Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Transcript (PDF)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 4 of 13

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The Kingdom of God is Within You.
The Later Religious Writings of the “Grandfather Sage”
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 26, 1984

Transcript:

See if we can recap where we are. It's difficult to have orientation. When Tolstoy was experimenting with education. He discovered that you don't have to have a pre-planned order for education, that education, as you begin to become interested in life and involve yourself an order comes up and the more you get into a relational meaning, the more you develop a sense of order. So I usually don't write anything down but I have to keep track mentally of where we are because we're painting a very large tapestry. We're working on something that will take about six or seven years to complete and we've already done four and a half so we've come a long way. And in fact we've done Tolstoy once before in a nineteenth century course. We took the nineteenth century as a historical phenomenon. You can do that. You can take human time as a phenomenon and you can say it's the nineteenth century and it has a certain shape. And we went through the nineteenth century and we discovered that Tolstoy was the apotheosis of the nineteenth century. He was the apex. He was the culmination. He was the ultimate man of the nineteenth century. He was an extraordinary individual. And only after we had done twelve lectures through the nineteenth century and got to the thirteenth Tolstoy were we able to appreciate his strategic importance?

I can't redo that for you here tonight. But all these lectures exist on tapes and all these tapes can be had just simply for a nominal sum from my friend John Reuschlein here. So the lecture on Tolstoy tonight assumes a lot of the information that was in that lecture but I'll catch it up in brief form. The reason for all these patterned lecture series is to dovetail and present history from a human standpoint. We in our time are drowning in the tail end of a fierce war of ideologies. And ideational histories are the bane of our intelligence today. And so we're purposely moving outside of the normal realms of history and we're talking only of people, like ourselves, human beings and our only center our interesting human characters positioned in a sequence roughly in terms of when they lived, when they flourished, when they were born, when they died. The orders that we're discovering or that we intuit come because of our acquaintance in a sequential way and because we also are human beings that are rather sensitive to life. None of you would be here if you were not sensitive to some process happening in life, some sense of patterning.

So that Tolstoy now comes for the second time. We've handled some individuals as many as four times. Leibniz because of his incredible position in Western history we had to handle four times, four separate ways. So now we come to Tolstoy again and we'll also come to Tolstoy again next year – at the tail end of next year after we do an American series in 1985 we're going to do the secret American tradition, the tradition that's no longer taught in universities: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John Dewey, William James, people they don't mention much anymore in universities and especially don't give courses on. But we have a great tradition. And at the end of the American tradition we need to bring Tolstoy in again. In fact it came as rather a shock to us that after a long life which we'll see and he had refined his views on man on Christianity on the ethical needs for man to not resist evil. He found that this was a law that this was an ultimate ethical law. And when he published his book someone wrote him from the United States and said you know these ideas were published by my father in 1838, William Lloyd Garrison, and that some of the writings of Garrison were then forwarded to Tolstoy. Some of the writer's– writings of the Boston pacifist Adin Ballou were forwarded to him and he discovered that there had been Americans busy for a half century trying to refine and put into practice these ideals which he independently had discovered hard won.

So we have a great tradition and we'll come back to Tolstoy again at the end of 85. The emphasis tonight is on Tolstoy after writing War and Peace. And I'll catch up a little bit– a little bit of his life so you get a setting for it. But in particular I want to emphasize the decade of the 1870s because by 1882 Tolstoy had suffered a sea change and would never again be the same sort of man that he had been. Well what sort of man was he? He was born in 1828 and came from a very distinguished family. On his mother's side he was descended from the Volkonsky princes. Prince Volkonsky. In fact his mother's father, his maternal grandfather, was a very great general and had in fact become disgusted with war. And had gone back to the family estate with his young daughter who was Tolstoy's mother and tried to raise her in a decent ethical way, in fact raised her to to ride and to hunt rather like a boy. So she was an exceedingly interesting woman and that estate then passed to her hands and through her it became Tolstoy's. And that estate's name is famous around the world; it's Yasnaya Polyana, the home of Count Leo Tolstoy for most of his adult life.

The Tolstoy's themselves were somewhat less nobility. The Volkonsky’s had been descended in direct line from Rurik who was a Viking who was the founder of the Russian Empire. In Russian history when the Vikings came down the river valleys they represented a powerful organizing force that had not been seen in those regions of the steppes and the inner terrain of what is now Russia. And because of the cross-currents of the times, the peasants of the land asked the Viking individuals who came in, to become a ruling-class to protect them. And so a feudal order was set up with the Viking families on top, and the Russian peasants collectively helping them and a whole notion of serfdom, not slavery but serfdom, evolved – very close to slavery but it was a symbiotic social relationship. That relationship lasted until 1861 and the serfs were freed in 1861. Until then there was the master, the aristocrat, and the vast population on the land – serfs. Some families owned as many as 200,000 serfs. So that Russia, in the nineteenth century, was a completely different society from one which we might imagine.

And Leo Tolstoy was born into this aristocratic sector – the highest levels. He was sent as a student to University in Kazan, not in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but in Kazan which is actually in Tataria – Tartaria. The Tartars, of course, very courageous people, quite different from the Russians. A friend of mine from Canada, a Turkish individual, when he was in Kazan about ten or fifteen years ago, they discovered that he could speak Azerbaijani. And as soon as they discovered this, a whole collection of engineers came around him and in furtive whispers they told him we are not Russians – we are Tartars, we are different.

So the Russia of our monolithic imagination actually does not exist and has never existed in history. And the Russia of Tolstoy is the strategic point at which the ancient history for a thousand years came to a fruition. And in the spirit and language and character of Tolstoy it found its enunciation of certain basic discoveries and principles about man. And they have not been improved upon until the present day. That is to say, the entire history of the twentieth century in Russia has been a backsliding away from the discovery of man. And in fact, the Russia of 1984 resembles more a creation of the Byzantine Empire than the historical Russia that freed the serfs in 1861. We don't understand that yet today. We don't still have a conception of the incredible reoccurring pattern that we are caught up in. But we are reliving very much the twelfth century in the twentieth century. The Kingdom of Acre was exactly the same size as the State of Israel, and all the participants in that vast struggle in the twelfth century are in power again and holding very similar views. So when we're talking about Tolstoy as a Russian, he is not a Soviet at all. He belongs to that ancient order which really could be characterized as Russian.

When he got to university he discovered in talking with other students that he had absolutely no religious leanings whatsoever. He said in his writings later on that at the age of seventeen or eighteen he had a vague notion that there must be a God. What God was he could not have said. He had some idea that perhaps Christ was real but what his teachings were he really couldn't say. And he had absolutely no compunction to say prayers or to go to church and considered all of this, literally, a waste of time. Something which was handed to children to keep them quiet. And that was about it.

After university he found himself trying to establish himself as a young man in all the ways, the poor ways, in which aristocratic youth used to establish themselves: drinking, card playing, visiting brothels, duels, this kind of commotion. One of his brothers, seeing that Leo was sliding very fast, took him along with him when he received a military assignment in the Caucasian Mountain regions of South Russia – Georgia we would know it as today. And so Tolstoy went with him and there received his baptism into real manhood and towards the end of his life the old wily Leo Tolstoy who had given up writing great fiction for some twenty years returned back to that scene of his achievement of a sense of what it was to be a man and what it was to be a human being on the earth and wrote one of his greatest works, the short novel called Hadji Murat. Hadji is an honorable person in Islam. It's someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and has returned. And so this was an honorable warrior.

Now towards the end of tonight try and read you a page or maybe two pages from Hadji– Hadji Murat. And you can see that he lost none of his touch. It was published after his death. It was written in 1904. He would die in 1910, and Hadji Murat, and a few other works from his table were published posthumously in 1911. So Tolstoy found the experience in the Caucasus’s the extremely formative for himself and he began doing some writing. He found himself back in Saint Petersburg and very quickly fell in with the literary circle that was centered upon a man named Nekrasov who published a periodical entitled The Contemporary. And in this writer's group, this writer's clique, were Turgenev and a number of other individuals – Strakhov, [inaudible]. They were associated, somewhat, with Dostoyevsky's literary groups. And so Tolstoy found himself being feted as the most promising young writer in Russia. And instead of buckling down to work with this, he began to slide back into his old habits and ways. So that Turgenev became disgusted with him when going to visit him one day arriving about one o’clock in the afternoon saw him lying still crumpled on the sheets not able to rise for several hours more. He had been out corrupting himself for all he was worth not only the night before but every night of several months before. They entered upon a feud which lasted for 17 years.

Turgenev was one of those great gentleman writers for whom the written word was a matter of hand-crafted pride. His friends were individuals like Flaubert in France – in fact the French literary style very much influenced Turgenev and for him writing was difficult. It was a matter of great craftsmanship. For Tolstoy it was almost an unconscious talent which he had in such abundance that when he wrote it was like a miraculous discovery of what written language could be.

I remember reading once in one of Thomas Mann's essays and he said when we discover a real lion like Tolstoy we realize how much like mice the rest of us writers really are. But Tolstoy was unable to adapt himself either to the position as a literary man, or as a military man, or as an aristocrat. And in the late 1850s something welled up in him and he left Saint Petersburg and he went back to Yasnaya Polyana and of all things he began opening a one room schoolhouse for the peasant children – the serf children. This was unheard of. They were never given any real education. Tolstoy's experiment was a shocker. He, within several months, had more than fifty students in his one room schoolhouse and began to take very seriously the task of becoming a teacher, an educator really. A teacher is one who could teach a lesson. An educator is one who draws out the human being.

So caught up was he in this educational experiment that he completely left off writing. He took a grand tour – he went through France and England. He went as far down in France as Marseille. He went to London. He went in search of education. He visited a number of individuals. At this time I think Matthew Arnold was the head of an educational situation in England. But what Tolstoy learned there was that everywhere in Europe that he went children were not educated. They were forced, brutally, to study the lessons that were put before them. They were expected to memorize and to regurgitate what they had memorized and then they were literally mechanically pushed along various levels, turned out, and that as far as he could see people were not educated in school. How then do they become human? And Tolstoy's answer was that man is educated by life and not by schools; that it is life that gives us the relational sense that if we had to depend upon the school learning we would all be complete idiots.

So he went back to Yasnaya Polyana and he devoted himself for about two years to creating one of the first real great textbooks. It was called his ABC book sometimes. He liked to refer to it in his correspondence as his Primer. And so he devoted the years between 1859 and 1862 to composing stories, fables, educational writings in the form of diaries, in the form of experiments with classwork. He'd been– he began writing little vignettes of botany, or zoology, of physics, of mathematics, all for the different grades of children. It's very difficult to find this. A friend of– good friend of mine found a copy of this for $0.50. They were throwing it away from the Los Angeles Public Library. That's what's happening in our time. That's exactly what's happening. So we have to rescue these things.

In this– here's a little fable that he wrote, that he put in his primer called, The Wolf and the Huntsman. It's, oh, about ten lines:

“A Wolf was eating up a sheep. The Huntsman discovered him and began to beat him. The Wolf said, ‘It is not right for you to beat me. It is not my fault that I am a wild beast. God made me so.’ But the Huntsman replied, ‘We do not beat wolves because they are wild beasts but because they eat the sheep.’ ”

This is Tolstoy's fables. Here's from the New Speller. These were lessons that were given to the children so that they would learn to spell all the words together. Instead of learning lists of words he would give them little stories and they would have to learn to spell all the words in the story. They would have to copy them out. And then these stories were read to them and then they would learn the vocabulary because it was an interesting little story. This one's about a page. So this is an example from Tolstoy's New Speller, probably about 1860/1861. It's called, The Big Oven.

“Once upon a time a man had a big house and in the house there was a big oven; but this man's family was small, only himself and his wife. When winter came, the man tried to keep his oven going; and in one month he burnt up all his firewood. He had nothing to feed the fire, and it was cold. Then the man began to break up his fences, and use the boards for fuel. When he had burnt up all his fences, the house, now without any protection against the wind, was colder than ever, and still they had no firewood. Then the man began to tear down the ceiling of his house, and burn that in the oven. A neighbor noticed that he was tearing down his ceiling, and said to him: ‘Why, neighbor, have you lost your mind? pulling down your ceiling in winter. You and your wife will freeze to death!’ But the man said: ‘No, brother; you see I am pulling down my ceiling so as to have something to heat my oven with. We have such a curious one; the more I heat it up the colder we are!’ The neighbor laughed, and said: ‘Well, then, after you have burnt up your ceiling, then you will be tearing down your house. You won't have anywhere to live; only the oven will be left, and even that will be cold!’ ‘Well, that is my misfortune,’ said the man. ‘All my neighbors have firewood enough for all winter; but I have already burnt up my fences and the ceiling of my house, and have nothing left.’ The neighbor replied: ‘All you need is to have your oven rebuilt.’ But the man said, interrupting: ‘I know well that you are jealous of my house and my oven because they are both larger than yours, so you advise me to rebuild it.’ So he turned a deaf ear to his neighbor's advice, and burnt up his ceiling, and burnt up his whole house, and had to go and live with strangers.”

These are examples from Tolstoy's Primer, the textbook. He had collected textbooks in French, and English, and German throughout the continent, had compared them. And he had found that none of them would do and that's why he was writing his own. But also in the textbook, in his Primer, available to the students notice, were his own observations on what was going on his own descriptions of what he was doing, what actually did happen, what he was trying to make out of it. So that the textbook for the students was a reflective record of the process itself. Very wise. Something incidentally later on that John and Evelyn Dewey would experiment with in the United States.

This is a little section about a paragraph on the classes. “The two smaller classes are put by themselves in one room. The older scholars are in another. When the teacher goes to the first class all gather around him at the blackboard, or sit on the benches, or they climb on the table and sit down around him, or one of those that are reading.” So the children collect around the teacher. “If it happens to be for writing they take more comfortable positions but they keep getting up so as to look at each other's copybooks and show their own to the teacher.” In other words there's– there's freedom of movement while they're doing their assignments. They can peek at each other and see what they're doing. “It is calculated that the time till dinner will be occupied by four lessons.” They used to start from eight o’clock in the morning and go till noon, then they would have a break from noon to three, and then come back from three to six. And Tolstoy records that very often when the children got interested in education they would stay. And of course when they stayed after six they would be hungry so Tolstoy would feed them and so forth. So the– the love is really quite apparent here. “Sometimes the teacher and the pupils get carried away and instead of one hour the class lasts three hours. There have been cases where the pupils themselves cried ‘more, more’ and they exclaim against those things which bore them. This is stupid. Go to the little ones they cry contemptuously. In the class for religious instruction which is the only one that is held with any approach to regularity because the teacher lives two versts away and comes only twice a week. And in the drawing class all the pupils are gathered together all ages before these classes begin. Liveliness racket and external disorder are the rule of the day. One drags benches from one room into the other, another scuffles, another goes home to the mansion after bread, another heats that bread in the oven, another borrows something, another goes through gymnastic exercises. But just the same as in the tumult of the morning it is far more easy to bring order out of chaos by leaving them to their natural impulses than by setting them down mainly by force.”

Tolstoy will record, later on, that the most important aspect of a school is the vitality of the spirit of that school. That there are no other sacrosanct rules. There are no other norms for form that are necessary in education except to respect the spirit of the school. He writes, “Thanks to the vitality in the spirit of the school, especially when its older pupils return from their village occupations, this method of reading failed of itself and began to grow listless to play pranks and cut their lessons.” That is to say they were left to be demonstrative if they were bored – they could walk out. “Also the teacher had to right– the right if the teacher was bored to send them away. So there was a reciprocal relationship going on there. The lessons had to be interesting to all the parties in order for them to go on and they discovered that the most difficult part of education was the acquiring of reading skills and that in fact all of the mechanical lessons – and they tried many systems – produced only a lack of attentiveness and finally a lack of memorizing capacity. No one remembered what they had read a few months before or even a few days before.”

What was needed then was that in terms of the spirit of the school to find a reading order that would work. And the method that was found, if you can call it a method, was to let them find their own, that each student had an approach which they would work out for themselves, and if one only kept the interests high and the spirit of the vitality of the school integral, that the students would find some way for themselves to acquire the skills to participate. One needed no other rules than that. As I say, the Primer is very hard to find. This is a 1917 translation. It's the only one I've ever seen. Usually in collected works of Tolstoy you'll find it. It's sometimes mislabeled. It's called The Long Exile and Other Stories, but that volume is really Tolstoy's Primer, his ABC book.

By 1862, in the spring, Tolstoy all of a sudden was filled and fed up with education and he quit. Something was unsatisfactory to him. He records later on in his confession that he should have realized, right then and there, that something basic was wrong, that something fundamental in him had spoken not with language but with a feeling-tone, the feeling-tone of blankness. But instead he covered it up and he went into a torrential period. For fifteen years Tolstoy became a novelist, probably the greatest novelist who's ever lived, and a family man. He covered up the perception of some blankness in himself by just a whirlwind of activity. He began writing War and Peace, which took him several years. He went through a false engagement to a neighbor and then married Sophie. They proceeded to have a family and children came. And War and Peace established him as the foremost novelist of his day. And in all this, Tolstoy proceeded to go along until the 1870s.

In the letters of the 1870s we find indications, as early as 1871, that his intuitions of himself are quite accurate. He writes: “I don't allow my spiritual longing… to well up in me. I never think about you and the children, and I don't allow myself to think because I'm tempted to do so every moment, and if I were to think hard I should go away at once. I don't understand my condition: either I caught a cold in the tent during the first cold night or else the kumys is bad for me, but I've been worse in the three days I've been here. The main thing is weakness, depression” – but then he covers it up. He covers it up with extensive correspondence.

War and Peace had established him as an international figure; established him as the central person in the Russian literary movement. Very often his most revealing letters are to N. N. Strakhov. He writes from Yasnaya Polyana, March 3rd, 1872”

“... My Primer is finished and is being printed very slowly and badly… but in my usual way I'm scribbling over everything and altering everything 20 times over. Because of this I didn't send it to The Dawn.” – a magazine – “Between ourselves let it be said that this promise embarrasses me;” He had promised The Dawn to send them something. “It's so worthless, and the stipulation that it should be something out of the Primer will destroy everything that my name might have meant. If it's at all possible for you to obtain my release, you would greatly oblige me. If there is any merit in the Primer articles, it [would] lie in the simplicity and clarity of stroke and line, [in other words,] the language; and in a journal” – a literary journal – “this would be strange and disagreeable…”

And then he goes on to give a theory of history to Strakhov. And we find in his letters, all during the early 1870s, indications that Tolstoy is covering up, with immense literary activity, a perception of himself. He is developing his intellectual capacities. He's able to talk about almost anything under the sun and yet there creep into his letters from time to time revealing sentences and statements. He gets headaches. They go on for days. He becomes uncomfortable. He becomes somewhat depressed. And then he takes up another subject. And finally we begin to find, towards the middle of the 1870s, he's writing to a relative of his, the Countess Tolstaya. “...I'm busier now than ever, particularly since I'm in a good mood for working. I've promised to publish my novel in The Russian Herald, but so far I've been quite unable to tear myself away from living people in order to devote myself to imaginary ones.”

And this of course towards the– This is Christmas of 1874 and he's beginning to write Anna Karenina and Tolstoy again is using a very large novel complex full of characters to draw himself out away from himself to create a fictive realm which is more powerful and real than his own life. And as he writes his second great novel it occurs to him, increasingly, in his letters that all of this is simply a decoy; that he is in fact verging upon a discovery. He begins to record in his letters that, in fact, as he writes to a friend in January of 1878:

“Your opinion about Anna seems to me wrong. On the contrary, I'm proud of the architecture – the arches have been constructed in such a way that it is impossible to see where the keystone is.” Talking about a literary structure, about centering on character and event. “And that is what I was striving for most of all. The structural link is not the plot or the relationships [or even the friendships] between the characters, but an inner link. Believe me, this is not unwillingness to accept criticism – especially from you whose opinion is always too indulgent; but I'm afraid that in skimming through the novel you didn't notice its inner content.”

And so he begins to pay attention in his correspondence to the fact that he is now discovering that beneath all of the characters and all the events there is an invisible structure, that there is a relationship. And as the 1870s close out Tolstoy discovers that this structure is a series of focuses that he has been for fifteen years trying to divert himself from. And now he's almost possessed by the idea of letting it come forth. What is it that he is thinking of that he will not let himself become aware of? And as it occurs to him that he is thinking of nothing, of a blank nothing, that life and merit in writing and all that he could imagine comes to nothing. It's all meaningless. And once he has discovered this thought, his mind, like a dog worrying a bone, will not let it go.

And throughout the last year of the 1870s, 1879, Tolstoy realizes that he is in a terrible situation. He has found himself intelligent enough, experienced enough, forthright enough to let occur to him the thought that he understands quite specifically that life is meaningless and that the emotional concomitant to this thought this discovery is an urge to commit suicide. And he records in his confession, written in 1879, but not published until 1882, that he begins hiding the guns in the house and he doesn't go hunting anymore. When he goes to sleep at night he makes sure that there are no cords in the bedroom that could be used as ropes because there are bare rafters in the bedroom. He begins hiding knives around the house and he discovers that there is a compulsive urge that comes to him again and again to end his life and that the very energy behind this urge was exactly that energy that made him a man before. It's his own manly character wanting him to face up to the fact that, if life is meaningless, if all of this is nothing, and the thing to do is immediately put an end to it.

And so all of the hard won characteristics of manhood that he prized so highly now turn around and become like shark's teeth trying to devour him the very same energies. So that Tolstoy finds himself in a complete quandary. There is no respite for himself. And so he takes pen in hand, thinking to himself the only out that he has at this juncture of impossibility is to write exactly what he is feeling and thinking so as to spell out that thought and give it a cocoon, give it a large context. And so he writes his Confession, which is only about eighty pages long, and ranks as one of the great spiritual messages of all time. It's one of the great writers of all time laying himself absolutely bare before the reader. And he wants the reader to understand that he has not got to this impasse in any simplistic way but that it's because of the exacting honesty of the comprehensive living experience of the poignant honesty of inner experience. That because of all of the finances in life he has arrived at this impasse. And that anyone with similar honesty and integrity will also arrive at the same spot. That it is only our duping ourselves or hypnotizing ourselves as he would say. To take ourselves away from this discovery that forbids us from coming here to this point.

Well we're going to take a little break and then we'll come back and. We'll go through a little bit of A Confession and we'll see what Tolstoy does with this.

Tolstoy got the bit between his teeth and could not let go. So in A Confession, or just entitled Confession, if you like – in recalling his years as a world famous novelist, he writes:

“I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain.” He said, “I wrote out of vanity, self-interest, and pride. I did the same thing in my writing that I did in my life. In order to acquire the fame and the money I was writing for, it was necessary to conceal what was good and to flaunt what was bad. And that is what I did. Time and time again I would scheme in my writings to conceal under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good which gave meaning to my life. And I succeeded in this and was praised.”

He said that these years were like an insanity to him, and that, finally, he writes:

“And so I lived. But five years ago something very strange began to happen to me.” – That’d have been 1874 – “At first I began having moments of bewilderment, when my life would come to a halt, as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed, and I continued to live as before. But then the moments of bewilderment would come again more frequently lasting longer. Whenever my life came to a halt, the question would arise: Why? why? why anything? Why all this? What next? At first I thought these were pointless and irrelevant questions. I thought that the answers to them were well known and that if I should ever want to resolve them, it would not be too hard for me; it was just that I could not be bothered with it right now, but if I should take it upon myself, some time and I would find the answers. But the questions began to come up more and more frequently, and their demands to be answered became more and more urgent. And like points finally concentrated upon one spot, these questions without answers came together to form a single black stain.”

“My life came to a stop. I could not breathe, eat, drink, sleep; indeed I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me anymore I had no desires for satisfaction on any account. If it occurred to me that I might want something it immediately occurred to me that it didn't matter… If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for.”

He said that his spiritual condition began to occur to him in sort of a mocking awareness. That life was a very stupid cruel joke and that some presence somewhere was having a very good laugh on his account. But he didn't even have a sense of irony anymore. So, he writes, about a third of the way through A Confession:

“Finally it began to occur to me, ‘Can it be that I have overlooked something? Have I inadvertently got into this position? Have I– Have I led myself to this kind of an impasse through making something up, or leaving something out? Have I been trying to tell myself something very important and I haven't been paying attention?”

So he says he begins to go back over his life with a fine-toothed comb; going back over the events, especially of the last five years – from the middle of the 1870s. And he realizes, yes, he's done all these things. He's written one of the great European novels. He just finished it. It's just running a serial and just now is coming out in book form. And he notes peculiarly that he's physically very healthy. He says, ‘I'm able to do almost any kind of physical work.’ So it’s nothing physically manifesting. It's obviously not something with language. He can do language better than almost anyone. But have I left something out? He writes:

“Maybe I have failed to understand. Is it not possible that this state of despair then is perhaps common to everyone? Maybe it's just a phase that men go through.” But no, it occurs to him more poignantly that something particularly for himself has emerged and he can't let it go. He begins using phrases like this: “You are a little lump of something randomly stuck together. The lump decomposes. The decomposition of this lump is known as your life. The lump falls apart and thus the decomposition ends as do all your questions.”

He begins going back over the most poignant reading that he's ever done, and in fact he then lists, four teachers: Schopenhauer, Socrates, Solomon, and the Buddha. And he puts them together and he says these represent the cream of intellectual understanding of life. And he goes through them one by one.

Schopenhauer, who had influenced him enormously, he writes: “ ‘If we accept the inner essence of the universe as will,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘and if we accept the objectivity of this will in all phenomena, from the unconscious surges of the dark forces of nature to the fully conscious activity of man, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all these phenomena disappear in the free denial and self-annihilation of will;’ ” – and he goes on to quote that all of it ends in a nothingness – “ ‘Therefore, upon the complete annihilation of the will, all that remains for us, who are fulfilled by that will, is, of course, nothingness; but on the other hand, for those in whom the will has been transformed and renounced, this universe of ours which is so real, with all that suns and galaxies, is itself nothingness.’ ”

And then he goes to Solomon, the vanities; he goes to Socrates; and he goes to the Buddha. And A Confession comes to the two-thirds part by saying:

“My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except an ultimate denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil. According to faith, it followed that in order to understand the meaning of life I would have to turn away from reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.”

So in A Confession he brings himself round to the fact that all of this consistent nothingness to the meaning of life has led him to either an impasse, or he must reject reason and rationality as a basis upon which to assess himself. And he does this that– just that. So he turns himself over in a– in his Confession to faith. He says, all right, what is bothering me is irrational. It isn't in the rational order. It cannot manifest itself in the rational order because every time I bring my mind, hone it to understanding, go in in-depth and think it through I keep coming out with the same equation zero equals zero. I keep coming back again to this fundamental tautological nihilism. That there's something in the very guts of the universe in me; that my mind cannot think out and it gets frozen into this tautological, or equation zero equals zero.

So, “Rational knowledge,” he writes, “has led me to the conclusion that life is meaningless; my life came to a halt, and I wanted to do away with myself. As I looked around at people, I saw they were living, and I was convinced that they knew the meaning of life.” They knew the peasants. They know. He goes through all the arguments of them not being educated. He's supposed to be educated. He's supposed to know. But his knowing, when it's really honed, leads him to zero equals zero, an impasse. But the people are dealing with something else in their irrational faith. They are just living life.

He'll, later in a correspondence, in fact, in his diary, he'll use the expression “x over infinity” – that there's no equation in understanding the mystery of life, but there's an expression for it – the unknown over infinity. That it's not an equation. That life is not a logical construct. It simply is a unity displayed. It occurs and it occurs in its fullness. And the mind can't understand it. Oh, the mind wants to understand it. We’ll go to any lengths, we’ll invent fictions, logics, histories, religions, to approach it. And so he finally comes to his understanding:

“The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but it had permanently lost all of its meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child. I realized that meaning was not to be sought here. The actions of the laboring people, of those who create life, began to appear to me as the only true way. I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth, and I embraced it.”

That whatever that life presented, whatever it engendered, that that became truth for him. And so, we began seeing at this time portraits of Tolstoy beginning to wear the moujik costume. In fact, all during the 1880s, increasingly, Tolstoy began donning the peasant garb, the famous portraits by Repin of him behind a plow. Twice he walked from Moscow all the way to Yasnaya Polyana in the neighboring province of Tula with a long staff and a peasants turbaned hat – sort of the raccoon skin hat of the Russian peasant – and the long drab rough burlap, like capes and togas. And we see in the eyes of the man the life, but we see in the face the stunned shame of a man who has seen that all of the constructs upon which his manhood was based, upon which his mind had been reared, upon which his character had been formed, were in fact the barriers which had kept him from himself all the while.

And so he went to school instead of teaching the peasant children. He began to learn from the peasants. And from the teacher of the 1850s he became the student of the 1880s of what we would call the common man – of the serfs and the peasants. He began to learn from them. And in this he realized that they had a tie-line to spirituality which was not clouded by any church structure. And so it began to gall Tolstoy that the largest unit of rational ordering that Western history had to offer was the Christian church and it was exactly the Christian church, rather than the experience which Christianity was based upon – the experience of a man 1800 years before him – and that it was the experience of that individual that was poignant and timeless and was redone when someone was poignant and timeless in their own selves. And that all of the church structures, just like the mind, were a complicated filigree, a shadow play, to keep man away.

In fact, he wrote after A Confession, a very poignant book which was refused to be published, which was a criticism of dogmatic theology. And in fact many of Tolstoy's books for the next twenty years were refused publication. He would get them published in Geneva or surreptitiously run a few copies off. And finally, the turn of the twentieth century, he would be excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. He wrote in, What Is To Be Done?

“The Church existed in her purity as long as her teachers endured patiently and suffered; but as soon as they became fat and sleek, their teaching activity ended. ‘Formerly,’ say the people, ‘priests were of gold, and chalices of wood; now chalices are of gold, and priests of wood.’

Tolstoy began to take upon himself in A Confession the standpoint which would become the basis for the rest of his life: “ ‘Live, seeking God, for there can be no life without God.’ And more powerfully than ever a light shone within me and all around me, and this light has not abandoned me since.”

How does he come to that? He tells us specifically: “I remember one day in early spring when I was alone in the forest listening to the sounds of the woods. I listened and thought about the one thing that had constantly occupied me for the last three years uninterrupted. I was in the act of searching for God. ‘Very well,’ I said to myself. ‘So there is no God like the one I have imagined; very well; the only reality is my life. There is no such God. And nothing, no miracle of any kind, can prove there is, because miracles exist only in my irrational imagination. But then where does my notion of God come from? Of the one who I am seeking, where does that come from?’ I asked myself. And again with this thought there arose in me joyous waves of life. Everything around me came to life, full of meaning.”

In that moment he's talking about. And then as time would go on – fifteen minutes, half an hour – he would be back thinking. And he would notice that the joy of life was gone. So he would redirect himself and commit himself again to that discovery about life.

And the waves of joy would reoccur in him. And he began to understand that there was a language of the spirit – a language.

“...at that point I took a closer look at myself and at what had been happening within me; and I remembered the hundreds of times that I had gone through deaths and revivals. And remembered that I had lived only in those moments when I believed in God. Then, as now, I said to myself, ‘As long as I know God, I live; when I forget, when I do not believe in him, I die.’ ”

He had purified himself to be able to record this experiential continuum. Everything else was extraneous. There was only this, only that single-minded recording of the way in which the switch goes on and off within ourselves, dependent not upon an idea, but on a quality of belief.

“I did not have some vague hope of finding God. I truly live only when I am conscious of him and seek him.” He doesn't need to have an image. Only when he is sincerely seeking. And when he is conscious of that fact, of that process, does life then suddenly light up and give him a meaning? That he doesn't need an equation; he doesn't need an image; he doesn't need an answer. He needs only to be conscious of a process of integrity in his searching and that alone was sufficient – that alone.

“ ‘What, then, do I seek?’ a voice cried out within me. ‘He is there, the one without whom there could be no life.’ To know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life. ‘Live, seeking God, for there can be no life without God.’ And more powerfully than ever a light shone within me and all around me, and this light has not abandoned me since.”

So that for Tolstoy there was no longer any answers. There was no intellectual structure to be mastered, to be analyzed, to be synthesized. There was simply the integrity as a man to be conscious; that he was searching for the ultimate, for the divine, and that as long as he held that attitude of integrity within himself and pursued it as best he could in his life there was meaningfulness. As soon as he forgot it everything blanked out and there was nothing. Nothing meant anything at all: Zero equals zero. But as long as he kept the relational manifestation, the unknown over infinity in mind, he was able to continue.

And so for thirty years after that, Tolstoy poured himself out. There are critics who say that he sacrificed the world's greatest literary talent to writing a bunch of religious diatribes. Not so. The catalog of his religious works in those thirty years is an exquisite revelation of a Western mind in possession of all of the great faculties that we would pride ourselves upon: language, insight, self-honesty, tremendous scope, awareness of large historical structures, the penetration of ideas and characters. And seeing that all of that exists within a mind, and that life flows in and through that mind and out again and carries with it– with it that quality of realization that we would call meaning.

Occasionally, in those last thirty years, Tolstoy would write stories to be beacons for those who came after. One of the great short stories of that period came out in 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, an old judge who on his deathbed realizes that his world is shrinking and that due to his illness he will never leave his house again. And a little later on he realizes he'll never leave his bedroom again; and he realizes that the physical world is shrinking for him that it's finally come to that moment of truth. And then he realizes he will never leave this bed. The whole world which was available to him is shrunk to his own bed. And finally his body which is unable to move very comfortably. And then all the self-pity comes out of the old judge. And he doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to go. Death looms to him like some black hole into which he's going to fall and be swallowed. And in the midst of this self-pity a little grand nephew comes into the room and brings his great grandfather a drink of water and tends him. And the old man is beginning to cry tears of pity that the little boy in his ignorance is caring for him; doesn't know that life ends in a blankness. And at the moment of thinking of the little boy of seeing him, everything lights up, everything becomes real. He stops quivering, the horror evaporates. It's gone and he realizes he can't die. What is there of him to die?

These stories are spectacular. In the larger novels – I think I selected for you a passage from Hadji Murat to just show you the grand writing quality of Tolstoy. Remember this is in translation. Hadji Murat had been one of the mountain bandits fighting with that great bandit hero Shamir who held off the Russian army for a long time, decades. A tremendous massive-faced individual with bandoliers and fur turbans and always was able to beat the Russians. And Hadji Murat had gone over to the Russians, had betrayed, and was one of their scouts. And near the end of the novel he realizes that all his family are there and his son is there, and he wants to see his son again, and he's no longer concerned about whether he lives or dies. He wants to go back and– and be there with his son. So he decides to leave. And this is the– this is the night passage, the Higuera, of Hadji Murat, who is a Muslim:

“Halfway through the night he had made up his mind. He decided that he must flee to the mountains and with the Avars who were loyal to him force his way into Vedeno and either free his family or die in the attempt. Whether or not to bring his family back to the Russians or to flee to Khunzakh with them and fight Shamil he did not decide. He knew only that he must now get away from the Russians and into the mountains. And he began at once to put this decision into effect. He took his black quilted jacket from beneath the cushion and went to his nukers’ quarters. They lived across the hall. As soon as he stepped out into the hall, the door of which was open, he was enveloped by the dewy freshness of the moonlit night and his ears were filled by the whistling and warbling of nightingales in the garden by the house.”

“Hadji Murat crossed the hall and opened the door of his nukers’ room. There was no light in the room, only the new moon in its first quarter shining through the windows. A table and two chairs stood to the side and all four nukers lay on rugs and cloaks spread on the floor. Khanefi was sleeping outside with the horses. Gamzalo, hearing the door creak, raised himself, looked round and, seeing it was Hadji Murat, lay down again. Eldar, however, who lay next to him sprang up and began to put on his jacket, expecting some command.”

And he takes out gold coins and he says sew these into my jacket. A sign to the mountain people that we are permanently going. Sew the money in the clothes. Then a little later on, the Russians have pursued them and have trapped them. And Hadji Murat knows that they are all going to die.

“By way of reply there was a puff of smoke from the ditch, the crack of a rifle and a bullet struck the horse of one of the militiamen, which shied and fell. After this there was a rattle of fire from the rifles of the militia positioned on the edge of the bushes. Their bullets whistled and hummed, clipping the branches and leaves and landing in the rampart, but none of them hit the men from behind. All they hit was Gonzalo's horse which had strayed off. It was wounded in the head but did not fall; snapping its hobble, it crashed through the bushes to the other horses, nestling against them and spilling its blood on the young grass. Hadji Murat and his men only fired when one of the militiamen showed himself and they seldom missed. Three militiamen were wounded and their comrades not only hesitated to charge Hadji Murat and his men, but dropped farther and farther back, firing only random shots at long range. This went on for over an hour.”

Then they rally themselves and there's a charge with swords and guns, and the end of– he’s wounded.

“The enemy, whooping and screeching as they ran from bush to bush, getting nearer and nearer. Hadji Murat was hit by another bullet in the left side. He lay down in the ditch and plugged the wound with another piece of wadding from his jacket. The wound in his side was mortal and he felt that he was dying. One after another images and memories flashed through his mind. Now he saw the mighty Abununtsal-Khan clasping his face his severed, hanging cheek and rushing at his enemies with daggers drawn; he saw Vorontsov, old, feeble and pale with his sly, white face and heard his soft voice; he saw at last his son Yusuf, Sofiat his wife, and the pale face, red beard and screwed up eyes of his enemy Shamil.”

“And these memories running through his mind evoked no feelings in him, no pity, ill will or desire of any kind. It all seemed so insignificant compared to what was now beginning and what had already begun for him. But his powerful body meanwhile continued what it had started to do. Summoning the last remnants of his strength, he lifted himself above the rampart and fired his pistol at a man running toward him. He hit him and the man fell. Then he crawled completely out of the ditch and, with his dagger drawn and limping badly, went straight at the enemy. Several shots rang out. He staggered and fell. A number of militiamen rushed with a triumphant yell towards his fallen body. But what they supposed was a dead body suddenly stirred. First his bloodstained, shaven head, it's papakha gone, then his body lifted; then, holding on to a tree Hadji Murat pulled himself fully up.”

This incidentally is the ancient birth position – giving birth – hanging onto a limb of a tree. He's giving birth to his real self to flee the world.

“...then, holding on to a tree, Hadji Murat pulled himself fully up. He looked so terrifying that the advancing men stopped dead. But suddenly he gave a shudder, staggered from the tree, and like a scythed thistle fell full length on his face and moved no more.”

Early in the novel Hadji Murat and– pride of his manhood showing the incredible accuracy with which he could ride at full speed and snatch a single thistle on the dead run of his horse is a sign of his great prowess as a warrior.

Tolstoy wrote this in 1904. He was nearing eighty years of age. But the difficulty for him again and again: the body, the physical body. He writes, the last year of his life, just a month before he died – October 9th 1910:

“My health is better. Went walking and had good thoughts in the morning. But the body. Why the body? Why space, time, causality. But the very question, why, is a question about causality? And the mystery of why we have a body remains a mystery. We must ask not why I live, but what I should do. I shall write nothing more. I wrote nothing except some worthless letter.”

And he goes on. And then his letters begin to record two separate directions. One is a growing antagonism of his wife coming in and disturbing him. Coming in to see if he's all right. And of course he isn't all right. He's old. He's dying. He's sick. He says– he writes, “I am physically very weak. The same as ever. There was a letter on the desk from Sophia Andreyevna with accusations and an invitation to repudiate something. When she came in I asked her to leave me in peace and she left. I have an oppressive feeling in my chest and my pulse was over ninety again. Revised his little essay on socialism.” And he writes, “A worthless occupation. Before going out I went to see Sophia Andreyevna and told her that my advice to her is to leave me in peace. The next day,” he writes, “got up early. Thought about space and matter. I shall write it later. Went for a walk. Letters in my booklet on sexual desire. I do not like it. Went riding with Derchen. Conversations in the evening. Not too boring. Am going to sleep.”

Then on October 19th he records, “Sophia Andreyevna came in during the night. Another conspiracy against me. ‘What are you talking about? What conspiracy?’ ” She's saying this to him and he's recording it. “ ‘Your diary was given to Chertkov, it's not here. Sasha has it.’ All this very painful. I could not go to sleep for a long time because I could not overcome the unkind feeling – pain in my liver. The conception of the world as material in time and space has nothing that is actually real about it but it is only our conception. This is so because this conception is internally self-contradictory. Matter cannot be understood except within the limited confines of space. Whereas space is infinite, unlimited. Everything in order to be a thing must be limited in some way limited by some other thing. The earth by the air. Particles of air by gases. Gases by thinner gases. And these? Exactly the same is true of time. Time defines the duration of occurrences whereas time itself is infinite and therefore every attribute as to its infinitude has no significance. The life of a microorganism is less prolonged than the life of a man; and the life of a man than the life of a planet; and the life of a planet then so that all measures of prolongation have only a relative meaning. They are only x over infinity and therefore are all equal to each other. Whatever x may be. To live in God's sight does not mean to live in the sight of some God in heaven but it means to evoke the God who is within you and live in his sight.”

And then a week later there's a break. He can't take it any longer. The interruptions and he flees his own house. The old man accompanied by one of his daughters flees in the middle of the night. He had many times in his life gone off to monasteries for meditation or retreat. This time he was leaving permanently. He got as far as a little train community and there everything broke down. His temperature went up and he was trapped. And there at Astapovo, Tolstoy lay ill for about a week. Word of course spread throughout the world and individuals were rushing to the site. And they kept his wife away. They would only have allowed her to come in if he had asked for her. He never asked for her at the end.

He– this is Aylmer Maude's great biography of Tolstoy. Most of it was written while Tolstoy was alive and Tolstoy corrected everything and it was published in September of 1910. And then he died two months later. So the revised version came out in 1911 just adding this:

“Towards midnight on Saturday he was worse, and in his delirium he repeatedly exclaimed: ‘To escape… to escape!’ A large injection of morphia was administered, his breathing fell from sixty to thirty-six a minute. His pulse grew weaker and weaker. At four a.m., it had become almost indistinguishable and an injection of salt solution had no longer any apparent effect. Artificial respiration was resorted to.”

And you can see from this an understanding of the man that all of this was clouding his physical self. Morphine. Salt. Artificial respiration. He was trying to maintain an inner yogic focus. There is a Christian yoga. And finally. Sunday September November 7th.

The great man died calmly and painlessly about six o’clock and his body was then taken by train back to Yasnaya Polyana and he was buried on the grounds there. About fifteen years ago when Yevtushenko was in San Francisco he talked about having gone on a pilgrimage, one time, as a younger poet man with some younger friends to Yasnaya Polyana. And he said that as they walked down the lane they approaching the estate these gnarled old trees that were there that Tolstoy had planted he said they stopped. And they suddenly realized that he wasn't in his coffin, he wasn't in his tomb, that he was in those gnarled trees all over the estate. And that having seen that they realized that he was in all the trees of the land, that he had returned himself back to the people in the most primordial way a person could. He had given his spirit back to the land and Yevtushenko said that that insight allowed him, finally, to become a poet, to realize that there was a tradition, that it wasn't the Stalinist structure that had been imposed upon them but that there had been a great man who had left his spirit in the land. And it was still there and could be found at any time by anyone if they looked in the right way.

Well, we'll have to come back to Tolstoy next year and finish him up if we can.