Tag: Russian Literature

Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin

Alexander Pushkin is held by his countrymen to be their greatest writer, something which always strikes Westerners as unusual. The main problem is that Pushkin was primarily a poet, and poets, particularly Russian ones, are exceedingly difficult to translate and still harder to translate well. Yet Pushkin did write prose. His novel The Captain’s Daughter, and his short story “The Queen of Spades”, are among his best-known prose works. Another is the cycle of short stories, The Tales of Belkin, which I finished recently. While I can’t deny Pushkin’s verve for verse, his prose is rather more – if you’ll forgive the pun – prosaic.

What is particularly interesting about these five stories is more how we see in them the seeds out of which grew the magnificent prose that for so many exemplifies Russian literature. A saying often attributed to Dostoevsky is that Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””. But Gogol’s story in turn came out of these tales.

For all their significance as trailblazers, though, that’s not to say that these five stories can’t stand on their own.

The Editor’s Introduction

The Tales of Belkin, as its title indicates, purport not to be Pushkin’s own work at all, but rather that of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The stories are introduced to us by Pushkin himself, acting as an editor (he did run a magazine for some time). This brief introduction, though, has much to say. Most of it is given over to a letter from one of Belkin’s friends, in which he describes the late author. Belkin was a young man, “humble and honest”, who let his estate in the country go to seed and died something of a recluse with many unfinished manuscripts lying around.

The letter-writer and editor note that the tales were all reportedly told to Belkin by someone else, and these names are given in a footnote by Pushkin. This, alongside the description of Belkin himself “average height, grey eyes, reddish hair, straight nose”, and the inclusion of a real date to the letter “Nov 16, 1830”, has the effect of giving The Tales of Belkin an extra dash of realism. We feel their author is a real person because he is treated like one. Many of the stories themselves feature a narrator as a character, who is then told the main story by someone else. This is quite a democratic approach, because many of these extra storytellers are from the lower ranks of society and it gives them a voice. It anticipates Turgenev’s Collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, where the approach is used to great effect.

“The Shot”

“The Shot”, the first of The Tales of Belkin, contains one of the classic examples of a duel in Russian literature, slotting in neatly next to Evgenii Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and that squib in Fathers and Sons. Our narrator, an officer, is beguiled by Silvio, a Russian with a distinctly non-Slavic name. Silvio is an excellent shot, and though he is not an officer but simply a nobleman living nearby, he spends much of his time with the officers. They, for their part, enjoy such traditional pleasures as carousing and shooting each other in duels. One evening Silvio suffers an embarrassment at the hands of another officer, for which he should have called him to a duel, but Silvio declines at great cost to his honour. Our narrator is confused by this, thinking that Silvio is possibly a coward. But then Silvio tells him his own story.

It turns out that Silvio cannot fight in a duel because he needs to get revenge on another man, and this requires Silvio to take care of his own life. The incident in question happened when Silvio was in the army. A newcomer turned out to be equal to Silvio in popularity and talent, and Silvio felt threatened, eventually finding an excuse to duel him. Alas, he was fighting a Russian of the new generation: “His indifference made me lose my temper. What was the point, I thought, of taking his life when he didn’t seem to give a damn what I did?” Silvio let the man live, but he was determined to get his revenge. He waits until he hears the man has married, then he goes to his country estate with the intention of finally shooting, this time against an opponent who has a reason to fear death.

It works. He does not hit his opponent, for his goal was simply to regain his lost honour. His rival survives, but shaken and embarrassed in front of his new wife. One thing that’s particularly interesting about “The Shot” is the way that it plays with our notions of truth. Not only is the narrator himself a character, but he hears the story in two halves. The first comes from Silvio, while the second part, detailing Silvio’s ultimate revenge, comes from the rival himself. The overall effect is to make us wary of trusting anyone by drawing our attention to the biases out of which our understanding of truth is necessarily built. With that said, I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the story itself, however much its ideas of honour and its narrative complexity are important for the later tradition, particularly with Lermontov, for instance.

“The Blizzard”

“The Blizzard” is another of The Tales of Belkin which seems particularly interested in narrative itself. Our heroine, Maria, has been “brought up on French novels” and has a rather overdeveloped imagination as a result. She and her lover, a poor soldier, are forbidden to meet by their parents, but together they hatch a plan to elope, relying on their parents to accept them once they are legally married. Alas, it does not work out. The night they are supposed to marry there is a terrible blizzard, and Vladimir, her husband-to-be, gets lost on the way to the church. Maria, meanwhile, reads in everything an ill omen as she heads there herself. Pushkin constantly switches perspective between the two lovers, before finally shifting forward to the next morning at Maria’s house, where she seems to wake up as if nothing had happened.

But it is not so. Maria falls ill from her failure to marry Vladimir, and her parents meanwhile forbid him to set one foot within their house ever again. Vladimir, dejected, returns to the army and fights against the French, who at this point are advancing on Russian territory (we are in 1812). We lose track of him, and then hear that he has died. But Maria, with a Romantic constancy, refuses to marry anyone else, and holds onto everything of Vladimir’s that she can lay her hands on. However, one day she meets Burmin, a Hussar, and they get on swimmingly. Yet for some reason, though time passes, he does not propose to her. At last, she pressures him into explaining himself, and he says that he’s already married. Now, finally, Burmin gives us the missing piece, explaining what actually happened in the church on the night Maria was awaiting Vladimir.

It is ridiculous. But the story is more interesting than it seems. On one level, it’s a magical “everything turns out okay” kind of ending. But it’s complicated by Pushkin’s shifting of perspectives, consciously manipulating the reader’s knowledge and setting limitations on it. Most importantly, it’s complicated by the way that Burmin himself does not recognise the woman he somehow married. While I don’t doubt she would have been wearing a veil at the time, it is still rather ominous. At least it seems so to me.

“The Undertaker”

“The Undertaker” is a rather unusual story, the most fantastical of the stories of The Tales of Belkin. Our hero is a grumpy old undertaker who has recently moved into a new house. Unlike, as Pushkin notes, the undertakers of Shakespeare or Walter Scott, his own is humourless. But that’s not to say the text is without humour, because Pushkin’s undertaker’s pleasure at hearing about other people dying, and his disappointment when they don’t, is all part of the comedy. One day the undertaker is invited by a German shoemaker to a birthday dinner, and there the old man drinks far too much. Made uneasy by a comment one of the Germans had made – that we should toast our clients and invite them to a party – he suggests he will indeed invite the dead back and goes home.

To his horror the dead do turn up. They seem in a good-enough mood, but unsurprisingly the undertaker is rather shocked by their presence. He ends up pushing a skeleton out of anger, and at this point the dead turn against him. At this point he faints, or rather “loses the presence of his soul”, and wakes up. The experience of death lends itself to a psychological reading quite easily. The undertaker has repressed his ambivalent feelings towards his clients – people whose deaths make him glad, though they should not – and these feelings burst out in a bad and drunken dream. The effect of this is immediate. We have a sense that the undertaker has awoken a changed man – his final words are to call in his daughters for tea, perhaps thereupon to make amends for treating them badly until then. We can only guess, for the story ends there.

This little story – it’s the shortest of all the Tales of Belkin – is still packed with things to think about. At its heart is that simple but rather unanswerable question which has always plagued Russian writers – how should we live? It takes a bad dream to jolt the undertaker out of his bad existence. Perhaps for Pushkin’s readers, it may take only this story.

“The Station Master”

Of all The Tales of Belkin perhaps my favourite was “The Station Master”. It tells the story of a station master, a man who was in charge of a station on a road where tired horses could be exchanged for fresh and food and rest sought, a little like an inn. The story is focused on questions of sympathy. It begins humorously, with an epigraph from Prince Vyazemskii (a poet) about how these station masters are little dictators within their realms, before Pushkin himself lists the difficulties and frustrations of using their services, including the pointless complaint we write optimistically in their feedback booklets. (How little, I thought, has changed!). But then Pushkin suddenly stops us to say: “if we really get into their position properly, then instead of frustration our hearts will be filled with an honest sympathy for them”.  

We are introduced to a particular station master, whose daughter, Dunya, is his helper. He is extremely proud of her – touchingly so – and guards her fiercely. The daughter’s attractiveness is irresistible to the narrator, and he kisses her before he leaves. A few years later he comes by the same road and expects to see her again. Instead, he finds a changed place, an inn “without flowers in the windows, where all around there was a feeling of carelessness and decay”. The station master himself is still there, but his daughter has vanished, and without her he has fallen into ruin. He tells the narrator how she disappeared – kidnapped and married by an officer passing through – and how his own attempts to get her back from her new home failed.

Dunya, alas, was happy there, though we have a feeling that her position is unstable, as it always was for the many girls who left the provinces for the city during those days, and were reliant upon the goodwill of whoever had seduced them, for class differences meant that a marriage was unlikely. In the inn, the narrator draws our attention twice to a cycle of paintings showing the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, and once the station master refers to Dunya in similar terms.

Yet one of the ways that Pushkin plays with his readers is to frustrate their expectations. The narrator leaves the station for the second time, and the next time he passes through the area he finds the man already long dead. He manages to locate his grave and there is told by a local about a noblewoman who once visited it, coming on a wonderfully rich carriage and with children in tow. It is no doubt Dunya herself. Though we are disappointed that no reconciliation between father and daughter took place, still Pushkin surprises us by showing that her own story at least has a happy ending.

In focusing so much on questions of sympathy and rank, “The Station Master” is an obvious inspiration for Gogol’s short stories, particularly “The Overcoat”. But it stands on its own. I cared for the characters and their fates, and that’s perhaps all that matters.

“The Noblewoman-Peasant”

“The Noblewoman-Peasant” is the final story of The Tales of Belkin. It tells the story of a romance between a noblewoman and a nobleman whose fathers are at odds with one another. Liza cannot meet Aleksei because as a noblewoman, she has no reason to go to his house without her father’s permission, and so she contrives a plan to bump into him in the countryside, dressed up as a peasant (so that nobody, least of all Aleksei himself, can suspect she is a noblewoman). It is an idiotic scheme, but Pushkin reminds us that it is not unbelievable for a country girl, whose entire knowledge of the world is from silly novels.

Liza successfully meets Aleksei, who himself is forced into a role – he doesn’t want to startle the peasant girl he thinks he’s caught by suggesting he’s a nobleman, so he pretends to be the nobleman’s assistant. Liza, meanwhile, has to contend with the fact that sexual mores among peasant girls aren’t quite the same as among noblewomen, and has to break character to tell Aleksei politely that she won’t be going to bed with him in the bushes. But this remark, delivered in the perfect Russian of a noblewoman, only piques Aleksei’s interest still further. They meet again, and again, and fall in love – even though both, faking their identities, know that the relationship can go no further.

But then, amazingly, their fathers make up and the two youths are supposed to meet. Even worse, the fathers decide the children would be a good match. Liza does not wish to reveal her deception, so she once more adopts a fake role, dressing herself up unrecognizably in a hideous dress, covering herself with makeup, and refusing to speak any language other than French. Liza survives the meeting, but Aleksei’s love for her peasant alter-ego grows unstoppable. The “Romantic idea” of marrying a peasant comes to absorb him, and he makes ready to propose. Luckily, this story does end happily, and just as madly as it began.

But under even this comic exterior, there’s a lot going on. As Aleksei’s father pressures him to marry Liza we have a sense of the generational conflicts that will be especially prominent in the 1860s, with works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile, though there’s a slight irony to its description of noblewomen in the countryside, Pushkin nevertheless demonstrates the difficult boredom of life there for them, practically trapped in their rooms and with nothing to do but read and gossip.

Conclusion

The Tales of Belkin are a cycle of short stories, and one thing that I looked for while reading them was points of connection between them, beyond their own imaginary author. It is not easy to say what they are all about, at least once one discards such broad and probably useless generalisations like “the meaning of life”, or “love”, and so on. Instead, I think the clue might be in the editor’s introduction. The stories are all about imagination. The undertaker’s imagination changes his life for the better, while Liza’s idea of dressing up as a peasant, however risible, ends up getting her exactly what she wants. I admit that it is not a fool proof suggestion, but it seems to work for most of the stories. Pushkin is interested in the ways that we tell stories, in narrative strategies, and imagination is part of that.

Taken separately, these stories are simply stories, but taken together The Tales of Belkin are in some sense an exploration of the ways we tell stories, and what their value can be. Either way, they’re worth reading if you come across some Pushkin lying around.

“Asya” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve never liked Turgenev. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest them either. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Fathers and Sons is not much better.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed.

“Asya”: an Introduction to the Plot

“Asya” was completed in 1858 and shows Turgenev’s Europeanness rather plainly by being set in Europe. Our narrator and the two other principal characters are Russians, but the action takes place somewhere along the Rhine in the German lands. N. N. is our narrator, and “Asya” is ostensibly a recollection by an older and wiser N. N. of a time in his youth – “First Love”, another Turgenev novella, has a similar structure. Our hero is about twenty five at the time of his story, carefree and travelling “without any goal or plan”. He enjoys observing others, and he has recently attempted a tryst with a widow only to get rebuffed. But we shouldn’t worry for the sake of N. N.’s soul – he says himself that the wound she left “wasn’t very deep”.

In any case, he winds up in the town of Z., on one bank of the Rhine. On the other is another town, L., which can be reached by ferry. Neither of them is on the track usually beaten by Russians holidaying in Europe. Having nothing else to do, one day N. N. heads over there, and to his surprise comes across two other Russian tourists, a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Asya, and her brother, who goes by Gagin. Gagin is a bad artist but a friendly fellow, and the two men strike up an acquaintance. Asya, however, is a wild thing – and Turgenev is constantly comparing her to a wild animal, or a child – and the narrator isn’t quite sure what to make of her. At one moment she’s enthusiastic and buoyant, at another she dresses demurely and shuns contact. One thing N. N. is certain of, however – she’s not Gagin’s real brother.

Well, he’s right. He overhears her making a confession of love to her “brother”, but it turns out she’s not actually his secret lover – as we might suppose – but actually his half-sister. She was born to one of the servants employed by Gagin’s father shortly after his wife died. Gagin for a long time never knew his sister’s identity, and her mother kept her out of the big house where the aristocrats lived. However, once her mother dies Gagin’s father took Asya into his own house, and on his deathbed he admits to Gagin that she’s actually his sister. So anyway, that’s how the two of them got to know each other.

Gagin and his sister go to Petersburg soon after, and he puts her into a boarding school – after all, he can’t keep her with him. Then, he decides he’s sick of work and wants to travel, so the two of them head to Europe for a wander, as you do.

Social Monster or Victim – Who or What is Asya?

The Russian name “Asya” is a shortened version of quite a lot of names. I know an Anastasia who uses that name, and an Arsenia. Turgenev’s Asya is, however, an Anna – which is quite unusual. It is a simple example of her rather confused, mixed identity. She is half aristocrat, half peasant – not just by parentage, but also by the amount of time she has spent in each milieu. If she stayed in Russia she would immediately be identified as not belonging, but in Europe there’s a little more leeway for her, a chance to determine her own identity. Turgenev plays up her unnaturalness by comparing her to a “little beast” and a “boy” on various occasions. N. N. notices in Asya something unnatural, though he’s unable to put his finger on what until Gagin tells him.

Asya is playing a role – she is trying to be the aristocrat she isn’t, and the effort is draining. Just like Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, because Asya is the product of two social groups she struggles to sit easily in either of them, causing great spiritual strain – like Maslova, she also struggles with having had an absent mother in her life. N. N. once comes across her reading a French novel and complains of her taste, not realising what her reading means to her: “She wanted to be no worse than other ladies, and so she gave herself to books”. Later, she desperately asks him “Tell me what I should read! Tell me what I should do!”

Youth, Love, and a Complete Inability to Do Anything

Unsurprisingly, after a few days together both Asya and N. N. fall hopelessly in love with each other. Asya, a girl who “doesn’t experience emotions by halves”, arranges a rendez-vous between them. They meet, but N. N. has already spoken with Gagin about it, and he comes prepared to play a role himself. She wants him to marry her, and he refuses. He doesn’t even say what he feels for her. Shortly afterwards, she and Gagin disappear, never to be seen again.

The narrator’s reluctance to marry her stems from his class prejudices, from the need for respectability. It also stems from his word of honour, given to Gagin, that he wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But once Asya has gone he realises his love for her and feels that it is stronger than anything else. However, he had missed his opportunity, and he will never have another such chance again. He grows old, feeling sad and regretting what he lost.

Honour, class, are apparently left worthless when love has escaped our grasp. But Turgenev’s novella tells us all this with enough irony to keep us guessing. First of all, we might think of the structure – why is N. N. telling this story? He says at the end “that I didn’t feel sad about her for too long”, that probably she’d have been a bad wife. At the beginning of his story he talks of youth as like a “biscuit that we think is hearty bread”, and says that like flowers we should never bloom too long. But I think his words are ultimately a kind of self-deception. The man is alone, living on his memories, and perhaps worth feeling sorry for. As he says, “happiness has no tomorrow”, and he missed his “today”.

Location and Literature

“Asya” doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex story, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are interesting enough to mention. I quite like the idea of the two towns, separated by the river. The crossing from one end to another is a nice visual metaphor for what happens to N. N. as he enters Asya’s world. I also like the way Turgenev uses literary references in “Asya”. We have Gretchen (Goethe’s Faust), Tatyana (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), and the Lorelei myth, which has featured in lots of poems by various Germans including Goethe and Heine. The Tatyana one is quite interesting. Asya says “I would have liked to be Tatyana” – a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her back, and then rejected him once he did. The comparison with Pushkin’s heroine ties Asya to her homeland (something N. N. remarks on elsewhere, saying she’s the most Russian creature he’s ever seen), but it also makes her a little immature for wanting to be a tragic heroine. Although N. N. is mostly to blame for the failure of the relationship, Asya herself is not without fault for her decision to appoint mysterious rendez-vous and make overly harsh demands of N. N. – her final note said if he’d said he’d loved her she would have stayed. So much for second chances or taking things slowly!

This tragic nature makes us think the story will end with a melodramatic death scene. Indeed, there’s a frightening moment when N. N. goes searching around the town for her, and it seems certain she’s about to take her own life (as Lorelei did, by jumping into the river). It turns out that she didn’t, and just went home instead. While Turgenev can’t escape traditional descriptions of women or boring men he is at least wise enough to know that not every story involving a girl needs to end with suicide.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt Turgenev was a sensitive soul. He wrote some beautiful nature passages which I had to force myself to analyse in my first year at university, but in some sense that’s about it. His characters are limp and forgettable. I don’t actually remember Fathers and Sons, though I’ve read it twice. I only remember Bazarov because he’s significant in Russian literary history, not because he actually shines in his own story. “Asya” was very okay. While it’s true I was surprised by it in a few places, at the end of the day it’s just another story about two young people who fall in love and end up unhappier for their trouble. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but not really enough to make this story particularly exciting. In the end, “Asya” is as limp as its narrator. And that’s just doesn’t make for an awesome reading experience.

Still, it’s a nice story to have in my mental repertoire. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be made between Asya and Lelenka in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Boarding School Girl” – both are almost the same age, and both of them are faced with the challenges of forming their own identity against the identity that society wants to force upon them. But Turgenev is not particularly interested in the Woman Question, and anyway I can’t write about him on that topic in my exam because he’s not a woman to begin with.

If you’re out here looking for some Turgenev to read that’s not Fathers and Sons, I’d recommend Rudin over “Asya”. It’s not too long but it’s much more interesting. But if you have nothing else to read except “Asya”, then be my guest. After all, if you’re dying of thirst then even the lukewarm bottle of water you left out on the table overnight will do for a drink.

Temptation and Pride in Tolstoy’s Father Sergius

Although I’ve been having a go at Tolstoy lately, I still admire him, and would probably rank his writings above those of anyone else. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s novella, “Father Sergius”, is another one of those frustrating prophet-Tolstoy pieces, so today’s post will be stained once again with disappointment. It shouldn’t be, in a way. Father Sergius, like Hadji Murat, was not published while Tolstoy was alive. Tolstoy shied away from publishing both works because they revealed too much about himself – at least, I remember reading that view somewhere among the criticism on Hadji. But whereas Hadji Murat revealed that Tolstoy still knew how to write cracking fiction even after he was old, “Father Sergius” reveals that Tolstoy was an awful egotist who thought he was better than everyone else. Because that’s basically what the novella is about: Tolstoy, Tolstoy, Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy, at about the time he was writing “Father Sergius”. The story was finished in 1898.

I recently read George Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”. To my knowledge, Orwell hadn’t come across “Father Sergius”, but the two pieces go together quite well. Orwell argues that the lives of Tolstoy and King Lear are curiously similar. Both were men who, in their old age, renounced their power, but then became bitter and angry for it. Both Lear and Tolstoy practiced self-denial – something normally associated with saintliness and goodness – for selfish reasons. In renouncing their earthly power, both men aimed to gain spiritual power and with it a greater sway over hearts and minds. Tolstoy gave up his copyrights, he neglected his fiction, but he did not give up the idea that he ought to influence people. Quite the opposite, as the torrent of moralistic pamphlets he produced evidences.

In short, Tolstoy’s renunciation was incomplete. Or, as Orwell puts it, “if you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.”

What does all this have to do with “Father Sergius”? Quite a lot, actually. Tolstoy’s novella is essentially a dramatization of this conflict. Our hero, Father Sergius, becomes a famous monk, but he remains unsatisfied with his life. Though he is supposedly serving God, he finds that in reality he is serving other people – the people who come to his refuge, the other members of his monastery. And of course, he is also serving his own pride. But, as with Hadji Murat, “Father Sergius” is also the story of how its central character reaches enlightenment of a Tolstoian sort. What happens?

A Bad Breakup – The Opening of “Father Sergius”

D’ya ever have that thing where you go off and become a monk just because your girlfriend turned out to have had a previous partner? Nobody? Tolstoy, with his many children with peasant girls, of course knew a thing or two about previous partners. But after his religious conversion he became very anti-sex, which we can see most clearly in The Kreutzer Sonata, but which is also on display in “Father Sergius”. Our hero is Prince Stepan Kasatsky, a young man at the story’s beginning, but one who has already risen almost to the peak of society. Apart from his one weakness, sudden bursts of rage (amazingly, Tolstoy suffered from this also), he’s a model man. He is the best at everything he tries, and has rather gotten used to that feeling of superiority. True, he’s not admitted to the very highest reaches of society, but otherwise he can’t complain.

He has a good role in the military, and has made an excellent match to a young lady. But here is where his problems start. What he doesn’t know is that this girl has been the lover of Nicholas I. In the second chapter we’re taken into her garden, a little while before the wedding. Everything seems perfect – even the nightingales are a-twitter. But “Mary” (a foreignized name in Russian literature almost always means something’s wrong) is in a state. She needs to admit to her past before the marriage, but it’s hard. Eventually manages to work up the courage, but Kasatsky is not willing to give her a hearing at all. (I’m pretty sure if the Emperor of all the Russians wanted to bed you, you didn’t have much choice in the matter). He gets up, gets angry, sells his estate, leaves his job, and becomes a monk.

As you do, of course.

Monk Days

Why does he become a monk? There are two reasons, we’re told. The first is that it lets him “stand above those, who thought they could look down on him”. The second is a real religious feeling, which is mixed up with pride and a desire to be the best. Anyway, Kasatsky becomes Father Sergius, but his problems do not end there. One day, while helping at a service, he is recognised by some ladies, who point him out to each other in French. Then, after the service his superior calls him round back to chat with a general who used to know him. Father Sergius is angry at the fact that even being a monk doesn’t save him from the people he was trying to escape. What is worse, the monks themselves aren’t as good as they’re supposed to be. There’s only one thing for it – to become a hermit!

A still from the 1918 film adaptation of Father Sergius.

A Hermit and his Temptation

Father Sergius gets permission to go to another monastery, further from civilization, and there he occupies the quarters of a recently deceased hermit. All seems well, and a few years pass. But one night a group of revellers is passing by, and one of their company, Makovkina, a young lady, decides to go and see Father Sergius, whose old identity they are all familiar with. Makovkina comes up with a plan to seduce him. (As you do). Anyway, she makes her way to his rooms and asks for shelter, saying she’s lost. At first, Father Sergius can’t believe she’s real – he thinks she’s an apparition, or else the devil. (“For the devil always appears as a woman”). But eventually, he lets her in.

Father Sergius has been a hermit all this time but he is still weak to “lust”. This woman causes a resurgence of his old feelings. Her power is that she is a normal human being. Her laughter, “cheerful, natural, kind,” has an effect on him. But normal human beings are evil people, Tolstoy would have us know, and this woman is a temptress! There is a great moment here, when the woman is drying herself and getting warm (Father Sergius refuses to see her more than he needs to), and we only hear her, just as Sergius does. It’s nice to remember that Tolstoy does know how to write.

Anyway, Father Sergius knows he has to see her, but he’s scared he will be unable to defeat his lust. So what is the logical solution? He cuts off his finger with an axe. Of course, when you have cut off your finger you end up a little distracted, with the result that temptresses can’t bother you. He goes in to see her, with his hand bleeding, like some axe murderer from a horror movie, and says: “dear sister, why did you want to destroy your eternal soul?” Amazingly, instead of being terrified, she leaves the hovel, changes her life, and becomes a nun. Cool, huh?

A Healer in Need of Healing

Time passes. Father Sergius acquires a reputation as a healer. And his isolation is brought to an end. Instead of living on simple food, his monastery now ensures he eats properly and is kept healthy. He has a constant stream of visitors, but in all of this he feels a growing dissatisfaction. He is being driven away from God and among the people:

“He had become like a place where once there had been a stream. “There was once a weak trickle of living water, which quietly flowed from me, and through me. That was the true life… but now I have had no time to gather water, for the thirsty are always coming, closing in and pushing at each other. They have crushed everything – now there is only dirt left.””

Father Sergius doesn’t like the people he meets, and it’s not clear that he can actually heal them either. They come to him “with their selfish demands”, and he gives them what they want. One day a merchant comes to him, wanting him to heal his daughter. He agrees. But when she comes, alone, she seduces Father Sergius instead. The next day, acting on plans he had made long ago, Sergius flees the monastery.

Flight

Tolstoy also fled a life that didn’t satisfy him. He died at the railway station at Astapovo, that being as far as he could get from his family before his body failed. “Father Sergius” was written over ten years before Tolstoy’s death, but the idea of fleeing was not a new one for him, just as the suicide Sergius also considers wasn’t either. Sergius goes to an old acquaintance, Pashenka, who he had treated unkindly as a child. He discovers her living poorly, surrounded by family, and struggling to survive. But the meeting brings an epiphany to him. “I lived for people under the pretext of serving God, while Pashenka lives for God, imagining that she’s living for people.” This final revelation allows him to live freely as an unknown wanderer, before eventually he is stopped by police and sent to Siberia for not having identity documents.

And there he lives happily ever after.

Tolstoy and The Holy Life – Identity and Truth

There are some interesting bits and pieces in “Father Sergius”, but they are ideas more than the story itself. One of the main themes in the story is that of identity. “Father Sergius” as a title is not a reflection of Stepan Kasatasky’s ultimate identity, but only an intermediary stage in its development. When Kasatsky first becomes a monk people often refer to his past by using his pre-monastic name, such as the women in the church or else Makovkina. Later he becomes “Father Sergius” the healer. But he is not a holy person – the story’s title is in fact ironic: “He now had no love, no humbleness, not even any purity”, he thinks after becoming well-known.

When he eventually flees, he destroys all of those past ideas of himself and returns to his own childhood. Pashenka calls him “Stiva” (the familiar version of “Stepan”), marking a new stage in his development. Finally, once he is a beggar, he answers the question of his identity by saying he is simply “a servant of God”. At last, he has removed all those connections with his past that made him a selfish person, and he is “free” to enjoy himself.

In connection with the subject of identity, “Father Sergius” also contains a persistent critique of organised religion. This is perhaps unsurprising – Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901, a few years after he’d finished “Father Sergius”. In the story the other monks are just as concerned about power, fame, and wealth as everyone else. More importantly, though, they are not shown to be in touch with any real kind of faith, either. Father Sergius himself regularly prays, but there is no sense that his prayers are answered until he finally leaves the monastery after his night with the merchant’s daughter.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m not sure I’m glad I read “Father Sergius”. I had expected something like Hadji Murat or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, where Tolstoy manages to squeeze in a moral message into a brilliant story. “Father Sergius” is a moral with a story attached, and there’s plenty to dislike here. In particular I hate the misogyny underlying Tolstoy’s depiction of women, something which is even stronger than the general atmosphere of misanthropy that pervades the story. There’s so little positivity here. The moral that we should serve God/our hearts rather than other people is, I suppose, okay, but when it’s combined with such dislike for humanity it’s hard to take seriously.

It’s like Tolstoy forgot that God (in Christian cosmology) created the world and wanted us to enjoy it. The whole thing’s just stupid. Alas, just as Orwell suggested, once Tolstoy gained his new faith, he didn’t seem to realise that he often appeared a fool. He would have been a lot more convincing, both as a writer and as a moral writer, if he had a little more self-awareness.

Anyway, if you’re after Tolstoy, go read Hadji Murat, or Anna Karenina, or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, or War and Peace. And if you’ve read them already, read them again, and again, and again.