Putting The Boot In

God and Man According to Tolstoy, by Alexander Boot; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 215 pages, £50.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

—Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Genius and mediocrity frequently coincide in the same person. Alex Boot takes Leo (Lev) Tolstoy as a very striking case in point. Tolstoy was probably the greatest novelist of all time. Most of his readers in English have probably not gone beyond War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although his last major novel, Resurrection, sold more copies than the two acclaimed “great” novels put together. Perhaps surprisingly, most of Tolstoy’s writing, especially once he had passed fifty, was not only non-fiction but, according to Boot, spectacularly bad non-fiction, portentous work affecting to attend to humanity’s spiritual, moral and political needs and pronouncing loudly on everything.

Boot, who is bilingual in English and Russian, has undertaken the huge and solemn task of explaining the circumstances, perhaps wounds, in Tolstoy’s life that might account for the vast gulf in achievement between the two flows of his writing, the one of fictional genius and the other of non-fictional mediocrity. Boot engages in some neat word-play here, saying that the novels made wonderful use of Tolstoy’s life circumstances, that is to say that the “fiction” is semi-autobiographical. His “philosophical” excursions, by contrast, are “fictional”, constructed with little reference to evidence, consistent thinking or rigorous knowledge.

Magnificent fiction is by definition benign. The tersest summation which Boot affords us of the malign influence of Tolstoy’s non-fiction is the allegation that Tolstoy’s was a significant input to our present-day “anomic, pacifist, nihilist, touchy-feely counterculture”.

Boot constructs a convincing psychological and moral sketch of Tolstoy, who carried a heavy burden of natural suffering. He lost his mother at two and his father at nine. He was epileptic, and in later life his attacks came in the terrible grand mal form. There is also some suggestion of clinical derangement, though nothing definite emerges in Boot’s book.

Tolstoy endured severe headaches and depression. He was intractably self-obsessed and manifested both the sentimentality and the bouts of weeping, along with the sporadic violence, common in those preternaturally disposed to thinking they are right about everything. He was very highly sexed, fathering many legitimate and illegitimate children and in his youth frequenting brothels. He seems, indeed, to have had all the vices of rich upper-class young men in his era, being given also to heavy drinking and fanatically addicted to gambling.

Tolstoy’s pantheism, which rules out his being a Christian at all, he acquired mainly from Rousseau. He contrived, however, to pass off this pantheism as authentically Christian. Indeed, his reputation as a Christian even survived his insistence that death is the end of human life, and redemption confined exclusively to this world. Rousseau also inspired Tolstoy’s reductionist veneration of “nature” and his hostility to any hint of economic specialisation. His ideal involved individuals producing for all their own needs, without recourse to co-operation with neighbours and co-equals, let alone with the wider society. The family likeness of this constricting fantasy to the Marxist imperative for abolishing the division of labour is apparent. In fact Tolstoy espoused a comparable primitivism at every level. He liked the motionless aristocracy and the trapped lower orders. The dynamic middle groups, who do civilisation’s work in backward places like Russia, just as in the advanced societies, he despised. The influence of Rousseau and “nature” also explains Tolstoy’s insistence that children’s learning must not be coerced—which proscription often ends in their learning nothing.

As Rousseau inspired Tolstoy, so Tolstoy inspired, among notables, Gandhi, Sartre and Martin Luther King. This does not mean that no one resisted his preaching. Boot says that Tolstoy’s eminent philosophical contemporaries had the full measure of his mediocrity as a non-fictional authority.

Russia’s best scholars decried his prescriptions. It was the weight of opinion, Russian and international, as to his genius as a novelist, the renown of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, that maintained his overall position. His prestige simply trumped any adverse assessment of his non-fiction. Thus the philosophical hack and ideologue who was Tolstoy’s ostensibly inexplicable alter ego found the world willing to listen to his meanderings. Boot seems to be right that the world listened; it is significant, even so, that despite the huge non-fictional output, no non-fictional titles by Tolstoy have achieved high status in English-speaking countries.

Whether for his greatness as a novelist, or the false acclaim accorded to his efforts qua philosopher, Tolstoy was the world’s most famous thinker at the time of his death in 1910 and had been so for a quarter of a century. He was far more celebrated in the first decade of the twentieth century than Lenin (who incidentally attended the same university as Tolstoy).

How many concessions should we make to outstanding talent? Given Tolstoy’s stature as a novelist, does Boot’s lambasting him as a mischievous, mediocre all-purpose thinker, not seem mean, even insolent? In a sense Boot’s unmistakable animus does jar. Is there not something odd in asking whether, apart from an unsurpassable contribution to prose fiction, a man should be taken seriously?

In fact, however, the further one gets into Boot’s text the more justified his criticism seems. His central purpose is to demolish the common view that Tolstoy was a Christian. His book affirms Boot’s own Christianity and denies Tolstoy’s. It begins with Boot reading Malcolm Muggeridge’s Jesus Rediscovered. Muggeridge has a high place in Boot’s esteem, as one of the few writers who had correctly reported the mass murder by famine, in early 1930s Russia, organised by Stalin. Many Western notables either lied about it or approved of it. Boot was surprised, however, when Muggeridge also identified Tolstoy as a formative Christian influence in his own odyssey, Boot himself having long held the widespread Russian view that Tolstoy was not a Christian at all.

It is true that the most Olympian talent may inconsistently keep company with folly or evil or both. Wagner, Picasso and Sartre are obvious examples of the category both folly and evil, feted figures who make our search for the often dark accompaniment to creative eminence an imperative. Tolstoy’s “philosophic” views are foolish rather than wicked. There are also more attractive versions of the Tolstoy kind of split. There are great individuals who soar like angels above most of humankind in one field and trail along, not in wickedness, nor even in folly, but in banality or error, in another. Einstein was regarded as the greatest scientific genius of his age but he was a hopeless—if genial— child in political reflection and theology alike. In the latter case he plumped, like Tolstoy, for the dismal dead-end of pantheism.

The cult of nature Tolstoy embraced was only one dark strand—Marxism was another related one—in a remarkable nineteenth-century Russian florescence which Boot compares to classical Athens or Tudor and Jacobean England, in terms of energy and achievement. If communism aborted the vast economic growth which seems to have lurked so tantalisingly round the next historical corner for Russia, it equally put paid to further intellectual and artistic achievements, at least on the nineteenth and early twentieth-century scale. We can only wonder what a dazzling polity might have emerged in twentieth-century Russia had the nation’s art and economy both continued their zooming upward trajectory of the late nineteenth century.

Maybe benign cultural and political evolution is at times enfolded in the dialectics of Divine Providence, as Burke believed. For believers, this would explain why it works. Malign cultural and political revolution, as in communism and Nazism, by contrast, bears all the marks, once realised, of Satanic malice and stasis. Novels of genius would never pave the way for such disasters. Bad philosophising can and does.

One cannot pontificate in good novels. Indeed, good philosophy is not a suitable vehicle for pontificating either. The world has still not recovered from the near deathblows inflicted on us by the false, pontificating theories of Karl Marx. Boot leaves little room for doubt as to Tolstoy’s huge urge to preach. His artistic integrity and craft precluded this in his novels. His literary authority, however, meant that he could ladle sententious twaddle into his non-fiction with irresponsible abandon, indeed with a good chance that the world would take it seriously, as, sad to say, it did. Boot links Tolstoy’s philosophising, we have seen, with our “anomic, pacifist, nihilist, touchy-feely counterculture”. This list catches most of the errors in our feeble, political life in America, Britain and other Western polities today. How our Islamist enemies must glory in such weakness and despise us accordingly!