But the mistress supports him, so they must send someone else. The choice is an agonizing one: conscripts could be retained for long periods, up to twenty years, and many never returned. So we have two things to worry about: whether Polikey will continue to withstand temptation and become a good member of the community, and how the conscription problem will be solved. The stakes are high, the characters — mostly from the peasant class — are among Tolstoy’s most memorable portraits, and the undeserved outcome has a terrible twist of ironic inevitability. Best of all, Tolstoy has built up a powerful case against warfare, conscription and violence, without our really noticing what he has been up to. This is one of his short masterpieces.

THE DEATH OF LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

Considering the time and effort expended by this famous man in an effort to confront death and prepare himself for the end, the death of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a disastrous shambles. The apostle of love and charity ran away from his devoted wife in a spirit of bitter malevolence and fell ill at a railway station, where he died a few days later, surrounded by six doctors, a police chief, government officials and an elder from the nearby monastery, even though he had rejected all the institutions they represented. His wife was excluded from the company until the very end, when he was unconscious. One or two of his hardline disciples were present, but they failed to carry through an experiment which Tolstoy had thought up in anticipation of a lingering death. Ten years before, he had written in his diary, ‘When I am dying I should like to be asked whether I still see life as ... a progression towards God, an increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes. If it is no I shall look up.’6 They knew of this, but no one asked him.

The sad truth is that, throughout his life, Tolstoy wanted to tell us all how we should conduct our lives, how we should love other people as a first priority, and how we should learn to die well. But the only way to do any of this would be to treat his life story like one of his cautionary tales, as an object lesson in how not to love and how not to prepare for death. On the subject of love, he behaved like Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s rationalist ideologue who found it easy to love the whole of humanity but had great difficulty in loving his next-door neighbour. Tolstoy’s uncharitable treatment, over many years, of his wife and of all those close to him (except a few devoted disciples) remains as a stain on his reputation. On the subject of death, his oblique and unintended lessons are that we should not become obsessed with dying and death as he did, and that there is little point in raging incessantly against the dying of the light.

However, his art is so powerful that it frequently achieves a didactic purpose by dispersing it in a strong solution of distracting entertainment. At its (frequent) best, Tolstoy’s writing sharpens our sense of being alive, even if our lives are rather ordinary ones. This accords with his claim (in a letter of 1865) that the first aim of art is to make people love life in its countless manifestations, which applies even when the subject matter is death. At the same time he persuades us also to consider the deeper issues that interest him, thus raising our perceptions and aspirations. It may not be quite what the master wanted, but we remain thankful for his existence and achievement, first because of the wonderful storytelling and portraiture, and then the thoughtful provocation and the inspiring affirmation of the life spirit as presented in War and Peace, Anna Karenina and a broad range of Tolstoy’s stories, some of the best of which are represented in this volume.

NOTES

1 Diary of Countess S. A. Tolstoy, 14 February 1870, cited in Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (London: W. H. Allen, 1968), pp. 317, 726.

2 Letter to S. A. Tolstoy, 4 September 1869, cited in A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp.