I'm a Tolstoy

I'm doing a lot of travelling this month, and rather than try to take several books with me, I decided to take just one: War and Peace. This isn't just to save luggage space; it's also a rare opportunity to try to read such a large book in a relatively short span of time.

I'm 650 pages (of about 1220) into it so far, and loving it. For all the normal reasons one might find a big fat novel engrossing: it's fun to get caught up in the soap opera and to know that there's still lots more to read about all these characters and what happens to them. But I'm also struck by how much I'm finding myself identifying with Tolstoy as author. Let me try to explain and qualify that.

A nice anecdote I've heard at third hand: an Oxford philosopher remarking that he's had a good career and is well aware of his abilities as a philosopher. And while he's never written a book as good as Hume's Treatise or Enquiries, he believes he's written a few paragraphs over the course of his career that are as good as almost anything in Hume. By contrast, he claims, were he to live a thousand years and write non-stop, he'd never come up with a single sentence that matches anything in Wittgenstein.

I don't think this anecdote is meant to illustrate Wittgenstein's superior genius to Hume's. The point is rather to distinguish between two different kinds of genius. Hume was great because he accepted the problems and framework of his day, and had thoughts about them that were more original, penetrating, and revolutionary than most of his contemporaries. Hume's intelligence impresses me, but it's also recognizable. He had ideas that I myself might have had in those circumstances, if only I were more brilliant than I am. By contrast, Wittgenstein is like an alien: what makes his work revolutionary isn't simply the keenness of its insight, but the fact that he thinks in a manner that's entirely different from anyone else. That's one reason why it's impossible to imitate his style without seeming obtusely sycophantic, far more so than if you were to try imitating the style of someone less distinctive.

It's a very rough distinction, but I think you can draw it more broadly: there's the kind of genius who sees more sharply than others, and there's the kind of genius who sees in a way that's totally different from others. In the latter group you have not just Wittgenstein but also Nietzsche, Kafka, Gogol, Van Gogh, and Blake. In the former you have not just Hume but also Dickens, Wordsworth, Aristotle, and, of course, Tolstoy. My enthusiasm has always been more for the ones who think totally differently. But I have to acknowledge that my own talents, such as they are, lie more in the camp of the sharp thinkers than the original thinkers.

This acknowledgment has been forced on me with particular clarity reading Tolstoy because I feel I'm reading someone who is more like me than almost any great writer I've read. I'm obviously very different from Tolstoy in very many ways (not least of which being writing talent), but in reading War and Peace I've been struck on numerous occasions by the feeling that someone I don't know is managing to express much of my own perspective about the world far better than I could hope to.

Part of it, I think, is that Tolstoy writes from a somewhat religious point of view without himself being deeply religious at this stage of his career (what does this presage for myself?). There isn't the deep religious yearning you find in Dostoevsky, but rather a sense hovering in the background that, of all the ways one might look on the world and other people, viewing it all sub specie aeternitatus is the most truthful, but that this perspective is one we catch only by glimpses and intimations. I should have bookmarked particular instances--if I don't have them at the tips of my fingers now, I never will. But it leads, first of all, to a rather bemused narrative voice whenever we're considering affairs that seem so crucial in the here and now, whether it's advancement in society or military matters, and this bemusement is occasionally accompanied by a brief allusion to someone's soul and the eternity that soul is struggling to see.

This bemusement leads Tolstoy to show gentle humour in dealing with his characters, but also great affection. (The one major exception so far is Natasha's near-fling with Anatole Kuragin, which struck me as out of character and imposed on her simply to complicate the plot, and it outraged me that he'd resort to such expedience with a character he's built up so lovingly.) It also leads him to write protagonists who are largely autobiographical, and I'm struck by what of myself I recognize in them too. I'm thinking here above all of Pierre Bezukhov, but also Andrei Bolkonsky. And I could say the same of Levin in Anna Karenina, and maybe even Vronsky. What strikes me about these characters most of all is their restlessness. Pierre and Andrei are both eager to lead meaningful lives, and sufficiently sincere in this eagerness that neither of them are particularly interested in the normal routes of advancement that their circumstances make very open for them. But neither of them seems able to settle on a course. Every six months, it seems, they'll throw themselves into some new endeavour--be it Freemasonry, modernizing Russia's bureaucracy, or tending a country estate--with a profound belief that now they've found themselves and are on the right path and that all that occupied them before was mere distraction. And then they'll change course six months later and consider this occupation also a distraction.

I find this a much more believable portrait of existential angst. I don't spend my life at a loss, wondering what to do, and just moping the whole time like some character out of Sartre. My problem is I'm not sure what path to follow. Sometimes I think I should be a philosopher. Sometimes I think I should be a playwright. Sometimes I think these are both distractions from the ascetic religious life I ought to be leading. Or ways of hiding from the life of political engagement that is the only decent way to live. And so on. One reason I think I've made so little progress in any of these directions is that I keep changing my mind and am unable to commit fully to any of them. I lack the clarity (or maybe the narrowness) to have a consistent vision of the good life. (On the other hand, it's only thanks to this restlessness that I've managed to do good work in more than one area.)

I don't feel like Tolstoy is writing primarily about Pierre or Andrei, let alone me. I feel he's writing about himself. I think this also comes through in the narrative voice that has this detached sense that there are deeper things that lie just beyond the fanfare that's distracting us. I don't think Tolstoy (at the time of War and Peace, at least) was writing as someone who could see beyond this fanfare and was writing from the perspective of an ironic knower. Rather, I think he was himself very much distracted by this fanfare and struggling with his sense that everything he did--including writing one of the world's greatest novels--was just further distraction. He was a man torn between a profound love of life and an ascetic conscience. I feel the same way, stuck somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Wittgenstein, deeply admiring of both, but unable to follow either wholeheartedly.

And in that respect, I'm unsure whether to call Tolstoy's religious conversion later in life a fulfillment or a betrayal of the restless man who wrote War and Peace. On one hand, he seems to have achieved what his characters aspired to. On the other, it all feels a little phony from what I know of it, more a decision to deny a part of himself that was still very much alive rather than an acceptance of who he truly was. But I really don't know much about Tolstoy. Maybe I should read a biography. As long as I can find one that's shorter than the novels he wrote...