Tolstoy's Flight

Pavel Basinsky’s new book, Lev Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise (Бегство из рая. Москва, АСТ, Астрель) is a calm, thorough investigation of the circumstances surrounding Lev Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana.

One hundred years ago, on the night between October 27 and 28, the 82-year-old writer, accompanied by Doctor Makovitsky, secretly left his estate. Tolstoy fled without really understanding where he was headed, yet he was driven by one clear desire: to never return home again. Alas, this desire was destined to be fulfilled. En route, Tolstoy fell ill from pneumonia and soon thereafter died at Astapovo train station.

Pavel Basinsky is a writer and literary critic, the author of a superb biography of Maxim Gorky in Molodaya Gvardiya’s series, Lives of Extraordinary People, and also the author of the experimental Russian Novel. In his research he plumbed various archival sources, including newspapers, correspondence, journals and memoirs of those who participated directly in the events: Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Andreyevna, his children, relatives, close friends, allies and antagonists. Basinsky sought the truth in the places where these various accounts intersected. As a result, he very accurately and subtly conveys the emotional atmosphere that reigned on the eve of Tolstoy’s flight – an atmosphere that was highly strained, electrified by the collision of various interests and wills.

Describing the life of a family that is not your own, about which you have discovered so many new details in the course of your investigations, is a dangerous endeavor: it is too hard to maintain emotional distance, to easy to start feeling as if you are a close relative of the genius. Yet Basinsky happily avoids any sort of familiarity and always maintains his distance; he discusses the most intimate details of Tolstoy family life with unfailing tact. It is a tact strengthened by a deep empathy for all the main participants in the drama. In fact, Basinsky is as objective as one could be expected to be 100 years after the fact. For this reason, you trust his interpretation; when you read his narrative you become certain that surely everything was just as he describes.

Basinsky is not shy about being fascinating or populist – in the good sense. As a result, he often prefers living images over distracting arguments.

And so we have a description of the nightmare of his night flight – the helpless old man hurries into the pitch darkness of the stable, drops his hat and cannot find it, and so his head gets cold. He blunders about in his own apple orchard and finally, trembling, huddles into a coach. The next day he is on board the train, purposely traveling third class, and he preaches to the people who, of course, have recognized him. Next he arrives at Optina Pustin; he walks along its walls but cannot make himself enter. The Elder Iosif, learning of this, immediately summons him, but it is too late. Tolstoy has gone. Then we are at the nunnery of Shamordino, where Lev Nikolayevich enters his sister’s cell and cries, complaining of the dissension in his family.

In the book, the chronicle of Tolstoy’s flight is interspersed with flashbacks: excursions through his “sinful” youth, the day of his marriage to Sonechka Bers, the period of familial bliss, which lasted 15 years and, although it was darkened by fights and scenes, proved indestructible. Yet the dissension grew; the chasm widened. Tolstoy changed his views on the church, on marital relations, on life. Sofia Andreyevna loved him all the more jealously, all the more demandingly. There followed her infatuation with the composer and musician Sergey Taneyev, the war with the writer’s editor and publisher, Vladimir Chertkov, for her husband’s trust, for the diaries and for Tolstoy’s one, “true” will. The writer himself confessed that Yasnaya Polyana had become a “roiling hell,” and finally fled. In response, Sofia Andreyevna twice attempted to drown herself in the estate’s pond, pounding her chest with an ink blotter and a hammer, crying out, “Shatter, heart!” In short, a true family drama unfolds on the pages of this book.

Nonetheless, Basinsky does not merely retell and “show” how events unfolded, he also offers his own interpretation. One of the book’s penetrating ideas: Tolstoy did not flee Yasnaya Polyana to die – as Ivan Bunin averred in his famous essay, “The Liberation of Tolstoy.” No, Tolstoy fled in order to survive, to live. As far as his famous non-meeting with the elder at Optina, Basinsky also contradicts conventional interpretations and explains it as a result not of the Count’s pride, but of his delicacy: Tolstoy simply decided not to be an uninvited guest in the cell of a sick elder.

Such emphases and commentaries are rather convincing, and their main value is that they do not distort the overall picture the book presents, leaving the impression of a deep, psychologically believable reality.

Basinsky’s book is a bestseller in Russia [there is yet no word of the book’s translation into English], if one is to judge from the ratings of the country’s leading booksellers. And this is entirely logical: as stated, Basinsky’s research has much to recommend it. Yet it is also doubtless that the book’s success is fired by Russians’ deep interest in the person of Lev Tolstoy, in the circumstances of his private life.

War and Peace continues to occupy its place in the national school curriculum, yet even the best teachers, as a rule, will merely analyze the text of the novel, and almost never use their lessons to scrutinize the author himself, his fate, and especially his family life. Yet, as we see in Basinsky’s work, and in the works of others, Lev Nikolayevich’s family life is a novel unto itself, combining idyll and tragedy, a build-up, culmination, and unexpected denouement.

This, by the way, is the favorite idea of the philologist Boris Eikhenbaum, one of the most exacting researchers of Tolstoy: that Tolstoy composed his fate the same way he did his fiction. So it is not surprising that many of the readers of this complex, paradoxical, by turns horrific and joyful, but unfailingly brilliant novel (that is, the novel of Tolstoy’s life), will be surprised and entertained no less than by a reading Anna Karenina or The Cossacks.   RL