Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary
ISBN: 9780393025859
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 1988-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Then again, there was the incident in January 1872, only a few versts away from Yasnaya Polyana, when Anna Stepanovna Pirogova ran up the local railroad and threw herself under a train. There is a danger of isolating the suicide of Anna Stepanovna Pirogova and pushing ahead – after all, she has the same Christian name – the comparisons between her situation and Anna Karenina’s beyond any point where such a comparison would hold. Two things to bear in mind with this death, when we imagine ourselves back into that engine shed of 1872, are the extreme novelty of the railroad (whereas we take it for granted) and the absolute normality of suicide (which for us is shocking). Dostoyevsky, in a famous issue of his The Diary of a Writer, dwells on the horrific fact that there are people who commit suicide for no apparent reason. He also makes the sweepingly theological point that ‘neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea. And on earth there is but one sublime idea – namely the idea of the immortality of man’s soul – since all other “sublime” ideas of life, which give life to man, are merely derived from this one idea.’13

Tolstoy, whose nihilism went deeper than Dostoyevsky’s, and whose egotism was more self-protective, could never really see this, even though in his novels – and above all in Anna Karenina – life itself is so potently and lovingly drawn. Goldenweiser describes a conversation with Tolstoy when he was a holy old man. ‘I can’t understand why people look upon suicide as a crime. It seems to me to be a man’s right. It gives a man the chance of dying when he no longer wishes to live. The Stoics thought like that.’14

Those who draw an immediate correlation between the suicide of Pirogova and that of Tolstoy’s fictional heroine sometimes fail to notice that in the neighbour’s suicide there was a motive, in the novel there is none. Film versions and précis always try to provide Anna with reasons. They tell us that she feels intolerably torn between love for Vronsky and that for her little son Seryozha. But as she says herself she has abandoned Seryozha and been perfectly happy to do so while ‘another love’ satisfied her. The ‘decision’ that Vronsky no longer loves her is completely irrational. The core of her despair is a madness which we glimpse as she lies alone on her bed four chapters before the end, dosed with opium and watching shadows dance around the room. ‘ “Death,” she thought. And such panic seized her that it was a long time before she realised where she was and with a trembling hand could find the matches to light another candle in the place of the one that had guttered and gone out. No – anything – only to live. . . .’15 This is the sort of crazy state which Tolstoy himself was to enter during the closing stages of the novel when, as he tells us, he had to hide ropes and guns from himself for fear of yielding to temptation.

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