Young Tolstoys Diaries: Time, Moral

Development, and the Search of Self

This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?

BY MA RIA POPOV A

Some of humanitys greatest writers championed

the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but hardly
any literary titan has explored the mediums
spiritual and existential value more intimately than
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828November 10,
1910). The same intense inward gaze that produced
Tolstoys record of spiritual awakening became, by
the end of his life, an effort to assemble a manual on
the meaning of existence. But the most
psychologically formative and creatively intriguing
journaling is that of Tolstoys youth.

Tolstoy wrote his first diary entry at the age of

eighteen, in March of 1847, while relegated to a hospital bed during treatment for a
venereal disease. He was already on the cusp of being expelled from university for
poor academic performance, so the forced sabbatical at the hospital led him to
begin a journey of self-exploration in the dual sense of both examining himself
and contemplating the notion of the self which would stretch and coil across his
entire life.

That journey is what Russian literature scholar and historian Irina Paperno
explores in Who, What Am I?: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self (public library)
a remarkably insightful account of the beloved authors paradoxical efforts to
create a narrative representation of both the self and the selfless being, and an
inquiry into the broader, more universal concerns with what actually constitutes a
self, that elusive and often self-defeating appendage of existence.
 Portrait of Leo Tolstoy by Ivan Kramskoy, 1873

What makes these diaries especially intriguing is their parallel existence in the past
and the future Tolstoy combined narrative reflections on the micro scale of
autobiography with moral resolutions on the macro scale of character. But what
emerges, above all, is the sense that Tolstoy was a man of intense intellect,
continually crucified by the compulsive shoulds in which that very intellect was
trapped. Caught up in his obsessive project of intentional moral organization, he
saw the self as a forceful function of supposed to rather than a peaceful bearing
witness to being, an embracing of is.

Tolstoy liked to trace the origin of his fascination with this question to his old
nanny, who used to lie in solitude, listening to the clock and hearing in its ticking a
question: Who are you what are you? Who are you what are you? In the
clocks question, Paperno argues, Tolstoy found his eternal quest:

This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?

And so for the young Tolstoy lying at the hospital, the diary was as much an
instrument of self-perfection with which to steer his wayward life as it was an
experimental project aimed at exploring the nature of self through concepts like
morality, memory, consciousness, and time.

Tolstoys early journals, in fact, were at once a moral checklist and narrative
cartography of time. Paperno points to one particularly intriguing notebook from
his mid-twenties, titled Journal for Weaknesses, which fell partway between
Benjamin Franklins agenda of virtues and Isaac Newtons litany of self-professed
sins. Like Franklin, Tolstoy marked his moral development along the temporal
progression of the calendar but, like Newton, he focused on his follies rather than
his feats he divided the page of his calendar-notebook into columns for potential
weaknesses like laziness, indecision, and vanity, marking with small crosses the
days on which the respective vice manifested.

Alongside this notebook, Paperno notes, Tolstoy kept another, titled Journal of
Daily Occupations a time-log in which each page was divided into two vertical
columns, one for the future and one for the past. The first listed Tolstoys agenda
for the next day, and the second marked the fruition of those plans the following
day. Each days entry thus began by using the previous days as a reference point,
producing what was essentially an evaluation and always an unfavorable one
of how the actuality of is measured up against the aspiration of should be.

Indeed, the fact that there was no column for the present at all further intensifies
the sense that Tolstoy was driven by the tyranny of should, always leaning forward
into a better imagined future and yet always plagued by hindsights sense of having
fallen short.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Tolstoys 1852 book

Nikolenkas Childhood. Click image for more.

Paperno quotes one illustrative entry from March 24, 1851, in which Tolstoy
scrupulously interjects into the narrative of his day the moral weaknesses that led
to having fallen short on the previous days resolutions:

Arose somewhat late and read, but did not have time to write. Poiret came, I
fenced, and did not send him away (sloth and cowardice). Ivanov came, I spoke
with him for too long (cowardice). Koloshin (Sergei) came to drink vodka, I did
not escort him out (cowardice). At Ozerovs argued about nothing (habit of
 arguing) and did not talk about what I should have talked about (cowardice).
Did not go to Beklemishevs (weakness of energy). During gymnastics did not
walk the rope (cowardice), and did not do one thing because it hurt (sissiness).
At Gorchakovs lied (lying). Went to the Novotroitsk tavern (lack of fiert).
At home did not study English (insufficient firmness). At the Volkonskys was
unnatural and distracted, and stayed until one in the morning (distractedness,
desire to show off, and weakness of character).

He then proceeds to outline his agenda for the next day, March 25:

From 10 to 11 yesterdays diary and to read. From 11 to 12 gymnastics. From

12 to 1 English. Beklemishev and Beyer from 1 to 2. From 2 to 4 on
horseback. From 4 to 6 dinner. From 6 to 8 to read. From 8 to 10 to
write. To translate something from a foreign language into Russian to
develop memory and style. To write today with all the impressions and
thoughts it gives rise to.

But when the 25th arrives, Tolstoy produces once again a litany of his shortcomings
as he contemplates his failed shoulds:

Awoke late out of sloth. Wrote my diary and did gymnastics, hurrying. Did not
study English out of sloth. With Begichev and with Islavin was vain. At
Beklemishevs was cowardly and lack of fiert. On Tver Boulevard wanted to
show off. I did not walk on foot to the Kalymazhnyi Dvor (sissiness). Rode with
a desire to show off. For the same reason rode to Ozerovs. Did not return to
Kalymazhnyi, thoughtlessness. At the Gorchakovs dissembled and did not call
things by their names, fooling myself. Went to Lvovs out of insufficient energy
and the habit of doing nothing. Sat around at home out of absentmindedness
and read Werther inattentively, hurrying.
 Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Tolstoys 1852 book
Nikolenkas Childhood. Click image for more.

And yet the harsh self-flagellation Tolstoy exercised in these youthful journals,
Paperno suggests, became a foundational experiment in the elasticity of time and
the struggle for moral development the elements that eventually came to define
the very fiction for which Tolstoy is so enduringly beloved. She writes:

He was involved in a struggle with the constraints that language and

narrative impose on ones ability to know and represent the I. Ultimately,
Tolstoy refused to accept that the self his self was limited to what could
be told. Inherent in the structure of any verbal narrative is a view of life that
accords a predominant role to linear temporal order, which implies finitude.
Tolstoys lifelong attempt to describe his life (or self) was a project with
philosophical, moral, and religious implications.

[]

His lifelong search for the true self turned into an impossible mission: to
define the non-self of the true being that lay outside language and time.
Tolstoy was tormented with the paradoxical desire to write himself into a
state of silence.

[]

His personal struggles with a sense of self left their mark: For many of his
readers, in Russia and beyond, Tolstoy has been an example by which they
seek to orient their own lives.

Who, What Am I?: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self is a magnificent and
layered read in its entirety. Complement it with Tolstoys search for meaning, his
reading list for every stage of life, and his letters to Gandhi on the truth of the
human spirit. For more pause-giving perspectives on the question of the self, see
Rebecca Goldstein on the mystery of personal identity, Joshua Knobe on how we
know who we are, Meghan Daum on how we become the people we are, and Alan
Watts on the self illusion.

Published January 28, 2015


https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/28/leo-tolstoy-irina-paperno-self/

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