byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975) - Assassinating Napoleon 

“You’re being all pantheistic again” - happy birthday Woody Allen!

The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy: 100 Years Ago | Open Culture

100 years ago today (November 20), Leo Tolstoy, who gave us two major classics in the Russian tradition, Anna Karenina and War & Peace, died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate and his wealth and traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to live the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weak constitution could bear. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s very last days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.

Great video, but the commentary - from 1969 - mentions that Tolstoy ran away, aged 82, from his “poor demented wife.” How patronising! I am a big fan of Tolstoy’s work, but he was a complicated and self-contradictory man with a strange Christ-complex, and so many biographers who become entranced by the depth of his philosophy and his literary skill completely fail to see his wife’s perspective. 

Sofya Tolstoya was utterly devoted to her husband. She bore him seventeen children - out of which thirteen survived - while he preached abstinence and celibacy. She fed him, their children, and dozens of devoted fans and acolytes he invited to stay with them as he promoted his peculiar version of religious philosophy, which involved vegetarianism and fasting (but he ate meat on the sly). She was in charge of the estate’s finances, and responsible for the lives of workers living on it (and off its produce), as Count Tolstoy preached the abolition of serfdom but nonetheless kept servants. She struggled to preserve the copyright to his works so that their children could have a relatively safe economic future even in the case of a revolution, as Tolstoy’s creepy secretary Chertkoff persuaded him to give up all income derived from his publications to the people of Russia (good sentiment, but if in a patriarchal society the father doesn’t earn anything it makes a large family’s life quite tricky, doesn’t it). Besides, without her there would be no War and Peace, nor Anna Karenina: she stayed up nights to transcribe his illegible handwriting before his drafts could be sent to publishers. 

For her sins, she was a naive but ambitious and spoiled rich girl when she married him, aged eighteen (he was thirty-five - the story of their courtship is mirrored in great detail in Levin and Kitty’s in Anna Karenina), and the shock of finding herself in the arms of this successful writer and penniless Count in the middle of a vast wild country, after a life spent as the daughter of the court doctor must have been enormous. She coped with it by learning to run the estate, and gaining a degree of intellectual independence and education unimaginable for a woman of the Russian high society at the time.

As he became more and more regarded as a sage and gradually lost touch with everyday life, she began to struggle and felt lost. She had devoted her entire life to him, and suddenly he seemed not to care about anything ordinary - anything that she had come to regard as her domain - anymore. Only the great topics of the world interested him. She suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide various times, some say, in order to get his attention. Perhaps, but read her diaries and you’ll find that she was burdened with misery of her own, which only worsened during middle age. They rowed like crazy, but then also made peace with intense and passionate words (through their diaries, which they kept daily, and exchanged every night in order to know exactly what the other was thinking or writing - something he insisted upon), often resolving their clashes through fierce lovemaking. It seems to me that they couldn’t live together without fighting, and yet they couldn’t be apart.

When Tolstoy finally ran away from home to pursue his fantasy of asceticism away from all human bonds he fell too ill to travel any further than the train station at Astapovo (now called Lev Tolstoy Station). Sofya Tolstoya travelled there as soon as she heard the news, and waited for three days outside in the freezing snow to see him. He was in agony and probably not conscious for most of the time, but his secretary did not allow her to see him until it was too late. It’s a sad story this story of genius, mania and love, but one that can’t be written without one character or the other.