But the dark patch was not stationary, it kept moving; and it was not a village but some tall stalks of wormwood sticking up through the snow on the boundary between two fields, and desperately tossing about under the pressure of the wind which beat it all to one side and whistled through it.
The reader feels the terror of the lost moment almost as vividly as Brekhunov did. No wonder Tolstoy commented scornfully to a friend that a story by the young Andreyev, a fashionable writer in the 1890s, always seemed to be saying hopefully to its reader ‘Are you frightened? – Are you frightened now?’ when the reader was merely bored by the author’s attempts to make him so. Tolstoy’s accumulation of telling detail really does make the reader feel frightened. So does the unobtrusive way in which he gives us portraits, as the tale goes on, of the master who has so much to live for and the servant who has nothing, and so accepts their increasingly desperate situation with stoic fatalism.
The travellers are reunited. Nikita, poorly clad, is soon nearly dead from exposure, and Brekhunov seems to come to a decision. ‘Suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase’, he sets about organizing what shelter he can for both of them. Then putting the servant in the sledge he lies down on him in his heavy fur coat. He is surprised by the pleasure he feels in looking after another human being. He sheds tears, and longs to share his joy with someone else, so he tells Nikita, who only answers drowsily from below that he is getting nice and warm. But Brekhunov is being far from selfless. ‘Nikita kept him warm from below and his fur coat from above’, a calculation that he made just as he used to strike a bargain.
When they are found next day the merchant is dead, but Nikita is just alive and recovers. ‘When he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on both his feet were frozen.’
Tolstoy’s early story The Snow Storm is almost equally vivid, but it lacks the quiet accumulation of telling detail which is so effective in Master and Man. The moral of the story works without strain, because the personality of Brekhunov is fully established, and he remains true to it throughout. Mirsky remarks that ‘his is a horrifying death’, but this is surely wrong. One feels on the other hand that Ivan Ilych is not, so to speak, allowed to die in his own way, but is thrust into the black bag by Tolstoy, as into his final moment of tranquillity and brightness. One can quote Tolstoy’s own rather portentous words against him: ‘When characters do what in their nature they are unable to do it is a terrible thing.’
Brekhunov’s end is moving, and also, in a curious way, both happy and comic. It makes us want to laugh and cry, an objectionable formula when used in a blurb, or in praise of Russian ‘soulfulness’, but here neither more nor less than the truth. One is left feeling that Tolstoy’s humour here is something he is not in the least concerned with, and that probably he would despise the notion. None the less humour comes out from under his hand involuntarily when his narrative is at its best. There is the same sort of involuntary humour in the detail of the narrator’s visit to the monastery in Youth.
It may be Tolstoy’s lavish and always graphic use of detail, together of course with its romance and exotic setting, which for many readers has made The Cossacks the most popular of all his works. Conrad and Hemingway greatly admired it, and the latter virtually copied from it. And yet Tolstoy himself was never satisfied with the story, and said hard things about it in the heyday of his artistry, when he was writing War and Peace. It is true the joints of the narrative creak a little. The young Olenin’s departure from Moscow and his arrival in the mountains of the Caucasus are wonderfully done; but the Cossacks themselves seem to occupy a kind of pastoral space into which Olenin blunders, like an eighteenth-century French hero among a tribe of Noble Savages. When the Chechen braves, the abreks, cross the river Terek, what do they come for? Obviously to ambush and attack the Russians. But the Cossack village appears to take few if any precautions against them, and the one who swims over by night seems to do it chiefly in order that Tolstoy should make a fine set-piece description out of his killing.
After Tolstoy joined the army and was posted as a young lieutenant to the Caucasus, he became seriously interested in military life and made his own kind of study of it. One of his sketches from that period, The Wood-Felling, is a little masterpiece, revealing Tolstoy’s close observation of officers and simple soldiers, and his sympathy with the latter. The story is slight – merely an account of how his artillery unit is required to cut down a band of forest so that the Chechens who lurk there, with whom they are in perpetual guerrilla conflict, can be kept under fire. The soldiers come to life even more vividly in this tale than they do in the Sevastopol Sketches which Tolstoy wrote a little later whilst on active service during the Crimean war. He had a mania just then for lists, definitions, and ways of analysing human beings, their conduct and character, and The Wood-Felling contains an amusing specimen of this, dividing soldiers into three types: the submissive, the reckless and the domineering – the last being classed under two sub-types, ‘the sternly domineering’ and ‘the diplomatically domineering’.
Shortly after he left the army Tolstoy wrote Two Hussars, a striking tale which shows his continuing interest in such types, and also the growing conservatism of his outlook, a conservatism which will permeate in a more disguised form the philosophy of War and Peace. The older officer in the story has many faults – recklessness, bravado, and the love of gambling which Tolstoy himself indulged at one stage of his army career. But he is open and honest and would not cheat or lie. His conduct contrasts with that of the young Hussar of the next generation, a cold-hearted correct creature, who maintains appearances but has few if any scruples.
After leaving the army Tolstoy settled on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and began to think about marriage and a family. He became interested in various girls, and with his usual wish to get everything settled in his own mind he began to plan a sort of experimental nouvelle, setting out what he conceived a marriage in its early stages should be like. The result was Family Happiness, a work which contains much admirable writing and its author’s usual shrewd observation, but which possesses a certain awkwardness arising from what was for him the hypothetical nature of the relationship. Tolstoy had to know such things intimately before he could really settle down to writing about them. In spite of the idyll which Family Happiness hopefully suggests, and which was implemented in the marriages of Mary and Nicholas and Natasha and Pierre in War and Peace, it also contains the themes of uneasiness and guilt, themes that will become obsessive in the long stories Tolstoy wrote after his spiritual crisis in middle age.
The strangest and most morbid of these is The Kreutzer Sonata. It is full of the more tormented side of Tolstoy’s own personality, which he exaggerates immensely to create the pathological figure of Pozdnyshev. The relation between author and character is thus exceptionally unbalanced: as if Shakespeare had let us know that he hated sex, but not as much as Hamlet does, or Timon. The playwright was silent on the issue but Tolstoy was not, and he cannot detach himself and his own views from those of the character he has created. No writer explores the marriageness of marriage so directly and so exhaustively as Tolstoy, and The Kreutzer Sonata gives us another view of the question, which in part at least was coming to be Tolstoy’s own. In Family Happiness he envisaged marriage; in War and Peace he described it; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he denounces it.