28 October: leaves home. 7 November: dies at Astapovo railway station. Buried at Yasnaya Polyana

1912 First publication of ‘The Devil’, ‘Father Sergius’, Hadji Murat, ‘The Forged Coupon’

Introduction

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.

King Lear V ii

THE VOICE OF DEATH

One of Leo Tolstoy’s distant ancestors is likely to have been a large man; the family surname is an adjective implying bulk. Generations later, Leo came into the sturdily named dynasty having inherited every last tendency to massiveness. He turned out to have a big, strong body - he could lift 180lb (82 kilos) with one hand - a large ego, and a colossal appetite for life and learning, along with a formidable intellect. He lived a long life, fathering thirteen children and dying in his eighty-third year, famous for having written, by common acknowledgement, the biggest and best novel in the world. By then he was also recognized across the globe as a titan of moral and spiritual leadership. His Collected Works run to ninety large volumes; there isn’t a delicate lyric among them. For Leo Tolstoy the only scale was gargantuan. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that when, at the age of forty-one, he was afflicted with what we might now call a mid-life crisis, it was an acute one.

The trouble started in the late 1860s as he finished War and Peace (1869). Now, in his full maturity, at the zenith of his physical and intellectual powers, bursting with vitality and nurtured by success, Tolstoy should have been a happy man. But on the contrary, the sheer goodness of living seems to have made him all the more obsessed with the inevitability of death. What he had could be taken away, would be taken away, and soon. His wife describes how he felt at this time: ‘Often he said his brain hurt, some painful process was going on inside it, everything was over for him, it was time for him to die.’1 Some of the pain came from what he was reading; during the summer of 1869 he was immersed in the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose poisonous pessimism was enough to make a happy man sad, and a sad man suicidal.

In August Tolstoy set off for the distant province of Penza in the hope of buying some land, and broke his journey in the small town of Arzamas. During a sleepless night he was suddenly seized with dread. He described the feeling to his wife as follows:

It was two o’clock in the morning. I was exhausted. I wanted to go to sleep, and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overwhelmed by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before ... such an agonizing feeling ... God preserve anyone else from experiencing it.2

Eleven years later he recalled the occasion in an unfinished work of fiction, Notes of a Madman:

I had hoped to get rid of the thing that was tormenting me in the room. But it came out behind me and everything turned black. I became more and more frightened. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I told myself. ‘What am I afraid of?’

‘Me,’ answered Death. ‘I am here.’3

Tolstoy’s spiritual agony at this time cannot be overstated. He never fully recovered from this shocking encounter with death. His dark thoughts on suffering, death and the meaningless of life itself stayed with him and were reflected in much of his subsequent work, particularly the last sections of Anna Karenina (1878) and the whole of A Confession (1884). The multiple irony in the distressing circumstances of 1869 is striking. First: within a few months of completing the world’s most life-affirming novel he becomes obsessed with dying and death.