of being one of the greatest novelists ever, and the conscience of the Western world. For all the inconsistencies of his arguments, he remains both things to this day. Whenever we hear politicians presenting spurious arguments for their acts of war, we who have learnt from Tolstoy go back in our minds to the bright glade where he, and the Green Stick, are so peacefully, yet so provocatively, buried.