Henri Troyat (1911–2007)

"All the inconsistencies of his entire life spread before his eyes and his mind reeled in horror. He preached universal love - and made his wife miserable; poverty - and lived in luxury; forgetfulness of self - and recorded his every twinge; fusion with God - and wasted his life in domestic bickering; contempt for fame - and curried his celebrity with correspondence, receptions, photographs; the worship of truth - and was driven every single day to the shabbiest dissimulation." /Henri Troyat/

First and foremost, if all that's in this book weren't thoroughly backed by documentation one could have easily imagined it was a fiction novel, especially towards the end of Tolstoy's life.

Tolstoy, according to one of his contemporaries was two persons: "one writer of genius and one mediocre thinker who impressed people by talking in paradoxes and contradictions" !!!!!!!!....

This book gives an unimaginably DETAILED account of the life of Leo Tolstoy. The most exhaustive biography I've ever read. All 744 pages of it. Apart from amazing writing by Henri Troyat, it's also thanks to Tolstoy's copious diaries and correspondence that survived for posterity. Thanks to that, so much is known about Tolstoy's personality and his views. A passionate yet extremely contradictory soul. That was my first impression... And THEN - I continued to read... and saw: what a brilliant writer but what a mess of a man... Although, by the end of the book, I felt really sorry for him.

In this biography, Troyat often adopts a sort of avuncular attitude: sometimes condescending, sometimes understanding, sometimes humoring , sometimes criticizing - and I wouldn't be too surprised about the latter, Henri Troyat being French and Tolstoy having a rather bad opinion of the French, due to their inborn sensuality and love of life, while he gradually developed his doctrine of denying himself anything even slightly superfluous in life. Well, but did it work???

"He affected semi starvation and peasant dress, he drew the water from the well himself and cleaned his own room, but he did not give up his library or his saddle horses or his piano or the big drawing room in which his admirers congregated." He hired a peasant to teach him how to make boots, we read... "Ah, the charms of temporary poverty!", smiles Troyat, adding: "He struts in his rags, he wallows in sham humility, and more than ever, reviling himself, he adores himself..."

But - "As always, he contented himself with half measures, and dug himself into an ambiguous position whose ludicrous side did not escape him." Because - "Poor as Job on paper, he nevertheless continued to profit from his fortune, which he simply changed from his hand into those of his wife and children." After all, "in theory, he was delivered from the evils of property, legally a pauper, hypothetically divested of all means of subsistence. Ah, the pleasures of utter destitution! ...." Troyat aimes his justified sarcasm well.

And Tolstoy himself wrote: "I have the feeling that I am the only sane man in a madhouse run by a madman..... The dreadful thing about it is that the luxury and sin in which I live were created by me; I am corrupt myself and incapable of doing anything about it."

And here is some extreme. Tolstoy writes: "To eat when one is hungry, drink water when one is thirsty; those are great pleasures of the body; but to refuse food and drink and everything the body desires is more than a pleasure , it is the joy of the soul!"

DIARIES
About the diaries. Just imagine - Tolstoy and his wife Sonya (who was a meticulous contributor to her diaries as well) had agreed to show their diaries to each other! And they commented on what they read in each other's diaries back in their own diaries! Or in person, too. Now, who does that?!.. This had been agreed upon at the very beginning of the marriage - prompted by Tolstoy, in a rash gesture of total openness, a sort of "be-what-it-may" self-punishing purification of his soul. This is how Troyat eloquently describes it:

"What complicated their relations was that each had given the other permission to read his diary, and thus their private confessions unconsciously turned into arguments of prosecution or defense.... The result of this practice was that the couple lived on two levels, one of speech and the other of writing. Decisions won by one of them in the lower court were appealed by the other in the upper. They could hardly have striven more mightily to bare their naked souls if their chief object had been to become thoroughly disgusted with each other. The miracle is that their marriage stood the strain of this continual rivalry to see which could be the most truthful."

SOUL SEARCHING/SELF CRITICISM...
And going back to Tolstoy's "soul" - from his early boyhood he was very critical of himself in his diaries. Here is what he wrote when still quite young:

"I am ugly, awkward, untidy and socially uncouth. I am irritable and tiresome to others, immodest, intolerant, and shy as a child. In other words, a boor. Whatever I know I have learned by myself - half-learned in bits and snatches, without any structure or order... I am excessive, vacillating, unstable, stupidly vain and aggressive, like all weaklings. I am not courageous. I am so lazy that idleness has become an ineradicable habit with me. I am honorable, that is I love the path of virtue... and when I depart from it, I am unhappy and glad to return to it. Yet there is one thing I love more than virtue: fame. I am so ambitious, and this craving in me has had so little satisfaction, that if I had to choose between fame and virtue, I am afraid I would very often opt for the former."

Now, that's some self-criticism, if I ever saw one. And the epitome of frankness. Tolstoy constantly examined and re-examined himself, harshly criticizing his moral and personal faults, "correcting" his "vices"... I would say that's his main feature, as far as his personality is concerned. And the frankness of it in his diaries that were read by his wife... He was constantly extremely self-absorbed, which, to me, is a sort of contradiction to his fiction writing!

Another interesting feature that I learned from this book is Tolstoy's inconsistency in his thoughts and behavior - I have never encountered anybody with more contradictions about his beliefs and philosophies of life... He goes from hating Church's dogma - to sudden piety. He goes from being terrified of death to suicidal thoughts or bravery in battle (he served in the military when he was young). As time went by, "... his erratic behavior and unstable nature may at last have been beginning to alarm even himself".

Here is another example of Tolstoy's inconsistent, fluctuating nature:

"On his bad days, he was aggrieved by the material comforts around him, cast murderous glances at the servants and the crystal, did not join in the conversation and hurried away from the table. When he was in a good mood, on the other hand, he charmed his guests with the vivacity of his conversation. Leaping from one subject to another, he stated his view on everything in simple, colorful language flew into rage at the slightest sign of disagreement, pressed his argument to the point of absurdity, apologized for speaking so sharply and, his features alert and his eyes darting around the room, basked in the wonderment of his audience".

But, that said, once he put his mind to doing something, he could move mountains (like what happened during a famine). Magazine "New Times" wrote: "We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy."

WRITING
Troyat's frank criticism of Tolstoy's negative qualities goes alongside his admiration of his unique contribution to literature. Troyat goes into the most painstaking critique/description of Tolstoy's major novels. I was really fascinated to read such elaborate and praiseworthy and detailed characterization of each and every major character and plot.

Troyat says that even "in the state of perpetual mental upheaval, one idea remained constant: write." And actually, his extreme inconsistencies in his own behavior might have helped him to be a good writer:

...from extreme fright (in battle) he passed to extreme bravery: he didn't know that the secret of his genius lay in just in this rare capacity to shift from cowardice to heroism, or that it was his very flaws and inconsistencies that would later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters in turn with equal sincerity, or that his diversity as a man would be the foundation for his universality as a writer."

Tolstoy was really phenomenal in using the world around him in his writing, or as Troyat puts it - "Tolstoy was making capital out of everything that crossed his field of vision. Nothing could happen to him that would not in some way be essential to his work, he thought."

TOLSTOY'S PHILOSOPHY
Now, about Tolstoy's new founded philosophy. As Troyat explains:

"The desire to repair, to improve things would not leave him. Despite his gambling losses, his "fits of lust" and his "criminal sloth", he felt the soul of an innovator stirring in his breast."

And:

"... he wrote about a "grandiose, stupendous idea: "I feel capable of devoting my life to it. It is the founding of a new religion, suited to the present state of mankind: the religion of Christ but divested of faith and mysteries, a practical religion, not promising eternal bliss but providing bliss here on earth."

And then this (overconfidence followed by frustration): "Without false modesty I may say that I formulate and express the most important and significant ideas, and at the same time, I spend the best part of my life yielding to or resisting the whims of women."

Tolstoy explains in his writings: "I believe in God, whom I conceive of as the Spirit, Love and Principal of all things.... I believe that the will of God was never more clearly expressed than in the doctrine of the Christ-Man; but to see Christ as god, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege." An arguable idea to many at any time in history.

First of all, Tolstoy claimed that "the best way of approaching the Creator was to become one with nature." And thus, after his tumultuous and not-too-pious youth, he tried, as noted above, to renounce all kinds of luxury and live naturally, like his own serfs. Which of course, didn't work most of the time...

Also, his argument (not an unreasonable one, one might argue) was that "God is not a being; God is Law and Power".

And, Troyat notes:

"On the social side, advocating a sort of Communism in Christian sheep's clothing, he errs through over-confidence in man. If everyone loved other people more than himself and the world were inhabited by followers of Leo Tolstoy, there would obviously be no need for laws, courts, police or government."

But in Sonya's thinking, Troyat points out "... if he had not written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who would have paid any attention to his philosophical and social writings?... The thinker's ever growing public had been won for him by the novelist." She was sure of it.

VIEW OF WOMEN
Tolstoy's view of women might surprise you. Troyat:

"The fact was that Tolstoy, who claimed to be so broad-minded, was extremely old-fashioned when it came to women. A champion of freedom outside the home, he applied the principles of tyranny under his roof. According to him, a wife should abandon all interest in her appearance ... and devote herself to running the household, educating her children and distracting her husband."

But wait, here is a real shocker. Tolstoy wrote this: "For 70 years my opinion of women has done nothing but sink steadily, and yet it must go lower still. The problem of women? One thing is sure! It is not solved by allowing women to run one's life but by preventing them from destroying it! "

Troyat points out that, as far as Tolstoy was concerned,

"...a woman lost her best quality the moment she left the sidelines - the incorrigible misogynist confided to his diary: "Women have only two emotions: love of their husband and love of their children, and, as consequences of these two, love of dress on account of the husband and love of money on account of the children. All the rest is artifice, imitation of men, tools for seduction, coquetry, fashion."...

And: "Nothing is predictable in a woman. In man, thought precedes and determines action; but in woman (especially very feminine women), action determines thought."

There you go - Tolstoy's evaluation of women can't be more clear than that... But wait! How about this "gem" - "Woman's chief talent is to guess the role that pleases every person and then to play that role".

SONYA
I had great admiration for Tolstoy's wife Sonya in the first half of the book. She "had succeeded in creating the atmosphere of peace and quiet that was necessary for the work to mature in him. Had she not kept such a jealous guard over his piece of mind and body, he might have abandoned "War and Peace" by the wayside. After all, he was not forced to write by material necessity. Unlike Dostoyevsky, he did not live on the income from his books..."

Sonya was the one copying and re-copying an incredible number of pages before the novel was sent to the publisher. She was his true champion. But after using her in this way, and after she gave him 13 (!!!) children, Tolstoy "complained that his wife did not love him enough to accept the poverty he was yearning for with his whole being. As a mother she could not bring herself to make such a sacrifice, which she might have accepted at the beginning of their marriage."

But as time went by, "so many husbands had succeeded each other beside her inside the same skin that in order to preserve some semblance of stability in her life she was forced to oppose that ever-shifting course set by Leo Tolstoy", and as a result Sonya started spiraling through the years from a young woman fascinated by her husband's talent to almost a maniac, jealous of his disciples. That was very sad to see, in the second part of the biography.

But one thing always remained - however Sonya criticized her husband towards the end of his life, she, like a tigress, was very protective of him, shielding him from the hostile world.

VIEWS ON ART AND OTHER WRITERS
Troyat writes that in his essay "What Then Must We Do?" Tolstoy "had already said that artists who neglected their vocation as educators were prostituting their talent", claiming that "Art must not be regarded as a means of procuring pleasure, but as an aspect of social life ". Therefore, for Tolstoy, "...the artist's duty was not to give form, color and reason to his flights of fancy, but to amuse the workers after their hard day of labor and give them "rest, as refreshing as in their sleep."

Troyat goes on to say:

"Carried away by his theory, he furiously set about demolishing the alleged geniuses of the race. French literature fared worst at his hands..... The same depravity prevailed in the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner - "dedicated to the expression of sickly states of nervous emotion", as Tolstoy put it. Troyat also points out that "Tolstoy's style is total freedom, absolute sincerity. He is the enemy of mystery in literature." Which, in a way, is true: no mystery, no ambiguity in his novels.

But it's quite a shame the way Tolstoy maligned some other great writers, such as Checkov, Dostoyevsky... About Dostoyevsky he admitted that "The House of the Dead" is a fine thing, but I do not set great store by his other books. People cite messages to me. And indeed there are some very fine parts here and there, but, on the whole, it is dreadful stuff! His style is targeted, he tries so hard to make his characters original, and in fact they are hardly outlined..." Of course, it's almost sacrilegious to say that of Dostoyevsky, but that was Tolstoy's thinking (or was it jealousy talking???....).

About Checkov, Tolstoy said that "The Sea Gull" was nothing but rubbish", and that he "...had not been able to force himself to read "The Three Sisters", ....was revolted by "Uncle Vanya"... And then: "Shakespeare's plays are bad enough," Tolstoy incredibly said to young Checkov, " but yours are even worse!"

But here's what Gorky wrote about Tolstoy: "Although I admire him, I do not like him. He is not a sincere person; he's exaggeratedly self-preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself. His humility is hypocritical and his desire to suffer is repellent! Usually such a desire is a symptom of a sick and perverted mind but in his case it is a great pride, wanting to be imprisoned solely in order to increase his authority. He lowers himself in my eyes, by his fear of death and his beautiful flirtation with it; as a rabid individualist, it gives him a sort of illusion of immortality to consolidate his authority." Powerfully expressed and to the point, no question about it.

And as a play of irony, Troyat points out, "However he viewed the evil effects of music, Tolstoy could not resist its charms. When a melody pleased him, his face softened into an expression of gentleness and suffering......" But then Tolstoy made excuses saying "My tears mean nothing, it's nerves, nothing but nerves".

ON LOVE
As part of his negation of everything worldly, and after tasting life fully during his youth, here's what Tolstoy says about "love": "As far as being in love is concerned for either men or women, ......it is an ignoble and, above all, an unhealthy sentiment,... I would have taken as many precautions to avoid being contaminated by that disease as I would to protect myself against far less serious infections such as diphtheria, typhus, or scarlet fever." This was written in a letter to his daughter Tanya in order to discourage her from marriage.

IN THE END, let me say this: having been raised on the worship of Leo Tolstoy as a genius writer and thinker (my Soviet school literature classes thoroughly dissecting his well-known works, but everything else being censured), I never realized that it was only PART of what he was. Especially, the second part of his life was not known to me - when, after having written "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" and having captivated Russia and the world with it, he started to become a critical thinker of theories that were extremely discordant with the main flow of intellectual thought, either religious or social. Not even speaking of his harsh criticism of other contemporary writers, like Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, etc., as well as foreign ones. He put himself on a pedestal and hardly anybody could be equal to him, he thought, and he expressed it loudly for all to hear.

Tolstoy did have a huge following, there is no denying that - wherever he went huge crowds gathered. But at that time the general public didn't have access to his diaries and private correspondence, and so, not all of his "unusual" (mildly putting) views were known, or the details of his private persona, for that matter, I should add.

I should also say that I have barely scratched the surface in this review, for there is so MUCH more in Troyat's thoroughly researched and skillfully written biography of Leo Tolstoy.
… (mais)

"My father began my education or, to put it more simply, began to beat me, before I reached the age of five," wrote Anton Chekhov of his earliest memories. "Every morning as I awoke, my first thought was, 'Will I be beaten today?'"

The grandson of a serf and the son of a fanatically religious and domineering father, young Chekhov had a hard start to life. Often forced to work in his father's store instead of studying, Chekhov was at first a mediocre student. But soon he saw that the way to lift himself and his family out of poverty and degrading circumstances was by becoming a professional. He studied to be a doctor, and began writing and publishing scads of humorous short stories as a way to make a little income. He would later often refer to his profession as a doctor as his wife, and his writing as his mistress.

Despite his treatment at his father's hands and the dissolute lives of his two older brothers, Anton accepted that it has his job to take care of the family, and took responsibility for supporting them (including his five siblings). Despite the financial burden, Anton often treated patients for free, and spent a great deal of time working for the common good: building schools, libraries, a sanitarium, raising money for famine victims, and acting as a public health officer during cholera outbreaks. He believed that a better future would be built through good works, not through political action or religious interventions.

A firm believer in science and an agnostic, it was surprising that he admired Tolstoy greatly, and the two grew to visit one another and have long conversations. Chekhov was closest with Gorky and Bunin, two other great Russian authors, although these two looked up to Chekhov the way Chekhov did to Tolstoy. Tolstoy often berated Chekhov for not imbuing his works with a moral message, and others chivied him for not taking a political stance. But Chekhov was a staunch believer that the author's job was to hold a mirror up to life and to let the reader make what conclusions (and take what actions) they would. Troyat wrote that there was "no intellectual force-feeding, there is complicity" between Chekhov and his readers.

The sincerity and moderation in his works, mirrored his personal life. Self-effacing and retiring, Chekhov hated emotional outpourings. He never turned away a visitor or a young author looking for help, but found them exhausting too. Never happy staying in one place long, he was constantly changing residences from dacha to Moscow or Petersburg, the Crimea, Europe. He enjoyed the company of witty women, but always pulled away when they got too close. He loved attending the theater, but never felt as though he were a good playwright. And often his plays were misunderstood or misrepresented at first, and it was often only when the public embraced them that the critics came around.

Unfortunately all of his adult life, Chekhov suffered from tuberculosis and other illnesses. He carried a leather pouch into which he would spit or cough blood, but for years refused treatment. He was solicitous of his patients, but not of himself. By ignoring his illness, he both focused on living and avoided the emotional attentions of others. Troyat writes, "As much as he delighted in seeing the theater resemble life, he despised seeing life resemble the theater." When Chekhov finally did fall in love and marry in 1901 at the age of 41, he was in the last stages of his life. His wife, a vibrant actress named Olga, continued to pursue her career in Moscow, while Chekhov became less and less able to leave Yalta. He died at the age of 44, a tremendously esteemed, though not well-remunerated, author.

I loved this biography, not only because the story of Chekhov's life was interesting, but because Troyat's writing and treatment of his subject is so well-done. Replete with quotations from Chekhov's library of letters (also translated by Heim), Troyat moves seamlessly between Chekhov's words and his own. Troyat keeps himself in the background, yet creates a narrative that is warm and enjoyable to read. I look forward to reading more of Troyat's many biographies and hope to try some of his novels as well. As for Chekhov, I have a much greater appreciation for the man, as well as his writing.… (mais)

CUPRINS

1. Capitolul I: Violenta la Kremlin - pag. 5
2. Capitolul II: Regenta - pag. 26
3. Capitolul III: Petru ori Sofia ? - pag. 40
4. Capitolul IV: Slobozia nemteasca - pag. 54
5. Capitolul V: Razboiul cu turcii - pag. 73
6. Capitolul VI: Marea Ambasada - pag. 82
7. Capitolul VII: Rascoala strelitilor - pag. 104
8. Capitolul VIII: De la Narva la Poltava - pag. 122
9. Capitolul IX: Sankt-Petersburg - pag. 146
10. Capitolul X: Calatoria in Franta - pag. 160
11. Capitolul XI: Tareviciul Aleksei - pag. 188
12. Capitolul XII: Imparat si imparateasa - pag. 236
13. Capitolul XIII: Ultimele reforme - pag. 268
14. Capitolul XIV: Uriasul rapus - pag. 302
15. Bibliografie - pag. 327… (mais)