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Ernest Hemingway admitted, “Nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy, unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”[1] If he had climbed into the ring, the great Russian writer probably would have scored a technical knockout in the first round.
At the age of forty-one, Leo Tolstoy published, in 1869, the last installment of War and Peace. Eight years later, he finished Anna Karenina, arguably the greatest novel ever written. At the age of fifty, Tolstoy achieved everything he desired in life. A famous novelist, happily married with six loving children, and the owner of a 16,500-acre estate, he should have been supremely happy.
After he rejected at age sixteen all religious doctrine, his “only real faith” was “to be more famous, more important, and richer than others.”[2] His religion became poetry and the development of life, although he quickly became disillusioned with the practitioners of writing, for on the whole, they were men of “bad, worthless character.” The artists and poets of his time claimed their vocation was to teach mankind; yet, Tolstoy discloses in A Confession that he and his fellow writers “knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: what is good and what is evil? We did not know how to reply.” Like the rest of us, Tolstoy hid from himself his lack of understanding of life. A happy family life diverted him from “all search for a general meaning of life.” He wrote War and Peace, “teaching what for me [was] the only truth, namely, that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family.”
Just before he turned fifty, Tolstoy experienced moments of perplexity and an arrest of life when two questions began to recur oftener and oftener: What is it for? What does it lead to? At first, the questions seemed “stupid, simple, and childish,” but soon, he became convinced they were the most important and profound of all life’s questions.
When thinking of the fame of his works, he would say to himself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world—what of it?” He could find no reply. The two questions would not wait; if he “did not answer them, it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.”
Tolstoy felt that what he “had been standing on had collapsed” and that he “had nothing left under his feet.” With brutal, unflinching honesty, he admitted to himself that what he “had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.”
Unlike few of us, Tolstoy had fulfilled his every desire, and he had nothing left to wish for. He could no longer close his eyes to avoid seeing that nothing lay ahead for him but suffering and death—complete annihilation. He beheld what he believed was the fundamental truth of human existence—life is meaningless.
Healthy, gifted, and energetic, Tolstoy felt he could no longer live. Suicide seemed the only recourse; yet, he was in no hurry, for he hoped to untangle the dreadful situation he found himself in. Nevertheless, the urge for self-destruction was so intense that he confessed, “I, a man of fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life.” He desired to escape from life and yet hoped to discover why he should live.
In contrast to the characters in his novels, Tolstoy could not give a reasonable meaning to any single past action of his or his life as a whole. “How could a person fail to see the meaningless of life?” he asked himself. No one cannot see the truth of what the preacher in Ecclesiastes says, “All is vanity and a striving after wind; a man dies, and nothing remains.” How could a person go on living after seeing this truth, intelligible to all? Tolstoy answered, “One can live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober, it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!”
Two drops of honey—his love of family and of writing—had in the past made life sweet but no longer diverted his eyes from the truth—and the truth was death.
He was like a man lost in a dark wood, horrified, rushing about in search of a way out; yet, every step he took confused him more and more. The horror of the darkness became so great that Tolstoy wished to free himself from life as quickly as possible by noose or bullet.
“But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something?” Tolstoy asked himself again and again. He sought in all branches of knowledge for a solution to the dilemma posed to all men. He sought “painfully and long—sought as a perishing man seeks safety”—and found nothing.
Tolstoy had access to scientists and scholars in all branches of knowledge, thanks to a life spent in learning and his fame as a novelist, He first turned to the scientists, the wise men of his day, and learned, “You are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles. The mutual interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you call your ‘life.’” Although the vocabulary of science changed somewhat from the nineteen century to our day, Tolstoy heard what we have drummed into our ears by present-day physicists, neuroscientists, and biologists: “You are an accidentally united little lump of something. That little lump ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its ‘life.’ The lump will disintegrate, and there will be an end of the fermenting and of all the questions.” Science only confirmed the senselessness of life.
Tolstoy, next, sought answers from the great teachers of mankind, and instead of freeing him from despair, the ancient sages only strengthened his hopelessness.
Socrates: “The wise man seeks death all his life, and therefore death is not terrible to him. The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore, the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it.”[3]
Solomon: “All that is in the world—folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief—is vanity and emptiness. Man dies, and nothing is left of him.”
The Buddha: “To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age, and of death, is impossible—we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life.”
Tolstoy’s conclusion about life was not much different than that arrived at by the Greek tragedians. In his book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche re-tells an ancient story. “King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words, ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”[4]
In his pursuit of the meaning of human existence, Tolstoy then turned to life, hoping to find the reason for living among the people around him. He found four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed. The first way out is ignorance, not to ask, “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” Or expressed differently, not to utter the terrible question, “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” Tolstoy claimed the way of ignorance is open to only the very young or the very dull.
The second way out is Epicureanism, which consists of knowing life’s hopelessness yet enjoying the sweet, although transitory, pleasures within reach. Tolstoy rejected this solution because the dullness of an Epicurean’s imagination enables him to “forget the things that gave Buddha no peace—the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.”
The third escape is that of strength and energy. When one understands life is an absurdity, a cosmic joke, an accidental cohesion of particles, he puts a rope around his neck or a bullet through his brain. Tolstoy saw this as the worthiest way of escape and wished to adopt it.
The fourth way out is weakness. One sees the truth of the situation, yet clings to life, knowing that nothing can come of it. Not having the strength to act rationally, Tolstoy found himself in this category. Recognizing that life was a stupid joke played on him and everyone else, he went on “living, washing, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books.” He found this “repulsive and tormenting,” yet remained in that position.
Looking back on his spiritual crisis, Tolstoy explained why he did not commit suicide: “I see now that if I did not kill myself, it was due to some dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts.” In his search for meaning, Tolstoy made an assumption that he was not aware of until much later. First, he asked, “What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?” After extended efforts of thought and searching for answers from the Masters, he reached the answer, “None.” The logic is impeccable. Death destroys all meaning within finite time and space.
After a painful struggle, Tolstoy realized that he implicitly assumed an answer to the question “What am I?”—a finite being. The solution to the problem of life that Tolstoy discovered lies in a few words, in the correct answer to “What am I?”—“I am a part of the infinite.”
In my estimation, Tolstoy’s reasoning in A Confession is straightforward, rigorous, and unassailable. If no part of us is infinite, then all human endeavors are vanities, and life is absurd. I had no idea what the infinite part of me meant, so I vowed to return to a fuller examination of the interior life.
To be continued.
Main image. Leo Tolstoy at his writing desk. Drawn by Meshkov, 1910. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Endnotes
[1] Ernest Hemingway, quoted by Lillian Ross, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?”, The New Yorker (May 13, 1950). Available http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/05/13/how-do-you-like-it-now-gentlemen.
[2] Leo Tolstoy, all quotations are from A Confession (1882), trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. Available http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/a-confession/.
[3] The quotations from Socrates, Solomon, and the Buddha are from Tolstoy, A Confession.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), Sec. 3, p. 42.