When Tolstoy began to write boldly and plainly about these things, he quite expected to be persecuted. The Russian Government, however, has considered it wiser not to touch him personally, but to content itself with prohibiting some of his books, mutilating others, and banishing several of those who helped him. Under the auspices of the Holy Synod, books were published denouncing him and his views (an advertisement for which, as he remarked, Pears’ Soap would have paid thousands of pounds), his correspondence was tampered with, spies were set to watch him and his friends, and finally he was excommunicated, in a somewhat half-hearted fashion which suggested that the authorities were ashamed of their action.
These external matters, however, did not trouble him so much as did a spiritual conflict. Indeed, at one time, imprisonment would have come as a relief, solving his difficulty. The case was this: He wished to act in complete consistency with the views he had expressed, but he could not do this — could not, for instance, give away his property — without making his wife or some of his children angry, and without the risk of their even appealing to the authorities to restrain him. This perplexed him very much; but he felt that he could not do good by doing harm. No external rule, such as that people should give all they have to the poor, would justify him in creating anger and bitterness in the hearts of those nearest to him. So, eventually, he handed over his property to his wife and his family, and continued to live in a good house with servants as before; meekly bearing the reproach that he was ‘inconsistent’ and contenting himself with living as simply and frugally as possible.
At the time of the great famine in 1891-1892, circumstances seemed to compel him to undertake the great work of organising and directing the distribution of relief to the starving peasants. Large sums of money passed through his hands, and all Europe and America applauded him. But he himself felt that such activity, of collecting and distributing money, “making a pipe of oneself,” was not the best work of which he was capable. It did not satisfy him. It is not by what we get others to do for pay, but rather by what we do with our own brains, hearts and muscles, that we can best serve God and man.
Since 1895 he has again braved the Russian Government by giving publicity to the facts it was trying to conceal about the persecution of the Doukhobórs in the Caucasus. To aid these men, who refused military service on principle, he broke his rule of taking no money for his writings, and sold the first right of publication in Russia of Resurrection. But of this act, too, he now repents. Whether for himself or for others, he has found that the attempt to get property, money or goods, is apt to be a hindrance to, rather than a means of forwarding, the service of God and man.
Tolstoy is no faultless and infallible prophet whose works should be swallowed as bibliolaters swallow the Bible; but he is a man of extraordinary capacity, sincerity and self-sacrifice, who has for more than twenty years striven to make absolutely plain to all, the solution of some of the most vital problems of existence. What he has said, is part, and no small part, of that truth which shall set men free. It is of interest and importance to all who will hear it, especially to the common folk who do most of the rough work and get least of the praise or pay. But, in England and elsewhere, his message is only beginning to reach those who most need it, and has been greatly misunderstood. Many of the ‘cultured crowd’ who write and talk about him as a genius, twist his views beyond all recognition. They enter not in themselves, neither suffer they them that are entering in, to enter.
The work he has set himself to co-operate in is not the expansion of an Empire, nor is it the establishment of a Church; for man’s perception of truth is progressive, and again and again finds itself hampered by forms and dogmas of State and Church. Sooner or later we must break such outward forms, as the chicken breaks its shell when the time comes. The work to which Tolstoy has set himself is a work to which each of us is also called: it is the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God, that is, of Truth and Good.
Preface to the Maude Translation
ANNA KARENINA , the second of Tolstoy’s great novels, was begun in 1873 when he was forty-five, and its publication was completed in 1877, when he was passing through the spiritual crisis described in his Confession , a book for which the last chapters of Anna Karenina may serve as an introduction, and which was the next work he wrote.
Besides being a splendid novel, Anna Karenina is of great autobiographical value. It was Tolstoy’s way to put much of himself into his characters, but in none of them has he so frankly depicted himself as in Levin, the hero of this story. The description of Levin’s estate is largely drawn from Tolstoy’s own patrimony, Yasnaya Polyana. The character of the old servant, Agatha Mikhaylovna, is drawn from a retainer of his. Nicholas Levin is Tolstoy’s brother, Dmitry. The way in which Levin proposes to Kitty, by writing only the initial letters of the words he wants to say, was an incident in Tolstoy’s own courtship of his wife. Levin’s contempt for the Zemstvo (of which, like Tolstoy, he was a member for only a short time) expresses the author’s own feeling, as does Levin’s censure of the Russian Volunteers who joined in the struggle between Turkey and its Christian subjects in the days preceding the Russo-Turkish war of 1877.
On that matter Tolstoy opposed what appeared to be the prevalent feeling of the Russian nation, and he did the same on the yet more fundamental problem of marriage. Russian divorce law was extremely rigid, but the general trend of the Russian Liberal movement, both in life and in literature, for a generation before Anna Karenina appeared had been opposed to regarding the marriage ceremony as a sentence for life. This book was therefore considered reactionary, and its author was, for a while, classed among the Conservatives. It is, however, absurd to blame a novelist for depicting a happy marriage and a disastrous illicit passion, for certainly such things are met with in real life, and no one need generalize from a particular example.
The book contains one incident the credibility of which has sometimes been questioned. It is said that Vronsky could not have broken his horse’s back in the way depicted in the steeplechase, but I am informed by a very competent authority that just such accidents have actually occurred. A rider by sitting back when jumping a ditch may jerk up his horse’s head and so cause it to drop its hind legs into the ditch, thus breaking its back. It is, moreover, just at narrow ditches, as in Tolstoy’s description, that this is most likely to occur.
Readers of Tolstoy’s books often wish to know something of the author’s life. I may therefore perhaps be allowed to mention that Messrs. Methuen are just publishing a short life of Leo Tolstoy , condensed from the two-volume Life of him which I wrote just before he died.
As English readers are sometimes in doubt where to place the accent on Russian names, a list of characters with the names accentuated is supplied, as also is a list of the Russian words, weights and measures mentioned in the book.
The translators desire to express their thanks to the friends who have assisted them with advice and information during the preparation of this work, and in particular to thank Mr. Benjamin Grad for his kind cooperation.
AYLMER MAUDE
26 January 1918
Characters in Order of Appearance
With stress-accents marked to show which syllable should be emphasized (This list of characters was published with the Maude translation in 1918.)
Oblónsky, Prince Stephen Arkádyevich (‘Stiva’) Oblónskaya, Princess Dárya Alexándrovna (‘Dolly’), his wife; eldest daughter of Prince Shcherbátsky Matthew, a valet
Karénina, Anna Arkádyevna
Karénin, Aléxis Alexándrovich, her husband Matréna Filimónovna, servant at the Oblónskys’
Tánya, Oblónsky’s daughter Grisha, Oblónsky’s