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"Tolstoy Today & You"
By Professor Andy Kaufman
Why Tolstoy is Still Relevant Today
What makes Tolstoy relevant even today, even to the most contemporary audience, is that Tolstoy was not just a great writer. He was also a great and inspirational teacher of life. Probably the greatest lesson about life that I have learned from Tolstoy is that it doesn’t matter if you lived in Russia in the 1800’s or in America in 2004. Human nature is the same everywhere, and it hasn’t changed. I learned this lesson in a very personal way when I first discovered Tolstoy sixteen years ago as a freshman at Amherst College.
I was going through a difficult time in my life. I had just moved from Michigan, where I grew up in the small town of Muskegon, to Amherst, Massachusetts. It felt as if I had been thrown into a foreign environment. The East Coast college world felt cold and competitive to me. I felt like everybody was smarter than I was. I felt like everybody was better prepared for college than I was. And I felt like there were social rules, which everybody seemed to understand except for me—what to do, how to speak, how to approach women. I felt awkward and bumbling. I was searching for myself, for who I was, for what was important to me in life.
It was in this stage of anxiety and insecurity that I was assigned to read a book for an English class: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. When I first saw the book in the bookstore, I was terrified! I had never even seen a book this big in my life, except for maybe the dictionary. And I had to read it?! I was intimidated, like many people are when they first encounter the large Russian novels.
But something amazing happened. As I started to read this book, the world that Tolstoy created from the very first page was so real, so alive, and so vivid to me. The characters were so full of life that I completely forgot about the fact that I had five hundred, a thousand pages, to go, because I was absorbed in the moment-to-moment experience that Tolstoy was creating.
There was one character in particular, with whom I fully identified: Pierre Bezukhov. At the beginning of the novel Pierre is young, he’s insecure, he’s socially awkward, and he’s on a philosophical quest for meaning. Pierre was essentially me. I had discovered myself in Tolstoy’s novel.
That made me realize that Tolstoy could become for me something more than just a writer I had to read for an English class, or even a so-called “great writer.” Tolstoy could become for me a kind of self-therapy. I could learn about myself and work through my own problems by living through the experiences of Tolstoy’s characters.
That was the beginning of my long journey with Tolstoy. I began to appreciate that, even though thousands of miles separate our two countries, and a century and half separates today from when that novel was written, human beings basically go through the same experiences. That was a very comforting lesson for me, especially as a young man at that stage in my life.
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Why Tolstoy Understood Anna Karenina So Well
Many women who read Anna Karenina sometimes ask the question: How could Tolstoy, a man, understand Anna so well? The reason is because, in many ways, Tolstoy was Anna! Whether you like Anna or not, the fact is that here is a woman with too much life, too much fire, too much passion for the world around her. Here is a woman who could not contain her rich abundance of life within the social structures of her time, or even within the structure of family life.
Tolstoy understood that, because he was like that himself. He was a very passionate man with a rich inner life. He, too, had women on the side. He was not a faithful husband all the time. Throughout his life he struggled with his own passions, his own zest for life.
In fact, Tolstoy even struggled with how to contain his own rich imagination within the given literary structures of the time. Why do you think his novels were so long, so unusual for that time? Why did Henry James call War and Peace “a loose baggy monster”? Because Tolstoy could not stop talking! He could not stop expressing himself! There was no genre, no literary structure that was adequate for him to express everything that he had inside him.
That’s why Tolstoy understood Anna Karenina so well. It is another illustration of the powerful lesson we can learn from Tolstoy: It doesn't matter if you’re a man OR a woman. Human beings go through the same experiences.
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Tolstoy’s Infectious Love of Life
What can we learn from Tolstoy the man? It’s unfortunate that there has been an image that has grown up around Tolstoy, especially in America --the image of Tolstoy as a “serious Russian writer,” who wrote long novels and who preached from on high about serious matters of life and death. This image is reinforced by the fact that you often see photographs and portraits of Tolstoy with the large beard and the intense eyes.
Nothing could be further from the truth about who Tolstoy really was as a man. Tolstoy was extremely genuine, gentle, down to earth, real. Tolstoy loved life! He loved children. There are wonderful stories about how Tolstoy would go on for hours with his grandchildren telling fantastic stories about exotic people, vegetables, and animals. Not because he wanted to get those stories published, but because that is how "Grandpa Tolstoy" wanted to share himself with his many grandchildren. And Tolstoy loved nature. All of those wonderful scenes in Anna Karenina, in which Levin is mowing in the fields and taking in the thrill of nature, come right out of Tolstoy’s own personal experience.
Tolstoy also had a dark side. Tolstoy loved loose women. He loved gambling. He loved to party a little too much, especially in his youth. In fact, when you open Tolstoy’s diaries from when he was in his twenties you get a picture of a man, a real man, who lived passionately, made mistakes, and constantly struggled with himself. A typical diary entry for Tolstoy when he was at that age would go something like this: “Today I rolled out of bed at noon with a hangover. Oh, I lost 200 rubles last night…Ah, that Cossack woman…No! This has got to stop! Today is the day that I will reform myself!” And the very next day you open his diary: “Today I rolled out of bed at 1 pm with a hangover. I lost three hundred rubles last night!” You get the idea.
There is another story about Tolstoy that illustrates this point. When you go to Yasnaya Polyana today, the country estate where Tolstoy grew up and wrote his novels, you will see a big open space where there is supposed to be a house, the house that Tolstoy was born in. That house is no longer there. There is just a stone, because Tolstoy lost the house in a gambling bet when he was serving in the military as a young man!
Apparently he lost three thousand rubles at that time, which, in today’s terms, is extraordinary. He sent up a note to his family requesting them to sell something so he could pay off his debt. And the only thing worth 3000 rubles at that time on his estate was his house! Tolstoy lost his own house because he loved to gamble so much!
The point of these stories is that Tolstoy was a man who LIVED LIFE. It is because of this passion for life, and the excesses and the mistakes that went along with it, that he understood life. He was not writing about people, about the world, from up in an ivory tower. He was writing about them from down here, where all of us live and struggle.
Tolstoy appreciated characters, such as Levin, who are out there living life, experiencing it, making mistakes, getting hurt, picking themselves up, and doing it all over again. He much preferred that to characters, such as Karenin, who hide from life and from themselves in their little self-protective bubbles.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Tolstoy’s life, it is that you must take emotional risks. You must make yourself vulnerable to all of the joys and the sadness and the mystery life has to offer. Only that way can you truly understand and appreciate life. This kind of healthy risk-taking mentality was the basis of Tolstoy's own life. And it is the reason his writing still appears so rich and so real to us even today.
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What Inspired Tolstoy to Write Books
Why did Tolstoy write Anna Karenina? Why did Tolstoy write at all? There is a revealing quotation, in which Tolstoy explains what he was trying to do in all of his works. Tolstoy said, “If I were told that I could write a work in which I would resolve all of today’s social questions, I wouldn’t spend two hours on such a work. But if I were told that this work will be read twenty years from now by the children of today, and that they will laugh and weep over it, and that it will make them fall in love with life, then I would devote all my time and all of my life to such a work!”
That’s why Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina Not just to solve social problems. Not just to solve philosophical problems. But to celebrate life, all of it, the good and the bad. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy doesn’t give us the answers to life’s vexing problems, but he gives us something even more valuable. He gives us such an appreciation of life, of the truth of life, that we develop the courage in ourselves to seek out the answers on our own. That’s why Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. That’s why Tolstoy wrote.
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Tolstoy’s Deep Compassion for All Living Things
The most inspirational aspect of Anna Karenina and of all of Tolstoy’s writing, for me, is Tolstoy’s profound compassion for human beings and his genuine desire to truly understand human beings, as we truthfully are, not as stereotypes. Just think about how many characters there are in Anna Karenina alone. There are so many different characters from so many different walks of life, and yet not one of them is described as a stereotype. Every character is described with such richness, such realness, such individuality, that they come alive for us.
Tolstoy makes these characters come alive in the way he takes us inside of their thought processes and shows us what is happening in their minds and in their hearts moment-to-moment. He makes these characters come alive for us in the way he shows us how the subtlest physical gestures speak volumes about what is occurring inside of a person’s soul.
I remember the scene early on in the novel when Anna is boarding the train to go back to Petersburg. You can just feel the storm within Anna’s own soul. You can feel the agitation and the nervousness and the excitement and the exhilaration all at the same time. Not because Tolstoy tells us these things are happening, but because he shows us in the subtlest gestures, in how Anna moves in her seat, in how she tries to control herself by putting her hand in her purse and taking it out, picking up the novel, in how she takes the pen knife and rubs it against her cheek and starts to giggle nervously.
Tolstoy makes his characters real to us in the way he shows us how human beings can communicate just in the look of the eyes, without words. Or how about communication between a human being and an animal?! Remember the scene where Vronksy has just crashed his horse in the steeplechase. And there they are, Vronsky and the horse, Frou-Frou, lying on the ground, and Vronsky catches a glimpse of Frou-Frou’s “lovely eye” just before Frou-Frou is about to die. It’s a very tender moment. It’s a chilling moment. So much is happening just in that little subtle description of Tolstoy’s.
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Tolstoy's Definition of True Understanding
Tolstoy’s ability to make these characters come alive for us and his ability to make his world so real to us is not just because he was an incredibly talented writer. It is also because he had an incredible compassion for human beings and a passionate desire truly to understand human life. True understanding of life, for Tolstoy, is not about how talented you are. It is not about how smart you are or how socially successful you are. True understanding doesn't come from the head. It comes from the heart, from a place of love, of compassion.
I would like to end with Tolstoy’s own quotation on this point. Tolstoy once said, “Everything I understand I understand only because I love.”
What a wonderfully inspirational message that is, not just for Tolstoy’s time, but for ours, as well.
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