Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20 (Jan., 1929), pp. 465-472 Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202318 . Accessed: 05/05/2011 17:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucl. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Modern Humanities Research Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review. http://www.jstor.org TOLSTOY CENTENARY SUPPLEMENT. EDITED BY PRINCE D. S. MIRSKY. TOLSTOY'S " MEMOIRS OF A MADMAN." (Two Chapters from The Revelations of Death.) AMONG the posthumous works of Tolstoy, there is a short, unfinished story, The Memoirs of a Madman. The subject is very simple. Having learnt that a property is to be sold in the government of Penza, a rich landowner goes to the place in order to look at it and to buy it. He is feeling very pleased; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a ridic- ulous price, almost for nothing. But suddenly, on the way, during a night which he spends at a hotel, without any apparent reason, he is seized by an agonising and unbearable pain. Nothing is changed in his surroundings, nothing new has happened, but up till now everything has inspired him with confidence, every- thing seemed to him to be natural, normal, necessary, well- regulated and satisfying, he felt the solid earth beneath his feet, and around him-reality. There were neither doubts nor ques- tions! Nothing but answers. But behold everything is changed, suddenly, instantaneously, as though a fairy had waved her wand. The solution of problems, peace, the solid earth, the knowledge of what was right and the feeling which arises from it of lightness, simplicity and clearness-all this had disappeared. He saw nothing around him but formidable questions with their inevitable, importunate accompaniments of anxiety, doubt, and unreasoning, gnawing and unconquerable terror. The ordinary means employed to rid oneself of painful thoughts were completely ineffectual. "I tried to think about what interested me: about the acquisition of the property, about my wife. Not only was there nothing amusing in these subjects, but they had ceased to hold 465 HH 466 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. any meaning for me. The horror of my lost existence hid all these things from me. It was time to sleep. I tried to go to bed; but hardly had I lain down, than my terror forced me to rise again. And an anxiety came over me, an anxiety like that which precedes sickness, but moral! Terror, fear! It seems as though death were terrible, but when one recollects, when one thinks of life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms one. Death and life seemed in a certain measure to be confounded. Some- thing was tearing my existence into shreds, but did not succeed in tearing it altogether. I went to look at the sleepers once more, I tried again to sleep; but terror was still there, red, white and square. Something was being torn, but yet it would not give way." Thus Tolstoy pitilessly exposes himself before our eyes. Few writers reveal such truths. And if one desires, if one succeeds in apprehending this truth-for truth laid bare is not easy to perceive either-a whole series of problems come into being, out of all proportion to our normal thoughts. How are we to receive these terrors which have suddenly appeared, red, white and square ? In the world which is common to all, there is not and there cannot be a " suddenly," nor an action without a cause. And the terrors there are neither white nor red nor square. That which happened to Tolstoy constitutes a menace to normal, human consciousness. To-day it is Tolstoy who has been seized upon by anxiety, suddenly, and without any assignable motive; to-morrow it will be another, then a third, and one fine day it will be the whole race, all mankind, which will succumb. If we seriously admit what we are told in the Memoirs, there is no other issue: we must either give up Tolstoy, cut him off from among his fellow-creatures, just as in the middle ages lepers and those suffering from contagious diseases were sequestered, or else, if we consider his experience to be legitimate, we must expect others to undergo the same, and tremble lest the " world common to all" should fall to pieces, and each individual begin to live in his own world, not only in his dreams, but also in his waking hours. Common sense and the knowledge which has issued from it cannot hesitate in making its choice. Tolstoy is wrong, with his causeless anguish, his unreasonable terrors, his foolish restless- ness. It is the " world which is common to all " which is right, with its solid beliefs, its eternal truths, sharp and clear, satisfying and accessible to all. If he had not been such a famous writer, his fate would have been rapidly sealed: he would have been " MEMOIRS OF A MADMAN." 467 banned by society, as a dangerous and unhealthy individual. But Tolstoy is the pride and glory of Russia: it would be im- possible to treat him like this; although his words appear to be devoid of all meaning and quite inacceptable, he is still listened to, and he even continues to be taken into account. " To-day, he tells us, I was taken to the provincial council and made to undergo a mental examination. Opinions were divided. There was a discussion, but it was finally decided that I was not mad. But this was because I forced myself not to speak the truth throughout the doctor's visit. I was not honest because I was afraid of the asylum, I was afraid that they would prevent me from accomplishing my work as a madman. They certified that I was subject to attacks and also other things, but that I was of sound mind. They certified it, but I know that I am mad." It is beyond question that it is not they, but he who is right. All his life Tolstoy had the feeling that something was forcing him out of the world which is common to all. He tells us that it had already happened to him, though only rarely, to undergo experiences of the same kind as he underwent at Penza. From childhood, he had felt himself, for the most trivial reasons, suddenly overwhelmed by a hideous terror which abruptly drove out all his natural happiness and the feeling of the balance of existence. He is lying in his bed; he is warm, he is satisfied, he is at peace, he believes that all men are good and that they love one another. Suddenly he hears his nurse and the house- keeper exchanging a few disagreeable words and behold the charm vanishes away immediately. " I am ill and I am afraid, I no longer understand anything. Terror, cold terror takes hold of me and I bury my head under the bed-clothes." Another time, he saw a little boy being beaten: " I had an attack. I began to sob and, for a long time, no one was able to console me. Those sobs were the first manifestation of my revolt." The third attack occurred when his aunt told him the story of the Passion of Christ. He wanted to know why they had made Him suffer in that way. His aunt did not know what to answer. " And again the same feeling took possession of me. I sobbed, I beat my head against the wall." We have all been present on the occasion of quarrels between our neighbours, we have seen children ill-treated, we have read and we have heard the story of the sufferings of Christ. Tolstoy was not alone in these experi- ences. But no one, or hardly any one, reacted against these 468 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. things as tumultuously, as irresistibly as did Tolstoy. One weeps and then one forgets; other impressions come which submerge and dissolve the earlier ones. But it was not given to Tolstoy to forget. The remembrances of childhood had anchored themselves deeply in his soul; it even seemed as though he wished to preserve them carefully, like a precious treasure, like a sort of mysterious Platonic anamnesis, dim witness to another inconceivable reality. And these impressions wait until the wheel of time has revolved, to appear as masters and assert their rights. Pleasures, preoccupations, all the multifarious business of existence made Tolstoy forget, it is true, and for many years turned his attention from his strange visions. And then, as he tells us himself, he had an instinctive fear of the mad-house, and he was even more afraid of becoming mad, that is to say, of having to live in his own particular world, and not in the world which is common to all. Therefore he made desperate efforts to live like everyone else, to see things which hold us to the common routine. II. The Memoirs of a Madman can be considered in a certain sense as Tolstoy's greatest work. If the Memoirs had not been written by Tolstoy himself, we should certainly have regarded it as a calumny against him; for we are accustomed to look upon great men as the incarnation of all the civil, and even the military virtues. And, moreover, he himself, if anyone had dared a year, a week, before the outbreak of his " madness," to paint his existence in the same light as that in which it appears in the Memoirs, would have been profoundly indignant and would only have looked upon it as a criminal attack upon his good name. The most envenomed calumny could not, in fact, have borne comparison with this truth which Tolstoy himself revealed to us. He wanted to buy a property, he did not wish to pay the right price for it. He was looking for an imbecile-those are his own words-who would give him his property for next to nothing, in order that by selling the timber he might obtain a sufficient sum to reimburse him for the purchase of the whole place, which, by these means, he would have acquired for nothing. Such " imbeciles " can undoubtedly be found; game will always come in the way of a good shot. Tolstoy waited patiently: he read the advertisements, collected information. If God should not send him an imbecile, he determined to make up for it by exploit- " MEMOIRS OF A MADMAN." 469 ing the peasants. He would buy a property in a district 'where the peasants had not got enough land for their needs; so that he would be able to get agricultural labour at starvation wages. It is easy to prove that this story was not a mere fiction, and that the landowner of whom it speaks is Tolstoy himself. One of the letters addressed by Tolstoy to his wife, explains the matter (I, 63); I will quote the whole of it: "The day before yesterday, I spent the night at Arzamas, and a most extraordinary thing happened to me. At two o'clock in the morning, a strange anxiety, a fear, a terror, such as I have never experienced before, took possession of me. I will tell you the details later, but I have never known such painful sensations, and may God preserve others from them. I hastily rose and gave orders to have the horses put in. . While they were being harnessed, I fell asleep, and woke' again in a normal state of mind. Yesterday, the feelings came back, in the course of my journey, but they were not nearly so strong; I was prepared and I resisted them, the' more easily as they were weaker than before. To-day I feel well, and as happy as it is possible to be when away from you. While I have been on this journey, I have felt for the first time the full extent of how dear you are to me, you and the children. I can be alone when I am constantly occupied, as at Moscow, but directly I have nothing to do, I feel how impossible it is for me to be alone." The letter and the Memoirs of a Madman agree down to the smallest details: the purchase of a property, the journey, the government of Penza, the town of Arzamas, the recollection of his wife, the wild unreasoning terror. It is an old-fashioned custom in literature to show only the facade of the existence of great men to their readers. The basic truths are of no use to us; what should we do with them ? We are convinced that truths are necessary to us, not for their own sakes, but in as much as they can be useful to us in our actions. Strakhov adopted this point of view, for example, when he wrote Dostoyevsky's biography; he acknowledged it himself in a letter written to Tolstoy, and published in I9I3: "All the time I was writing, I had to fight against a feeling of disgust in myself, I tried to stifle my bad feelings. Help me to get rid of them. I cannot look upon Dostoyevsky as a good or happy man. He was bad, debauched, full of envy. All his life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him 470 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. ridiculous and miserable if he had been less intelligent or less wicked. I was vividly reminded of these feelings, when I was writing this biography. In Switzerland, in my presence, he treated his servant so badly, that the man revolted and said to him: ' But I too am a man ! ' I remember how much I was struck by these words which reflected the ideas current in free Switzerland, about the rights of man, and were addressed to one who was always preaching sentiments of humanity to the rest of mankind. Such scenes were of constant occurrence, he could not control his temper. A thousand times I opposed silence to the insults, with which he would attack me unexpectedly and some- times indirectly like an old woman; but on one or two occasions I gave him very disagreeable answers. However,healways gotthe better of ordinary people; and the worst of it was that he prided himself on the fact and that he never really repented of his dirty actions. Dirty actions attracted him, and he gloried in the fact. Viskovatov (Professor of Yuryev University) told me how he had boasted of having abused' a little girl, in the bath, who had been brought to him by her governess. Of all his characters, those which resemble him most are the heroes of Notesfrom Under- ground, Svidrigaylov and Stavrogin. Katkov refused to pub- lish one of the Stavrogin scenes (rape, etc.), but Dostoiyevsky read it here to a great number of people. With' all this, he was given to a sort of mawkish sentimentality, to high-flown humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary message and the tendency of his writings which endear him to us. In a word, all these novels endeavour to exculpate their author; they show that the most hideous villainies can exist in a man side by side with the noblest sentiments. This is a little commentary on my biography; I might describe that side of Dostoyevsky's character; I can call to mind innumerable incidents which are even more striking than the ones I have already mentioned; my story would have been more truthful; but let this truth perish; let us continue to show nothing but the beautiful side of life, as we always do, on all occasions." I do not know whether there are many documents of greater value than this in the whole history of literature. I am not even sure that Strakhov understood the true significance, the value of what he acknowledged to Tolstoy. In modern times many people have affirmed that lies are better than truth; Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have told us this, and even Pushkin says: " The lie which helps us to rise is dearer to us than a legion of low "MEMOIRS OF A MADMAN." 47I truths!" But they all address themselves to the reader; they teach. Strakhov makes his confession very simply and sincerely, and this gives great and special meaning to his words. It is probable that his letter made a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of conventional life very hard to bear, and was consumed with the desire to cleanse himself by a wholehearted confession. For Tolstoy too was one of the priests of the magnificent life, and how beautiful and how seductive that life could be ! Like Strakhov, Tolstoy taught us to show the beautiful side of life and to hide the truth. He wrote War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, in which he painted the lives of country gentlemen in the most glowing colours, and himself bought land at starvation prices from imbeciles, oppressed the peasants who were without land, etc. But then all that was a very different matter-that was reality. All that appeared legitimate, even sacred, because it served to maintain the world which is common to us all. If you turn away from that world, you will be obliged to make a world of your own. This is just what happened to the hero of the Memoirs of a Madman. He saw that he had to choose: either his wife and his kindred were right in attacking his new ideas, and he was really ill and in need of treatment, or else all mankind were sick and tainted with madness. This title, the Memoirs of a Madman, sums up, in fact, all that Tolstoy wrote after he was fifty years of age. And it seems to me that it was not merely by chance that Tolstoy borrowed this title from Gogol. A little girl to whom Gogol's story was read in my presence, appeared most surprised by the fact that Gogol had been able to describe so minutely the smallest details of the chaotic state of an unbalanced mind. What, in fact, had this strange subject, that could attract a young writer ? Why describe chaos and madness ? How can it affect us that Poprishchin' should fancy himself to be the king of Spain, that he should fall in love with the daughter of his chief, etc. ? It is obvious that the disordered imagination of a madman did not appear to Gogol to be as absurd, as devoid of all meaning as it appears to us, just as the world peculiar to this madman did not appear as unreal to him as it does to us. Poprishchin and Poprishchin's madness attracted him; the strange world and the miserable life of his hero had in them something which fascinated the future author of the Correspondence with his Friends. Why should he otherwise have concerned himself with the pitiful absurdity of Poprishchin's feelings ? Remember, too, that at this 1 The hero of Gogol's story, The Memoirs of a Madman. 472 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. time Gogol was not only attracted by the madness of Poprishchin. It was at this time that he also wrote Viy, The Terrible Vengeance and The Old-world Landowners. And it would be wrong to think that he shows himself as only an impartial observer of the habits and lives of the people in these books. The horrible death which wrested Afanassy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna so abruptly from the torpor of their exist- ence, constantly troubled the imagination of the young Gogol. It is evident that the mysterious horror of the popular tales and myths intoxicated him too, that he himself lived in the realm of the fantastic, as much as in the actual world which is recognised by all men. The sorcerers, witches and demons, inimitably painted by him, all the horrors, all the delights which unfold in the human soul, when it touches the mysteries of another world, irresistibly attracted Gogol. If one should wish to define Gogol's secret nature, his essence, and that part of him which was a stranger to the other, external nature, if, in other words, one wanted to know where to find the true Gogol, whether in the place which the history of culture has assigned to him, or in the realms to which his capricious fancy took him, there would not be sufficient data at one's command with which to answer these questions, unless one made up one's mind to trust to one of those modern theories of knowledge which, following in the footsteps of Aristotle, have arrogated to themselves the right to define the boundaries between waking and dreaming, between reality and imagination. But if one is not of those who blindly believe in ready-made theories, if one is able to free oneself sometimes, if only for a moment, from the suggestion of modern ideas, then one will be less categorical in valuing Gogol's endeavours to paint this enigmatical reality, which, though inaccessible and held in dis- repute by theory, is full of seduction. It will then perhaps be admitted that in Dead Souls Gogol was not trying to reform manners and customs, but was trying to arrive at a knowledge of his own destiny and that of humanity. He himself has told Us, moreover, that his apparent laughter covered unseen tears, and that when we laugh at Chichikov or at Nozdrev, we are in reality laughing at their creator. LEO SHESTOV. (Translated by CAMILLA COVENTRY.)
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