Tolstoy, Troglodyte

LEO TOLSTOY (836 pp.) -- Ernest J. Simmons--Little, Brown ($5).

The Russian writer Turgenev, entertaining a visitor one day in 1855, kept the conversation in whispers for fear of waking Count Tolstoy, who was asleep in the next room. "He's like this all the time," Turgenev explained. "He has come from his battery at Sevastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gypsies, and cards every night; then he sleeps like the dead until two o'clock in the day. . . ."

One of the best things about this new full-length biography of Tolstoy is the picture it gives of the great Russian as a young man. Both of the novels by which he is best remembered were written later: War and Peace in his 30s and Anna Karenina in his 40s. They were not written by the unkempt peasant-patriarch of the last publicized years of Tolstoy's life, but by a rude aristocrat of tremendous energy.

Brothels, Boorishness. "Lyovochka the bubble," as he became known to his three elder brothers, took life with gusto from the start. He loved pillow fights and, at the age of nine, a pretty little house guest whom he pushed downstairs because she gave him too little attention. He was ugly, and in his teens dismayed society by not only looking but behaving like a troglodyte, as Turgenev called him. Neither dressing like a fop nor training on horizontal bars brought the shy Count success with fashionable ladies. He took refuge in boorishness and brothels.

Tolstoy's sense of guilt was as great as his appetite, and Biographer Simmons quotes tortured entries in his diary, full of repentance and good resolutions. When he joined the army as a cadet at 23, serving in the Caucasus, he congratulated himself one day on exorcising the evils of vice, especially gambling. In the next entry he recorded that "on the same day I was so carried away that I lost [850 rubles]. Now I shall restrain myself and live prudently. I went to Chervlyonnaya, got drunk there, and slept with a woman. All this is very bad and troubles me deeply."

War & Literature. At Kazan University, where he had distinguished himself by refusing to be educated, Tolstoy had read the complete works of Rousseau with such adoration that he wore a medallion portrait of him around his neck. In the army he began to write, still under Rousseau's influence and partly in enthusiasm for Laurence Sterne. In 1852 Tolstoy's Childhood, written in camp, excited the reading public in Moscow and won the praise of Turgenev and of Dostoevsky*--then in exile in Siberia.

The firsthand experience of war, which Ernest Hemingway has called indispensable to the greatest writers, awaited Tolstoy at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat his soldiers in fits of irritation, and they said they had never known his like for cursing.

Truth & Consequences. Matured by every kind of rough experience, Tolstoy had an irritable perception of the weakness in much literary chatter. In Petersburg he roared first at one coterie of intelligentsia and then at another, quarreled with Turgenev, insisted that he himself lived by instinct, not "convictions"--the fashionable word of the moment. Truth to Tolstoy, as to Rousseau, was a matter of feeling, though he called it "reason."

One of Tolstoy's presentiments was that unless Russia's serfs were freed they would free themselves in violence; he tried to get his own serfs to accept a program of gradual emancipation and was profoundly hurt by their suspicious rebuff. He practically gave up writing for several years to conduct a school for peasant children at the Tolstoy estate, Yasnaya Polyana, meanwhile tormenting himself over a passionate affair with a pretty young woman of the village: "Today, in the big old wood. I'm a. fool, a brute. Her bronze flush and her eyes. . . ." It was beyond him to give up the privileges of a Russian landowner, though he felt sure by this time that the Russian feudal system was evil.

Sonya & Serenity. After a long, puzzled courtship and a proposal as awkward as all Tolstoy's efforts with women of his own class, he married Sonya Andreyevna Bers in 1862. Tranquillized by his marr;iage, he settled down in the next years to write the long novel he had been meditating. At first he meant to call it All's Well That Ends Well. When he wrote the first 38 chapters he had no idea of the expanding design of the next volumes; Turgenev, still smarting over their most recent quarrel, in which Tolstoy had scornfully challenged him to a duel, found the opening "bad, boring, and unsuccessful." But before the last volumes of War and Peace appeared, in 1869, all Russia knew that the work was a masterpiece. So did Tolstoy. After going over :he battlefield of Borodino he wrote to Sonya: "I'll write such a description of Borodino as was never written before. Always boasting!"

Sonya, who worked faithfully recopying his manuscripts, had meanwhile borne him four children. Absorbed in his work and in his family, Tolstoy was untroubled by social and spiritual worries until after the novel was finished. Then for several years he turned restlessly from one concern to another, learning Greek in three months by a prodigious zeal of application, writing a schoolbook, taking a milk cure. Even when he began Anna Karenina his creative enthusiasm sometimes gave way to his urge for personal salvation. But in 1878 Anna was published, presenting, in the characters of Levin and Kitty, Tolstoy himself and Sonya, who had now borne nine children and wrote to her sister: "I . . . nurse like a machine from morn to night. . . ."

The anguished seer that Tolstoy became after a religious crisis at 50 attracted both fame and followers of a kind that Sonya did not like. She hated the "institution" of her husband. Worn out by childbearing, jealous of his disciples (she called them "dark people"), infuriated by his decision to give up the copyrights on all his work after 1881, she gradually became a hysterical paranoiac. The familiar story of the last 25 years of their life together is terrible, ending in the old man's wild flight from home at 82, to die of pneumonia in a stationmaster's cottage--which the Soviet Government last year made into a Tolstoy shrine.

Biographer Simmons' sympathetic treatment of Tolstoy's religion of "nonresistance to evil," love for the common people, and individual self-perfection by undogmatic Christianity make it seem the titanic moral effort of an intellectual child, caught in the determinism of society and history upon which his own War and Peace was based. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him; the Communist Lenin wrote incisively: "On the one hand, an extraordinarily powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy; on the other, a Tolstoyan, that is, a wornout, historical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who, publicly beating his breast, cries: 'I am bad, I am vile, but I am striving after moral self-perfection. . . .' " Yet Stalin's government has hailed Tolstoy as a literary hero of the Russian people.

Biographer Simmons, professor of Russian literature at Columbia, has also written biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. His work on Tolstoy includes much material, such as diaries of Tolstoy's wife and his letters to her, that were unavailable to Aylmer Maude, whose Life of Tolstoy, published in 1910, has been standard in English. Along with a Russian biography by N. N. Gusev, of which only two volumes have yet appeared, the Simmons biography is the most authoritative and objective work on the subject.

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