[NOTE: I’m not becoming Tolstoy-obsessed, although I’ve written two days in a row on him. However, I think that the topic of both posts is not really Tolstoy per se, but larger philosophical questions about the good life, politics, and art.]
Yesterday, commenter “chuck” linked to a great essay by Orwell on Tolstoy and his virulent criticism of Shakespeare. I’d never before read this work of Orwell’s, and it was a pleasure. I agree with it nearly 100%.
I had vaguely remembered that, back in his curmudgeonly old age when Tolstoy had turned into an esthetic bully, he had put down a lot of writers for being insufficiently didactic (among them, his former writing self). Just as Tolstoy denied himself pleasure for moral and spiritual reasons in his later life, and hoped that others would follow suit, he advocated denial of pleasure in writing—literature now had to be didactic or he hated and despised it.
Shakespeare’s protean nature, his creation of teeming worlds with every manner of being and person in them, was anathema to the moralizing elderly Tolstoy. What’s hard to understand, though, is why Tolstoy says he had always hated Shakespeare (Orwell’s essay discusses this at some length). Perhaps this statement of Tolstoy’s was a form of revisionist history, but I’m going to take him at his word and assume he had in fact always hated Shakespeare. A curious thing in a writer.
In the last half of his life Tolstoy didn’t just renounce his own earlier literary works by turning over the copyrights to his wife (at the same time he was writing fiction that excoriated both her and the institution of marriage). He renounced them by also repudiating them aesthetically. The world continued to love them, though, and continues to this day.
But when I think of Tolstoy’s earlier sprawling novels such as War and Peace, even though it’s fiction, it occurs to me that most of the fictional characters are based very strongly on people he actually knew, such as himself, his wife, and his wife’s family. It occurs to me that it is possible that (unlike Shakespeare) Tolstoy was not really the sort of writer, even when young, who could write well about things extremely “other” than himself and those around him. And in fact the first literary works for which Tolstoy became famous had been an autobiographical trilogy couched as novels, called Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.
Perhaps his main focus was always himself, a topic on which he worked almost endless variations.
I have long thought that in general fiction writers can be roughly divided into two camps: those who create worlds and those who explore the world they know (or write riffs on it). It’s a form of something I’ve written about before, the theme and variations vs. the symphony:
I’ll let author Milan Kundera take over on the subject now, since he was actually my inspiration in the first place (from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Here he is describing his musicologist father who, during the last ten years of his life, had lost the ability to speak:
Throughout the ten years of his illness, Papa worked on a big book about Beethoven’s sonatas. He probably wrote a little better than he spoke, but even while writing he had more and more trouble finding words, and finally his text had become incomprehensible, consisting of nonexistent words.
He called me into his room one day. Open on the piano was the variations movement of the Opus 111 sonata. “Look,” he said, pointing to the music (he could no longer play the piano). And again, “Look,” and then, after a prolonged effort, he succeeded in saying, “Now I know!” and kept trying to explain something important to me, but his entire message consisted of unintelligible words, and seeing that I did not understand him, he looked at me in surprise and said, “That’s strange.”
I know of course what he wanted to talk about, because it was a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Variation form was Beethoven’s favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.
Yes, all that is well known. But Papa wanted to know how it should be understood. Why exactly choose variations? What meaning is hidden behind it?
That is why he called me into his room, pointed to the music, and said, “Now I know!”
And, somehow, Kundera the son finally understood (or thought he understood; the father wasn’t telling) what his father meant:
I am going to try to explain it with a comparison. A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world hidden in all things.
…Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.
The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the marvelous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves further and further away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.
Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack that other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach….
It is not surprising that in his later years variations become the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well…that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.
The wide-ranging Shakespeare is the symphony, the narrow elderly Tolstoy the theme and variations. And although in his younger writing years Tolstoy appeared for a while to be symphonic (certainly War and Peace appears that way), that was either a short-lived experiment or it was in fact an illusion, and his scope was probably always more narrow and focused and self-referential than it had seemed.
Music lovers—and literature lovers—usually make room for both in their hearts, the theme and variations and the symphony, even if writers themselves tend to specialize in one or the other when they work. In his later years Tolstoy wanted to write universally, but because he wrote didactically he ended up narrowing himself still further. You might say his theme and variations became less varied and less tuneful. But every now and then a melody still broke through.
