Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and readers

 1/ Recently I’ve reread Tolstoy’s short story “Polikushka”. Still love it.

There are many people who keep repeating some stock opinions about Tolstoy, I don’t know where from, such as that Tolstoy can’t write about the working class. He can, “Polikushka” is the answer, among others. I also think that he would still be considered one of the greatest writers if he hadn’t written War and Peace and Anna Karenina—his name would have survived on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Hadji Murad, The Forged Coupon, The Devil, “Polikushka”, “Master and Man”, and plenty of other wonderful works.

His ability to inhabit characters’ minds is unparalleled. I can’t help thinking, we can never know another person in real life as well as we know the fictional people in literature, especially Tolstoy’s characters. 

Interestingly, for me reading Anna Karenina didn’t have an effect on Chekhov’s stories (the way some other works such as Doctor Zhivago or Lady Chatterley’s Lover suffered in comparison when I read them right after Tolstoy), and reading Chekhov’s stories didn’t have an effect on “Polikushka”, Tolstoy’s short story about a house serf. 

2/ The other day I was asked if I thought there were two Tolstoys: Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the thinker/moralist.

I think in a sense there are, but I don’t think it’s simple to separate them. Tolstoy’s a complex man, and many of his ideas are part of his art, embedded in his art. Having said that, I personally think Tolstoy isn’t as preachy and didactic as people often say—some even accuse him of forcing his opinions down their throats—but again, this is one of those stock opinions people keep spouting about Tolstoy that are very far from the truth. In Anna Karenina, he presents different opinions and different perspectives, and if Levin is meant to be a stand-in for the author, in some discussions he is silent or unable to express his ideas, or finds himself conflicted and unsure. In fact, Levin has a questioning attitude throughout the entire novel, even after his “conversion” at the end. 

At the moment I’m reading Rosamund Bartlett’s biography of Tolstoy. So far it seems fascinating, she accepts and presents him as a complex man, and doesn’t reduce him to a naïve, idealistic fool like so many people do. I do see Tolstoy’s faults and disagree with many of his views, but do I wish he had been saner and not had any of his maddening views? Probably not. Perhaps he’s capable of entering the minds of a wide range of people and writing such complex, multifaceted, and self-contradictory characters because he himself was full of self-contradictions. 

I’m live-tweeting interesting passages from the biography here: 

https://twitter.com/nguyenhdi/status/1423229596518998016 

3/ As I read about the events and experiences that shaped Tolstoy as a man, as a thinker, and as a writer, I also want to read a Chekhov biography, though perhaps after knowing his works better. Chekhov’s personality and temperament were different, his life was also different. 

It’s hard to read about Tolstoy’s life and not think about the narrow, circumscribed lives of 19th century female writers such as Jane Austen or the Brontes. Tolstoy could write about a wide range of experiences because he himself did a lot and went everywhere—he grew up on a country estate but also moved between places and knew well both Moscow and St Petersburg; went to university, played music, learnt languages; went to balls and parties, went hunting, went gambling, went to brothels; was in the army, knew the Caucasus, Crimea, and other places around Russia, met people of different classes and different ethnicities; travelled around Europe; and so on and so forth.

Tolstoy, compared to Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, had the advantage of not having to worry about money and write against deadlines. 

I don’t know a lot about Chekhov’s life, but I imagine that he also had a wide range of experiences, though in a different way, as a doctor. He would have gone everywhere and met everyone, and had better understanding of peasants and the working class. I’m also aware that Chekhov went to the Sakhalin island for some time.   

4/ These days I’ve been thinking, why is it that certain authors such as Tolstoy or Dickens are often cut down to size and spoken of condescendingly by so many people on the internet, especially Twitter? Why Tolstoy more than Dostoyevsky, for example? I’m not talking about dislike, but condescension. 

Sometimes I hear from someone that Dostoyevsky writes badly, or can’t write women, but I’ve never heard anyone speak of Dostoyevsky as a naïve, foolish man the way some people talk about Tolstoy. We are talking about the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad, and it was the late Tolstoy who wrote Hadji Murad.

Looking at Twitter, I can’t help noticing that somehow some authors such as Dostoyevsky or Kafka are perceived as cool and “edgy”, whereas some others such as Tolstoy or Dickens are seen as “safe”. It’s almost as though some people think preferring Dostoyevsky makes them more intellectual (even if they can’t say much more than some generic statements about Dostoyevsky’s insight into the human psyche), the same way teenagers think they’re cool for liking Camus or Murakami. 

I also think on Twitter, Tolstoy seems to get more hate than other writers (or do I notice more because I love Tolstoy?). He gets hate from Dostoyevsky’s fans. From Turgenev’s fans. From Chekhov’s fans. From those who dislike Russian literature. From those who hate classic literature and “dead white men”. From everywhere. Preference is understandable, but it’s hard to understand hostility and obsessive hatred. Within 19th century Russian literature, I’m team everybody—I’m team Tolstoy, team Chekhov, team Turgenev, team Gogol, team Leskov, team Dostoyevsky, etc. Beyond the Russians, I don’t see other dead writers get quite the same hate and condescension as Tolstoy—wouldn’t Zola or Balzac be more maddening in some other aspects? Or Henry James? Or George Eliot? Or Dostoyevsky? Tolstoy may provoke hostility because of his sexism, but what about Dostoyevsky’s anti-Semitism? But no, I don’t see other writers get the same kind of obsessive hatred and regular attacks. 

I’m writing about this not because it matters—it doesn’t. People disparage Tolstoy the same way they disparage Shakespeare all the time, not realising the problem is in themselves, and it means nothing. I see it mostly as a curious phenomenon, an amusing spectacle. 

5/ I should return to Dostoyevsky this year, especially when it’s going to be the 200th anniversary of his birthday. I’m a bit afraid that my sensibilities have been so strongly shaped over the years by Tolstoy and similar writers that I may not be able to appreciate Dostoyevsky now, so we’ll have to see. 

Several years ago, I didn’t like Crime and Punishment but loved Notes from Underground and The House of the Dead, both of which were written from the first-person point of view. I expect to clash with the novels because they’re novels of ideas. I expect to clash with the excesses, with the chaos and shapelessness, with the way characters are embodiments of ideas rather than human beings, etc. Woolf says Dostoyevsky’s novels are “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in”, but I wonder if I’ve not changed in the opposite direction over the past few years—I used to find Chekhov too quiet but now become more sensitive to his subtlety and openness; similarly in cinema, I used to love only Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, but have come to appreciate the quietness of Ozu.

But we’ll see. 

I shouldn’t be prejudiced against Dostoyevsky because of some of his fans. After all, I didn’t let the idiotic things Chekhov’s fans say about Tolstoy make me prejudiced against Chekhov. Can’t judge an author by their (so-called) fans, and frankly I don’t think those who belittle Tolstoy and talk as though he’s some second-rate writer would truly get Dostoyevsky anyway.