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402
403
Although Eikhenbaumdoes not questionthe assumptionthat sentimentalism precludes romanticism,his rigorous use of the formalist
method indicates, by its very limitations,the basis for a study of the
young Tolstoi which would question it. In attempting to make that
study, this essay will suggest that the deepest affinitybetween Tolstoi
and Rousseaulies not in their ideas or even in the forms which their
ideas took but in a basic contradictionto which those ideas gave rise;
and that Tolstoi felt the need to resolve that contradictionin his art,
whereas Rousseau was content to express it as an insoluble paradox.
From this it will become clear that the very contradictionwhich links
Tolstoi to Rousseau is also the contradictionwhich makes of the romantic plot a tragic one. The purpose of this essay is to identify the
terms of that contradictionbut, once they have been identified, we
shall discover a unity in the young Tolstoi which is not otherwise apparent.
Tolstoi made no secret of having read and re-readthe sentimentalist
precursorsof the romanticsand above all Rousseau, of whom he alledgedly told the French Slavist, Paul Boyer, "I read all of Rousseau,
yes, all twenty volumes,the Dictionaryof Music included. I more than
admiredhim, I made a veritable cult of him: at fifteen I wore a locket
with his portraitat my neck like a saint'simage ... Some of his pages
go straightto my heart; I believe I could have written them myself."6
The Tolstoi who told Boyer all this had already distinguishedhimself,
as Rousseauhad before him, by publishinghis confessions,but even the
young Tolstoi wrote by a self-analyticmethod which lends itself to the
confessionalgenre. Tolstoi planned his first book-lengthwork as a selfanalysisin four parts, of which he drafted only three, Childhood,Boyhood, and Youth. The originalintroductionto Childhoodinvites comparisonwith the introductoryparagraphsof Rousseau'sConfessions,a
comparison which, despite his attention to Rousseau, Eikhenbaum
neglects to make. Tolstoi explicitly delegates to his reader the role of
a confessorwhen, by way of introduction,he observes,
It mustbe saidthatI havebeen so sincerein thesememoirsaboutall my
weaknessesthat I could not makeup my mindto cast them beforethe
judgmentof the crowd.AlthoughI am convincedthat I am no worse
thanmostpeople,I may yet seemto be the lowestof the low becauseI
havebeen sincere.Duplicityis the inclinationto hide one'sbad qualities
and to showoff one'sgood ones;sincerity-theinclinationto show one's
bad qualitiesand to hide one'sgood ones.... I ask you to be my confessorandmy judgeas I confideto you in thesememoirs.I couldnot have
chosenbetterbecausethereis no one whomI love and respectmorethan
you.7
404
he."8
405
406
407
408
act with natureis good and to act againstnatureby making social distinctionsis evil. Societynot only institutionalizesthe distinctionsamong
individuals,it is doubly perniciousbecause it motivatesthe individual
to sharpen the distinction between himself and others. Conscious
though man was of the distinctionbetween himself and other individuals in the state of nature,he was not yet consciousthat others were
conscious of him. He believed himself to be his only judge until, on
founding society, he became conscious that other individuals might
judge him. Self-loveled him to judge himself not as he was for himself
but as he appearedto othersand, in orderto distinguishhimself among
them, he resisted his instincts in accord with their judgment. ". .. The
1878-90); cited in JaroslavPelikan, The Christian Tradition:A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)
(Chicago, 1971), p. 298.
15 Rousseau, vol. 3, Sur l'inegalitd,
p. 143.
409
410
". .. Although men had come to have less endurance and although
natural pity had already suffered some alteration,this period of the
development of human faculties, maintaininga golden mean between
the indolenceof the primitivestate and the petulant activity of our selflove, must have been the happiest epoch and the most durable."x9If
this period was, as Rousseaumaintains,the happiest epoch, it was also
the period which transformedlove of self into vain self-love. "Theone
who sang or danced the best, the handsomest,the strongest,the most
adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly considered, and
that was the firststep toward inequalityand, at the same time, toward
vice. From these first preferenceswere born on one hand vanity and
contempt and, on the other, shame and envy, and the fermentation
caused by these new leavens eventually produced compoundsfatal to
happiness and innocence."20Thus, if this period was the most durable
epoch, it enduredonly long enough to providea temporarycompromise
between man's amoralanimal nature and his immoralhuman nature.
The compromisebetween them mitigated the amorality of the one
nature and the immoralityof the other,corruptnaturewithout actually
renderingman truly moral. Hence even patriarchalsociety could not
resolve the fundamentalcontradictionof the Discourse on Inequality,
which may be summarized briefly as follows. Ideal social relations
would restorenatureinsofaras they would allow man to live as though
alone and free from choice, but they would at the same time destroy
nature insofaras they would requirehim to live with others and hence
to make choices. So long as Rousseauis content to expressthis contradiction as an insolubleparadox,he gives us scant indication of how to
avoid the corruptionof our mores without crawling about on all fours.
The commonassumptionis that Rousseauwas an eighteenth-century
Pelagian but, however true this may be in some of Rousseau'sworks,
Pelagius regards free will as the means to salvation whereas, in his
Discourse on Inequality, Rousseauregardsit as the source of corruption. Pelagius maintainedthat Adam'ssin was not transmittedto other
generationsand that free will alone was enoughto save man. Augustine
maintainedthat, because guilt for Adam'ssin was transmitted,free will
can save man only throughgrace. In the Discourseon Inequality Rousseau absolvesindividualman of guilt for originalsin, while he imputes
collective guilt to men in society. Rousseaumight have viewed the need
to make choices as a gain, but instead he viewed it as a loss, albeit the
loss of what perhapsnever existed,the loss of a state in which man was
free from choice. In viewing the need to choose as a loss, Rousseaudid
19Ibid.
411
This alludes, of course, to Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth
Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932). For the controversywhich surroundsit,
see Raymond 0. Rockwood, ed., Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1958). Except on the issue of original sin, my discussion of Rousseau'stheodicy relies largely on the interpretation in Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington,Ind., 1963), pp. 72-78.
On the issue of original sin, my discussion is partly anticipated by Milan I.
Markovitch, Jean Jacques Rousseau et Tolstoi (Paris, 1928), where Markovitch
broaches the issue in relation to Tolstoi and Rousseau. '"I nous semble voir chez
les deux ecrivains la contradiction meme qu'ils trouvaient dans la doctrine de
l'lglise sur le peche originel. Comment, demandaient ils, Adam, cr66 bon a-t-il pu
tomber dans le pech? .. . Lhomme ne peut se pervertir lui-m6me s'il est bon.
Quant a la societ6, qu'ils rendent responsable de tout le mal, elle est compos6e
d'hommes. C'est jouer sur les mots que d'expliquer la perversion de l'homme par
l'action de la societe, c'est l'expliquer par elle-mime" (pp. 136-137). With this,
however, his discussionof original sin comes to an end.
412
child (or the child a savage) who, like man in his prime, remainsrelatively unselfconsciousand unaltered by knowledge of good and evil.
The patriarchalsociety in which these characterslive is not so much
governed by a father as nurtured either by a mother or by mother
nature. But the narratorof Childhood and Olenin, the hero of The
Cossacks,both learn that real life occurs after the fall, when mother's
nurtureis withdrawn.The narratorof Childhood,who happens to be
the grown-upNikolen'ka,and Olenin, the Russianofficerwhose viewpoint The Cossacks often takes, are both self-conscious, cultivated
adults. Inasmuch as they are fully self-conscious, they experience
nostalgia for unselfconsciousness,the narratorof Childhood because
he has been drivenout of the Eden of childhood,and the officerOlenin
because he finds himself barredfrom the Eden of the Cossacks.So for
Tolstoi, as for Rousseau,Eden recedes ineluctably into the past of the
individual (Nikolen'ka)and of the species (the Cossacks), as Tolstoi
attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable contradictionof Rousseau's
myth of exile. He looks for traces of myth in real life, and the real
life of his charactersbecomes a searchfor "a state which perhapsnever
existed"and "whichprobablyneverwill exist."
The narratorof Childhoodtells us a storyfromhis past, a past which
unmistakablyresembles Tolstois own. Childhood is not, as the title
suggests, the story of the narrator'schildhood:it is the story of the end
of his childhood.His childhood,insofaras he remembersit, is the state
in which he lived with his motherand ends abruptlywith his mother's
death. In the chapterentitled "Grief,"which marksthe break between
childhood and adulthood,the child Nikolen'kastands in grief by his
mother'sfuneral bier. The narratoralso grieves over his mother but
retrospectivelyhe expresseshis grief this way: "If in life's darkerhours
I could have caught sight of [my mother's]smile for even an instant, I
would not have known what grief is."22Here the narratordoes not
mournthe loss of his mother alone; he mournsthe loss of the state in
which he once knew no grief. It is in search of that state, which perhaps never existed and probably never will exist, that the narrator
writes the memoir of his childhood. When, at his mother'sdeath, her
nurtureis withdrawn,Nikolen'kafinds himself exiled to the society of
others,where he becomesself-conscious.
Nikolen'kais oblivious to social inequality among adults so long as
he, a child who depends on his mother,makes no choices which affect
others. But if he is oblivious to social inequality, he is all the more
sensitive to the moral distinctionsthat accompanyit. He is an unselfconscious perceiver of adults whose unselfconsciousnessmakes him a
22 Toltoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, p. 9.
413
keen judge of their actions. He does not initiate the action in Childhood: he respondsto it morallyor "sentimentally"
(for naturalvirtue is
sentiment).Pity for unselfconsciousadults is the sentimentwith which
he respondsmost often: pity for his kindly Germantutor KarlIvanych,
with whom we firstsee Nikolen'ka'smother;for God'sfool Grisha,who
prophesieshis mother'sdeath; and for the old nurse Natal'ia Savishna
whose grief at her death proves deeper than Nikolen'ka's.All that
Nikolen'kaperceives, or the narratorremembers,expressesitself in the
oppositionnature versus culture and its variant, the opposition childhood versus adulthood.A third opposition,countryversus city, grows
out of the other two when Nikolen'kais separated from his mother.
Nikolen'kaundergoestwo separationsfrom his mother, on which the
entire story is constructed.The first one occurs when, with his father,
Nikolen'kadepartsfrom the countryfor Moscow;the second and final
one occurswhen, on his departurefrom Moscowfor the country,death
cuts him off fromhis motherforever.
In Moscow it turns out that even children, who remain unselfconscious in the country,may be radicallyinfected with the self-consciousness of adults. There Nikolen'kasees KarlIvanych in contrastwith his
cousins' tutor Herr Frost, whom their mother, Princess Komakova,
allows to beat them. Nikolen'ka'sgrandmother,who speaks for country
manners,sharplyasksthe Princess,". .. what delicacy of sentimentcan
you expect from your children after that?"23Nikolen'ka'scousins are
not, in fact, capable of the pity Nikolen'kafeels for KarlIvanych.They
do not play imaginative games like the ones Nikolen'kaplayed with
his brother in the country. Incipient inequality even leads them to
humiliatea poor boy in their midst. When Nikolen'kaleaves the country for Moscow,he also leaves his mother and just after his separation,
in the very middle of the book, comes a lyric interludeentitled "Childhood."Entirely in the imperfectivepresent, the narratordescribes, as
though it were an habitualoccurrence,how his motheronce woke him
froma light sleep beforebedtime.
It is quiet and half-darkin the room;my nervesare excitedby tickling
andwakingup; motheris sittingclosebesideme; she touchesme; I smell
her scentandherhair.All this makesme jumpup, pressmy head to her
breastand breathlesslysay, "Oh,dear,dear, mommy,how I love you!"
She smilesher sad,lovelysmile,takesmy headin her hands,kissesmy
foreheadandputsme on herlap.
"So you love me very much?"She is silentfor a moment,then she
says,"Makesure you love me always,and neverforgetme. If you lose
yourmother,youwon'tforgether,willyou,Nikolen'ka?"
Shekissesme stillmoretenderly.
23Ibid.,t. 52.
414
with the words,'as our mother dear', which would prove beyond a
doubt that I never loved her and had forgottenher."25To the amused
reader, who accepts the conventionalityof rhyme, the guilt to which
these verses give rise seems excessive. Not so to Nikolen'kawho, in
accordwith Rousseau,views the rhyme as a falsehood.For if the faculty of language itself develops only in society, then the convention of
rhymemust be wholly artificial.Society has so motivatedNikolen'kato
distinguishhimself that, child though he is, he falsifies the expression
of his deepest sentiment.The real pathos of this episode is, however,
that his mother's request, "If you lose your mother...
," anticipates
his loss of her in the end, and it is not the only.such anticipation.The
book opens with a scene in which the narratordescribes how Karl
Ivanych, like Nikolen'ka'smotherin the scene mentionedbefore, once
woke Nikolen'kafrom his sleep. This time Nikolen'kasheds tears of annoyance, not tears of rapture,and to excuse his behavior,he tells Karl
Ivanych that he dreamedof his mother'sdeath. When, later the same
day, he firsthears that he is to leave for Moscow,he thinksto himself,
24 Ibid., p. 44.
25 Ibid., p. 49. One might quite aptly observe here that the perfection of
Nikolen'ka'sfaculties in Moscow society has brought with it the corruptionof his
mores. But this does not take place without the transformationof his natural love
of self into vain self-love (amour-propre), a transformationwhich involves more
than the faculties of language and reason. In Paul de Man's interpretationof the
Discourse on Inequality, metaphor understood as an inherent property of all
language is the ultimate cause of social corruption,and not property, which is only
the immediate cause. "The passage from literal greed to the institutional, conceptual law protecting the right of property runs parallel to the transition from the
spontaneous to the conceptual metaphor,"writes de Man, and adds the footnote,
"Thus confirmingthe semantic validity of the word-play, in French, 'sens propre'
and 'propriete." ("Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse,"in David
Thorbum and Geoffrey Hartmann, eds., Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities [Ithaca, 1973], p. 112.) By this logic John Charvet (footnote 12, above), in
whose interpretationamour-propreis the ultimate cause of social corruption,might
have added that his interpretationconfirmsthe semantic validity of the word play
"amour-propre"and "propriete."To maintain, as de Man does, that the basic idea
of the Discourse on Inequality is that language is about language, is to make the
mistake Tolstoi warns against in his journal for April-May 1851, "Pourquoidire
des subtilites, quand il y a encore tant de grossesv6rites Adire."
415
27 Ibid., p. 41.
28 Ibid., p. 85.
416
417
that sense "good"so that, like man in his originalstate, one neither sins
noris consciousof sin. As a child Nikolen'kaought not to sin but, as we
have seen, the narratorattributes guilt to him at his mother'sdeath.
Hence, at the point when Nikolen'kacomes to the knowledge of death,
he also comes to the knowledgeof sin, and there is a certain emotional
plausibility about this experience. An adult who loses a parent may
well feel guilt, but he is already conscious that the wages of Adam's
sin are death for all men. A child who, like Nikolen'ka,first becomes
consciousof sin at his mother'sdeath, feels as though he were the first
one ever to sin. By Rousseau'sanalogybetween the developmentof the
individualand the evolutionof the species, the child'sfall recapitulates
Adam's fall. Thus Childhood so fuses Tolstoi's autobiographywith
Rousseau'sphilosophy that the rememberedguilt which the narrator
once felt at his mother's death provides an objective correlative for
Rousseau'smyth of exile. At the end of Childhoodthe narratorinvokes
Natal'ia Savishnaand his mother with this question, "CanProvidence
have united me with those two beings only that I should eternally regret them?"33The narrator'sregret betrays his failure to regain the
Eden in which he knew no grief, but it also confirmshis success in
telling the storyof how he cameto grief.
It would be a mistake to ignore that Childhood and The Cossacks
are linked biographicallyas well as ideologically. Whereas Childhood
began to take shape in 1851when Tolstoi visited his brotherNikolai in
the Caucasus,The Cossacksdeveloped over a period of ten years out
of the same visit. In 'TheCossackswhich, like Childhood,Boyhood,and
Youth, was never completed as a book-length work, Tolstoi collides
head-on with a moral situationwhich he had experiencedin the Caucasus but had not and perhapscould not entirely work out. The young
Tolstoi, who, in Childhood,had uncriticallyaccepted Rousseau'sDiscourse on Inequalitywith its myth of exile, now sets out to re-evaluate
the crucial problem of moral freedom. In orderto do so he first of all
makes his principal characteran adult who, unlike the child hero of
Childhood,has to make choices that affect others. He places this character in the traditional romantic situation of the European among
savages; that is, engages him, like the hero of Pushkin'sGypsies, in
conflictwith one of the savages and her betrothed.But he goes further
than this, he makes of this charactera reader of Marlinskiiand Lermontov, whose Caucasiannovels had turned Rousseau'sindictment of
cultureinto a conventionof literature.
If inequality,or evil, originatedin society, then is the guilt of society
not in practice the guilt of all the individualswho constitute society?
If, moreover,an individualaccepts Rousseau'stheory, will he not tend
~8 Ibid., p. 95.
418
419
Olenin has reached the Caucasus,he can no more live the life of the
Cossacksthan the narratorof Childhood can relive the life of Nikolen'ka;not because time is irreversiblebut because the self-consciousness it bringswith it is irredeemable.
To emphasize that his Caucasiannovel is free of romantic cliches
about the Caucasus, Tolstoi attributes to his principal characterthe
literary preconceptionsof his readers. Marlinskiihad given them, on
the one hand, a grandiose Caucasian landscape, hyperbolically described;Lermontov,on the other hand, had given them a disenchanted
hero who remainsunmoved by its beauty. Olenin has read Marlinskii's
hyperbolicdescriptionsof the mountainsand because he has read them
he is disenchanted when, at dusk, he first sees the mountains. "...
He
thought the special beauty of the snow peaks, of which he had so often
been told, was as much an invention as Bach's music and the love of
women .. ."35But at dawn the mountains overcome his preconceptions
Ibid.,p. 41.
420
39 Ibid., p. 77.
40 Ibid.
421
fixed on a particularobject:for is desiringthat someone not sufferanything but desiringthat he be happy?"41Shortlyafter his experiencein
the stag'slair, Olenincomes acrossLukashka,who killed a Chechenthe
night before; the Chechen'sbrother, who has come to trade for the
body, will kill (or seem to kill) Lukashkaat the end of the book. By
contrast with Eroshka,who largely representsthe natural aspects of
patriarchalsociety, Lukashkarepresentsits more corruptaspects.Blood
revenge is to him a matter of course and, although Olenin envies him
his happinesswith Mar'iana,he pities Lukashkahis triumph over the
Chechen. Olenin feels his own happiness will be complete only when
he can live for someone else. Why not live for his rival Lukashka?To
marry Mar'iana,Lukashkamust have a horse. Olenin chooses to give
him the horse,and therebyMar'ianaas well.
Olenin'striumphover himself contrastssharply with Lukashka'striumph over the Chechen although,when Olenin boasts to Lukashkaof
having many other horses, his self-denial is momentarilydiminished.
On the other hand Olenin is disappointedthat Lukashkaexpressesno
appreciationfor his self-denial: Lukashkalives by the natural instinct
of self-preservationwhich, in his case, appears to be less softened by
pity than in Eroshka's,and he promptlytrades Olenin'sgift horse for a
better one. Rousseausays of pity, "Insteadof that sublime maxim of
reasonedjustice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
it inspiresall men with this other maximof naturalgoodnessmuch less
perfect but perhapsmore useful than the first,Do what is good for you
with the least possible harmto others."42
Even if, in tryingto follow the
risks
of
Olenin
self-denial,
hypocrisy, the principle itself
principle
a
the
to deny himself Mar'iana.Yet
to
make
him
choice
choice,
obliges
the other Russian officer,Beletskii, who has acquired a Cossack mistress, soon tempts Olenin beyond his strengthand Olenin goes back on
his choice. Olenin is clearly Beletskii's moral superior and, even in
going back on his choice, he does not lapse into the Byronicpattern of
seduction.Having given Lukashkathe horsehe needs to marryMar'iana,
Oleningoes a step furtherthan Beletskii:he proposesto make Mar'iana
his wife. To justifythis proposal,Oleninwrites himself a letter in which
he addressesthe Muscovitearistocrathe once was. Just as Olenin deduced the moral principle of self-denial by crawling on all fours into
the stag's lair, he now abandons himself to his natural instincts by
writing himself a letter. He writes that he at first refused to Russify
Mar'ianaby castingher in the role of his wife, or to deceive himself by
playing the role of a Cossacklike Lukashka.It was because he knew
41
42
422
423
424
have them do unto you." Such "rational"principles as self-denial depend on freedomeither to acquiescein one's instinctsor to resist them,
yet the principle of self-denial is the very one which Tolstoi believes
Oleninoughtto follow by instinct.
Once Olenin has botched his attemptsto act on principleand to live
by instinct, Mar'ianabrings Tolstoi'sparody of the Byronic hero and
his tragedy to its conclusion.Like the narratorof Childhood,the Byronic hero of Tolstoi'sparody has sinned and, although Tolstoi denies
him the opportunityto confess, his repentantattitude towards sin can
be traced back to the earlierbook. The sentimentalistinsisted on confession itself as sufficient penitence for the sins confessed, but the
Byronichero neither repents nor confesses sins which he does not recognize. His ability to defy the judgmentof othersthrough crime raises
him above society. Were Olenin a Byronichero like Lermontov'sPechorin, he would turn his back on Mar'iana,not she on him.46The importanceof female charactersin the young Tolstoi far exceeds the importanceof the Byronichero, and the affirmationof romanticideas far
outweighs all ridicule of the Byronichero by parody. The male characters both in The Cossacksand in Childhoodare defined by their relation to the primaryfemale characters,Nikolen'ka'smother and Mariana. Just as The Cossacksis based on Olenin'sfrustratedurge to unite
with Mariana, so Childhood is constructed on Nikolen'ka'sfear of
separationfrom his mother. Mar'ianachastely foregoes the unmarried
Cossackwoman'sright to take a lover, even though her would-be lover
is Lukashka,her husband-to-be.Nikolen'ka'smother, "the angel,"47is
not only chaste in body like Mar'iana,she is so chaste in mind that she
46 I can find no evidence that Tolstoi ever read Byron at all, however often he
may mention him; as for Pushkin, he first read The Gypsies six years after he began The Cossacks, and then only in Merimee's French prose version (Molodoi
Tolstoi, pp. 36-37)1 This is all the more reason why neither Tolstoi's nor any other
Byronic hero is to be confused with the real Byron, whom biographical critics
avant la lettre compared with Rousseau, and who parodied their comparisonsin
his Detached Thoughts for 15 October 1821. "My mother before I was twentywould have it that I was like Rousseau--and Madame de Stael used to say so too
in 1813-and the Edin[burgh] Review had something of ye sort in its critique of
the 4th Canto of Ch[ildle Ha[rold]e.-I can't see any point of resemblance-he
wrote prose-I verse-he was of the people-I of the Aristocracy-he was a philosopher-I am none-he published his first work at forty-I mine at eighteen,-his
first essay brought him universal applause-mine the contrary-he married his
housekeeper-I could not keep house with my wife-he thought all the world in a
plot against him; my little world seems to think me in a plot against it-if I may
judge by their abuse in print and coterie .. .-Altogether, I think myself justified in
thinking the comparisonnot well founded. I don't say this out of pique-for Rousseau was a great man-and the thing if true were flattering enough-but I have no
idea of being pleased with a chimera.-" Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron's Letters
and Journals(Cambridge,Mass., 1979), 9: 11-12.
47 Tolstoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, pp. 56, 81, 86,90.
425