"It seems to me, Leo Nikolayevich, that in the beginning Nikita was doing all right. But afterward, he went wrong."
Tolstoy could get nothing more out of these people whom he held to be the best judges of art. That evening he raged to Stakhovich:
"It was all that Andrey's fault! Until now he looked up to you as a sort of general, you tipped him three rubles at the station buffet. . . . And all of a sudden you begin to shout and imitate a drunkard. How could he help laughing? . . . And his laughing prevented the others from understanding the meaning of the play."25
He sent The Power of Darkness to Chertkov to be printed in the Intermediary collection, and began a comedy, The Fruits of Enlightenment. Passing the year's work in review, Sonya could proudly tell herself that apart from the essay What Then Must We Do? and a few minor articles, her husband's entire output had been, as she hoped, literary.
In the first part of What Then Must We Do? Tolstoy describes the Moscow slums he had seen during the census-taking. Here his accuracy of observation and the unfaltering logic of his discernment are remarkable. From page to page the shocked and horrified reader breathes in the stink of the cesspools, blinks in the gloom and feels his skin itching from head to foot. But the novelist soon yields to the moralist, and the emotion he aroused in describing the evil is dissipated when he begins to set forth the remedies for it. As disorderly in manipulating ideas as he is incisive in describing facts, he rants, threatens and promises with the naive self-assurance of an autodidact. The root of all evil, as others had said before him, is property. The rich, who produce nothing and revel in vice, luxury and idleness, attract the poor to the towns and enslave them. "The poor come to feed on the crumbs of wealth," writes Tolstoy. "It is surprising that some of them continue to work, and do not begin to seek easier means of making money: commerce, hoarding, beggary, debauchery, swindling and even robbery." Wage-earning and slavery are synonymous. And whoever says slavery says deprivation. The reason the rich can get away with such scandalous conduct is that they are protected by State and
Church. 'Hie State is a murderous vehicle devised by the violent to dominate the weak. In a mankind-according-to-Christ, there should be no State. Nor any Church. For the Church deforms the teaching of Christ in order to adapt it to the demands of the State. It is aided and abetted in this devil's work by science and art. The true scholars and artists are not those who are supported by State and Church, but those who "claim no rights, and recognize only duties," those who fight, suffer and die for the truth. "There arc no fat, self-indulgent and self- satisfied artists," Tolstoy concludes.
How to combat the evil to which mankind is sinking ever more deeply? First, by rejecting all the machinery on which society is now founded. Turn one's back on the State, refuse to serve it in any way, take no share in the exploitation of others, give up money and land, abolish industry—a source of pauperism—flee the corrupting cities, tear the conccit of education out of your heart and return to a healthy rural existence. God wants everyone to work with his hands and be self-sufficient. The mind is improved by the body's fatigue. The truly wise are the "peasant thinkers" on the Syutaycv model, the muzhik in sheepskin jackct. Down with intelligence! Long live simplicity!
The tiling that immediately strikes one about this sermon is the enthusiasm the author feels for religious ideas which he believes to be new but which in fact go back to the heart of the Middle Ages—the Walden- sian, the Ix)llard and Anabaptist brotherhoods, who taught the invisibility of the Church and the uselessncss of the sacraments and preachcd that the people should l>c free in relation to kings, magistrates and priests. On the social side, advocating a sort of communism in Christian sheep's clothing, he errs through over-confidence in man. If everyone loved other people more than himself and the world were inhabited exclusively by followers of Leo Tolstoy, there would obviously be no need of laws, courts, police or government. If all people were equally intelligent, strong and skillful, everyone would work for himself and it would not be necessary to divide labor according to individual capacities at the risk of establishing further noxious inequality. If mere non-resistance could convince and ccasing to fight could convert, we might demobilize the army and throw open the frontiers.
Unfortunately, human nature is not made of such delicate stuff. Aggressiveness, jealousy, sloth, falsehood and violence arc solidly anchored in our hearts. To pretend that abolishing evil's outward means of coercion will do away with evil itself is putting the cart before the horse. Once again, in presenting his doctrine, Tolstoy assumes that the problem has been solved so that he will not have to solve it, and replaces reasoned argument with prophetic but haphazard intensity.
In his anger, he hurls himself against everything his contemporaries might be tempted to venerate. The more universally an idea is accepted, the more it infuriates him. He would impose a whole new scale of values upon the mass, reject all that has been said and done before him; if need be, recreate the world. In passing, he doles out a lesson in con jugal meekness to his wife: a mother is the only woman entitled to man's respect, all others are prostitutes and that's that. (The days when he recognized their usefulness to society are long past.) "The mother will not urge her husband to engage in false and misguided strivings whose only aim is to profit from the work of others; she will regard all such activities, which might tempt her children, with loathing and contempt. . . . Such are the women who dominate men and act as their guiding light."
Upon reading this paragraph Sonya must have felt that she could never be a "guiding light" in the sense Lyovochka meant. However much he insisted that his philosophizing was more important than his novels, she would never believe it. Besides, if she had begun to doubt her judgment, this year's admirable Death of Ivan Ilich was proof that she was not mistaken. After so many volumes of woolly philosophy, this simple, profound, piercing story showed that at fifty-seven, Tolstoy's creative powers were still intact.
The idea for the story, originally entitled The Death of a Judge, was given to him by the death of a man named Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, a judge at the court of Tula, in 1881. He had heard the details from Mechnikov's brother. His original idea had been simply to write a diary of a man struggling with and then abandoning himself to death. But gradually he saw what the story might gain in tragic depth by being told in the third person, particularly in changes of lighting effects and camera angles. And the diary grew into a novel.
Ivan Ilich is a perfect specimen of the conscientious official, who has no religion but is supported by a few principles handed down from his parents; he does not steal, he does not take bribes, he is not unfaithful to his wife, he lives an "easy, agreeable, honest" life. His rise through the ranks of the administration keeps pacc with the gradual disintegration of his marriage. Indifference soon settles in, followed by irritation and sullen anger. "At rare moments amorous impulses still drove them toward each other, but not for long," writes Tolstoy. "They were little islands, brief ports of call before sailing back out onto the high sea of their latent hatred." The hero's material circumstances are so vastly improved by an unexpected promotion that he is able to move into a luxurious apartment, perfectly suited "to his rank," and he becomes totally absorbed in decorating and furnishing it. Antique furniture, bronze figurines, plates 011 the wall ... An echo of Tolstoy's joys and tribulations while he was supervising work on the new house in Moscow? "When there was nothing left to decorate, they began to be a little bored." But Ivan llich had fallen from a ladder while hanging curtains and, after a time, the pain began to grow worse instead of better. This is the prelude to a period of unremitting anguish for the judge. He senses that something dreadful is going on inside him, "something more important than everything that had happened to him until then." He consults doctors, who reassure but cannot cure him. His wife and daughter refuse to take him seriously, or feign cheerfulness in order to keep him from worrying even more. A chasm opens up between him and all people in good health. They are only play- acting; he, for the first time, has touched the essence. Condemned to his bedroom, he faces the thought of death. "I was alive and now my life is going away. It is going and I cannot stop it. . . . Where shall I be when I am no more?" As his illness wears on, he begins to feel more alone, less understood, less loved. His presence is a weight upon the living, he is preventing them from being happy, amusing themselves, going about their business. His wife and daughter stop in to see him one evening on their way to the theater. He hates them for looking so strong and clean and healthy, with the loathing of a diseased body for all cool, white, sweet-smelling flesh. His only friend is a servant, Gerasim, who wipes and washes him and sometimes holds up his feet, which relieves the pain a little. He feels sorry for himself, he bemoans his fate, he tries to recall his former pleasant life, and he is appalled to discover that all the memories he took for gold are nothing but false coin. "The closer he came to the present, the more uncertain and empty seemed the joys he had known. . . . Perhaps I have not lived as I should have lived, he thought." No matter how he rationalizes, his failure becomes more and more patent. Now he knows that all the time he thought he was succeeding in his career, he was actually failing in his life, and his "service, well-ordered existence, family and social interests were nothing but lies." Then what is man's purpose on