Tolstoy’s Weaknesses

David Lapadat | Music PhD

7 minutes ago

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Spoiler warning. This essay discusses the endings of Anna Karenina and Resurrection, and the Borodino chapters and Second Epilogue of War and Peace.

In Resurrection, a jury leaves five words out of its verdict. Katerina Maslova has given a man poison, the jurors find, without intending to rob him. The verdict leaves out “without intent to take life.” Once that second qualification drops out, the court reads the verdict as a finding of intentional murder.

In the verdict chapter, Tolstoy traces the omission to the people who could have caught it. One juror, a colonel, goes on about the time his brother-in-law’s wife nearly died from a dose of opium. Dmitri Nekhludoff, who seduced and abandoned Maslova years earlier, is too agitated to check the wording. The longer the deliberations drag on, the more willing the jurors are to accept the wording that will send them home.

The endings of three of Tolstoy’s novels offer some of his most confident judgments on much thinner terms. In War and Peace, the historian’s search for laws hardens into a verdict on freedom. Anna Karenina reserves its last and most generous moral language for Levin. And Resurrection certifies a change in Nekhludoff’s life just when we would need to see him act on it.

War and Peace demands a law without exceptions

For Tolstoy, a science of history begins by ruling out the possibility of an action exempt from law. In the Second Epilogue, the narrator compares the historian who admits free will as a force exempt from law to an astronomer who permits one body to move outside the laws of motion. The next sentence applies the same test to all human action.

“If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.”

Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation, Second Epilogue, chapter XI.

The two uses of single make one exception fatal to an entire discipline. By the next chapter Tolstoy is pointing to regularities in births and crimes and to migrations shaped by land and population. Such patterns weaken the case for treating one powerful person’s wishes as the cause of a migration. They tell us much less about whether any one of those people could have acted otherwise. One exception could undo a rule that claimed to govern every action. It needn’t undo a pattern that holds across a population. The epilogue needs that stronger sort of law and offers evidence for the weaker sort.

Earlier in the epilogue, Tolstoy concedes that we cannot conceive of an action as wholly free or wholly necessary. The concession leaves a harder question than the closing comparison with Copernicus will admit. The earth keeps moving whether we feel it or not. A person’s sense of having chosen may also be unreliable. The likeness between the two cases cannot establish that the historian has discovered a law of the same kind as the astronomer’s.

At Borodino, an adjutant reports that a French attack has been repulsed and Marshal Davout killed. The same sentence tells us the position had already been retaken when the adjutant heard the report, and that Davout was alive. Napoleon gives orders on the strength of information the reader can check against events elsewhere on the field. From the hill he can issue an order, but by the time it reaches his men the occasion for it may have passed. Officers closer to the fighting can still direct their own units. The scene can tell us where command breaks down. The epilogue closes by ruling out a kind of cause everywhere, before a historical law has demonstrated what could take its place.

Anna Karenina grants Levin a future in his own words

The novel’s final division of attention is severe. Anna’s death survives as evidence for other people’s judgments. Levin, whose religious discovery closes the book, can imagine his own future failings and decide what place they will have in a good life. Death explains why Anna can have no such future. The sharper question is why the last chapters leave so little space for what she believed and wanted.

Speaking to Levin’s half brother at a railway station, Vronsky’s mother calls Anna’s death

“the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling.”

Constance Garnett’s translation, Part Eight, chapter 4.

We have already seen Anna cross herself in her last moments. The gesture brings back the pleasures of childhood, and she asks God to forgive her just before she dies. The countess has no access to those seconds. Her son has another kind of obstruction. He looks at the wheels of a passing tender and sees in memory the body at the station. He tries to recover the woman he first met. The last sight keeps displacing the first. No one who speaks about Anna after her death is in a position to give the prayer its weight, and the story moves on to Levin’s household.

Levin’s last monologue ends with a claim about what he can put into his own life.

“the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

Constance Garnett’s translation, Part Eight, chapter 19.

The assertion follows a list of failures Levin expects to repeat. He will lose his temper with his coachman and scold his wife when he is frightened. His sentence can hold those acts and his discovery together. Goodness in the final clause names something he can still do. In the countess’s sentence, the adjective vile and the denial of religious feeling turn one act into a definition of a whole person.

The reader remembers the prayer the countess never heard. By moving from the railway to Levin’s household for the rest of the book, Tolstoy leaves that contradiction behind. The final chapter can ask how a man who still lashes out at his wife will go on living well. The woman who died asking for forgiveness has no share in the answer.

Resurrection vouches for the life it leaves unwritten

Resurrection ends by asserting the effect of Nekhludoff’s conversion on every action that follows it. As he finishes reading the Gospel, the narrator jumps ahead of him.

“everything he did after that night had a new and quite different significance than before.”

Louise Maude’s translation, Book Three, chapter XXVIII.

With the past tense of did, the narrator looks back on a span the novel never depicts. The last sentence leaves the outcome of the new life to time. The word everything has already settled what that time will mean for him.

The chapter before the conversion has already put the question of punishment to a man in a cell. An English visitor asks, through Nekhludoff, what should be done with thieves and murderers. The prisoner turns the charge back on the authorities who lock people up. The visitor calls him crazy. When Nekhludoff opens the Testament in his hotel, he asks what will happen if wrongdoers go unpunished, then concludes that punishment compounds the harm. The argument in the prison had three participants and could change direction with any reply. In the hotel, Nekhludoff can put an end to his own objection. The prose moves on to enumerate five duties he draws from the Sermon on the Mount.

Earlier, Maslova has interrupted Nekhludoff as he starts to talk about where they can settle after her sentence is commuted. She has chosen to go with Simonson, a political prisoner. Nekhludoff has to hear her plan and reckon with a future she has arranged without him. That interruption was a test he could scarcely have set himself. The final assurance reaches over all the occasions when someone might test his convictions just as abruptly.

The presiding judge had seen the omission in Maslova’s verdict. The court could set it aside under Article 817, but one judge worried what the newspapers would say. The presiding judge had an appointment. He looked at his watch and handed the questions back to the foreman to read. The available remedy went unused. That is the kind of scene the new Nekhludoff would have to pass through before we could judge what his rules had changed. For his changed life, we have the narrator’s word.

FAQ

Where does Tolstoy compare the laws of history to the laws of astronomy? Read chapters XI and XII of the Second Epilogue to War and Peace. Chapter XI sets the condition for a science of history. Chapter XII compares the change in method to the acceptance of Copernicus.

Does War and Peace treat all military orders as futile? The Borodino chapters show officers near the fighting directing the units closest to them and superior officers re-forming troops outside the range of fire. The view from Napoleon’s hill is a poor guide to what those officers can do.

Painted portrait of Leo Tolstoy between a rider in battlefield smoke and a bright planet above a birch. Cover text reads Tolstoy’s Weaknesses and Leo Tolstoy.

Sources

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Book Ten, chapter XXXIII, and Second Epilogue, chapters X–XII. Project Gutenberg

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett. Part Seven, chapter 31, and Part Eight, chapters 4–5 and 18–19. Project Gutenberg

Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, translated by Louise Maude. Book One, chapters VI and XXIII–XXIV, and Book Three, chapters XVI–XVII and XXV–XXVIII. Project Gutenberg

Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” translated by Constance Garnett, section IV. Project Gutenberg

George Eliot, Middlemarch, “Finale.” Project Gutenberg

The cover illustration draws on Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s 1908 portrait of Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. Library of Congress