It is impossible to imagine him at a writing desk. I see him with his cobbler’s last between his knees and nails held between his lips—he has such a character: God has become a cobbler named Michael and entered the service of Master Simon. He has turned his formidable head from his work towards the door, where a reporter from some Western newspaper has appeared to ask the Count’s opinion on women’s freedom or, say, the Russo-Japanese War. The reporter appeared joyfully and now regrets it, sweating, for in the Count’s heavy gaze he already sees his accurate assessment: charlatan. I see him slipping his fingers beneath a horse’s girth—has the labourer saddled it firmly?—eating bread crumbled in kvass in a hayfield with a wooden spoon he carved himself with his crooked, worked, strong fingers; making a hive from thick limewood boards beneath their white Russian sun; building a neighbouring peasant’s hut with him. Their broken, almost silent conversation is incomprehensible to everyone around, and no one knows the warmth that simple friendship with a simple man gives him. A dog would not bark at him, a horse would not kick him, the Pharisees would not capture him; Leonardo, brush in hand, would blush and wait for his approval. Border barriers would rise long before his appearance, before him, the great creator of lands, people and animals, that great traveller across the weary earth. And that image of the old man with a shoulder bag is his own creation too, the most beloved to us of all his characters: his own image, Leo Tolstoy’s, the most enormous, whose creation and correction took all his time, all his talent and all his peasant diligence. Before sending himself, as it were, on a great journey through the ages, he checked, tested and checked that image of himself again.
It is impossible to imagine that old man sitting at a writing desk.
His work in a hundred and more volumes, his examination and judgement of his time, seems not written but spoken. His world presents itself not as books but as images full of light, movement, fragrance, space, sounds and thoughts. Books—the binding, typeface, bad translation, good translation, original, syntax and notes—cannot turn his world into a book. With the trembling of a Mozart melody, life evades, flows, soars, plays, expands and refuses to enter a book and be shut inside, though more than a hundred years have passed and it would seem time for that life to be loved already as writing and culture.
Like God, he speaks from his height, and there is light. With precisely chosen words he speaks, and the clearing of light, that great Yasnaya Polyana, expands. In that great luminous valley, with his words appear children, animals and flowers, appointed by their creator, the enemy of approximation and so-called reinterpretation, to be only flowers, only animals, only children. With his words passions flare, events unfold, and he is master of each and all and knows well every layer of those events, the causes of passions, all the inflections of existence: from the ruler’s self-exalting arrogance to the spinal sensations of a slain man; from the adolescent’s almost floral, vegetal ripening, the old princesses’ last coquetries, the dying horse’s submissive waiting, the mischievous surge of a young mare’s blood, to the rational person’s tragic struggle against the calling ordained by God.
He has no unindividualised dogs, no characterless horses, no faceless mechanical movement of horse, dog, wolf, hare, person, retinue or army. They are all—the running, the rain, the dawn of a particular day, the tree—all characters. He does not use the words crowd, people, mass, which would betray his weakness as a writer or the contempt and secret fears of a well-provided count. The word crowd does not exist for him. Name by name, care by care, destiny by destiny, he knows them all, and they are all his children. At any moment they can separate from the background, come forward and take the place of Prince Bolkonsky, Father Sergius or Kholstomer the horse, pushing those others into the background and again pointing out that the background is not a crowd but Bolkonskys. Before being a question of talent and ability, this is a question of worldview, a question of human kindness—unless human kindness, too, is a question of talent and ability.
The outline of his narrative, not another’s, bends, opens and takes in the poor life of the soldier accidentally struck in the dark by a stray bullet: his village, parents, his wife grown shameless with a shop clerk. The outline bends and stretches, follows Hadji Murad’s affair to Petersburg, embraces the tsar with clouded eyes, looking and not seeing, that successful favourite of court maidens and bad master of the country. And it becomes clear that the Caucasus’s slowly grown forests will be felled, the Chechens’ poor, well-tended auls devastated, soldiers struck down by stray bullets.
His people, things, phenomena and animals do not end at their physical boundaries; they radiate, and that is their inner property. That radiance, that constant trembling of light over his spaces, that halo around his animals and people is not brought from above. It is not light scattered by Christianity or Islam, not the crowning of a faithful flock before the heavenly master, not deception, vision, falsehood and preaching for some lofty cause. It is the nature of existence, and Tolstoy is the one who reveals it.