A Billy-Goat Pining for Purity TOLSTOY

By R.Z. Sheppard

The artistry of War and Peace and Anna Karenina translates into many languages, but Leo Tolstoy the social phenomenon is strictly Russian. Most biographers take this fact for granted. A.N. Wilson spells it out in his descriptions of that vast, isolated kingdom of the 19th century in which the roles of writer and prophet were frequently indistinguishable. Martine de Courcel strikes a deeper Slavic chord when she says that Tolstoy's aim was to become a Fool of God. Count Leo was, of course, no fool, although many of his truths never got off the ground. His moralizing often seems as windy and endless as the steppes. Had he expounded his ideas about the utility of art earlier in his life, he might never have written his masterpieces of fiction.

To modern American readers, Tolstoy's life sometimes reads like a 19th century version of Portnoy's Complaint, in which the protagonist never stops griping that his desires are repugnant to his morals. Tolstoy's diaries and instructional writings are engorged with this seriocomic theme, a fact that led Biographer Henri Troyat to conclude more than 20 years ago that Russia's literary icon was "a billy-goat pining for purity."

De Courcel, holder of a psychology degree from the Sorbonne, latches on to this internal conflict as a dramatic device. The results are somewhat predictable and schematic. She relies heavily on the diaries of Tolstoy and his wife Sophia Andreyevna, memoirs, letters and interpretive readings of the novels and essays. These materials are tailored to fit what appears to have been a predetermined conclusion: Tolstoy reconciled his warring selves only when, ten days before dying in 1910, he fled farm and family.

Wilson, one of Britain's most accomplished comic novelists, is more relaxed about Tolstoy's contradictions and racked conscience. His imaginative approach to the mysteries of personality is a good reminder that consistency is for peanut butter, not for geniuses who exploit their conflicts in creative acts. Wilson's Tolstoy is the story of the literary titan's relationships with three subjects: God, Russia and women.

Tolstoy tried to resolve the first through a homegrown faith that amounted to a churchless Christianity. He shunned organized religion and city life for rustic self-sufficiency among the muzhiks (peasants) at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana (Bright Glade). He preached against the evils of meat, alcohol, tobacco and fornication. He believed a Christian should make his own shoes and empty his own chamber pot.

De Courcel generally lets Tolstoy's feelings for his homeland emerge from his writings. Wilson sums up his subject's ambivalent love of country with a bold stroke of his own: "On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a 'God-bearing' nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country -- that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there."

Born in 1828 into one of Old Russia's aristocratic families, Tolstoy had the luxury of pondering the chasm between the privileged few and the impoverished masses. His early heroes were the Decembrists, a group of liberal noblemen who tried and failed to end Czar Nicholas I's tyranny. Tolstoy's first career was as a soldier in the Crimean War, where he saw a great deal of action in brothels and gambling dens. But he also wrote the accounts of the siege of Sevastopol that established his literary reputation.

Both biographers amply illustrate the heightened consciousness that made Tolstoy's journals and fiction irresistible. And painful. A week before his marriage to 18-year-old Sophia Behrs in 1862, he asked her to read his diaries. A 20-year record of wenching jumped off the pages. One entry confessed his passion for a peasant mistress only weeks before his wedding date. Twenty-eight years later, Sophia was still feeling the jolt. "I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading Lyovochka's diaries when I was engaged to him," she wrote in her own journal. "I can still remember the agonising pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

Countess Tolstoy's private jottings are as famous as those of her husband. Read jointly, their volumes are evidence of what Wilson calls "an atmosphere of domestic hatred perhaps unrivalled in the history of matrimony." To the usual problems of marriage, Tolstoy added his tortured asceticism. Eventually he was repulsed by all things that gave him pleasure, including the writing of great romances and the love of his wife. Yet their earlier years together had been physically satisfying and artistically fulfilling. Sophia bore 13 children in 26 years. Her editorial skills were essential to the labor and delivery of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She also made sure that publishers paid top ruble.

In later years, Sophia's chief rivals were not the muzhiks or the muse but Tolstoy's disciples, led by Vladimir Chertkov, an aristocrat and former guards officer who underwent conversion to Tolstoy's Utopian doctrine of universal peace and brotherhood. In 1908 Chertkov settled near Yasnaya Polyana and made himself indispensable to his teacher. As the master's literary properties came increasingly under Chertkov's control, Sophia's justifiable paranoia worsened. "Everything is a plot against me," she wrote in her diary on June 26, 1910. "It will end only with the death of this poor old man, who has been led astray by the devil Chertkov."

Four months later, after listening to his wife rummaging through his closets late at night, Tolstoy slipped out of the house with his physician, intending to live out his days in a monastery. He boarded a train, but developed a high fever at the village of Astapovo and could not go on. He was put to bed in the stationmaster's house, and word spread by telegraph that Leo Tolstoy was dying. The press and thousands of Russians began to stream toward Astapovo.

In his autobiography Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he and his family were in Berlin when they got the news. "Good gracious," said his mother. "Time to go home." Charles Pathe, the newsreel pioneer, cabled his cameraman: TRY TO GET CLOSEUP, STATION NAME. TAKE FAMILY, WELL-KNOWN FIGURES, CAR THEY ARE SLEEPING IN. Pathe's drained images survive. Among them is Sophia pacing the platform. Having been barred from entering the station house, she tries to peer through the windows. The curtains are drawn.

There would be no more quarrels with "Lyovochka." Besides, Tolstoy had already had the last word 35 years before, when he began Anna Karenina with the observation that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."