“‘What am I asking?’ he said to himself. ‘I’m asking about the relation to the Deity of all the various faiths of mankind. I’m asking about the general manifestation of God to the whole world with these nebulae. What am I doing? To me personally, to my heart, unquestionable knowledge is revealed, inconceivable to reason, and I stubbornly want to express this knowledge by means of words and reason.’”
So says Levin to himself at the end of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” the work that followed “War and Peace,” both of which are regarded by many critics and readers as two of the greatest novels in the history of literature.
Tolstoy continued writing works imbued with his singular and controversial religious philosophy. In “Confession,” he grappled with spiritual questions. In fiction like “Resurrection” and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued to explore issues of life, death, and God.
His book “What Is Art?” in which he rejected the idea of beauty and works by artists like Shakespeare and Beethoven, and some of the tracts and essays he wrote later in life, reveals his nontraditional beliefs regarding Christian life and thought.
A Different Path
In the original edition of “Twenty-Three Tales,” Aylmer Maude, who with his wife, Louise, translated the Russian’s works into English, included in his Preface these words from Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” to explain the significance of these stories:
“The artist of the future will understand that to compose a fairy tale, a little song which will touch a lullaby or a riddle which will entertain, a jest which will amuse, or to draw a sketch such as will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel, or a symphony, or paint a picture, of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time and is then for ever forgotten. The region of this art of the simplest feelings accessible to all is enormous, and it is as yet almost untouched.”
What We Live By
Nearly all the stories in “Twenty-Three Tales” center on a theme of morals or faith. Several of them are introduced with brief passages from the Bible, and a number of the stories are either folk tales retold or read like fables, such as “Esarhaddon, King of Assyria,” “Work, Death, and Sickness: A Legend,” and “Three Questions.”
In the latter, for instance, a nameless king believes that if he can discern the proper time to begin everything, the best people to listen to, and the most important thing to do, “he would never fail in anything he might undertake.” He seeks the advice of a hermit known for his wisdom. After the king helps the hermit with his garden and then saves the life of a wounded man who intends to assassinate him, the hermit interprets these events to answer the king’s questions. “There is only one time that is important—Now!” he tells the king, and the most important person and task, the hermit reveals, are those with which we share that moment.
“What Men Live By” begins with Simon, a poor shoemaker, who despite his skills can barely support his family. On his way from town, he meets a naked man freezing beside a shrine, reluctantly clothes him, and takes him to his home. Even more reluctantly, Simon’s wife, Matryona, feeds the stranger, whose name is Michael, and they give him a place to sleep. He then takes up quarters with the family, becomes a skillful shoemaker himself, and brings them prosperity. After some years have passed, we learn that Michael is an angel made human as punishment for his disobedience to God, and that he must learn three truths before he is forgiven. At the end of the story, he has acquired these truths and so regains his status in heaven.
Down to Earth
Not all of these tales are centered so heavily on heavenly matters.
Zhilin, an army officer and the protagonist of “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” and a fellow officer are captured by the Tartars, but they are spared death in hopes that their families will pay a ransom for them. His master gives Zhilin various chores, and he also makes friends with Dina, the master’s daughter, making toys for her. In the end, it is she who helps him escape, and he makes his way back to Russian forces. It’s an adventure story told in crisp, blunt prose. Significantly, “A Prisoner in the Caucasus” was written before Tolstoy’s radical conversion.
A story regarded as one of Tolstoy’s finest, and frequently anthologized, is “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” Pahom is a clever and hardworking peasant who wants more land. He attempts to buy some land but is always tempted by rumors of better bargains elsewhere. Eventually, he lands among the Bashkirs, whose chieftain offers him land for 1,000 rubles a day, meaning that however much land Pahom can walk in a day’s journey will be his, so long as he arrives back at the starting line. He covers an enormous area, but at the end, exhausted, he must race to the hillock from which he left. As he runs, he remembers his dream of the previous night, when the devil had tempted him into this bargain. Pahom reaches the finish line just seconds away from sunset, but there he collapses and dies.
“His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”
Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce called this parable of Pahom “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” Here is high praise indeed from our culture’s best-known modernist.
To Love Is to Be Alive
If we match these stories against Tolstoy’s novels, or his shorter works such as “The Kreutzer Sonata” or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” many would likely argue that these tales suffer by that comparison. Nonbelievers might regard the tales as too burdened by God and biblical beliefs. Others might consider them too didactical or lacking the psychological explorations of Tolstoy’s earlier work.Yet the gold in these tales far outweighs the dross. Considerations of religious faith aside, Tolstoy gives us valuable portraits of Russian men and women who 150 years ago scrabbled to make a living from the land or their craftsmanship. The moral dilemmas he presents—greed versus generosity, truth versus lies, kindness versus indifference—are universal, valid conflicts now just as they were then. In most cases as well, his command of the language and his narrative skills are as much in place as in his earlier work.
And though Tolstoy is often accurately described as a master of realism in fiction, many of these stories have about them the quality of fairy tales, albeit for adults, in their simplicity and their sense of wonder at the mysteries of the world. Indeed, “The Story of Ivan the Fool” is categorized in the book as “A Fairy Tale.”
One of these stories, “Two Old Men,” tells of two neighbors going on a pilgrimage. It concludes with the reflection by one of the men that “he now understood that the best way to keep one’s vows to God and to do His will, is for each man while he lives to show love and do good to others.”
Found in several other of these stories, this idea is one final reason for reading “Twenty-Three Tales,” if only because it differs so radically from the messages dispatched by our own culture.
‘Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales’ By Leo Tolstoy Orbis Books, Nov. 20, 2003 Paperback: 351 pages
