If life was a nasty joke, the only thing to do was refuse it. Just as powerfully as he had once longed to fight, Tolstoy now wanted to die. 'Ilie void attracted him as strongly as the prospect of new land to buy had done before. A simple and profitable operation. The rewards were certain. lie was not troubled by the thought of his wife or children: he had never been concerned with them except in relation to himself. With him dead, they would manage, living 011 the income from the
estate and his books. The question was when and how he would destroy himself. He was in no hurry—there was a glimmer of common sense in his delirium. No sooner had he let himself be swept away by the temptation of obliteration than he caught himself up again, his reason alerted, with a delicious shiver running down his spine.
The need to make an end of it all was strongest at night. lie slept alone, in his study. As he undressed for bed, he looked at the crossbar between the two cabinets loaded with books. A slipknot, a chair kicked away, a body that jerks, sways back and forth and then stops. ... No more Leo Tolstoy! "Then I, the happy man," he wrote, "removed the rope from the room . . . and stopped taking my gun when I went out to hunt, so that I could not yield to the desire to do away with myself too easily."1
This alternating boldness of purpose and prudence of action was in keeping with the rest of his personality. No one could be more preoccupied by the state of his health than this permanent suicide candidate, lie was fond of recalling an oriental fable: A man pursued by a tiger climl)S down into a well. At the bottom of the well he sees the gaping jaws of a dragon. Unable to go either up or down, the poor man clings to a bush growing between the loosened stones. As his strength begins to fail he spies two mice, one white and one black, gnawing at the branch he is hanging from. A few seconds more and he will fall. Knowing himself about to die, the man makes a supreme effort, and licks the drops of honey from the leaves. Tolstoy would have been glad to do the same; but the two drops of honey—love of family and love of literature—that had formerly helped him to accept reality had now lost all their savor for him.
"The family, I told myself, my wife, my children, are also human beings and therefore ruled by the same conditions as myself: either they must live a lie or face up to the ghastly troth. Why do they have to live? Why do I have to love and protect them and help them to grow up and safeguard their interests? To lead them into the despair in which I am myself, or to keep them in a state of imbecility? As I love them, I cannot hide the truth from them. . . . And the truth is death. As for art and poetry—for a long time I managed to convince myself, under the influence of success and praise, that they were a possible form of activity, even though death would destroy all, both my work and the memory of it. Then I realized that this activity was also a lie."2
The despair he thought lie alone suffered was in fact being shared —and indulged in—by a good many intellectuals in Russia. In Fathers and Sons Turgenev had given a name to this mal du siecle: nihil-
ism. And he had made it the subject of his last book, Virgin Soil. As defined by Turgcncv, the nihilist was "a man who would accept no authority and adopt no principle as an article of faith, no matter how highly esteemed that principle might be." A steadily growing number of young people, having rejected family, art, religion and all existing social structures in general, were finding themselves alone in a great emptiness, and losing their heads. Some began to dress as muzhiks, "going over to the people" and coming back misunderstood. A suicide epidemic was raging among the students and wealthy classes. People were killing themselves out of lassitude, nausea, imitation, braggadocio or plain curiosity.
But the true nihilists, those who resisted the call of "nirvana," were the confirmed materialists who preached the messianic future of the Russian people and saw salvation for the country in the abolition of the monarchy and the institution of a republican government based on the rural commune. This revolutionary movement was very foreign to Tolstoy, who tended toward idealism and non-violence; but both attitudes were the result of the same fundamental disillusionment, the same desire to challenge official doctrine and the same trust in the wordless wisdom of the peasant. After admiring Bakunin and Ilerzen, Tolstoy turned away from them in disgust. All those two cared about was the material side, and for him the welfare of the soul was more important than that of the body. His personal torment had overleaped the social phase and ripened into full flower in the metaphysical realm. In search of a reliable opinion, he read or reread Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, all the philosophers who had given a spiritualist explanation of life. But their enlightened minds had all tripped over the same obstacle. "The life of the body is an evil and a lie," said Socrates. "And that is why we should desire its destruction as a blessing." "Everything in the world—folly and wisdom, riches and poverty, joy and grief—is nothing but empty agitation and vanity," Solomon went on. "Man will die and nothing will remain of him." "Life should not be," said Schopenhauer, "and the sole good is the passage from being to nothingness." "To live, conscious of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, age, death, is impossible," added Buddha. "We must free ourselves from life, from all possibility of life."3
Not having found what he was looking for in the great thinkers, Tolstoy came down a few levels, and tried to understand how ordinary mortals made their peace with the human condition by observing those around him. If death were preferable to life, why did the majority of the people not commit suicide? Upon reflection, he concluded that his fellow men adopted one of four attitudes toward the problem: some
were honestly unaware of the tragedy of life and death, but this implied a mental lethargy bordering upon idiocy; others, related to the epicureans, were aware of their desperate situation but continued licking the honey off the leaves of the bush while they waited to fall into the dragon's jaws; still others, realizing the absurdity of their destiny on earth, made it a point of honor to destroy themselves; and the last group, too weak to carry out this act of deliverance, went on eating, drinking, dressing, procreating, buying land and making money, in a state of insurmountable revulsion. Tolstoy belonged to the last category. He hated himself for his cowardice. Sometimes, however, his certainty wavered.
"If there were no life, there would be no reason," he suddenly said to himself. "'Itierefore, reason is the child of life, and being the child of life, reason cannot deny life."
He was trapped in an infernal circle. His notebooks were filling up with observations on the relationship between intelligence and faith, man and space, matter and motion. The most self-evident concepts now seemed debatable to him. His new-found ignorance was comparable to that of the muzhik. The muzhik. Why hadn't he thought of him before? There was the source of light.
"I turned my eyes to the huge masses of simple, ignorant, poor people, and I saw something altogether different," he wrote.
These people accepted poverty, hunger, ill-treatment, disease, suffering and death with tranquil resignation. Some, in the direst circumstances, even looked happy. And few, in any event, thought of hanging themselves. Was it reason that helped them to bear the burden of their existence? Assuredly not. They drew their courage from the most simple blind faith, as taught by the pope in the little country church with the tarnished gilt cupola. Faith like theirs could only be accepted, without question or argument. God, like vodka, was to be swallowed at a gulp, without thinking. "As soon as man applies his intelligence and only his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object," Tolstoy wrote in his notebook.4