The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

The Young Tolstoi and Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality

Author(s): Carol Anschuetz
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 401-425
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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The Young TolstoiandRousseau's

Discourse on Inequality
By CAROLANSCHUETZ
The most pervasive locus communis of Tolstoi scholarship is that, in

adopting the ideas of Rousseau,Tolstoi sided with his "grandfathers,"

the eighteenth-centurysentimentalists,against the more recent generation of his "fathers,"the early nineteenth-centuryromantics. From
this it seems to follow that, because Tolstoi was a nineteenth-century
writer of eighteenth-centuryculture, he was not and could not have
been a romantic. Although this assumptionnever becomes fully explicit, it is so ubiquitousthat no one has ever troubled to verify it by
systematicallycomparingTolstoi either with Rousseauor with the romanticsTolstoi read.1The deepest and still the most provocativecomparisonof Tolstoi with Rousseauand the romanticsis 'TheYoung Tolstoi (1922), with which Boris Eikhenbaum challenged the accepted
1 At least four essays on Tolstoi and Rousseau were available to Eikhenbaum in
1922, the first of which, Andreevich [V. Solov'ev], "Bor'ba s razvratom kul'tury.
Russo i Tolstoi,"in L. N. Tolstoi. Monografiia(St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 111-168,
probably occasioned Tolstoi's remarksin his journal for June 6, 1905. G. Benrubi,
"Tolstoi-prodolzhatel' Russo,"in Tolstovskiiezhegodnik 1912 g., pp. 179-198, provoked a challenge by M. M. Kovalevskii in "Mozhno li shchitat' Tolstogo prodolzhatelem Russo?,"Vestnik Evropy, 1913, no. 6, pp. 343-352. A. Divil'kovskii presented analogies largely similar to those of Benrubi and Kovalevskii in a more
densely reasoned form: "Tolstoi i Russo," Vestnik Evropy, 1912, no. 6, pp. 59-79,
and no. 7, pp. 125-153. At a time when Tolstoi still wielded his moral authority
against church and state in Russia, or had recently ceased to wield it, all four
essays treated Tolstoi's art as part of a life devoted, like Rousseau's,to social ideas.
Consequently not Tolstoi's art but his life became the object of comparison with
Rousseau's: the exception which proves the rule is Viacheslav Ivanov, who compared Tolstoi's life not with Rousseau'sbut with Socrates'in "L. Tolstoi i kul'tura,"
Logos, 1911, kn. 1, pp. 167-178. The rule also holds for a much later and broader
study, Milan I. Markovitch,Jean-JacquesRousseau et Tolstoi (Paris, 1928) which,
together with B. I. Bursov, L. N. Tolstoi. Seminarii (Leningrad, 1963), contains
the fullest bibliography. All these studies offer cultural-historical generalizations
such as those Isaiah Berlin later developed in "Tolstoi and Enlightenment" (1961),
although none of them is so concernedwith Tolstoi's attitude towards history as The
Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), republished, together with "Tolstoi and Enlightenment," in Russian Thinkers (London, 1978). Isaiah Berlin cites neither the essays
available to Eikhenbaum, which in fact seem not to have influenced him, nor
Eikhenbaum'sYoung Tolstoi, the formalist method of which he must have found at
variance with his own. As for nineteenth-century critics of Tolstoi, they referred
to Rousseau as early as the sixties; see V. A. Zelinskii, Russkaia kriticheskaialiteratura o proizvedeniiakh L. N. Tolstogo, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1897-1904), especially 2
and 3.

401

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biographicalmethod of Tolstoi scholarship.Eikhenbaumposited that

literaryforms, not social ideas, determinedthe young Tolstoi'suse of
literarytraditio/n.Social ideas he treated as evidence of the fluctuations
which occur whenever the dominantsystem of literarynorms, and in
particularof genres,is felt to be obsolete.2In Rousseau'stime the dominant system of norms was neoclassical; in Tolstoi's time it was romantic. Both of them wrote in genres which the dominantsystem of
normsexcludedas non-literary.Rousseauset up a new system of norms
which has come to be known as sentimental;Tolstoi set up one which
has come to be known as "realistic,"a term which Eikhenbaum,however, eschews.3
If Eikhenbaum'schallenge to the biographical method of Tolstoi
scholarshipmet with success, his Young Tolstoi did not question the
assumptionthat sentimentalismprecludes romanticism.On the contrary, it reconfirmedthat assumption,which becomes most nearly explicit when, for example,in his discussionof Tolstoi'sjournalfor 1847,
Eikhenbaumobserves,"It is as though Tolstoihad no link with the last
generation,as though he had resolutelyturned his back on his fathers
[Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauerand the Russianromantics] and returned to his grandfathers[the Russian sentimentalistsand above all
Karamzin]."4Eikhenbaum'sinterest in Tolstois use of literary tradition touches on sentimentalismand romanticismyet, because his formalist method does not commit him to historical analysis, he leaves
those historical terms undefined as though their definitionwere selfevident. When occasionallyhe does happento qualify them, he does so
only in accordwith his nonhistorical,formalistmethod: romanticismin
Russia entails for him a metaphoricalstyle and a tragic plot in which
the Byronichero (otherwiseundefined)plays the mainrole.5
2 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Molodoi Tolstoi (Berlin, 1922; rpt. Munich, 1968), pp. 1157, especially p. 36. All translationsfrom Russian and French will be mine.
3 Ibid., p. 99.
4 Ibid., p. 16.
5 Ibid. See pp. 93-94 for Eikhenbaum's identification of the romantic hero in
Russia with the Byronic hero, and p. 108 together with footnote 91, p. 152, for his
definition of the tragic plot in which the Byronic hero plays the main role. Here
Eikhenbaum clearly has in mind the hero whom Russian critics have traditionally
called "Byronic"but, as in the case of other historical terms, he leaves the Byronic
hero undefined. Molodoi Tolstoi appeared two years before V. M. Zhirmunskii,
Bairon i Pushkin (Leningrad, 1924), a remarkablebook which has since been the
authoritative work on that topic. Zhirmunskiideals mostly with the Byronic hero
of Pushkin's Southern Poems, who originates in the passionate, vengeful hero of
Byron's Turkish Tales and Manfred. But the Byronic heroes of Pushkin's later
works originate in the blase, aristocratic (and often unheroic) figures of Childe
Harold and Don Juan, and in Byron himself as rightly or wrongly understood by
his contemporaries.Together with the permutationsundergone by the Byronic hero
in the work of writers other than Pushkin, these three forms of the Byronic hero
would have to be considered in a thorough discussion of the Byronic hero in Tolstoi's work.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

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

6 Paul Boyer, "Chez Tolstoi. Trois jours AYasnaiaPoliana,"Le Temps, 28 August

1901.
7 L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-1958), vol.
1, Detstvo, pp. 103-104. All quotations from Tolstoi will refer to this edition.

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In introducing his confession with what seems to be an apology,

Tolstoi follows the example of Rousseau, whose confessor is, however,
none other than the "Sovereign Judge" to whom Rousseau will proclaim
at the Last Judgment,
I have shown myself as I was, as contemptibleand vile when I was so,
as good, generous and perfect when I was so: I have unveiled my inner
nature as Thou Thyself hast seen it. Eternal Being, assemble around me
the innumerablethrong of my fellow men: let them hear my confessions,
groan Tatmy offenses and blush at my depravities. Let each of them in
turn uncoverhis heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity, and
then let any one of them who dares tell Thee, "I was a better man than

he."8

The original introduction to Childhood betrays, with its Rousseauian

"apology," a sentimentalist insistence on the confession itself as sufficient penitence for the sins confessed. Eikhenbaum maintains that the
sentimentalism of Childhood, which derives from Rousseau as interpreted by Sterne, led to what in Eikhenbaum's analysis is the antiRomanticism of The Cossacks. It is here that, instead of progressing
from sentimentalism to romanticism as literary history dictates, Tolstoi
sides with his grandfathers against the generation of his fathers. He
parodies the romantic situation of the European among savages who,
in the novels of Marlinskii and Lermontov, usually inhabit the Caucasus. The romanticism of these so-called Caucasian novels derives from
Byron as interpreted in Russia by Pushkin, whose poem, The Gypsies,
engages a Byronic hero in tragic conflict with his gypsy mistress and
her lover. Tolstoi's parody of the Byronic hero and his tragedy leads
Eikhenbaum to conclude that "Tolstoi consciously follows in the steps
of the romantics with the intention of systematically destroying their
poetics."9
8 Jean-JacquesRousseau, Oeuvres completes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1959-1969), vol. 1,
Les Confessions, p. 5. All quotations from Rousseau will refer to this edition.
9 Eikhenbaum,p. 108. Critics did not at first recognize that Tolstoi had followed
in the steps of the romantics with the intention of destroying their poetics. In a
review of 1865, a critic for the influential Sovremennikdeclared that "In its basic
idea The Cossacks is no better than those Byronic works of Russian literature in
which our civilized Europeansgo out in search of tranquillity and oblivion to lands
where precipices hide in stormclouds and men live free as eagles" (the last two
clauses of this sentence scan and rhyme in imitation of romanticverse); see Sovremennik, 1865, no. 6, cited in Eikenbaum'sless formalisticLev Tolstoi, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1928-1931; rpt. Munich, 1969), 2:152. Eugene-Melchior de Vogiie, the
French diplomat who, with his Roman russe (1886), introduced the Western public
to the Russian novel, may have been the first to observe that "Les Cosaques marquent une date litt6raire: la rupture definitive de la poetique russe avec le byronisme et le romantismeau coeur meme de la citadelle ou s'etaient retrancheesdepuis
trente ans ces puissances" (E.-M. de Vogii, Le Roman russe [Paris, 1886], p. 285;
Russian translation [Moscow, 1887]). By 1886, then, Tolstoi's parody of the ro-

Tolstoi and Rousseau

405

AlthoughEikhenbaumwould presumablyacknowledgea connection

between sentimentalismand romanticism,his discussionof them in The
Young'Tolstoireduces them to separate and independentphenomena.
It places Childhood in a direct line of succession from Rousseau to
Sterne,and The Cossacksin anotherline from Byronto Pushkin.With
these lines of successionEikhenbaumsets up two literaryalternatives:
sentimentalism(which Tolstoi adopts) and romanticism(which, in parodying the romantics,he rejects).However, by setting up sentimentalism and romanticismas alternatives,real though they may be, Eikhenbaum obscuresthe similaritywhich underliesChildhoodand The Cossacks. As a consistentformalistEikhenbaumfinds them similarin that
each is, in its own way, an attemptto develop a new genre by the selfanalytic method. I find them similarin that both of them express the
basic contradictionin a structure of ideas which is distinctively romantic. That structureof ideas occurs throughoutRousseauand finds
its clearestexpressionin his second discourse,On the Originand Foundationsof InequalityAmongMen.
What Eikhenbaum calls the romantic situation of the European
among savages actually correspondsto a myth of exile by which disillusionedidealists,whetherliberal or conservative,came to terms with
their historicalsituationin the aftermathof the French Revolutionand,
later, of the DecembristRevolt. But the myth of exile originatedbefore
either the French Revolutionor the Decembrist Revolt in that structure of ideas which occurs throughoutRousseau and finds expression
in his Discourse on Inequality.When Tolstoi parodies the romantic
situation of the Europeanamong savages, he merely disguises his ideological affinity,if not for the individualromanticshe parodies,at least
for the myth of exile to which the traditionalromantic situation cormantics was already understood to preclude his own romanticism; later it was
understoodto ensure his realism, the term which Eikhenbaumso pointedly eschews.
So, to cite an example at random,it was understoodby Philip Rahv in his essay of
1946, "Tolstoy: the Green Twig and the Black Trunk,"Essays on Literature and
Politics, 1932-1972 (Boston, 1978), pp. 208-221, especially p. 216. For Soviet
critics, still more than for Western critics like Rahv, romanticismand realism are,
in the words of Iurii Lotman, "diametricallyopposed systems of artistic cognition,"
and therefore mutually exclusive (Iurii Lotman, "Istoki 'tolstovskogo napravleniia'
v russkoi literature 1830-kh godov," Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 5,
Uchenye zapiski TGU, 1962, vyp. 119, pp. 2-76, especially p. 36; see also Lotman's
"'Chelovek prirody' v russkoi literature XIX veka i 'tsyganskaia tema' u Bloka,"
Blokovskiisbornik [Tartu, 1964], pp. 98-156 and "Russoi russkaiakul'tura XVIII
veka," in Epokha prosveshcheniia [Leningrad, 1967], pp. 208-281). Hence for
Soviet critics there can be no romantic realism because "romantic"has come to
mean "unrealistic."Lotman's essay on what he calls "the Tolstoyan trend" in realism, together with two later essays on Rousseau in Russia (also cited above), are
to my knowledge the best pertinent studies. But even in Lotman's essays romanticism is a pejorative and vaguely defined concept: clearly a redefinition of it might
fundamentallyalter our conception of Russianliteraryhistory.

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responds. It is true, as Eikhenbaum observes, that "... Tolstoi enters

battle with romanticism not only to overthrow it and put his veto on
all its conventions, but also to oppose it with something different, something new."'? Yet inasmuch as the romanticism of Tolstoi's fathers, no
less than the sentimentalism of his grandfathers, derives from Rousseau,
Tolstoi attempts, in his parody of the Byronic hero and his tragedy, to
refute romanticism in its own terms. The attempt results in an internal
conflict which prevents Tolstoi from putting his veto on the ideas behind the romantic conventions. Those ideas inevitably trap Tolstoi and
his heroes in a vicious circle of romantic opposition to romanticism. In
Twe Cossacks Tolstoi proves unable to oppose Marlinskii and Lermontov with anything newer than an appeal to the old ideas of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.
The Discourse on Inequality is Rousseau's reply to the question proposed in 1754 by the Academy of Dijon: "What is the origin of inequality among men; and is it authorized by natural law?" Rousseau
replied that inequality cannot be authorized by natural law because
it did not originate in nature. He undertook to defend his reply by
arguing the still more controversial thesis that society itself did not
originate in nature. Man as we know him is the artificial product of his
own faculties, language and reason, which have developed in society.
We can know man as he originally was only by reconstructing the history of his descent from an asocial state of nature, "a state which," as
Rousseau concedes, "no longer exists, which perhaps never existed,
which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless
necessary to form sound notions in order to judge our present state
correctly.""
In order to demonstrate that society did not originate in nature,
Rousseau reconstructs the history of man's descent from this asocial
state. Where there is no society, there can be no social inequality
among men, who lived, like animals, in utter harmony with their instincts. Among these instincts Rousseau singles out two natural principles or sentiments prior to reason: love of self, which society has transformed into vain self-love, and pity for others, which in society provides
the basis for virtue. Yet love of self and pity for others in no way distinguished man from other animals: what distinguished man was the
potential freedom to acquiesce in his instincts or to resist them. To
exercise this freedom would mean to choose between acquiescence and
resistance, but choice between them is irreconcilable with Rousseau's
idea of nature for two reasons. An act of choice must be an act against
to Ibid.,p. 113.
11Rousseau,vol. 3, Discourssur l'origineet les fondementsde 'in4galitd,p. 123.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

407

nature because it cannot by definitionbe instinctive, and even if man

in nature could performsuch acts against nature, the choice to resist
his instinctswould destroy the utter harmony in which he originally
lived with them. Clearly man would be able to act against nature
only after he had acquiredthe faculty of reason, and as it is in society
that reason,like language, develops, man would be able to choose between acquiescence and resistanceonly after he had founded society.
Rather than consider the problem of moral freedom any further,
Rousseauimmediatelyreplaces his first distinctionwith a second one:
what distinguishedman from other animalswas his inherent ability to
develop or perfect his faculties.l2Even in the state of nature this ability, which Rousseaucalls perfectibility,renderedman more than equal
to otherspecies in the struggleto live. With time man became conscious
of the distinctionbetween himself and other species and, having developed his reasonsufficientlyto ensure his advantageover them, man
became consciousof the distinctionbetween himself and individualsof
his own species. It was to secure an advantageover individualsof his
own species that man founded society and with it, social inequality,
which artificiallycompoundedsuch physical inequality as had existed
before. The foundationof society and of social inequalityled to the development of mans faculties, language and reason; and the development of man's faculties led to the institutionof still greater social inequality. This mutual interactionbetween man's faculties and the society in which they develop had a cumulative effect which ultimately
transformedman into the artificialproduct of his own faculties.
Rousseauemphasizesthat, althoughthe perfectionof man'sfaculties
in society enables man to exercise his freedom, it necessarily brings
with it the corruptionof his mores. As soon as man begins to exercise
his freedom, his now highly developed ability to resist his instincts
turns him against nature. Societyteaches man for the first time to distinguish between equality and inequality (read "good"and "evil").To
12John Charvet,The SocialProblemin the Philosophyof Rousseau(London,
1974), p. 8 ff. Charvet'ssecond chapter,which follows the logic of Rousseau's
thesis step by step, is by far the clearestand, for purposesof comparisonwith
Tolstoi,the mostvaluablestudyof the Discourseon Inequality.On the questionof
intermediate
the familyas the socialunitin Rousseau's
period(pp.22-23), it supersedes ArthurO. Lovejoy'swell-knownbut relativelyfacile essay of 1923, "The
of Rousseau'sDiscourseon Inequality,"Essaysin the HisSupposedPrimitivism
tory of Ideas (Baltimore,1948), pp. 14-37. It also demonstratesthat self-love
firstbringsaboutthe conditionsfor propertyand not vice versa;
(amour-propre)
hence,self-loveis the ultimatecauseof socialcorruption,and not property,which
is onlythe immediatecause (pp. 25-26). Charvetuses the distinctionbetweenselflove and love of self (amourde soi) to distinguishbetweenconsciousnessof self
and consciousness
of others,and endshis studywith a critiqueof Rousseau'sargumentas a whole.

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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

savage lies within himself;sociable man, always outside himself, knows

how to live only in the opinionof othersand it is, so to speak,fromtheir
judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence."l3
Rousseau'sreconstructionof man'sdescent from nature explains,like
the Biblical story of Adam'sfall, the reasons for man's present fallen
state. It identifiesnaturewith an Eden in which man, like Adam, lived
without sin. But if it follows, on the one hand, the Biblical story of
Adam'sfall, it departs radicallyfrom the theological doctrine of original sin on the other. Augustineformulatedthis doctrinein his debate
with Pelagius as to whether the wages of Adam'ssin are death for all
men. Augustineposited that Adamwas originallyable not to sin (posse
non peccare)and not to die; he did not maintainthat Adamwas originally unable to sin (non posse peccare) and to die.14In his Discourse on
Inequality Rousseauaffirmsprecisely what Augustinedenies; that man
was originallyunable to sin and, if not unable to die, at least unable to
fear death. Man in nature fears only hunger and pain, ". .. pain and

not death,"writes Rousseau,"becausean animalwill never know what

it is to die, and knowledge of death and its terrorsis one of the first
acquisitionsthat man has made in moving away from the animal condition."15Rousseau'snatureis not the Eden in which man first chose to
sin; it is a gardenin which man was unable to choose. He sinned not, as
did Adam, by choosing to know good and evil; he sinned in the very
act of makinga choice. To be free to choose and to be free from choice
are mutuallyexclusive propositions.The failureto distinguishbetween
them leads in Rousseau,as later in Tolstoi, to an ambiguity between
two differentuses of the word "good."
3 Rousseau,vol. 3, Sur l'inegalite,p. 193.

14 Augustine, De Correptioneet gratia 12.33 in Patrologia Latina 44:936 (Paris,

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.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

409

"Men are wicked,"writes Rousseau, ". . . nevertheless, man [here

Rousseauuses the singular] is naturallygood...."16 The crux here is
what Rousseauunderstandsby the word "good,"and Rousseauis not
explicit about this. Given that only man in nature,or man in the singular, is good, Rousseau'suse of the word excludes men in the plural.
The society of men sets up relations such that good and evil are opposed, and in which men must choose between them. Man's original
asocial state sets up no relationsamong men; consequentlyman in nature has no need to make choices. Men in society make choices but
they are often wrong; man in nature makes no choices but he is, if
never right, at least never wrong. Moral categories do not pertain to
nature because, so long as man remainsalone or, as Rousseauputs it,
"equal,"he has no occasion to choose. But just as it is trivial to assert
that men are equal when they merelylive alone, it is trivial to suggest,
as Rousseaudoes here, that men are good when they make no choices.
A sign that Rousseauwas perhaps uneasy with these ambiguitiesis
that he prefers an intermediateperiod of history to the original, prelapsarianstate of nature. The foundationof society and of social inequality did not in themselvesput an end to the state of nature,for the
state of natureunderwenttwo revolutions.The first revolutionbrought
with it the institutionof the family together with what Rousseaucalls
a kind of property.The second revolution,which finallydid put an end
to the state of nature, brought with it the institution of legally sanctioned property.Rousseauopens his history of man's descent with an
analogy between the developmentof the individual and the evolution
of the species: "Thereis, I feel, an age at which the individual man
would want to stop; you will seek the age at which you would desire
your species had stopped."'7By analogy with the prime of the individual man, the prime of the species is not its original state, which
Rousseaualready described as the state of nature. The prime of mankind is the age in which men instituted the family which, as the only
naturalsocial unit, representsa virtual contradictionin terms. It is in
the communalactivities of a family-like society that Rousseau would
desire his species had stopped. "The example of savages, who have almost all been found at this point, seems to confirmthat mankindwas
made to remainin it always...."18
The family-like or patriarchal society of Rousseau's intermediate
period was relatively moral because it was social; yet, because it was
still relativelynatural at the same time, it was also minimallycorrupt.
6 Ibid., p. 202.
17Ibid., p. 133.
18Ibid., p. 171.

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". .. 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.

20 Ibid., pp. 169-170.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

411

not formulatea secularizedgospel of Christianredemption,nor did he

help to build the heavenlycity of the eighteenthcenturyphilosophers.21
Original sin becomes, for Rousseau,the sin of choice, which society
transmitsfrom generationto generation;and as remissionfor the original sin of choice Rousseauoffersnothing that would correspondto the
doctrineof grace.
Man'sdescentfrom the state of natureestablishedthat what we ordinarily understandas human nature is just a corrupt "second"nature
determinedby human culture.In this, the second discourseis entirely
consistentwith the first discourse,On the Arts and Sciences,which inverts the traditionalevaluation of culture by placing nature above it.
Once Rousseauhas placed nature above culture in his discourses,he
finds it appropriate,in ?Emile,to place childhood above adulthood as
well. The education of any child in society is an acculturationwhich
renders him a "naturalized"citizen of adult society. When Rousseau
gives his Emile an education outside society, he contrives to demonstrate,by his method of negative education,that a child can become an
adult without losing his originalnature.The educationof Nikolen'kain
Childhood is, as we shall see, at once less utopian and more realistic
than that of Emile. Ratherthan offerthe hypotheticalsolutionRousseau
offers in Emile, it reformulatesthe fundamental contradictionof his
Discourseon Inequality.The adult,who is free to choose between good
and evil, must for that reasonbe wicked whereasthe child, who is free
from choice, remainsuntaintedby corruption.Given that this structure
of ideas providesno remissionfor the originalsin of choice, adulthood
becomes a state of exile from the lost and unregainableEden of childhood.
Rousseau'sanalogy between the developmentof the individual and
the evolutionof the species links the child hero of Childhoodwith the
savage Cossacks:for the young Tolstoi,as for Rousseau,the savage is a
21

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.

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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.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

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.

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"Stop!Don't even say that, my darling, my dearest!,"I cry out, kissing

her knees, and tears streamfrom my eyes, tears of love and rapture.24

Once Nikolen'kais in Moscow,the promiseto love his motheralways

and never to forget her gives rise to the first real guilt Nikolen'kahas
ever known. For his grandmother'snameday Nikolen'kacomposes a
quatrainwhich he ends, for the sake of rhyme, "Toplease her we will
strive while here, / And love her as our mother dear!"-and so, Nikolen'kathinks,he breakshis promise."I was beside myself at the thought
that . . . my good-for-nothing verses would be read aloud, together

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."

Tolstoi and Rousseau

415

"Sothat'swhat my dreammeantl ... Dear God, if only nothing worse

happensl"26In anotherscene Nikolen'ka'sfather kisses his wife before
he leaves with Nikolen'kafor Moscow."'Enoughmy dear',said father,
'we aren'tpartingforever.'" "'But still it's sad', said mother in a voice
that trembled with tears."27All such references to the first separation
from his mother sound retrospectivelylike anticipationsof the final
separation,whereasGrisha'sprophecyof her death soundsinitially like
a mere reference to the departurefor Moscow. The narratorhas involuntarilypresented his memoriesin such a way as to attribute the
guilt he felt at his mother'sdeath to the time before it occurred.These
memories impose on the narrator'spast a self-consciousand entirely
literary constructthrough which he looks back at himself and judges
himselfguilty.
The narrator'sguilt lurks behind the grief Nikolen'kafeels when, in
the chapter entitled "Grief,"he stands by his mother's funeral bier.
Here the narratorconsiderswhether or not Nikolen'kafelt true grief at
his mother'sdeath. By true grief he understandsa grief that excludes
all sentiments which result from consciousnessof grief. Nikolen'kais
alone in the roomexcept for a deacon whose monotonousvoice in a far
corer makes him forget the deacon is there. He climbs up on a chair
and looks down on his mother'sface, which he at firstidentifiesmerely
as "somethingtransparentand waxen in color."Then, when he recognizes that thing as his mother'sface, he cringes with horror,but the
memoryof her face as it was in life enables his imaginationto compensate for reality. Thus the ocular image of a transparentand yellowish
thing alternates for some time with the remembered image of his
mother'sface until the narratortells us, "Atlast my imaginationtired, it
ceased to delude me; consciousnessof reality also vanished, and I forgot myself altogether.I do not know how long I remainedin that position, or what constitutedit; I know only that for a long time I lost consciousnessof my existence and experienceda kind of exalted, inexpresAt this point, there occurs somesibly pleasant, and sad enjoyment."28
is
which
incidental
perhaps the most significantocthing apparently
currencein the whole book. The door creaksas a new deacon comes in
to relieve the one alreadyin the corer. Nikolen'kabecomes conscious
of how he may appearto the new deacon and, to impresshim with his
grief,begins to weep. The narratorcomments,
As I call to memorymy impressions,I find that only that minuteof
was true grief. Before and after the burial I never
self-forgetfulness
ceasedto cry and was sad but ... I despisedmyselfbecauseI did not
^ Ibid.,p. 13.

27 Ibid., p. 41.
28 Ibid., p. 85.

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experience exclusivelythe sentimentof woe, and tried to hide all others;

for that reason my sorrow was insincere and unnatural.Above all, I experienced a kind of enjoymentin knowing that I was unhappy, and tried
to arouse the consciousnessof my unhappiness, and that egoistic sentiment did more to stifle true sorrowin me than did any other.29
Clearly this is an adult's memory of a child's experience, in which the
child probably felt less the guilt expressed by the narrator than shame
at being caught dry-eyed at his mother's bier. That Nikolen'ka should
have been dry-eyed would come as no surprise to Rousseau, whose
1Emilemight have provided the scene with this epigraph: "smile has
never feigned to weep at anyone's death because he does not know
what it is to die."30Nikolen'ka is unselfconscious like smile only until
the society of others in the form of a new deacon makes him selfconscious. Then, as when he wrote, "To please her we will strive while
here / And love her as our mother dear," self-consciousness leads him
to falsify the expression of his deepest sentiment. Yet just at points such
as this one, where Tolstoi appears most similar to Rousseau, the difference between them becomes most pronounced. If at first Nikolen'ka,
like ]imile, does not know what it is to die, it is clear that Nikolen'ka
uses his imagination to resist that knowledge. At his mother's funeral
service the cry of a peasant child who sees her face breaks down Nikolen'ka's resistance, and he, too, lets out a cry which the narrator explains as follows: ". . . The thought that the same face which, a few
days before, had been filled with beauty and tenderness, the face
of the one I loved more than anything in the world, could awaken
horror, revealed to me, as though for the first time, the bitter truth and
filled my soul with despair."31
Although self-consciousness prevents Nikolen'ka from feeling true
grief at his mother's death, nothing can prevent him from feeling horror
at it. Natal'ia Savishna, who lacks all self-consciousness, not only feels
true grief but accepts her own death instinctively when she, too, dies
shortly thereafter. It is her death which elicits from the narrator this
judgment: "She accomplished the best and greatest thing in life-she
died without regrets or fears."32The problem of life becomes, as in War
and Peace and Anna Karenina, the problem of death; hence Tolstoi's
autobiographic "Notes of a Madman" as well as the stories "Alesha the
Pot" (really Natalia Savishna's story retold), "The Death of Ivan IIich"
and "Master and Man." In each instance to accept one's own death is
somehow inexplicably to become unselfconscious and, in effect, like
Natal'ia Savishna. To be unselfconscious is to be free from choice and in
29 Ibid.,pp. 85-86.

30 Rousseau,vol. 4, smile, p. 505.

31 Tolstoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, p. 88.
32 Ibid., p. 95.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

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.

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to think himself better than anyone else? By Rousseau'stheory, he

plus any one individual (except his mother)twill constitute a society.
The originalintroductionto Childhoodsmacksof this tendency where
Tolstoi writes, "AlthoughI am convincedthat I am no worse than most
people, I may yet seem to be the lowest of the low because I have been
sincere. [But inasmuchas I have been sincere in my confession, the
readerinterpolates,am I not in fact the highest of the high?] I ask you
to be my confessorand my judge as I confideto you in these memoirs."
Rousseau, who recognizes only the Supreme Being as his confessor,
proudly challenges the innumerablethrong of his fellow men to outconfess him. "Let each of them in turn uncoverhis heart at the foot of
Thy throne with equal sincerity, and then let any one of them who
dares tell Thee, 'I was a better man than he."' This is the confessionof
a narcissisticpenitent who would absolve his own sins in the very act
of confessingthem. Tolstoi, who probablysensed the narcissismin his
originalintroduction,actuallysubmitteda differentone for publication.
He may also have sensed that Childhood,though written in a humbler
tone than Rousseau's,is itself an attempt to go back to the Eden of
childhood by confessing the sin of his fall. In it he confesses his selfconsciousness,but the very activity of confessing one's self-consciousness is, if not altogethernarcissistic,at least highly self-conscious.
Childhoodfinds its complementin The Cossacks,which substitutes
the past of the species for what, in Childhood,was the past of the individual. Whereas Childhood gives an unselfconscious,child's-eyeview
of culture, The Cossacksgives a self-conscious,cultivated view of nature. The narratorof Childhood is separated from his past by time;
Olenin is separated from the Cossacksby a thousand versts of space
which stand for time. When Olenin leaves for the Caucasus,he means
to cast off his identity as a Muscovitearistocrat,together with his debts
to those he leaves behind: several restaurateurs,a tailor and a woman
who loved him but whom he, like other Byronic heroes, cannot love.
As Childhoodis punctuatedby Nikolen'ka'sdeparturesfrom the country for Moscow and from Moscow for the country, the story here is
constructedon Olenin'sdeparturesfrom Moscow for the Caucasusand
fromthe Caucasusfor Moscow.What Oleninplanned as a mere escape
from himself takes on the quality of a pilgrimagein the strict sense, a
redemptive journey like the one made by the narratorof Childhood
into his past. It begins in the corruptcity (in Childhood,in the narrator's corruptpresent), passes through a pristine wilderness (the past)
and finally leads back towards the city (or the present).34But once
34 The terminology of the "redemptivejourney"and its three stages comes from
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (London, 1964), pp. 69,71.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

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

and he discerns in them the physical symbol of the moral beauty of

nature.It is with these mountainsthat he associatesthe Cossackwoman
Mar'ianahe will come to love: both are truly beautiful, not falsely
beautifullike the romanticideals of the other Russianofficer,Beletskii,
who, not accidentally,reads Dumas's Trois Mousquetaires.With the
mountainsand Mar'ianaTolstoiturnsthe conventionsof literatureback
into an indictment of culture and takes sides with Rousseau against
Rousseau'sown progeny,the romantics.
Because Olenin finds the Cossack community, or stanitsa, still at
Rousseau'sintermediate period of man's descent from nature, most
situations in The Cossacks provide textbook examples from his Discourse on Inequality. At first sight Olenin singles out Mar'ianaas the
potentialheroineof his own Byronicromance."'This is she',"he thinks
to himself,only to add, "'But there will be otherslike her'."36Although
there are in fact other, more accessible Cossack women, Mar'ianais
betrothedto the young dzhigit Lukashka.This Olenin learns from the
old hunter Eroshka,who initiates Olenin into Cossack life. Men are
animalsin Eroshka'seyes, and men ought to hunt animalsonly out of
need. The boar has one law, he tells Olenin, and the hunter has another, but they are both God's creatures. Here this unselfconscious
philosopherof natureechoes the Discourseon Inequality,which reads:
... As [animals]sharesomethingof our natureby virtueof the sensitivity with whichthey are endowed,one will judgethat they too ought
to participatein naturalright, and that man is subjectto some sort of
duties towardthem. It seems,in effect, that if I am obligedto do no
'3 Tolstoi, vol. 6, Kazaki,p. 13.
36

Ibid.,p. 41.

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harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a reasonable being than

because he is a sensitive being, a quality which, being common to beast
and man, ought at least to give the one the right not to be uselessly mistreated by the other.37
Just as man may hunt animals out of need, so he may love women
but, here also, only out of need. Men have their own laws but those
laws are not God's law, which is that everything was created for man's
need. From this Eroshka concludes, "There's no sin in anything," but
as for man's laws, he says, "That's all false . ."38, a phrase which,
when he repeats it at the end of the book, will sound like a judgment
of Olenin. Whether Christian or Muslim, all men will die like animals
and grass will grow on their graves. Alone in a stag's lair from which
he and Eroshka startled a stag (in Russian, olen') the day before, Olenin
meditates on Eroshka's dictum. He has sought out the stag's lair as a
refuge from the sun, crawled (on all fours) under a bush and literally
taken the stag's place, where he surrenders himself to the mosquitoes.
" ... one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes,
and for some reason all humming something around me, and every one
of them as much a particular Dmitrii Olenin as I am . . .' And it became clear to him that he was not at all a Russian aristocrat, a member
of Moscow society, friend and relative of someone or other, but just the
same mosquito ... or stag, as the ones living around him now. 'Just like
them, as Old Eroshka said, I'll live and die. And he was right: only
grass will grow'."39Here as in Childhood the problem of life becomes
the problem of death which, at one with himself and with nature,
Olenin lears to accept in a pantheistic experience. Yet the conclusion
he draws from this experience is one which neither Eroshka nor any
other Cossack could understand.
"Why am I happy and what have I lived for till now?" Because he
has lived for himself, Olenin concludes that he must now live for others.
"That is what happiness is, ... happiness is to live for others. That is
evident."40But it is evident to the reader that Olenin is lying in a stag's
lair, not living for others. In this asocial state Olenin experiences the
desire to live for others as an instinct, but nature, in which he experiences the revelation, is a state to which moral categories do not pertain.
It will turn out that he has mistaken the moral principle of self-denial
for the natural instinct of pity, of which Rousseau says, "Benevolence
and friendship itself strictly defined, are the products of a constant pity
37 Rousseau,vol. 3, Sur lindgalitd, p. 126.

38Tolstoi,vol. 6, Kazaki,p. 56.

39 Ibid., p. 77.
40 Ibid.

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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

Rousseau,vol. 3, Sur l'ingalite, p. 155.

Ibid., p. 156.

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both these roles to be false that, in choosing to give Lukashkaa horse,

he denied himself Mar'iana.But now he feels that happinessis not to
live for others (he has tried this and only been unhappy)."Happiness,"
as he redefinesit in his letter, "is to be with nature, to see her, to talk
with her."I use the femininepronounin my translationbecause Olenin
goes on, "Perhapswhat I love in Mar'ianais nature,the personification
of all that is beautiful in nature;but I have no will of my own; in me
some elemental force loves her; all God's world, all nature forces this
love into my soul and says, lovel ...

In loving her, I feel I am an in-

alienable part of all God's happy world."43So, in choosing to marry

Mar'iana,Olenin has not in fact made a choice: he has acquiesced in
his instinctsand become at one with nature as he was in the stag's lair.
Alone in the stag's lair, where he was free from choice, Olenin was
so happy that he "instinctively"wanted to make a choice. But once he
finds his way back into society, where he is free to choose, he cannot
bear the responsibilityof self-denial.Olenin'sproposalto marry Mar'iana expressesthe need to recreate,in social relations,the asocial state
he enjoyed in the stag's lair; and in his letter, he describes the real
Mar'ianain mythic terms, as "a magnificent woman in the primal
beauty in which the firstwomanmust have emergedfrom the Creator's
hands."44In expressingthe need to recreate,in his relationswith Mar'iana, the asocialstate he enjoyedin the stag'slair, Olenin lapses into the
fundamental contradiction of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality,
Ideal social relationswould restorenature insofar as they would allow
man to live as though alone and free from choice, but they would at the
same time destroy nature insofar as they would require him to live
with others and hence to make choices. However happy Olenin may
have been in the stag'slair where he was free from choice, he could not
instinctivelyhave wanted to live for others: as a man whose faculty of
reason has been perfected in society, and whose mores have thereby
been corrupted, he can at best act spontaneously,not instinctively.
There is nothing in the descriptionof Olenin'sexperiencein the stag's
lair to suggest, however, that Tolstoi regardsit as in any way less naturalthan the experienceof man in his originalstate. Only when Olenin
undertakes,in his letter, to live by the naturalsentimentof pity do we
find out that Olenin himself now regards self-denial as hypocritical.
The end result of this turn to nature will be the same as if Olenin had
denied himself Mar'ianaexcept that, whereas he might have ennobled
himself by self-denial,he will now expose himself to ridicule.If, on the
one hand, Olenin does not RussifyMar'ianaby makingher the wife of
43 Tolstoi, vol. 6, Kazaki,p. 123.
44 Ibid., p. 120.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

423

a Russianofficeror, on the other hand, deceive himself by playing the

role of a Lukashka,how does Olenin foresee his life with Mar'iana?
Fortunately,when Lukashkalies wounded by the Chechen at the end
of the book, Mar'ianaherself relieves Olenin of the need for foresight.
She scorns Olenin'sproposalto make her his wife and, in conversation
with Eroshka,turnsher back on Olenin as he forlornlydepartsfor Moscow. It is clearly a matter of indifferenceto the Cossackswhether he
will ever return and, as the book stands, it is a matter of indifference
to the readertoo.
The refusalto accept the fundamentalcontradictionof the Discourse
on Inequality as an insoluble paradoxruns throughoutall of Tolstoi,
from the "PhilosophicalRemarkson the Discoursesof J. J. Rousseau"
(an unfinishedcommentaryof 1847 which includes only the first, not
the second discourse),to the entry in his journalfor June 6, 1905,where
he writes, "Theycompareme with Rousseau.I owe much to Rousseau
and I love him, but there is a great differencebetween us. The difference is that Rousseaurejects all civilization whereas I reject pseudoChristiancivilization."Rousseaualways supposesthe possibility of another, radicallydifferentcivilizationon other foundationsthan those of
society as he knows it. But Tolstoi supposes, with the hindsight of the
French Revolutionand the DecembristRevolt,that this other,radically
differentcivilizationis, if not yet actual, still latent in each individual,
as the title of his tract "The Kingdomof God Is within You"suggests.
The young Tolstoipresumablyunderstandsthat to be free from choice
and to be free to choose are mutuallyexclusive propositions:if he did
not understandthat, he would not perceive the situation of the European amongsavages as a dilemmato be parodied.Yet he does not perceive that, as a consequenceof Rousseau'sideas, it is not naturalto be
moral:if he did perceive that, he could not describeOlenin in the stag's
lair as both free from choice and free to choose at the same time. As
soon as Olenin lies down in the stag's place, Tolstoi leaves no doubt
that it is not only naturalto be moral,it is also naturalto be Christian.
"... Suddenlysuch a strange sense of causelesshappiness and love for
everything came over [Olenin] that, out of an old habit acquired in
childhood,he began to cross himself and to thank someone."45In substituting the postulate of man's original innocence for the doctrine of
originalsin, Rousseauarrivedat a structureof ideas from which traditional moral values, preeminentlyChristianin origin, do not logically
spring. He provided a basis in naturallaw for the maxim,"Do what is
best for yourself with the least possible harm to others";he did not
intend to provide a basis for the maxim,"Do unto others as you would
45 Ibid., p. 76.

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The Russian Review

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.

Tolstoi and Rousseau

425

blinds herselfto her husband'sinfidelityto her. These female characters

are good in the sense that they are thoroughly,not just relativelymoral
like Rousseau'ssavages or Tolstoi'sCossacks.They embody a Victorian
ideal of perfect wife- and motherhoodwhich, in terms of the Discourse
on Inequality,can only be unnatural.Yet, unnaturalthough their perfection may be, both Mar'ianaand Nikolen'ka'smother represent for
Tolstoi the Edenic state of naturefrom which Olenin and the narrator
of Childhoodare cut off by theirhistoriesof past choices.
In 'The Cossacks, as in Childhood, the surest moral insight occurs
when the principalcharacteris alone and free from choice; in both of
them the principal characterfails to act on that insight when he reenters the society of others. The distinction between pre-romantic
sentimentalismand the Byronic hero's full-blown romanticismbreaks
down with time in Tolstoi's work, but the fundamental structure of
Rousseau'sideas endures. Behind Tolstoi's charactersthere still lurks
the figure not so much of naturalman (who is, after all, an animal),as
of a civilized man for whom choice comes naturally.In Childhoodand
The Cossacksthe problemis how to come to terms with society but, as
Tolstoi matures, the children in his work will successfully grow up,
marrythe right woman(like Tolstoihimself) and reconcile culturewith
nature in the family. War and Peace will restore what is, for Tolstoi,
the Edenic past of Russia,in which choices were easier to make. 1818
is itself a mythical childhood when, by contrast with the corrupt societies of the West, Russia represented nature. If Pierre Bezukhov
makes a wrong choice (to marryHelene, for example), the action of
War and Peace will put it right. But when Tolstoi's contemporary,
Anna Karenina,makes a wrong choice in the Westernized Russia of
the 1870s, her choice, unlike Bezukhov's,will prove to be fatal. The
profound mistrust of free will that we have seen in Rousseau'sDiscourse on Inequalitypreparedthe authorof Anna Kareninafor Schopenhauer'sconceptionof the will as destruction.It seems in no way inconsistent to argue that although, as Eikhenbaummaintains, Tolstoi
was a nineteenth-centurywriter of eighteenth-centuryculture,he was
also a romantic;because Tolstoi selected, from among the ideas which
the eighteenth century offered him, a uniquely romanticcontradiction
to resolve.