There are two states for which writing provides a balsamic effect to me: the half-conscious, half-drunk of the dark hours of Saturday night and the measured and peaceful out of the truce of Sunday mornings. Today is not an exception: cold breeze, careless rain. Peace... .
***
I've been listening to Beethoven's
Kreutzer Sonata (1803). In 1889 Tolstoy wrote the story of a jealous husband who kills his wife, who seems to take a liking on a violinist. The wife and the lover are playing Beethoven's sonata when the husband shows up earlier than expected from a trip, and there he kills her. Later on,
Leoš Janáček took the train back from the novel to the music, and composed his anxious and disturbing string quarter (1923) based on Tolstoy's story.
Kreutzer Sonata. Xavier Prinet (1901)
***
I've read the account that Paul Johnson does on Tolstoy's life and personality and I can hardly believe now what Martin Amis said: that perhaps only Tolstoy has been able to "make happiness work in the novel", as opposed to evil and sickness, the true motor of the fiction. I can hardly believe it because Tolstoy was an unhappy man. He
must have been an unhappy man, full of trouble. If Amis' statement is true, it seems then wonderful how a bitter man can portrait happiness in tender light.
Johnson enlightens one of Tolstoy's endless flaws as the title for his essay: "God's elder brother". He was too full of himself. Johnson underlines his tendency or necessity to hold himself different and above from everyone else, better, of course, and nobler. Tolstoy shared the same immature self-consideration of teenagers: misunderstood, unfit and choked by the mean, vulgar society. It is his
belief to be destined to a universal fate for the good of humankind and he feels that people around -namely, his wife- are preventing him to fulfill such a high call. His relationship with Sonya, his wife, for more than 30 years was sick and devastating, a constant war. Both of them kept diaries, and this simple fact was horrible to bear, especially for Sonya. The handwriting of Tolstoy was bad and she was copying his writings into a better form by mutual agreement and had access, then, to all the sick aspects of her husband's personality, from gambling debts to episodes of sexual diseases, due to his countless infidelities with whores and lots of women. Worst of all, Sonya had to endure Tolstoy painful and bitter and, sometimes, cruel speeches against her, their marriage or in favor of prostitution.
Tolstoy's attention to his trouble brothers Dimitri, Nikolai and Sergei as much as to his many sons and daughters and to his aunt -who raised him up- was close to nothing, even or especially, in times of sickness or great necessity for them. This behavior was also the case of other prophets of the world, Marx or Rousseau. Furthermore, the three of them sacrificed the love to the individual by the love of mankind in the cold, frozen altar of ideas. This is the thesis of Paul Johnson's Intellectuals. Sonya grasped it perfectly: "My little one is still unwell, and I am very tender and pitying. You and Syutayev may not especially love your own children, but we simple mortals are neither able nor wish to distort our feelings or to justify our lack of love for a person by professing some love or other for the whole world".
As mentioned, Sonya copied all manuscripts of her husband... Included
The Kreutzer Sonata. One has just to image the situation... .
***
On Friday I was cooking dinner and listening to an interview to the great Argentinian editor Mario Muchnik. As usual the man -responsible for editing Elias Canetti in Spanish in the 60s and cleaning Tolstoy's
War and Peace translations in the decade of 2000, with tons of work done in between- was a great unknown for me. He graduated in Physics from Columbia in 1953, worked a little and quit.... . He asked his father -an editor- for work and he did not have it. He quit without having another job, that's the
point, without knowing what to do. And, first, an acquaintance who worked for
Life in Paris gave him two Leica cameras as a present and that's how he become a photographer before editor, at a point where he had nothing. Later, in Rome, he got robbed both cameras: someone opened the trunk of his car and took the whole of it. (I was actually robbed in a similar way in Lisbon once).
Precisely, photography was a technique first available in the time of Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. It was used in the war of the diaries, to photograph pages and pages for whatever purposes. Tolstoy could be photographed performing manual labor in the 1880s. His was one of the first cases of class transvestism (as Johnson named it), a tendency others like Bretch also would share later.
I think I will approach Tolstoy through the editions of Mario Muchnik.
***
Charles Dickens was not born as an aristocrat like Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy. Miriam Margolyes describes him as a social climber and shows as an anecdote the episode of Maria Beadnell rejecting him when he was nothing and coming back to him 19 years later -although 19 years older- when he was the most famous man in England (episode that Dickens would use to recreate Flora Finching in
Little Dorrit). But I feel that both of them, Dickens and Tolstoy, share the common record of dispensing the most abominable treatment to their long-term wives, Catherine and Sonya, respectively. Dickens left Catherine after many years of marriage in order to marry Ellen Ternan, a 17-year old actress, 30 years his junior. The appalling part of the story is the way he did it, disposing of Catherine to never see her again in life and taking all her children but one away from her. Two daughters started taking piano lessons -or painting lessons, I don't remember- right across the residence where Catherine established and never, ever, the women stopped by to see her mother.
In
The Godfather II, Al Pacino rejects his wife Kate (after she refused to have the baby) and does not allow her to see the children, so she have to go to the house when he is not in with the help of his sister, see the boys for a little bit and then leave the house through the back door. There is a scene when he arrives home, see Kate saying goodbye to the kids in the back kitchen and, without muttering one word, softly and very calm, closes the door in Kate's nose.
I said to myself: wow, that was Dickens.
***
And, again, for sure Dickens did some charitable show-off in the public stage, but what sort of human being was he, really? In a much worse scale, what type of human being was Tolstoy?
In the fiction aspect, it is said that Tolstoy was an unsurpassed genius of unusual intensity, but on the human side, no doubt in my mind, he was a monster, the worst character of all his stories, the very example of evil and tragedy. This is proof to my view that there is nothing noble in art that can necessarily make this world better. In fact, the opposite seems closer to the truth. The highest art has been seen often incapable of touching a single inch of the heart of the highest artist: a cold, inhuman stone.
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