Late Essays: 2006-2017 by Coetzee J. M

Author:Coetzee, J. M. [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911215431
Amazon: 1911215434
Goodreads: 33295244
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Published: 2017-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

13. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

In 1884, at the height of his fame as a novelist, Leo Tolstoy produced a strange autobiographical document which, because of its controversial comments on religion, had to be published abroad. Entitled Confession, it told of a spiritual crisis that he had undergone in 1877 during which his life had ceased to have any meaning and he had come within a hair’s breadth of committing suicide.

Even before 1877, he further confessed, he had begun to lose faith in the value of artistic endeavour and the importance of his own writing. This set him apart from his contemporaries, who seemed to believe that, religion having lost its relevance to the modern world, the artist should take over from the priest as moral and spiritual guide. Art should be the new religion, they said, great works of art the new scriptures. He could not agree. How could artists, who in his experience were usually bad and immoral people, act as moral guides to humankind?

Nevertheless, despite his doubts about his vocation, he had gone on writing and publishing, receiving acclamation and monetary reward for work that he privately considered to be worthless.

We should think twice before conceding to Tolstoy the right he claims in Confession to dismiss his earlier literary works. 1877, the year of his spiritual crisis, was also the year in which Anna Karenina was completed. It is inconceivable that the man who wrote that novel was not committed, heart and soul, to its writing, that on the contrary he secretly believed the pages issuing from his hand were worthless. Confession is a powerful piece of writing with an air of urgent sincerity that sweeps the reader along. No less than in the case of Anna Karenina, one must believe that the man who wrote Confession was committed, heart and soul, to its writing. But the fact that in Confession Tolstoy in effect calls the author of Anna Karenina an impostor, writing in bad faith, does not mean that the author of Anna Karenina was truly an impostor. Confession has no right to claim that, by its nature as autobiography, it speaks a more authoritative truth than a mere novel can speak. Indeed, for anyone who takes seriously the religious pretensions of art, which would include the belief that beauty and truth are one and the same thing, Anna Karenina must speak a higher truth than Confession, since it is by far the more ambitious of the two works, by far the more beautiful aesthetic construct. But one does not have to elevate art to the status of a religion to know that Anna Karenina is not false at its core. Anna Karenina is true through and through. The only point of contention is what kind of truth it tells.

What does Anna Karenina say to its readers? What, crudely speaking, is the message of the novel? Ever since Tolstoy’s day this has been a live issue. To the vast majority of readers today, Anna

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