Tolstoy (68 page)

Tanya had been a peacemaker for her parents, and she was keenly missed. In the summer of 1897 Masha lamented in a letter to Galya Chertkova that there was a sadness at Yasnaya Polyana, with each person dealing with their own issues, and feeling very lonely.
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There certainly seemed to be many problems in both generations of the Tolstoy family that year. Sergey's marriage had gone wrong soon after he married in 1895, and in 1897 his wife divorced him after their son was born.
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Ilya now had three children (a fourth had died before his second birthday), his wife Sonya was expecting another, and he was always short of money. Lev junior had recovered from the nervous breakdown he had suffered after the famine-relief work out in Samara, and had married the daughter of the Swedish doctor who had cured him in Stockholm, but, like most of his brothers, he was fanatically opposed to his father's views. After he and his wife moved into the wing at Yasnaya Polyana, there had been many bitter rows with Lev senior. The situation with the three youngest children was not much better. Andrey, who turned twenty in 1897, had been expelled from school for tearing up a picture of Nicholas II, and was leading a dissipated life. He was already a notorious womaniser, first angering his father by wanting to marry a peasant girl from Yasnaya Polyana whom he had become involved with at the age of fifteen, then absconding to the Caucasus where he fell in love with a Georgian princess, who in due course was also unceremoniously dropped.
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Andrey constantly ran up large debts, and expected his mother to bail him out. Eighteen-year-old Misha, still at school in Moscow, was suffering teenage angst, and Alexandra (Sasha), who turned thirteen in 1897, had turned into a tomboy with an unwavering hostility towards her mother. This was hardly surprising as Sonya had neglected her youngest daughter from the moment she was born.

There were also problems over at Pirogovo. To the horror of Tolstoy's brother Sergey, whose way of life was very ancien régime, despite his unconventional marriage, both his daughters had become fervent Tolstoyans. In 1897 Varya became the common-law wife of Vladimir Vasiliev, who was one of Sergey's peasants, and she left home. Her elder sister Vera was also a free spirit who shocked her father by having a child out of wedlock a couple of years later with Abdurashid Sarafov, a Bashkir who had come to Pirogovo to provide them with koumiss.
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Tolstoy felt very guilty. In 1897 Sonya's strange obsession with Taneyev and his playing showed no sign of abating, and Tolstoy yearned again to leave home. At one point he got as far as writing a farewell letter to Sonya, but ended up stuffing it down the back of a chair after they made up.
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Sonya agreed not to invite Taneyev to Yasnaya Polyana again, and Tolstoy channelled his feelings about music, and what he regarded as its dangerous powers, on to the page. The product was his iconoclastic treatise
What is Art?,
which he had been thinking about writing ever since his daughter Tanya had become a student at the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1881.

What is Art?
is of a piece with Tolstoy's religious writings, in that it promotes the sort of Christian art to which he himself aspired. Art for Tolstoy was the ability to communicate universal feelings of brotherly love to the widest possible audience. Everything else is made the subject of condemnation as 'counterfeit art', namely:

all novels and poems which transmit ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings, and also exclusive feelings pertaining only to the class of the idle rich, such as aristocratic honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings flowing from sex-love - quite incomprehensible to the great majority of mankind.

In painting we must similarly place in the class of bad art all the Church, patriotic, and exclusive pictures; all the pictures representing the amusements and allurements of a rich and idle life; all the so-called symbolic pictures, in which the very meaning of the symbol is comprehensible only to the people of a certain circle; and, above all, pictures with voluptuous subjects - all that odious female nudity which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. And to this class belongs almost all the chamber and opera music of our times, beginning especially with Beethoven (Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner) - by its subject-matter devoted to the expression of feelings accessible only to people who have developed in themselves an unhealthy, nervous irritation evoked by this exclusive, artificial, and complex music...
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Into the category of 'counterfeit art' falls most of modern Western culture, deplored by Tolstoy as degenerate and elitist, not to mention all the fiction he himself wrote before he became an overtly Christian artist (such as the novels
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina).

Looking back over the trajectory of Tolstoy's career, it is possible to see that he took pains to transform himself into a different kind of artist long before his religious 'conversion' at the end of the 1870s. The love and care he invested in his
ABC
books is testament to his desire to simplify his artistic expression, just as the distress and discomfort he experienced writing
Anna Karenina
is witness to the pangs of conscience provoked by his return to writing for an educated audience. Tolstoy was never less than a consummate artist, however. The simplicity of the message conveyed by his late masterpiece
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
belies the sophisticated means with which the story is constructed on both the narrative and thematic levels, and his hard-won clarity exerted a huge impact on younger writers like Chekhov, whose linguistic register is deliberately unpretentious and straightforward. Tolstoy certainly recognised Chekhov as a major artist - they had warmed to each other at their first meeting, when Chekhov visited Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895 (stealing Tanya's heart, before Sonya nipped the development of any romantic feelings in the bud).
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All the same, Tolstoy's impossibly narrow criteria meant that most of Chekhov's greatest stories (and all his plays) failed to make the grade as true art.

Of all the arts, Tolstoy regarded music as the most powerful, and also the most dangerous. He was a sentimental man, often reduced to tears by his favourite pieces, and it was probably his inability to control his emotional reactions to music as much as his moral scruples which made him condemn much of it. There is a link here, of course, to Tolstoy's punitive attitude to female sensuality, which also exerted a hypnotic hold over him, and which he also censured on moral grounds in works like
The Kreutzer Sonata.
The writer D. H. Lawrence, for one, was incensed that the vibrant, warm-hearted Anna Karenina had to fall victim to Tolstoy's didactic urge and be essentially punished for her sexuality. As someone who in 1912 himself eloped with a married woman who had three children, Lawrence took strong exception to the idea that Tolstoy's admirably brave and passionate heroine should have to pay for committing adultery by committing suicide.
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Similarly, Tolstoy seemed to find it easier to deal with the 'terrible power' of music by dismissing it.
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There was always a lot of music at Yasnaya Polyana, and the Becker concert grand in the main drawing room was at some point joined by a second, smaller model made by the same firm, which was reputed to be the best in Russia. (Jakob Becker, a German immigrant, had set up his piano manufacturing business in St Petersburg in 1841.) Both Tolstoy and his sister Masha were keen pianists who sometimes played for hours at a stretch (Sergey Tolstoy remembered his father sometimes playing until one in the morning in the 1870s while he was growing up), while Sonya also played, and her sister Tanya had a fine soprano voice. Of the Tolstoy children, Sergey and Misha were musically the most talented. Sergey went on to become a respected composer and ethnomusicologist who collaborated with the Indian Sufi musician and philosopher Inayat Khan, and he taught at the Moscow Conservatoire in the late 1930s. Misha was an accomplished pianist and violinist.

Apart from the family's amateur music-making (which involved lots of duets), there were also impromptu concerts given by the professional musicians who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana and the house in Moscow. These increased as Tolstoy grew more famous. Visitors ranged from the legendary Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who performed Rameau, to Boris Troyanovsky, the first great virtuoso balalaika player, whose repertoire consisted mostly of Russian folk tunes. Tolstoy personally invited this 'Russian Paganini' to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1909, shortly before he played for Queen Alexandra at Windsor Castle. The opera singers Nikolay and Medea Figner came up to Yasnaya Polyana from their nearby dacha on a number of occasions and bewitched the local peasants with their powerful voices, while one winter's evening Shaliapin and Rachmaninov turned up to perform at the Moscow house. The musician to whom Tolstoy became closest, despite the almost fifty years difference between their ages, was the pianist Alexander Goldenweiser, whom he got to know in 1897. Goldenweiser often played Tolstoy's favourite Chopin pieces, and later became a trusted friend of Chertkov - the memoirs he began publishing in 1922 are heavily biased against Sonya.

Even Goldenweiser had to admit that Tolstoy was a dilettante when it came to music.
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Tolstoy liked folk music and gypsy music, and most of Haydn, but otherwise was very selective about approving works by the other major western European composers. According to his son Sergey, Tolstoy liked Mozart's symphonies, some of his sonatas and a few of his arias, and he liked certain early Beethoven sonatas (definitely none of the late works). He liked some of Schumann's piano pieces and the
Dichterliebe,
one of Schubert's impromptus, and a handful of his Lieder. Otherwise his favourite composer, despite his general animus towards elite Western culture, was by far and away Chopin, which is somewhat ironic given that he was the salon musician par excellence.
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Tolstoy certainly did not like Taneyev's own music, but then there was barely any contemporary music he had time for, Russian or otherwise. He professed to being choked by the news of Tchaikovsky's untimely death in October 1893, but he had not always been very complimentary about his music.

They had met in 1876 at the Moscow Conservatoire at Tolstoy's express insistence. Tchaikovsky was very flattered that Tolstoy wanted to meet him (he was still at a relatively early stage of his career) but he was a very retiring man, and found the one serious conversation they had very onerous. It was not just that he was constantly terrified the novelist's penetrating gaze would bore straight into the 'innermost recesses' of his soul, but that he also did not enjoy being lectured at about music. He recounted the gruesome experience afterwards in a letter:

[N]o sooner had we met than he straightaway started expounding his views on music. According to him
Beethoven lacked talent.
And that was his starting point. So, this great writer, this brilliant student of human nature began, in a tone of the utmost conviction, by delivering himself of an observation which was both fatuous and offensive to every musician. What is one to do in circumstances such as this? Argue?...Although my acquaintance with Tolstoy has convinced me that he is a somewhat paradoxical, but good and straightforward man, even, in his own way, sensitive to music, all the same, my acquaintance with him, as with anyone, has brought me nothing but weariness and torment.

The meeting was followed by an evening of chamber music put on in Tolstoy's honour, which included a performance of Tchaikovsky's First Quartet, op. 11, written in 1871. The fabled
andante cantabile
of its second movement is based on a Russian folk tune which Tchaikovsky had heard a carpenter sing while he was composing at his sister's house in Ukraine, and it brought tears to Tolstoy's eyes. That, at least, Tchaikovsky found touching.
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Tolstoy went to very few public musical performances, so his knowledge of, say, Mozart's symphonies mostly came from four-hand piano arrangements. His antipathy to the artificial conventions of opera, meanwhile, was developed at an early age (and expressed through his faux-naive account of Natasha's night at the opera in
War and Peace,
which is seen as if through her eyes). Tolstoy even exhorted Tchaikovsky to abandon writing operas,
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so his response to the performance of Wagner's
Siegfried
that he went to at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1896 was perhaps entirely predictable. Tolstoy writes more about Wagner than any other artist in
What is Art?
Criticism of the performance of
Siegfried,
and of Wagnerian opera, takes up an entire chapter. Taneyev shared a box with the Tolstoys at the performance they attended on 18 April 1896, and although he liked Wagner no more than Tolstoy, he was heartily ridiculed for following with a score and listening seriously.
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Tolstoy arrived late, and walked out before the end.

As with his analysis of Metropolitan Makary's
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology
back in 1880, Tolstoy was very
parti pris
when it came to analysing Wagner's
Siegfried
- in both cases he took two isolated works out of context as exemplary of the whole, the easier to demolish them.
Siegfried
is the third part of a tetralogy, and by common consent the least engaging part of
The Ring,
so was a surprising repertoire choice for the sleepy Bolshoi Theatre in 1894, several years before even the Mariinsky, Imperial Russia's premier opera house, had staged any of Wagner's music dramas - works which place special demands both on singers and orchestra. The Mariinsky would finally complete a distinguished
Ring
cycle in 1907, but this Bolshoi
Siegfried,
sung in Russian, while a valiant effort, left a lot to be desired. Attendance at one of the two isolated revival performances in April 1896 was hardly the appropriate basis for a general assessment of Wagnerian art.
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