Dostoevsky Reads WAR AND PEACE

 

Dostoevsky Reads War and Peace

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was serialized in Katkov’s journal The Russian Messenger, beginning in the January and February issues of 1866. At times early chapters of War and Peace were running in that same journal concurrently with C and P. By the time first chapters of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot ran there as well (January, 1868), Dostoevsky had read half of War and Peace and was eager to read the rest. As he wrote to his friend, Apollon Maikov, “I should so much like to read the whole thing . . . It seems to me quite a major work, although unfortunately it has too many psychological details. I wish there were fewer of them. On the other hand, though, perhaps just because of these details it has so many good things.”

Aware that he was in competition with a genuine writer, Dostoevsky often tempered his admiration for Tolstoy with criticism. He could not conceal a certain envy. He was offended by remarks made by the critic Nikolai Strakhov, a long-time friend who was in ecstasy over Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In a critical article Strakhov once wrote that “Count Tolstoy did not attempt to entice the reader with any complicated and mysterious adventures, or the description of any scabrous and horrifying scenes, or the depiction of terrible spiritual agony, or, finally, any sort of daring, new tendencies that stimulate in an unhealthy way the imagination of the reader.” Dostoevsky saw such remarks as aimed at himself, and he was probably right.

Although for a long time Strakhov dined regularly with the Dostoevsky family in St. Petersburg, he and Dostoevsky never much liked each other. Strakhov paid the writer back tenfold for any personal slights, when, in 1883—after Dostoevsky’s death—he wrote a letter to Tolstoy, repeating vicious gossip that painted Dostoevsky as a pedophile. This canard, which came to light only after Strakhov himself was dead, has taken on a life of its own, as people, unfortunately, delight in believing the worst about great men.

Back to War and Peace. Shortly before the birth of Dostoevsky’s second child, Lyubov—she was born in Dresden on September 26, 1869—Strakhov had sent him the book publication of War and Peace. Dostoevsky, however, pretended that one of the volumes had been misplaced. Since in 1868 they had lost their first baby born abroad, Sofya, and since his wife Anna Grigorievna was fearful about giving birth again, he wanted to shield from her the passage describing the death in childbirth of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s wife in the novel. [Information above is from Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, p. 278-79, 350-51, 368.]

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Dostoevsky’s great dream was to write a novel substantial enough to vie with the novels of his two great rivals, Turgenev and Tolstoy. He felt a sense of inferiority to both of them, and part of that had its origins in his low social status. Turgenev and Tolstoy were both of the high nobility. They never had to live hand to mouth, as did Dostoevsky almost the whole of his life, and one can understand his bitter complaints that he—had he not been oppressed perpetually by financial constraints, had he not had to rush his works into print because he needed money—would have had the time and leisure to perfect his style.

Comparing him to Turgenev today seems ludicrous, as his fictional works—their psychological and philosophical content—is so much more profound than that of Turgenev. Late in his career he hoped to complete his Life of a Great Sinner, a work that would rival War and Peace in scope and profundity. He completed only the first volume, The Brothers Karamazov, but if you take into account the aggregate of his novelistic production: five big novels, beginning with the prelude novella, Notes from the Underground, and ending with The Brothers Karamazov, he did manage a literary oeuvre inferior perhaps only to Tolstoy in Russian literature.

Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" CHEKHOV WINKS AT TOLSTOY: (2) THE GOOD COUNTRY LIFE

CHEKHOV WINKS AT TOLSTOY: (2) The Good Country Life

One of Tolstoy’s obsessions throughout much of his life was his dream of good country living, surrounded by wife and family and in close communion with nature. He exalted this sort of life in both of his two major novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Furthermore, he tried to live exactly such a life himself, on his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy hated cities, trains, loved peasants and Mother Earth. But his attempts to find happiness in the good country life were never entirely successful. In the final pages of Anna Karenina the author’s alter ego Levin—despite his having achieved a happy family life and contentment on his country estate—is in constant depression and contemplates suicide on a daily basis.

Chekhov has a lot of fun taking Tolstoy’s themes and circumstances, then making a travesty of them. This is most obvious in the story “Gooseberries,” which depicts how the dream of good country living results in a man becoming a miser, then marrying a woman for her money, then practically starving her to death in his parsimony. All this so that he can buy a paltry little landed estate, where he vegetates out his life, being a pig, eating hard and sour gooseberries.

As if the take-off on Tolstoy were not clear enough, Chekhov makes an obvious allusion to one of Tolstoy’s short moralizing stories, “How Much Land Does A Man Need.” This is a parable about a peasant who is told he can buy very cheaply as much land as he can walk over in a given day. But the peasant is so greedy that he overstrains himself and dies of exhaustion at the very moment he is on the verge of acquiring a huge plot of land. The moral of a story and the answer of the question in the title: a man needs really only six feet of earth to be buried in.

Chekhov has one of his characters, Ivan Ivanovich, reply to Tolstoy. “They say man needs only six feet of earth. But it is a corpse, and not a man, who needs six feet . . . . these country estates are nothing but those same six feet of earth. To escape from the town, from the struggle, from the loud bustle of life, to escape and hunker down on a country estate is not life, but egoism, idleness . . . . It is not six feet of earth, not a country estate that man needs, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, where he will have room to display his personality and the individual characteristics of his free soul.”

Don’t make the mistake, however, of assuming that the above is Chekhov’s own personal reply to Tolstoy. That is not the way Chekhov writes fiction. Everything tends to cut two ways, and the authenticity of the above opinion is undercut, at least in part, by the fact that the blowhard melancholic Ivan Ivanovich is the person voicing it.

As we move on to the next story, “About Love,” the theme of good country living/or the lack thereof moves with us. Alyokhin the landowner in “About Love” is a travesty of Levin the landowner and alter ego of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. One of the most famous scenes in all of Russian literature is the episode that depicts Levin out mowing with his peasants, exulting in the sweat of his brow. He tells his idle half brother that he has found a new therapy, known as Arbeitskur: the work cure.

But Alyokin is bored stiff living in the country. He works like a peasant only because he has no choice, but he finds the work exhausting and stultifying. He “ploughed, sowed and reaped” and felt “like a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen garden.” So much for the Arbeitskur.

As for the little pokes at Tolstoy, especially at Anna Karenina, the list could be extended indefinitely. In an important episode in Tolstoy’s novel a man falls under a train at the station and is killed. Anna Karenina is present at this time, and the death haunts her for the rest of the novel. In Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” Ivan Ivanovich tells of a man who fell under a train; his leg was cut off. Taken away for treatment to the waiting room, the bloodied man pleads desperately for someone to find the leg: it had twenty rubles in the boot and he doesn’t want to lose his money.

Why all the literary poking at Tolstoy and his works? For one thing it’s fun. For another it takes Tolstoy’s literary works and subtly rewrites them, showing some of the multivaried possibilites for new works based on the same materials. Finally, it is a way Chekhov has of asserting: “I too am a writer, and I too can show you a thing or two about writing.” This is the age-old business of the competition between literary “fathers” and their literary “sons.”