Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.
Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.
Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.
A Woman’s Story
Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.
Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.
Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.
Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?
Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)
Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.
A Woman’s Identity
What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.
This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.
An Adulteress
When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.
Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.
““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.
Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.
More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.
Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things
One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.
And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.
That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?
Towards the end of his time writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had something of a spiritual crisis and it almost killed him. He suddenly realised that the life he was living was pointless. Worse still, he was unable to identify any way of living that would return a sense of meaning to it. In A Confession, a short work of non-fiction published soon after the conversion, Tolstoy describes being driven nearly to suicide as a result of his despair. The only way out of his predicament except for suicide, as Tolstoy saw it, was through belief in God. The spiritual transformation that then came over him had profound implications for his work and the rest of his life. He eventually abandoned the city, lived like a peasant in the countryside, and began a career as a pamphleteer. What fiction did come this period was blunt and didactic, with rare exceptions like Hadji-Murat.
Many people would consider Tolstoy one of the greatest writers of all time, but they rarely have the late Tolstoy in mind. The late Tolstoy is a strange creature and just as strange a writer. I’m currently reading his only novel from the period, Resurrection, which partly prompts this post. The other prompt is that I’m dipping into essays by the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, who seems to have sprung from the cradle just the same as Tolstoy eventually became. Berry is a defender of the old and simple ways, of a faith bound closely to the soil. I like Berry a lot, but something’s bothering me about his writing, just as Resurrection is bothering me, and just as other things Tolstoy wrote late in life have bothered me.
The Old Man in All His Glory
By “bothered”, I do not mean that my spirit is touched – it’s not that kind of bothering. If anything, the problem is the opposite. The problem is that I’m struggling to care. It’s all well and good to simply accuse the late Tolstoy of didacticism, but I think there’s some value in trying to go into detail to answer what exactly has gone wrong. There must be a reason why Anna Karenina and War and Peace are beloved by all, but Resurrection has failed to be resurrected from its canonical grave. In this essay I’d like to have a go working it out.
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
To begin with, it’s worth going back and thinking about Dostoevsky and his own fiction. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are world famous, but generally people prefer one or the other. I started out life as a huge fan of Dostoevsky, but now I’m in Tolstoy’s camp. What Dostoevsky does well is often called polyphony, after the name given it by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. By “polyphony” I mean that Dostoevsky creates a great many characters who seem to be existing independently of their author. Their views are no longer Dostoevsky’s own. But more than that, their views are so developed, and so passionately felt, that the characters seem like they cannot be the creation of Dostoevsky at all, but rather real figures, animated by belief. I cannot think of any other writer who has written people who feel so intensely as Dostoevsky’s characters do.
For a young person, these kinds of characters are well-suited to themselves. When you are young you want desperately to believe in something. Almost without exception we were all, in our youth, hopelessly idealistic. Dostoevsky provides, in a way, a buffet of ideas for us to try. But over time we come to realise that these ideas are for the most part incompatible with a good life. Suicides, murders, and despair are the keynotes of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and they are so because they are the consequences of the characters’ ideas. Those few characters who seem to find happiness are religious, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, or Sonya. These characters are not particularly interesting. After all, we say, religion is for idiots.
Tolstoy’s Early and Middle Fiction
Tolstoy’s fiction before his late period is not the battleground of ideas that Dostoevsky’s is. There are characters who believe passionately, such as Levin’s radical brother in Anna Karenina, but they are few and far between. Most characters do not believe in anything, at least not actively. Anna Karenina wouldn’t say she believes in love – she just does. The same would go for Vronsky and his honour, or Dolly and her family. These people are unideological because they are all striving for one thing – a good life. Dostoevsky’s characters don’t really seem to care about happiness, and they are not striving for anything in particular. For them, the act of searching is enough. They just need some kind of outlet for the passionate feeling they have within them. The outlet’s nature, whether murder or kindness, is neither here nor there.
There are people in Tolstoy’s fiction who are after answers, who have that additional store of passion needed to demand a kind of seeking. They are the likes of Pierre and Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Levin in Anna Karenina. But their crises are not the same as those of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Levin’s problem is that he is looking for an authentic and moral life. He wants to know how to live. He looks at the world of the city, where people like Stiva Oblonsky spend their days eating oysters and their nights chasing after women, and he’s disgusted. In the countryside, sitting on a haybale or cutting the wheat, he feels a kind of peace. We may call it a connection with God, but I think that that would be incorrect. What he feels is a oneness with the world, something that is more pantheistic than Christian.
Spiritual Vacuums, past and present
We can always look to Nietzsche as a great prophet of atheism, but he’s not the first by a long shot. From the Enlightenment onwards God and organised religion faced salvo upon salvo from intellectual circles, with nary any intellectually-grounded fire returned. Society was left with an absent centre, a spiritual vacuum. This was filled in many cases with radical politics. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”, the implication being that revolutionary communism was what they really should be smoking. Nationalism also filled the void. At first that nationalism was well-intentioned, a unifying force, as it was in Italy, Germany, Greece. But in the 20th century both Marx’s teachings and nationalism morphed into horrible monsters, leaving millions and millions of dead as a result. Nietzsche, of course, proposed his own solutions to “nihilism”, but they’ve hardly filtered out and aren’t always to everyone’s taste to begin with.
So we are left today with an even greater blank than there existed back then. Nationalism nowadays is reactionary and selfish, while left wing politics can seem so focused upon marginalised groups that any utopian thinking about the greatest marginalised group of all – the working class – appears to have fallen by the wayside. More importantly, it’s not even clear if there are enough workers left to really have a revolution. Marxism has, in some sense, just fizzled out.
Our modern-day preachers, such as Jordan Peterson, attempt to fill the void for their followers. Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism attempts to provide a philosophically-sound answer to the question of what we must do, telling us that we should give away as much as we can and focus on raising the world’s happiness in utilitarian terms. Nationalism and Islamic terrorism, meanwhile, both work by preying upon those who feel dislocated from the world they inhabit. The hatred many people feel for “outsiders” is not driven by the outsiders themselves, but by the need to feel something. And anything is better than nothing. For, there are plenty among us who feel just that – nothing, or else depression and despair. For those people, the conditions of late capitalism have successfully snuffed out their hope. And hope is one of the few things capable of expanding into the space left by the spiritual void.
One Reason Why we Read Tolstoy
To people today, characters like Levin and Pierre – and their novels – are attractive because they record a search for meaning. Not for that passionate, violent meaning that dominates Dostoevsky’s works. Most of us don’t need something to die for; we just want something to live for. We want that peace and calm in our (possibly non-existent) souls. Tolstoy’s fiction, with its emphasis on the simple, rural life, is all about that quiet faith which people once-upon-a-time would have found in religion, but now they cannot get from it for any number of valid reasons. Anna Karenina’s faith is attractive because there’s nothing to believe in except that Levin’s searching is worthwhile. There’s no God at the end of it, whatever Levin seems to think. There’s simply a sense of wholeness. A good, humble life – a virtuous life – has filled the spiritual vacuum he had once had.
And when we read Anna Karenina or War and Peace, we get the sense that we too can see the gap within us filled too, if only we go out and seek the answers, and then live them when we find them.
The Late Tolstoy – The Prophet Defeats the Disciple
After Tolstoy had his conversion, he had all the answers. No longer was he content to describe the path to harmony, he wanted to force that specific harmony upon us. As time went on that harmony became ever more specific, and ever harder to stomach. A simple life became a particularly Russian peasant life. A kind of vague pantheism became a radical form of anarchic Christianity. For some people, this is to their liking. But I have spent enough time in the Russian countryside of the present day to have my own view on what the Russian peasant’s life was probably like, and it’s not exactly positive. Tolstoy’s earlier works are so effective because they see the value of searching; his later works seem only interested in the destination.
Resurrection
Take Resurrection. I am about half-way through, and I have definitely read enough to comment on it. Tolstoy’s story is not very subtle, not because he’s forgotten how to write but because didacticism, convincing us that he’s right, is now the most important thing. Take the very first sentence, in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation:
“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.”
This is great prose, but it is impossible to read this without feeling Tolstoy behind it. The late Tolstoy can no longer see objects without also seeing the way they fit into his moral system and feeling obliged to put them within said system. And this quickly becomes grating.
Resurrection is, from the title onwards, not exactly coy about its moral bent. A young man, Prince Nekhlyudov, finds himself on jury duty, tasked with judging for murder and theft a girl who he had once seduced. It turns out that his careless seduction, one winter’s night, of this servant girl, led to a whole string of events resulting in her presence in the courtroom some years later: she became pregnant, was kicked out, found work again and lost it, and eventually became a prostitute, her job when the murder took place. Nekhlyudov recognises his complicity in her fallen nature and determines to set things right, whatever the cost. Thus begins the process of his spiritual regeneration.
He breaks off his relations with a young lady, moves out of his house, gives away most of his land to his peasants, and is within a hundred pages far further down the path to a new life than Levin or Pierre managed to get in almost a thousand. Tolstoy is in such a rush to show us the wrongs of the world through Nekhlyudov’s refreshed eyes that he completely forgets to make Nekhlyudov truly breathe to begin with. His conversion is all too brief, and it feels cheap. In my head I can easily picture Tolstoy standing behind his hero with a whip, forcing Nekhlyudov to morally contort himself into the shape Tolstoy demands of him rather than letting things take their natural course.
But Nekhlyodov is not our only hero, for we also follow Maslova, the prostitute he wronged. She smokes; she drinks; she’s rude and rough. But when I read about her I can’t help but feel I’m basically just reading a list of things Tolstoy doesn’t approve of, things that Maslova will undoubtedly abandon once she’s been redeemed herself. Compare Maslova with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov never feels like he’s waiting for redemption. There’s no sense of inevitability there. In a religious sense, perhaps, but not in a thematic sense, from the perspective of the story itself. Maslova, however, needs to be redeemed. Tolstoy just can’t leave her alone.
Both Maslova and Nekhlyodov feel like pawns upon the pages of Tolstoy’s novel, and their only purpose seems to be to advance Tolstoy’s views. They don’t seem to have any kind of independence, either of thought or of action. Reading the late Tolstoy doesn’t feel like a journey – it feels like being shackled and dragged along a specific path. We know where the destination is when we set out, whereas with Levin or Pierre we always have the feeling that there are other roads, other options for them to potentially take.
This lack of human freedom in Resurrection, when it’s coupled with Tolstoy’s didacticism, is exhausting. Like Karolina Pavlova in A Double Life, Tolstoy’s anger leaves Resurrection feeling unbalanced. It is too clear who is good and who is bad. Every detail, from Nekhlyudov’s golden cufflinks to Maslova’s drinking, seems to have its purpose as a criticism of the world as it lies before Tolstoy’s eyes. He can’t see anything without judging it, and the judgements are always unfavourable. In spite of Tolstoy’s determination to bring us to the good life, what actually happens is that the experience of reading Resurrection is depressing. And not because it’s a story about prisons.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
A good comparison for Resurrection is another one of Tolstoy’s later works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I reread recently. Ivan was published in 1886, ten years before Resurrection, and it shows. The novella still tries to take us towards a good life, but the methods are more subtle, and the work as a whole is more joyous.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is first and foremost an extremely funny book. Tolstoy absolutely hates Ivan’s stupid boring vapid existence, but he understands that it’s better to dismantle it through laughter than try to annihilate it with a diatribe. Take the moment one of Ivan’s friends beholds his dead body and thinks “the only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross”. Or how the first thought of people, hearing he’s died, is “a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t”. In undermining the solemnity of the occasion Tolstoy has his purpose – he wants to show the citizens as selfish, unvirtuous, and themselves unprepared for death. But he does it in a way that’s a joy to read.
Where Resurrection is blunt, Ivan is full of wonderful ironies and subtleties. Things that stuck out for me included the way Ivan receives his fatal injury while decorating his drawing room – meaning that he literally dies because of the banal existence he’d been living. Another moment was when Ivan is lying there dying, and his daughter’s fiancé comes and talks about an actress with him instead of showing any kind of compassion. The novella is really funny, and yet it is perfectly capable of conveying a serious message too. In fact, the seriousness is heightened by its contrast to the levity. When Ivan tells himself at last that “death has gone”, it’s a magical moment. In Resurrection, which is entirely drab, there’s far less room for any spiritual manoeuvre.
An Evangelical is Rarely Convincing…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent some time volunteering in a prison, so I know a little about what Tolstoy describes in Resurrection from personal experience. I also once volunteered in a community project with people who had Down’s syndrome. Both of these experiences proved life-changing, but there’s a reason I don’t write about them, either fictionally or non-fictionally. That reason is, simply put, that I don’t think there’s much value in talking about them. The greatest lesson I took away from both experiences is that experience is much more important than thought. This is not something I can transfer, really, in writing. I don’t want to be like Tolstoy and tell people what to think. I have my views on rehabilitation, just as I have my views on everything else, but I have no desire to evangelise.
This a good time to think back to Dostoevsky again, who I deliberately brought up at the beginning. What happens in the fiction of late Tolstoy is something akin to what we would see in Dostoevsky’s works if they had only one fully-developed character – Tolstoy himself. Without showing the possibility of passionate alternative views, of the sort that (for example) each of the Karamazov brothers offer in their novel, Tolstoy sucks the ideological air from his late fiction, leaving only his own viewpoint. But in doing so, he sucks more than ideology from his pages – in some real sense he removes the life from his stories altogether.
Tolstoy’s “Good Life” in Practice
And Tolstoy himself, who ultimately lived what Dostoevsky simply had his characters feel, is the best argument against his own late fiction. He did not really find the good life – he just found something that eased his conscience and he tried to force it upon others. He tore his family apart through bickering and pettiness. Aside from stunts like making shoes by hand and walking to far-off monasteries, he could never bring himself to fully abandon his aristocratic position and home. He became an object of ridicule, or else of pity. And though he had his followers, I don’t think he was happy. Not in the way that Levin becomes happy, at least.
Tolstoy Ploughing the Fields. This piece is not an argument against Tolstoy’s agrarian impulses – though they have their issues. Rather, what I mean is that the Late Tolstoy’s anarchic Christianity tore his family apart and did not make anyone happy.
The spirit of searching, of passionate inquiry, that dominates Anna Karenina and War and Peace, is fundamentally unideological. It doesn’t tell us how to think, only to think. But once Tolstoy’s views are calcified in his old age, there’s no longer any point in us readers thinking for thinking’s sake – thinking now only has value inasmuch as it can lead us to Tolstoy’s views. And this demands not a garden of delightful ideas, but a path along an empty alley, at the end of which stand Tolstoy and his beliefs, and nothing besides.
Stories- not Authors – Change Us
I don’t think I can respect any writer who writes without a sincere desire to make the world a better place; but I also don’t think I can truly enjoy a writer who lets that desire overwhelm their stories and whatever else they might be able to say. The fire within them must be for the act of striving after answers, and not for the answers themselves.
Tolstoy’s mistake in his later fiction is that he forgets that although many people come to fiction to learn, they come to learn for themselves, and not to be told what to think. That is why, I think, the best fiction, in the sense of morally best as well as greatest, has always been didactic not in the sense of telling us what to think, but in reminding us of the value of thinking, of trying to find the answers for ourselves. The best fiction does not change us – it helps us to change ourselves. Anna Karenina, like War and Peace, shows what changing looks like. Both do little more than that, and for that we should be thankful.
Conclusion
The question “what must we do” has bothered me almost my entire life. I have looked everywhere for the answer, and though I have found many answers, including in Wendell Berry and Tolstoy, I have never found something that made me think it was worth giving up the search and stopping where I stood. The day we stop seeking is the day we stop growing; it is the day we lose our dynamism and become boring. It is a bitter irony that those searching for goodness and the good life are often better and kinder people than those who’ve stop at a certain idea of goodness and way of living, thinking they’re finished. Life itself is also much more interesting when we keep ourselves searching. Tolstoy himself, perhaps, understood this at the very end. A. N. Wilson ascribes to the dying Tolstoy the following words: “Search, also go on searching”.
Here at least, the late Tolstoy is absolutely right.
Hadji Murat was one of the last works of literature that the aging Leo Tolstoy wrote, but you wouldn’t get that impression reading it. Absent is that preaching tone that marks much of Tolstoy’s work from around the time he finished Anna Karenina until his death. Instead we have a tale that is almost Classical in its grandeur, stakes, and larger-than-life characters. It takes place in the Caucasus in the years 1851-1852, at a point where the Russian subjugation of the native peoples – Chechens, Avars, and many others – was in full swing. The natives, under the Imam Shamil, are waging a brutal guerrilla war against Tsar Nicholas I’s Russian forces. Chief among the guerrilla leaders was one Hadji Murat, but when the story begins, he has decided to switch sides and join his hated Russian enemies. Shamil no longer trusts him and has imprisoned his family. He had little choice.
Hadji Murat, an Avar warlord, was given the nickname the “Red Devil” by the Russians he fought against. But Tolstoy’s novel aims to reveal that in spite of that, he was not so different from his enemies after all.
Against the backdrop of war, it is the personal that stands out. Hadji Murat, like War and Peace before it, shows the messy truth that lies behind maps and military manoeuvres. It shows the suffering, the heroism, and the dignity of ordinary people. Harold Bloom once called it “the best story in the world”. I’m not sure I would go that far, but it’s certainly among the best I’ve ever read.
Translations from the Russian are my own.
Characters over Plot – the Structure of Hadji Murat
One of the first things you notice reading Hadji Murat
is that for a story with its hero in its title, the man himself isn’t the only
prominent person here. Instead, Tolstoy makes sure to give us so many names and
faces, and indeed places, that we’d be forgiven for thinking we’re reading
something as long as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Hadji
Murat is a short book, but one of its unique strengths is that it acts like
a long one. Even though most of the characters are only involved for a few
pages, they are treated as though they could be there for longer. Whether this
is a local officer, a cook, or somebody’s wife, we never know what role they’ll
have to play.
And this makes us pay attention. Tolstoy’s strategy, it
seems to me, has two important effects. The uncertainty surrounding the later
involvement of characters means we have to consider carefully all of them in
turn, instead of skipping hastily over those who other writers might mark (unintentionally)
as having no further role to play. It all reflects an attitude that sees human
dignity as more important than anything else, even concision and consistency. And
that’s nothing to complain about, both because Tolstoy’s characters are drawn so
well, and because the message of respect and human dignity is so important,
especially in our times, when the statistical value of people seems more
important than the idea that behind every number is a living, breathing person
with their own hopes and dreams.
Violence and Death
The second important effect, very much related to the first,
is that Tolstoy’s care for characters makes the underlying anti-war message in Hadji-Murat
all the more powerful. In stories the main characters sometimes die, usually at
the end, and any decent author can make such a death have weight for their
readers. But Tolstoy’s careful portrayal of his minor characters means that
even their deaths leave a mark.
One death that particularly affected me was the death of a simple
soldier, Avdeev. He is introduced as one soldier among a small group, heading
out for a quick smoke beyond the walls of their outpost. He doesn’t take a
major part in their conversation, and we would likely forget him without a
second thought. Tolstoy does not let us. When the soldiers fight a battle with
the natives later on, one of them is wounded. “It was none other than that Avdeev
who had been out smoking earlier”.
The wounded man is suddenly given a history not because
Tolstoy has delved into his dying thoughts, but because he has connected a
dying man with the life he had innocently led earlier, a life we ourselves had scarcely
noticed. Avdeev’s life is banal, but it is life all the same, and that life has
been robbed from him, and Tolstoy, rightly, wants us to be outraged. In dying
he has achieved nothing. No grandeur nor glory surrounds him. He hadn’t even
managed to load his rifle before he was hit. And as his comrades gather round
him, the overwhelming impression is one of the pointlessness of his end, of the
stupidity of it. “What, mate, does it feel bad?” One of them asks him. And then
Avdeev dies.
But still Tolstoy does not leave him alone. The eighth
chapter of Hadji Murat takes us to his home, where his family are hard at
work. Avdeev, the virtuous youth, had volunteered to be conscripted in place of
his brother, who had children of his own to look after, while Avdeev had only
his wife. The family go around doing their simple tasks like threshing oats and
bantering, and it’s painful to watch. They do not know that Avdeev is dead. The
brother he has left behind is no good at the work and the family scold him for
it. And though they all try to forget about Avdeev, to save themselves the
worry, they think of him all the time – he was a good worker and they want to
send him a letter and money.
The whole chapter is pointless. A modern editor, probably,
would cut it. It does not advance the plot an inch. But its pointlessness is
its very strength. The stupidity of the chapter within Hadji Murat reflects
the stupidity of war and death itself, suddenly removing human joy and life. When
at the end of the chapter the family finally hears that Avdeev has died, “protecting
the Tsar, the motherland, and the Orthodox faith”, we feel disgusted. It’s a lie
that provides no consolation for these lives. And it’s easy to understand, at
this point, why his mother wails.
The landscapes of the Caucasus are breathtaking, but for the Russians they also held a dangerous enemy. Photo from Peretz Partensky of San Francisco CC BY-SA
Authority
The message to Avdeev’s family connects the theme of pointless war-time death with its – in Tolstoy’s view – main cause: misguided authority. People are moved around, killed, and suffer, all because of people who are not affected by their decisions. And so they fail to appreciate them. If they did, Tolstoy would no doubt say, then there would be no more war. Hadji Murat, having lost Shamil’s trust and joined the Russians, finds himself trapped between two tyrants. Both Shamil and Nicholas I receive a chapter’s inspection by Tolstoy’s pen, and neither comes out particularly well. Shamil knows he is fighting a losing battle but refuses to surrender or find a compromise that would result in reduced bloodshed. Instead, he allows his men to believe they are winning against the Russians after all. But Shamil’s treatment is nothing next to Nicholas’s.
Hadji Murat is not a funny book, but the chapter
detailing a moment in the life of Nicholas I’s is simultaneously tragic and
hilarious. We find him receiving a report on the “capture” of Hadji Murat by
the Russians. Tolstoy emphasises the contingency of Hadji Murat’s fate here. If
Nicholas hadn’t been in a “bad mood” when he received the report, perhaps history
might have been completely different. Nicholas, however, was. He is a petty
womaniser, chasing after a married woman at a party, refusing to acknowledge
any moral authority except his own, looking at the world through “lifeless eyes”
(Tolstoy repeats the description three or four times in just as many pages). He
is cruel and stupid. When worried, he begins “to think about what always calmed
him: how great he was.” If he had no power, he would be funny, but he does, and
the implications are terrifying.
Culture and Blood
Avdeev’s death is not the only one that is sprung on us. The
first chapter of Hadji Murat details its eponymous hero’s arrival into a
mountain village, where he is offered shelter by a friend. Once again, we are
introduced to characters who we would otherwise forget. But Tolstoy, as the
book draws towards its closing chapters, returns our attention to them. The
Russians, chasing Shamil’s army, torch the village to the ground, kill the animals,
and destroy the land. We see them come back from their shelter in the mountains
to find their world in ruins.
“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they
all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not
hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”
Tolstoy fought in Chechnya as a young man. We have several short stories and the novel The Cossacks to show for it. But in Hadji Murat his attention goes beyond the Russians to their enemies. I cannot say if Tolstoy accurately portrays the Chechens, but I can say without a doubt that he portrays them with respect. By contrast, he has little love for the Russian army, with the pettiness of its commanders and brutality among much of its rank and file. Their tactics, of destroying the native forests and burning all they can, puts Hadji Murat next to Heart of Darkness as being a powerful Western critique of our own imperialism. Unfortunately, even now, I find most Russians expressing opinions about their southernly neighbours (now successfully “pacified” and “integrated”) that show they still haven’t learned the lessons Tolstoy was trying to teach them a hundred years ago.
We may have our differences, but we aren’t so different.
An Epic Figure – who was Hadji Murat?
No review of Hadji Murat could be complete without the man himself. But like Nostromo in Conrad’s novel of the same name, the figure of Hadji Murat is hard to pin down. While in Conrad’s work we rarely get a glimpse within Nostromo’s mind, Tolstoy freely tells us what Hadji Murat is thinking. But all the same, there is a tension in the story between rumour and official reports, and what Hadji Murat is actually like as a person. Legendary warlord Hadji Murat, we discover early on, is a human being. His main motivation in life is not some epic hatred of the Russians but simply protecting his own family – a universal concern.
The Russians he meets cannot believe that. They are always
trying to work out how he’s planning to betray them. The Russians have a kind of
mythic view of Hadji Murat that scarcely corresponds to reality. He’s never
been scared, so one rumour goes. But when, in Tbilisi (then Tiflis), he
recounts his life’s story to a Russian scribe, we find he has been scared like
any other person, if only once. He has one leg short than the other – he’s no
monstrous figure. But the Russians almost don’t want to see him like that. When
they meet him they aren’t concerned with his personality. At public events in
Tbilisi they only ask him one and the same question – “how do you find it here?”.
It’s as if they only want to go home and say they’ve met the legendary warlord,
rather than actually get to know him.
An illustration from an early edition of Hadji Murat. The man himself is on the right. Speaking little Russian and unwilling to conform to the arbitrary rules and customs of Russian high society, his first appearance draws plenty of attention.
And what is he really like? A heroic figure, yes, but not
only. He scarcely fights during the book. Instead, he’s full of life, with a “child-like”
smile – exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t need to die. When he is given
a Breguet pocket watch with a minute repeater function he spends hours
listening to its chimes. He is also devout, constantly making time to pray and perform
his ablutions. In short, he is a good man. If he is once described as like a caged
beast, it is not because he’s an animal in Tolstoy’s eyes but rather because he
is a victim of the Russian bureaucratic machine, which gradually dehumanises everyone.
For Tolstoy the answer to the question “who is to blame” is obvious: the leaders,
surrounded by sycophants and insulated from the pain their actions cause. Alas,
not much has changed.
Conclusion
I had read Hadji Murat once before now, but then I barely understood a thing. My Russian wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t willing to read slowly enough to compensate for it. This time I was better prepared. Tolstoy’s story demands slow and careful reading, though it is short, because otherwise we run the risk of denying the characters their own dignity. And there are so many exciting people here that I was spoiled for choice when it came to writing this review. Alongside Avdeev and Nicholas I, another one I was particularly struck by was the character of Butler, a young man who loses everything (and then some) at cards after striking up a friendship with Hadji Murat. Even though his role in the overall book is not great, his short story is so perfectly written that I would gladly have read an entire book that carried on his tale.
That, perhaps, is Tolstoy’s ultimate gift. He not only creates characters who are so real that the best of them live inside us, but he also creates characters who are so interesting that they make us realise that everyone around us has their own personal dignity, and everyone deserves attention and respect. Whether man or woman, Chechen or Russian, everyone has their own story, and the world would be better if only we stopped to listen.
