Leo Tolstoy Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Mostly About Stories

An Autobiography of the Spirit – Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco

Report to Greco was pretty much the last thing the great Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, and though it is complete in and of itself, it was only really a first draft. It is an autobiography, but not of the sort that most of us are used to. In spite of a fascinating life full of adventure and travels, in Report to Greco the focus is very much on the internal adventures of the mind. Kazantzakis explores the spiritual discoveries, challenges, and epiphanies that made him who he was as a person and, equally importantly, as a writer. It is a beautifully written book, challenging and rewarding in equal measure, and easy to recommend to one tormented by those accursed questions: what must we believe, and what must we do?

I loved it. For the truth is, except for the pressures of reading lists and friends’ recommendations, I read for the same reasons I live – to find a justification for my life, and a way of looking at the world that redeems it and all its suffering. In this journey many writers have helped me – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Whitman, and Rilke come to mind – but no author of fiction, in a single book, has been so determined to find answers as Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco.

“My life’s greatest benefactors have been journeys and dreams. Very few people, living or dead, have aided my struggle.”

At times the dominant force is Nietzsche, at times Homer or Bergson or Buddha or Lenin. To go through Report to Greco trying to plot the exact nature of Kazantzakis’ growth is a fool’s errand. He contradicts himself, forgets himself, and repeats himself. As we ourselves do, in our own development through life. To read this book is to be bourn along a river whose current and banks are ever-changing. The journey is more important than the specifics precisely because it is Kazantzakis’ attitude that is most memorable here. In Report to Greco he demonstrates how life can truly be lived according to the injunction memorably stated by the dying Tolstoy “Search, always keep on searching”.

A photograph of Kazantzakis's gravestone — Kazantzakis’s grave in Crete. Photo by Frente (CC BY-SA 3.0)

It is not enough to know that Kazantzakis had engraved on his gravestone: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”. It is not even enough to know his intellectual forebears. It is necessary to know the attitude that could guide a man’s life such that at the end of his days he truly could believe in those words and rest. That story of a life is Report to Greco’s gift to us.

The Structure and Messages

Report to Greco is not really an autobiography, and trying to read it as one is a little foolish. Comparing it even to Kazantzakis’s Wikipedia page is going to lead to a lot of confusion. In spite of the book’s length and variety, it seems that there remained a huge amount of Kazantzakis that he nonetheless conceals, or else thinks is not worth writing about – “rinds they were. You tossed them into the garbage of the abyss and I did the same”. The book’s introduction by Kazantzakis’s widow, Helen, explains that as Kazantzakis lay dying he was nonetheless remembering still more events, still more travels, which would have made it into a second draft. These passed away with him. But so much is here that we have little to complain about.

Report to Greco begins in Kazantzakis’ home in Crete. It talks of his quiet mother and warlike father, and of ancestors on both sides. The teachers who influenced him, the schoolfellows who first accompanied him, and later disappointed him, are all described lavishly. I have not been to Crete or even Greece, but after Report to Greco and Zorba the Greek I feel like I need to go soon. Still, Kazantzakis doesn’t stay long in his homeland. Soon he begins the travels that make up the majority of the book. To Italy, to France, to Germany, Austria, Russia, the Caucasus, Jerusalem… the list is almost endless. And certainly, if Kazantzakis had lived longer, no doubt it would have been. His companions are monks and priests and poets and thinkers. Their conversations range widely, but always reflect Kazantzakis’s occupation with the big questions. What must we do, and what must we believe?

From everyone he gets a different answer. From the monks on Mt Athos he gets one, from the monks on Mt Sinai another. The revolutionaries of Russia give him faith in humankind – at other moments it disappears. At times God exists, at times a void. And when we reach the end of the book I’m not sure we’re all the wiser as to what Kazantzakis actually believes, except for in those big ideas that would seem cheap without the whole of Report to Greco to serve as their explanation and justification.

Of freedom he writes:

“love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul’s enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosanct of the old moulds when they are unable to contain you any longer”

And then of his own life there is this cryptic message:

“I was becoming a sea, an endless voyage full of distant adventures, a proud despairing poem sailing with black and red sails over the abyss.”

God is not important, because “the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise.” But God, perhaps, lurks at the end. The achievement of Report to Greco is to make God irrelevant by showing how much of His creation can be enjoyed and savoured by us while we are still among the living. Affirmation requires a creator, but it doesn’t require a Beyond at all.

Travel and the Language of Affirmation

Report to Greco is a journey of the body as well as of the spirit. In some way, the journey of the latter needs the journey of the former. Through different people, and through different books, Kazantzakis comes to flourish. But as I reader I loved the places too, and though this is not a travel book, Report to Greco still has a lot to say about the locations Kazantzakis passed through during his life. We get the sense that places were inhabited by their ideas and beliefs just as much as they were by people. As he heads towards Mt Sinai Kazantzakis writes of the place: “This arid, treeless, inhuman ravine we were traversing had been Jehovah’s fearsome sheath. Through here He had passed, bellowing.” I too have had the experience, in the Himalayas and the desolate Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, of feeling a spirit passing in the wind.

Kazantzakis’ language also contributes to the feeling in Report to Greco of being closer to these big questions. His prose is always straightforward, and his images are influenced by his upbringing on Crete and his love of the Classics. These images reflect the rawness of his passion in searching for answers, and drag us after him. Our own images are often cliched and soulless and keep listeners and readers from truly feeling the truth of our own feelings, our own spiritual upheavals.

Meanwhile, who can read something like this without feeling its power, even if you do not believe it? – “Away, away! To the wilderness! There God blows like a scorching wind; I shall undress and have Him burn me.” Or his words on a statue: “Just as a hawk when it hesitates at the zenith of its flight, its wings beat and yet to us it appears immobile, so in the same way the ancient statue moves imperceptibly and lives”. I myself can scarcely differentiate a hawk from any other such bird, or the trees in the forest. I lack that knowledge, that experience.

On his own style Kazantzakis writes “In vain I toiled to find a simple idiom without a patchwork of adornments, the idiom which would not overload my emotion with riches and deform it.” Kazantzakis’s regular use of such natural images is part, I think, of the whole thread of affirmation in Report to Greco. He lives in this world more closely than I do, and by using the world in his images he shows the value he finds in it. The riches are in the world, not in the virtuosity of the language he uses to describe it. As a result, the language is breath-taking because it’s the product both of love and of experience. Few modern writers have both, at least where nature is concerned.

A Few Complaints

There are problems here, and things that are out of date. The contradictions and repetitions in Kazantzakis’s spiritual development would probably be cut by a harsher editor, even though they likely reflect what he actually experienced. The fact is, a repeated epiphany loses much of its value to a reader. Still, I like the way that the current structure demonstrates just how we can reach the same conclusions from many different circumstances. In some way that reinforces what I feel to be one of the book’s underlying messages: it is the attitude we take to things rather than the specific experiences we have that count for becoming who we are.

Less easily looked past are the instances of old-school sexism, which is really just a little boring. (“Women are simply ornaments for men, and more often a sickness than a necessity”) This is a man’s spiritual journey, and it often feels like women are excluded from the peak Kazantzakis is climbing towards. All the same, the sexism here isn’t as bad as it is in Zorba. Much worse, however, is the tacit defence of Stalin. Report to Greco was written in the years immediately after Stalin’s death so there’s really no reason for Kazantzakis to be so silent on Stalin’s atrocities – in the Soviet Union Khrushchev hadn’t exactly kept quiet himself. I also cannot believe that Kazantzakis wasn’t aware of them either, since he travelled so widely in the Soviet Union. All he has to say, however, is these words, given to his female companion at the time.

“Lenin is the light, Trotsky the flame, but Stalin is the soil, the heavy Russian soil. He received the seed, a grain of wheat. Now, no matter what happens, no matter how much it rains or snows, no matter how much it fails to rain or snow, he will hold that seed, will not abandon it, until finally he turns it into an ear of wheat.”

Well, this, and a little story about Stalin’s bravery while he was a revolutionary in Tbilisi. Isn’t that great? The irony, probably not deliberate, is that Stalin might have had a much easier time growing his seed if he didn’t actively cause huge famines in modern-day Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Genocide doesn’t grow fruits, and I’m disappointed Kazantzakis leaves any dark from his portrayal of Stalin. It would be better not to mention him at all if this bad taste in the mouth is all we’re offered. Kazantzakis’ love of the Revolution’s ideals is perfectly understandable – the chapter taking place in Russia has a particularly memorable moment where Kazantzakis witnesses a large parade and feels a great unity with his fellows. But it’s a real shame he didn’t think Stalin could be separated from his revolutionary origins.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to read Report to Greco, but enjoying it demands an open mind. The book rewards those who are willing to let themselves be bourn across time and space through Kazantzakis’s life. If we ourselves are not searching for answers, Kazantzakis’s desire to find them will no doubt seem somewhat foolish. But if we are, then even if we don’t agree with his conclusions – and why should we? – we will appreciate the spirit that drove him to reach them. Kazantzakis’s attitude towards life is what inspires me most of all. The German-language poet Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet that we must “live the questions for now”; Kazantzakis shows what such a life can look like. This is the great gift of Report to Greco. The task now, for all of us searchers, is to go out filled with the same faith that animated him and find our own.

And then perhaps, we may come to have upon our headstones the same words that lie on his. “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”.

Have you read Report for Greco? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments below.

For more Kazantzakis, look at Zorba the Greek here. For more affirmation of human existence, look at Platonov, Shalamov, and Rasputin. If you want more old school beauty and simple living, look at Satta’s Day of Judgement.

Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning

Today my father was cremated. Though he had lived an enviable life he was just fifty-nine – not an age at which many would be satisfied to face death. For my brother and me, at sixteen and twenty-one, it feels far too soon to lose him, and more than a little unfair. But so sudden was the cancer that we all had little say in the matter. Death affects us all in different ways, and those of us touched by it must find our own solutions for coping, whether they be fighting bravely against the current, or following it into a numbing despair that seems, all things considered, reasonable enough. I want here to set down a few thoughts about books, and their value, in times of difficulty. Exhaustion has left my mind not entirely clear, so I apologise for mistakes and incoherency. This is, I’m afraid, a personal piece.

Medicine

I am the only one in my family who reads fiction. My father was a great lover of non-fiction and read widely, according to his whimsy, in the way that only one who is naturally intelligent but has never been confined in a university can. When news of his several brain tumours came, just over two months ago, in spite of his inability to read properly he did what he could to try and understand the disease that was killing him, and see if he might not discover a solution that the doctors had passed over or did not know. I myself placed my faith in them, because I know many medics at Cambridge, and they have always struck me as the greatest, hardest working, and best of all the students there. If anybody could save him, it seemed to me that a doctor would be the one.

A picture of Tolstoy — Leo Tolstoy may have ended up with some odd views about God and religion, but at his best his fiction can instil a sense of wonder that lets us weather the storm the death brings into our lives

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy on several occasions displays a sort of scorn towards medicine. Doctors come to try to rescue Kitty from her despair, proscribing contradictory remedies that never work and looking like fools in the process. Of course, Tolstoy has a point that is still relevant today, when it has been proven how much our mental health can affect our physical health. Often the best remedies can be ones of the heart and head, and not things we ingest. Tolstoy’s mistake, at least as I see it, is that he thinks all diseases work this way and doctors have no purpose. But he was as opinionated as they come, and I can understand why he thought that way – at least in the late 19^th century medicine still had something alchemical to it. Now we are much luckier. My father’s problems were in his head, yes, but not his mind.

Wonder

I thought of Tolstoy a lot as my father rapidly declined. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Hadji Murat, and Anna Karenina in particular were sources of comfort. They made death real, but Tolstoy, the spiritual man, also made death valuable and sacred by imbuing it with a sense of wonder and mystery. He makes us see its horror, yes, but he also shows that through it there may also come a kind of salvation. There was a sense of wonder in seeing my father’s casket, and a sense of wonder in hearing our bagpiper piping us all in. In moments of such wonder you can feel that death is but a stepping-stone to something that lies beyond.

Tolstoy, like the best of our writers and artists, instils this sense of wonder. They make us see that death is not an end, but a new beginning. By making us aware of the mystical, the spiritual component that accompanies a passing on, they give us the consolation that mere thoughts and intellectual rigor cannot. Schopenhauer’s idea of death as returning to sleep is nice, but not nearly so nice as what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other writers of spiritual conviction can achieve at their best. The Bible, and the other mystical books of our world’s religions, are full of tales that inspire wonder. They give us food for belief in magic, the sort of magic that makes the world glisten and shine with meaning. I’m thinking of Ivan Karamazov’s sticky buds here. And when we feel wonder, nothing, not even death, can hurt us or our love for the world.

Dreams and Levin’s Brother

For what consolation can rationalism offer here? The man under the shroud is still dead and cold. Death can lose its sting through thinking about the absence of our perceptions in the tomb, but loss of life will never cease to be painful to contemplate unless we see the mystical opportunities that surround it. My father came to me in a dream. He was in the Saint Petersburg Metro, healthy and well again, and heading onwards. He did not speak, but we embraced. The dream came during his final night alive – he died the next afternoon. Of course, it could have been just luck that made him appear at that time. But I see no reason to favour seeing it as mere chance instead of a holy and hopeful sign.

I cannot explain my dream, except as a revelation of the magic and mystery of our human souls. I remember clearly the death of Levin’s brother in Anna Karenina – his death was not one, but twofold. He said his final words and departed in dignity as a soul – “Don’t leave me”. And then he struggled on for another day, and when the characters gathered round his deathbed mention he has finished his struggling he suddenly comes back to life to say: “Not yet… just a little longer”. And then he dies as a body as well.

Conclusion: Narratives against Death

I have an advantage as a reader and as a writer. I live in stories, and I build them. Death, as Walter Benjamin remarks, destroys the placidity of our bourgeois existence – it is the one thing that breaks through even the strongest of our illusions and delusions about our lives. It creates a rupture and destroys the meaning of our world. In the initial weeks of my father’s illness I was almost glad to have, for the first time, a real reason to be depressed. It felt right for once to be in mental anguish. But of all my family I have been the one to cope with the fewest tears and the least pain, and I can’t help but think that reading has something to do with that.

Against the rupture of death, I was able to create a narrative, to come to an understanding with what has happened. I had read about death many times, and when the grief came, I saw how it reflected countless moods I’d seen in books. It gave me the community of fellow-sufferers and their strengths, and their own attempts to move on. And it made me feel less alone. By understanding that stories are the way we give meaning to our lives, I was able to reconfigure the meaning of my own to take into account my father’s death. Perhaps I am deluding myself in talking of wonder, in seeing signs in dreams and the dewy grass. But it is the power of books that they give you the choice to do so. They give you the tools to choose your fate. And that is a magical thing, whatever you believe.

Have you found literature to be a consolation in times of great suffering? Or have all our great scribblings become petty and unreal for you under the harsh light of death? Do leave a comment and let me know what you think

The Largely-Forgotten Tragedy of Fontane’s Effi Briest

Introduction – Germany’s contribution to the European realist novel

There are no two ways about it – Effi Briest is a sad and depressing book, and a deeply tragic one too. It tells the story of the marriage of a young girl to a much older man, and that marriage’s inevitable break down. I heard about it, as I imagine a few others may have done, because Samuel Beckett really liked it, and though I don’t like Beckett’s writing much his praise was enough to put Fontane’s novel on my radar. Beckett said of it: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”, and while I can’t imagine reading it four times I do think I’ll come back to it one day, and maybe even be moved once more. It is, all in all, an excellent book.

A painting of Theodor Fontane, author of Effi Briest — Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is the most well-known representative of German bourgeois realism. He turned to novel writing late in his life, using works like *Effi Briest* and *Frau Jenny Treibel* with their female leads to criticise the social structure and ideals of the newly unified German Reich.

But that’s where its problems begin. Effi Briest is a good book: it is meticulously well put together, pleasantly short for a 19th century realist novel, and has interesting characters whose fates are easy enough to be interested in. But it was published 1895, a few scant years after Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a book which it has a lot in common with, and a book which is Great where Effi Briest is only good. I know the Germanists have tried to make Effi stand among Anna and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as one of the best realist novels of the 19th Century, but I can’t help but feel the comparison just leaves Effi looking silly, a little girl next to these older and more experienced women.

The Daughter of the Air – Effi Briest at home

“Poor Effi”, as the narrator on rare occasions breaks their neutral facade to call her, is seventeen at the story’s beginning, though there’s very little indicate that. The girl is introduced more as a cheeky child than as an almost-adult, with she and her mother doing some handiwork together. Effi soon leaves to be with her friends, though, where they make a mess eating berries and sitting on the swing at Effi’s house. The swing is one of the recurrent leitmotifs of the story, one of those objects connecting Effi and a certain vision of her world. She is given the epithet “Daughter of the air” at one point, and it well describes the carefree attitude that she has at the novel’s outset.

But there are storm clouds ahead, even if Effi can’t see them. While they eat their berries she tells her friends about the guest to the family’s house, Baron Geert von Innstettin, who once was madly in love with Effi’s mother but was unable to marry her due to lack of funds, and who perhaps – we assume – still has some passion left over. He proposes to Effi as soon as she has finished with her friends, in spite of only having had a glimpse of her up till then, and with no small amount of pressure from her parents Effi agrees to let herself be married off.

Very little of this is described, which I suppose is one of my main gripes with Fontane. The wedding is not described, the first real meeting between Effi and Innstetten isn’t described, and the honeymoon trip to Italy is equally sparsely illustrated. You might say that this is impressive stylistic economy – Fontane knows what he doesn’t need to show. Furthermore, it surely adds a sense of mystery to the novel, making us ask ourselves what might have happened and look for clues in the rest of the narrative. Up to a point I’d agree with both of these views. But only up to a point. For I suspect that Fontane’s economy is due to a lack of funds too – I can’t help but feel he just doesn’t have the talent or confidence to attempt certain scenes, such as going inside Effi’s head while she’s giving birth.

Kessin and its ghouls

After some shopping in Berlin, Effi is whisked away to the fictional town of Kessin, out on the Baltic Sea, where Innstettin has his home. It is a quiet, isolated town with an oppressive atmosphere that leaves Effi longing for her own home. One of the best scenes in this section of the novel is one where Effi sees the train heading West and cries – it is excellent precisely because the connection between home and trains is one we have to make for ourselves. Throughout the novel trains are constantly mentioned – they always point to another life that seems to be running away from us.

A picture of the Baltic Sea — The Baltic Sea. In *Effi Briest* the town of Kessin becomes a hugely oppressive place for young Effi, who finds its populace close-minded and hostile, and the sea equally cold.

Even with Innstettin, who Effi does love, or thinks she does, there is difficulty. He goes away regularly for work, leaving her all alone. The townsfolk, bar one, are no company, and the house may have a ghost in the attic who prevents Effi from sleeping well. Another brilliant moment that reveals just how isolated Effi is is when she confesses to the maid about how she didn’t sleep well the first time the ghost appears. This information, given privately, is then immediately passed on to Innstettin by his servant – it shows where the real power in the house lies, and how Effi is completely without anyone to trust.

“An Affair” of sorts

Eventually an old friend of Innstettin’s comes to town to occupy one of the various beaurocratic posts created by the new German Reich. He is, like Effi’s husband, in his forties, but Major Crampas is also a far more youthful man than Innstettin is. Innstettin is a man who is absolutely blinded by various conceptions of duty, order, and what is proper – his career is everything to him, and even though he cares for Effi it’s hard to see much passion in his interaction with her.

Meanwhile, Crampas knows poetry, and dazzles Effi by introducing her to Heine’s works. Even though he has a wife, that doesn’t stop him from seducing her. The consummation of their affair takes place in a carriage, deep in the woods late one night on the way back from a dinner – a thoroughly Romantic location. It lies at the centre of the novel in terms both of structure, and in terms of pages.

But after it, there’s almost no hint that the affair took place. Effi meets him a few more times, and we forget about him. It may be that I didn’t understand the nuances of the German I read the novel in, but that really did seem to be all there was to it. There aren’t any more chapters devoted to him. He just fades out. Effi, for her part, doesn’t really seem to be all that into the affair. Like a leaf floating the air, she just seems content to be blown around by his passions.

Growing up and its Consequences

With the prospect of an imminent promotion Innstettin decides, much to Effi’s relief, to move to Berlin with her. She goes ahead to choose a flat, but deciding she doesn’t want to see Crampas again, she feigns illness until Innstettin himself comes out, a few weeks later, having finished up at home in Kessin. Her illness is a key incident because it shows how Effi has gone from being a carefree dreamer to having something akin to a cunning nature of her own. From being a child who it is easy to like, I found myself turning a little bit against her.

But time passes, and everybody gets on with life. Effi’s daughter, Annie, grows up a little, and Effi herself reaches about twenty-five years old before anything else happens. It is then, quite by chance, that Innstettin discovers Crampas’s old love letters to Effi. Even though the whole thing lies deep in the past he decides that his honour still demands he duel with Crampas, so he arrives in Kessin and kills him in single combat in another sparsely described scene – “The shots came; Crampas fell”. Crampas tries to say something, but dies before he can have any last words. Innstettin goes home, having already sent Effi away, and gets on with his life. Fontane’s realist style does well to take any kind of magic away from the conflict.

The Ending of the Story

Effi can’t go home – her parents forbid it – but she does get a little money from them and rents a small flat, also in Berlin. She has few visitors, except for one of Innstettin’s servants whom she had been responsible for hiring, and who now decides to carry on serving her. Only twice does she see her own child, but the second time, in a meeting organised with Innstettin’s blessing, Annie is completely monotonous and shows no signs of affection towards her mother. Effi sends her away after only a few minutes, and cries. But her inner turmoil is avoided by Fontane – another moment where he seems to have lacked the confidence to go inside her head.

Eventually though, Effi gets to go home after her parents take pity on her. She has some happy moments, then dies of a chill. It is a frustrating ending because there really is no reason for her to die. Both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary had relatively good reasons to justify their tragic fates. But with Effi, I can’t help but feel like Fontane was just shrugging his shoulders and saying “well, I have to finish the novel somehow”. I also am not sure I am a fan of the implications of the end, which seem to suggest that death is inevitable for adulterers. It’s strange to me because Fontane is generally a champion of progressive social changes in the novel. It’s like he can’t bring himself to have an ending that fully goes against convention.

A photo of a girl on a swing. — A little girl on a swing. If only Effi had chosen to stay on her swing instead of marrying at such a young age her life would not have ended in misery and tragedy. But as with both *Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary* social pressures proved greater than Effi’s own resistance. We can only hope that in our own day the situation is no longer so.

The one thing I did like about the ending, though, was the glimpse we get of Innstettin. He now has served a short stint in prison for the duel and is back at work, having also had the promotion he wanted. But all his love for his job has vanished. He is tormented by the feeling that all of his career ambition is actually meaningless, that the duel was a mistake too. I didn’t want to see him have a gruesome comeuppance, but I was glad to see him face the consequences of his own actions. In much the same way Effi’s parents express the beginnings of doubts concerning the whole marriage, once she is back at home and dying. Even though Fontane isn’t willing to keep Effi alive, I suppose he does make the most of her death.

Conclusion

I suppose I can recommend Effi Briest, but only with reservations. If you are going to dip into Fontane, it seems to be an excellent place to start – but given how few of his works are translated, there’s not much choice to begin with. He called Effi his “first real success”, and it is a success. But as much as we often like to read good books, variety also seems to be pretty important in considering what to give our time to. And unfortunately there is another novel which involves trains, adultery, parents and children, and the battle of the individual against social pressures – another novel which is, I think, far better than Effi Briest. That’s the unavoidable problem here. If it weren’t for the book being useful for my German exams next year, I’d be feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t just read Anna Karenina another time through.

Am I completely wrong here? Have you read Effi Briest and did you enjoy it? Comment below!

Picture of the Baltic Sea by Mantas Volungevicius [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] is used without changes.