PROPHET AND WIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 12

PROPHET AND WIFE

TOLSTOY, a Life of My Father, by Alexandra Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Victor Gollancz, English price 30/-, LEXANDRA TOLSTOY, who must now be 70, was a young woman in her father’s tormented old age. She supported him in the struggle with his wife,: Sophia Andreyevna, and helped him to escape on the journey that ended with his death. Her biography is very much a family chronicle. Perhaps she was too much engaged, emotionally, to be objective about events which have already been described in many books; but she gives an admirable picture of daily life at Yasnaya Polyana, especially in those later years when the house was always full of Tolstoyans. The ageing writer, no longer inter. ested in novels, was deeply preoccupied with religion. He had divided his property among wife and children, and was trying to detach himself from material things. But he could not stay silent when new evils and injustices were reported, so that thé man of peace was always in the arena, arguing and denouncing. Inevitably, he was surrounded by disciples and camp followers. He was revered and hated; and in his own home, where he had his best opportunities to carry out his precept of nonresistance, life was a succession of little wars. ¥

His wife, who had 13 children, could not understand Tolstoy’s reluctance to take money for his writings, and. resented an idealism which threatened her security. "You ... may not have a special love for your own children," she wrote while still a young woman, "but we common mortals cannot, and perhaps we do not want to, pervert ourselves and justify our lack of love for a particular person by some sort of love for the whole world." The conflict deepened. Tolstoy wanted to surrender all property in his writings; his wife resisted strenuously, and sons and daughters moved into opposite camps. Life at Yasnaya Polyana was intensely emotional. Everybody kept diaries; Tolstoy had two-one secret-after he discovered that his wife was reading what he had written and was making her own entries post facto, with the aim of justifying herself to posterity. There were scenes, faintings, attempted suicides, and a simmering hysteria. The aged prophet, wrongheaded in so many ways (Shakespeare was "a terrible impostor and piece of filth," and art was real only when it was "comprehensible and accessible to all’’) was trying to be pure in spirit and to

love everybody while endlessly he fought with his wife. Alexandra Tolstoy has been loyal to her father, but it is no saint who lives in these pages, even after the conversion. He suffered much, and worked faithfully for good causes; yet he never ceased to be the egoist who had written two of the world’s greatest novels, and his tragedy was the diversion of that giant energy from its true creative

tasks.

H.