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The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
The Young Tolstoi and Rousseau's Discourse on InequalityAuthor(s): Carol AnschuetzSource: Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 401-425Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/128809 .Accessed: 13/06/2011 12:30
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The Young Tolstoi and Rousseau's
Discourse on Inequality By CAROL ANSCHUETZ
The most pervasive locus communis of Tolstoi scholarship is that, in adopting the ideas of Rousseau, Tolstoi sided with his "grandfathers," the eighteenth-century sentimentalists, against the more recent gener- ation of his "fathers," the early nineteenth-century romantics. From this it seems to follow that, because Tolstoi was a nineteenth-century writer of eighteenth-century culture, he was not and could not have been a romantic. Although this assumption never becomes fully ex- plicit, it is so ubiquitous that no one has ever troubled to verify it by systematically comparing Tolstoi either with Rousseau or with the ro- mantics Tolstoi read.1 The deepest and still the most provocative com- parison of Tolstoi with Rousseau and the romantics is 'The Young Tol- stoi (1922), with which Boris Eikhenbaum challenged the accepted
1 At least four essays on Tolstoi and Rousseau were available to Eikhenbaum in 1922, the first of which, Andreevich [V. Solov'ev], "Bor'ba s razvratom kul'tury. Russo i Tolstoi," in L. N. Tolstoi. Monografiia (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 111-168, probably occasioned Tolstoi's remarks in his journal for June 6, 1905. G. Benrubi, "Tolstoi-prodolzhatel' Russo," in Tolstovskii ezhegodnik 1912 g., pp. 179-198, pro- voked a challenge by M. M. Kovalevskii in "Mozhno li shchitat' Tolstogo prodol- zhatelem Russo?," Vestnik Evropy, 1913, no. 6, pp. 343-352. A. Divil'kovskii pre- sented analogies largely similar to those of Benrubi and Kovalevskii in a more densely reasoned form: "Tolstoi i Russo," Vestnik Evropy, 1912, no. 6, pp. 59-79, and no. 7, pp. 125-153. At a time when Tolstoi still wielded his moral authority against church and state in Russia, or had recently ceased to wield it, all four essays treated Tolstoi's art as part of a life devoted, like Rousseau's, to social ideas. Consequently not Tolstoi's art but his life became the object of comparison with Rousseau's: the exception which proves the rule is Viacheslav Ivanov, who com- pared Tolstoi's life not with Rousseau's but with Socrates' in "L. Tolstoi i kul'tura," Logos, 1911, kn. 1, pp. 167-178. The rule also holds for a much later and broader study, Milan I. Markovitch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Tolstoi (Paris, 1928) which, together with B. I. Bursov, L. N. Tolstoi. Seminarii (Leningrad, 1963), contains the fullest bibliography. All these studies offer cultural-historical generalizations such as those Isaiah Berlin later developed in "Tolstoi and Enlightenment" (1961), although none of them is so concerned with Tolstoi's attitude towards history as The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), republished, together with "Tolstoi and Enlighten- ment," in Russian Thinkers (London, 1978). Isaiah Berlin cites neither the essays available to Eikhenbaum, which in fact seem not to have influenced him, nor Eikhenbaum's Young Tolstoi, the formalist method of which he must have found at variance with his own. As for nineteenth-century critics of Tolstoi, they referred to Rousseau as early as the sixties; see V. A. Zelinskii, Russkaia kriticheskaia litera- tura o proizvedeniiakh L. N. Tolstogo, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1897-1904), especially 2 and 3.
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biographical method of Tolstoi scholarship. Eikhenbaum posited that literary forms, not social ideas, determined the young Tolstoi's use of literary traditio/n. Social ideas he treated as evidence of the fluctuations which occur whenever the dominant system of literary norms, and in particular of genres, is felt to be obsolete.2 In Rousseau's time the dom- inant system of norms was neoclassical; in Tolstoi's time it was ro- mantic. Both of them wrote in genres which the dominant system of norms excluded as non-literary. Rousseau set up a new system of norms which has come to be known as sentimental; Tolstoi set up one which has come to be known as "realistic," a term which Eikhenbaum, how- ever, eschews.3
If Eikhenbaum's challenge to the biographical method of Tolstoi scholarship met with success, his Young Tolstoi did not question the assumption that sentimentalism precludes romanticism. On the con- trary, it reconfirmed that assumption, which becomes most nearly ex- plicit when, for example, in his discussion of Tolstoi's journal for 1847, Eikhenbaum observes, "It is as though Tolstoi had no link with the last generation, as though he had resolutely turned his back on his fathers [Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and the Russian romantics] and re- turned to his grandfathers [the Russian sentimentalists and above all Karamzin]."4 Eikhenbaum's interest in Tolstois use of literary tradi- tion touches on sentimentalism and romanticism yet, because his for- malist method does not commit him to historical analysis, he leaves those historical terms undefined as though their definition were self- evident. When occasionally he does happen to qualify them, he does so only in accord with his nonhistorical, formalist method: romanticism in Russia entails for him a metaphorical style and a tragic plot in which the Byronic hero (otherwise undefined) plays the main role.5
2 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Molodoi Tolstoi (Berlin, 1922; rpt. Munich, 1968), pp. 11- 57, especially p. 36. All translations from Russian and French will be mine.
3 Ibid., p. 99. 4 Ibid., p. 16. 5 Ibid. See pp. 93-94 for Eikhenbaum's identification of the romantic hero in
Russia with the Byronic hero, and p. 108 together with footnote 91, p. 152, for his definition of the tragic plot in which the Byronic hero plays the main role. Here Eikhenbaum clearly has in mind the hero whom Russian critics have traditionally called "Byronic" but, as in the case of other historical terms, he leaves the Byronic hero undefined. Molodoi Tolstoi appeared two years before V. M. Zhirmunskii, Bairon i Pushkin (Leningrad, 1924), a remarkable book which has since been the authoritative work on that topic. Zhirmunskii deals mostly with the Byronic hero of Pushkin's Southern Poems, who originates in the passionate, vengeful hero of Byron's Turkish Tales and Manfred. But the Byronic heroes of Pushkin's later works originate in the blase, aristocratic (and often unheroic) figures of Childe Harold and Don Juan, and in Byron himself as rightly or wrongly understood by his contemporaries. Together with the permutations undergone by the Byronic hero in the work of writers other than Pushkin, these three forms of the Byronic hero would have to be considered in a thorough discussion of the Byronic hero in Tol- stoi's work.
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Although Eikhenbaum does not question the assumption that senti- mentalism precludes romanticism, his rigorous use of the formalist method indicates, by its very limitations, the basis for a study of the young Tolstoi which would question it. In attempting to make that study, this essay will suggest that the deepest affinity between Tolstoi and Rousseau lies not in their ideas or even in the forms which their ideas took but in a basic contradiction to which those ideas gave rise; and that Tolstoi felt the need to resolve that contradiction in his art, whereas Rousseau was content to express it as an insoluble paradox. From this it will become clear that the very contradiction which links Tolstoi to Rousseau is also the contradiction which makes of the ro- mantic plot a tragic one. The purpose of this essay is to identify the terms of that contradiction but, once they have been identified, we shall discover a unity in the young Tolstoi which is not otherwise ap- parent.
Tolstoi made no secret of having read and re-read the sentimentalist precursors of the romantics and above all Rousseau, of whom he al- ledgedly told the French Slavist, Paul Boyer, "I read all of Rousseau, yes, all twenty volumes, the Dictionary of Music included. I more than admired him, I made a veritable cult of him: at fifteen I wore a locket with his portrait at my neck like a saint's image ... Some of his pages go straight to my heart; I believe I could have written them myself."6 The Tolstoi who told Boyer all this had already distinguished himself, as Rousseau had before him, by publishing his confessions, but even the young Tolstoi wrote by a self-analytic method which lends itself to the confessional genre. Tolstoi planned his first book-length work as a self- analysis in four parts, of which he drafted only three, Childhood, Boy- hood, and Youth. The original introduction to Childhood invites com- parison with the introductory paragraphs of Rousseau's Confessions, a comparison which, despite his attention to Rousseau, Eikhenbaum neglects to make. Tolstoi explicitly delegates to his reader the role of a confessor when, by way of introduction, he observes,
It must be said that I have been so sincere in these memoirs about all my weaknesses that I could not make up my mind to cast them before the judgment of the crowd. Although I am convinced that I am no worse than most people, I may yet seem to be the lowest of the low because I have been sincere. Duplicity is the inclination to hide one's bad qualities and to show off one's good ones; sincerity-the inclination to show one's bad qualities and to hide one's good ones.... I ask you to be my con- fessor and my judge as I confide to you in these memoirs. I could not have chosen better because there is no one whom I love and respect more than you.7
6 Paul Boyer, "Chez Tolstoi. Trois jours A Yasnaia Poliana," Le Temps, 28 August 1901.
7 L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-1958), vol. 1, Detstvo, pp. 103-104. All quotations from Tolstoi will refer to this edition.
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In introducing his confession with what seems to be an apology, Tolstoi follows the example of Rousseau, whose confessor is, however, none other than the "Sovereign Judge" to whom Rousseau will proclaim at the Last Judgment,
I have shown myself as I was, as contemptible and vile when I was so, as good, generous and perfect when I was so: I have unveiled my inner nature as Thou Thyself hast seen it. Eternal Being, assemble around me the innumerable throng of my fellow men: let them hear my confessions, groan Tat my offenses and blush at my depravities. Let each of them in turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity, and then let any one of them who dares tell Thee, "I was a better man than he."8
The original introduction to Childhood betrays, with its Rousseauian
"apology," a sentimentalist insistence on the confession itself as suffi- cient penitence for the sins confessed. Eikhenbaum maintains that the sentimentalism of Childhood, which derives from Rousseau as inter- preted by Sterne, led to what in Eikhenbaum's analysis is the anti- Romanticism of The Cossacks. It is here that, instead of progressing from sentimentalism to romanticism as literary history dictates, Tolstoi sides with his grandfathers against the generation of his fathers. He
parodies the romantic situation of the European among savages who, in the novels of Marlinskii and Lermontov, usually inhabit the Cau- casus. The romanticism of these so-called Caucasian novels derives from Byron as interpreted in Russia by Pushkin, whose poem, The Gypsies, engages a Byronic hero in tragic conflict with his gypsy mistress and her lover. Tolstoi's parody of the Byronic hero and his tragedy leads Eikhenbaum to conclude that "Tolstoi consciously follows in the steps of the romantics with the intention of systematically destroying their
poetics."9
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1959-1969), vol. 1, Les Confessions, p. 5. All quotations from Rousseau will refer to this edition.
9 Eikhenbaum, p. 108. Critics did not at first recognize that Tolstoi had followed in the steps of the romantics with the intention of destroying their poetics. In a review of 1865, a critic for the influential Sovremennik declared that "In its basic idea The Cossacks is no better than those Byronic works of Russian literature in which our civilized Europeans go out in search of tranquillity and oblivion to lands where precipices hide in stormclouds and men live free as eagles" (the last two clauses of this sentence scan and rhyme in imitation of romantic verse); see Sovrem- ennik, 1865, no. 6, cited in Eikenbaum's less formalistic Lev Tolstoi, 2 vols. (Lenin- grad, 1928-1931; rpt. Munich, 1969), 2:152. Eugene-Melchior de Vogiie, the French diplomat who, with his Roman russe (1886), introduced the Western public to the Russian novel, may have been the first to observe that "Les Cosaques mar- quent une date litt6raire: la rupture definitive de la poetique russe avec le byron- isme et le romantisme au coeur meme de la citadelle ou s'etaient retranchees depuis trente ans ces puissances" (E.-M. de Vogii, Le Roman russe [Paris, 1886], p. 285; Russian translation [Moscow, 1887]). By 1886, then, Tolstoi's parody of the ro-
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Although Eikhenbaum would presumably acknowledge a connection between sentimentalism and romanticism, his discussion of them in The Young'Tolstoi reduces them to separate and independent phenomena. It places Childhood in a direct line of succession from Rousseau to Sterne, and The Cossacks in another line from Byron to Pushkin. With these lines of succession Eikhenbaum sets up two literary alternatives: sentimentalism (which Tolstoi adopts) and romanticism (which, in par- odying the romantics, he rejects). However, by setting up sentimental- ism and romanticism as alternatives, real though they may be, Eikhen- baum obscures the similarity which underlies Childhood and The Cos- sacks. As a consistent formalist Eikhenbaum finds them similar in that each is, in its own way, an attempt to develop a new genre by the self- analytic method. I find them similar in that both of them express the basic contradiction in a structure of ideas which is distinctively ro- mantic. That structure of ideas occurs throughout Rousseau and finds its clearest expression in his second discourse, On the Origin and Foun- dations of Inequality Among Men.
What Eikhenbaum calls the romantic situation of the European among savages actually corresponds to a myth of exile by which dis- illusioned idealists, whether liberal or conservative, came to terms with their historical situation in the aftermath of the French Revolution and, later, of the Decembrist Revolt. But the myth of exile originated before either the French Revolution or the Decembrist Revolt in that struc- ture of ideas which occurs throughout Rousseau and finds expression in his Discourse on Inequality. When Tolstoi parodies the romantic situation of the European among savages, he merely disguises his ide- ological affinity, if not for the individual romantics he parodies, at least for the myth of exile to which the traditional romantic situation cor-
mantics was already understood to preclude his own romanticism; later it was understood to ensure his realism, the term which Eikhenbaum so pointedly eschews. So, to cite an example at random, it was understood by Philip Rahv in his essay of 1946, "Tolstoy: the Green Twig and the Black Trunk," Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972 (Boston, 1978), pp. 208-221, especially p. 216. For Soviet critics, still more than for Western critics like Rahv, romanticism and realism are, in the words of Iurii Lotman, "diametrically opposed systems of artistic cognition," and therefore mutually exclusive (Iurii Lotman, "Istoki 'tolstovskogo napravleniia' v russkoi literature 1830-kh godov," Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 5, Uchenye zapiski TGU, 1962, vyp. 119, pp. 2-76, especially p. 36; see also Lotman's "'Chelovek prirody' v russkoi literature XIX veka i 'tsyganskaia tema' u Bloka," Blokovskii sbornik [Tartu, 1964], pp. 98-156 and "Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII veka," in Epokha prosveshcheniia [Leningrad, 1967], pp. 208-281). Hence for Soviet critics there can be no romantic realism because "romantic" has come to mean "unrealistic." Lotman's essay on what he calls "the Tolstoyan trend" in real- ism, together with two later essays on Rousseau in Russia (also cited above), are to my knowledge the best pertinent studies. But even in Lotman's essays romanti- cism is a pejorative and vaguely defined concept: clearly a redefinition of it might fundamentally alter our conception of Russian literary history.
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responds. It is true, as Eikhenbaum observes, that "... Tolstoi enters battle with romanticism not only to overthrow it and put his veto on all its conventions, but also to oppose it with something different, some- thing new."'? Yet inasmuch as the romanticism of Tolstoi's fathers, no less than the sentimentalism of his grandfathers, derives from Rousseau, Tolstoi attempts, in his parody of the Byronic hero and his tragedy, to refute romanticism in its own terms. The attempt results in an internal conflict which prevents Tolstoi from putting his veto on the ideas be- hind the romantic conventions. Those ideas inevitably trap Tolstoi and his heroes in a vicious circle of romantic opposition to romanticism. In Twe Cossacks Tolstoi proves unable to oppose Marlinskii and Ler- montov with anything newer than an appeal to the old ideas of Rous- seau's Discourse on Inequality.
The Discourse on Inequality is Rousseau's reply to the question pro- posed in 1754 by the Academy of Dijon: "What is the origin of in- equality among men; and is it authorized by natural law?" Rousseau replied that inequality cannot be authorized by natural law because it did not originate in nature. He undertook to defend his reply by arguing the still more controversial thesis that society itself did not originate in nature. Man as we know him is the artificial product of his own faculties, language and reason, which have developed in society. We can know man as he originally was only by reconstructing the his- tory of his descent from an asocial state of nature, "a state which," as Rousseau concedes, "no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to form sound notions in order to judge our present state correctly.""
In order to demonstrate that society did not originate in nature, Rousseau reconstructs the history of man's descent from this asocial state. Where there is no society, there can be no social inequality among men, who lived, like animals, in utter harmony with their in- stincts. Among these instincts Rousseau singles out two natural princi- ples or sentiments prior to reason: love of self, which society has trans- formed into vain self-love, and pity for others, which in society provides the basis for virtue. Yet love of self and pity for others in no way dis- tinguished man from other animals: what distinguished man was the potential freedom to acquiesce in his instincts or to resist them. To exercise this freedom would mean to choose between acquiescence and resistance, but choice between them is irreconcilable with Rousseau's idea of nature for two reasons. An act of choice must be an act against
to Ibid., p. 113. 11 Rousseau, vol. 3, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de 'in4galitd, p. 123.
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nature because it cannot by definition be instinctive, and even if man in nature could perform such acts against nature, the choice to resist his instincts would destroy the utter harmony in which he originally lived with them. Clearly man would be able to act against nature only after he had acquired the faculty of reason, and as it is in society that reason, like language, develops, man would be able to choose be- tween acquiescence and resistance only after he had founded society.
Rather than consider the problem of moral freedom any further, Rousseau immediately replaces his first distinction with a second one: what distinguished man from other animals was his inherent ability to develop or perfect his faculties.l2 Even in the state of nature this abili- ty, which Rousseau calls perfectibility, rendered man more than equal to other species in the struggle to live. With time man became conscious of the distinction between himself and other species and, having de- veloped his reason sufficiently to ensure his advantage over them, man became conscious of the distinction between himself and individuals of his own species. It was to secure an advantage over individuals of his own species that man founded society and with it, social inequality, which artificially compounded such physical inequality as had existed before. The foundation of society and of social inequality led to the de- velopment of mans faculties, language and reason; and the develop- ment of man's faculties led to the institution of still greater social in- equality. This mutual interaction between man's faculties and the so- ciety in which they develop had a cumulative effect which ultimately transformed man into the artificial product of his own faculties.
Rousseau emphasizes that, although the perfection of man's faculties in society enables man to exercise his freedom, it necessarily brings with it the corruption of his mores. As soon as man begins to exercise his freedom, his now highly developed ability to resist his instincts turns him against nature. Society teaches man for the first time to dis- tinguish between equality and inequality (read "good" and "evil"). To
12 John Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (London, 1974), p. 8 ff. Charvet's second chapter, which follows the logic of Rousseau's thesis step by step, is by far the clearest and, for purposes of comparison with Tolstoi, the most valuable study of the Discourse on Inequality. On the question of the family as the social unit in Rousseau's intermediate period (pp. 22-23), it super- sedes Arthur O. Lovejoy's well-known but relatively facile essay of 1923, "The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality," Essays in the His- tory of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 14-37. It also demonstrates that self-love (amour-propre) first brings about the conditions for property and not vice versa; hence, self-love is the ultimate cause of social corruption, and not property, which is only the immediate cause (pp. 25-26). Charvet uses the distinction between self- love and love of self (amour de soi) to distinguish between consciousness of self and consciousness of others, and ends his study with a critique of Rousseau's argu- ment as a whole.
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act with nature is good and to act against nature by making social dis- tinctions is evil. Society not only institutionalizes the distinctions among individuals, it is doubly pernicious because it motivates the individual to sharpen the distinction between himself and others. Conscious though man was of the distinction between himself and other indivi- duals in the state of nature, he was not yet conscious that others were conscious of him. He believed himself to be his only judge until, on founding society, he became conscious that other individuals might judge him. Self-love led him to judge himself not as he was for himself but as he appeared to others and, in order to distinguish himself among them, he resisted his instincts in accord with their judgment. ". .. The savage lies within himself; sociable man, always outside himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence."l3
Rousseau's reconstruction of man's descent from nature explains, like the Biblical story of Adam's fall, the reasons for man's present fallen state. It identifies nature with an Eden in which man, like Adam, lived without sin. But if it follows, on the one hand, the Biblical story of Adam's fall, it departs radically from the theological doctrine of orig- inal sin on the other. Augustine formulated this doctrine in his debate with Pelagius as to whether the wages of Adam's sin are death for all men. Augustine posited that Adam was originally able not to sin (posse non peccare) and not to die; he did not maintain that Adam was origin- ally unable to sin (non posse peccare) and to die.14 In his Discourse on Inequality Rousseau affirms precisely what Augustine denies; that man was originally unable to sin and, if not unable to die, at least unable to fear death. Man in nature fears only hunger and pain, ". .. pain and not death," writes Rousseau, "because an animal will never know what it is to die, and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that man has made in moving away from the animal con- dition."15 Rousseau's nature is not the Eden in which man first chose to sin; it is a garden in which man was unable to choose. He sinned not, as did Adam, by choosing to know good and evil; he sinned in the very act of making a choice. To be free to choose and to be free from choice are mutually exclusive propositions. The failure to distinguish between them leads in Rousseau, as later in Tolstoi, to an ambiguity between two different uses of the word "good."
3 Rousseau, vol. 3, Sur l'inegalite, p. 193. 14 Augustine, De Correptione et gratia 12.33 in Patrologia Latina 44:936 (Paris,
1878-90); cited in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the De- velopment of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago, 1971), p. 298.
15 Rousseau, vol. 3, Sur l'inegalitd, p. 143.
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"Men are wicked," writes Rousseau, ". . . nevertheless, man [here Rousseau uses the singular] is naturally good...."16 The crux here is what Rousseau understands by the word "good," and Rousseau is not explicit about this. Given that only man in nature, or man in the singu- lar, is good, Rousseau's use of the word excludes men in the plural. The society of men sets up relations such that good and evil are op- posed, and in which men must choose between them. Man's original asocial state sets up no relations among men; consequently man in na- ture has no need to make choices. Men in society make choices but they are often wrong; man in nature makes no choices but he is, if never right, at least never wrong. Moral categories do not pertain to nature because, so long as man remains alone or, as Rousseau puts it, "equal," he has no occasion to choose. But just as it is trivial to assert that men are equal when they merely live alone, it is trivial to suggest, as Rousseau does here, that men are good when they make no choices.
A sign that Rousseau was perhaps uneasy with these ambiguities is that he prefers an intermediate period of history to the original, pre- lapsarian state of nature. The foundation of society and of social in- equality did not in themselves put an end to the state of nature, for the state of nature underwent two revolutions. The first revolution brought with it the institution of the family together with what Rousseau calls a kind of property. The second revolution, which finally did put an end to the state of nature, brought with it the institution of legally sanc- tioned property. Rousseau opens his history of man's descent with an analogy between the development of the individual and the evolution of the species: "There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would want to stop; you will seek the age at which you would desire your species had stopped."'7 By analogy with the prime of the indi- vidual man, the prime of the species is not its original state, which Rousseau already described as the state of nature. The prime of man- kind is the age in which men instituted the family which, as the only natural social unit, represents a virtual contradiction in terms. It is in the communal activities of a family-like society that Rousseau would desire his species had stopped. "The example of savages, who have al- most all been found at this point, seems to confirm that mankind was made to remain in it always ...."18
The family-like or patriarchal society of Rousseau's intermediate period was relatively moral because it was social; yet, because it was still relatively natural at the same time, it was also minimally corrupt.
6 Ibid., p. 202. 17 Ibid., p. 133. 18 Ibid., p. 171.
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". .. Although men had come to have less endurance and although natural pity had already suffered some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our self- love, must have been the happiest epoch and the most durable."x9 If this period was, as Rousseau maintains, the happiest epoch, it was also the period which transformed love of self into vain self-love. "The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly considered, and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on one hand vanity and contempt and, on the other, shame and envy, and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence."20 Thus, if this period was the most durable epoch, it endured only long enough to provide a temporary compromise between man's amoral animal nature and his immoral human nature. The compromise between them mitigated the amorality of the one nature and the immorality of the other, corrupt nature without actually rendering man truly moral. Hence even patriarchal society could not resolve the fundamental contradiction of the Discourse on Inequality, which may be summarized briefly as follows. Ideal social relations would restore nature insofar as they would allow man to live as though alone and free from choice, but they would at the same time destroy nature insofar as they would require him to live with others and hence to make choices. So long as Rousseau is content to express this contra- diction as an insoluble paradox, he gives us scant indication of how to avoid the corruption of our mores without crawling about on all fours.
The common assumption is that Rousseau was an eighteenth-century Pelagian but, however true this may be in some of Rousseau's works, Pelagius regards free will as the means to salvation whereas, in his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau regards it as the source of corrup- tion. Pelagius maintained that Adam's sin was not transmitted to other generations and that free will alone was enough to save man. Augustine maintained that, because guilt for Adam's sin was transmitted, free will can save man only through grace. In the Discourse on Inequality Rous- seau absolves individual man of guilt for original sin, while he imputes collective guilt to men in society. Rousseau might have viewed the need to make choices as a gain, but instead he viewed it as a loss, albeit the loss of what perhaps never existed, the loss of a state in which man was free from choice. In viewing the need to choose as a loss, Rousseau did
19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., pp. 169-170.
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not formulate a secularized gospel of Christian redemption, nor did he help to build the heavenly city of the eighteenth century philosophers.21 Original sin becomes, for Rousseau, the sin of choice, which society transmits from generation to generation; and as remission for the orig- inal sin of choice Rousseau offers nothing that would correspond to the doctrine of grace.
Man's descent from the state of nature established that what we ordi- narily understand as human nature is just a corrupt "second" nature determined by human culture. In this, the second discourse is entirely consistent with the first discourse, On the Arts and Sciences, which in- verts the traditional evaluation of culture by placing nature above it. Once Rousseau has placed nature above culture in his discourses, he finds it appropriate, in ?Emile, to place childhood above adulthood as well. The education of any child in society is an acculturation which renders him a "naturalized" citizen of adult society. When Rousseau gives his Emile an education outside society, he contrives to demon- strate, by his method of negative education, that a child can become an adult without losing his original nature. The education of Nikolen'ka in Childhood is, as we shall see, at once less utopian and more realistic than that of Emile. Rather than offer the hypothetical solution Rousseau offers in Emile, it reformulates the fundamental contradiction of his Discourse on Inequality. The adult, who is free to choose between good and evil, must for that reason be wicked whereas the child, who is free from choice, remains untainted by corruption. Given that this structure of ideas provides no remission for the original sin of choice, adulthood becomes a state of exile from the lost and unregainable Eden of child- hood.
Rousseau's analogy between the development of the individual and the evolution of the species links the child hero of Childhood with the savage Cossacks: for the young Tolstoi, as for Rousseau, the savage is a
21 This alludes, of course, to Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932). For the controversy which surrounds it, see Raymond 0. Rockwood, ed., Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958). Except on the issue of original sin, my discussion of Rousseau's theod- icy relies largely on the interpretation in Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Peter Gay (Bloomington, Ind., 1963), pp. 72-78. On the issue of original sin, my discussion is partly anticipated by Milan I. Markovitch, Jean Jacques Rousseau et Tolstoi (Paris, 1928), where Markovitch broaches the issue in relation to Tolstoi and Rousseau. '"I nous semble voir chez les deux ecrivains la contradiction meme qu'ils trouvaient dans la doctrine de l'lglise sur le peche originel. Comment, demandaient ils, Adam, cr66 bon a-t-il pu tomber dans le pech? .. . Lhomme ne peut se pervertir lui-m6me s'il est bon. Quant a la societ6, qu'ils rendent responsable de tout le mal, elle est compos6e d'hommes. C'est jouer sur les mots que d'expliquer la perversion de l'homme par l'action de la societe, c'est l'expliquer par elle-mime" (pp. 136-137). With this, however, his discussion of original sin comes to an end.
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child (or the child a savage) who, like man in his prime, remains rela- tively unselfconscious and unaltered by knowledge of good and evil. The patriarchal society in which these characters live is not so much governed by a father as nurtured either by a mother or by mother nature. But the narrator of Childhood and Olenin, the hero of The Cossacks, both learn that real life occurs after the fall, when mother's nurture is withdrawn. The narrator of Childhood, who happens to be the grown-up Nikolen'ka, and Olenin, the Russian officer whose view- point The Cossacks often takes, are both self-conscious, cultivated adults. Inasmuch as they are fully self-conscious, they experience nostalgia for unselfconsciousness, the narrator of Childhood because he has been driven out of the Eden of childhood, and the officer Olenin because he finds himself barred from the Eden of the Cossacks. So for Tolstoi, as for Rousseau, Eden recedes ineluctably into the past of the individual (Nikolen'ka) and of the species (the Cossacks), as Tolstoi attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of Rousseau's myth of exile. He looks for traces of myth in real life, and the real life of his characters becomes a search for "a state which perhaps never existed" and "which probably never will exist."
The narrator of Childhood tells us a story from his past, a past which unmistakably resembles Tolstois own. Childhood is not, as the title suggests, the story of the narrator's childhood: it is the story of the end of his childhood. His childhood, insofar as he remembers it, is the state in which he lived with his mother and ends abruptly with his mother's death. In the chapter entitled "Grief," which marks the break between childhood and adulthood, the child Nikolen'ka stands in grief by his mother's funeral bier. The narrator also grieves over his mother but retrospectively he expresses his grief this way: "If in life's darker hours I could have caught sight of [my mother's] smile for even an instant, I would not have known what grief is."22 Here the narrator does not mourn the loss of his mother alone; he mourns the loss of the state in which he once knew no grief. It is in search of that state, which per- haps never existed and probably never will exist, that the narrator writes the memoir of his childhood. When, at his mother's death, her nurture is withdrawn, Nikolen'ka finds himself exiled to the society of others, where he becomes self-conscious.
Nikolen'ka is oblivious to social inequality among adults so long as he, a child who depends on his mother, makes no choices which affect others. But if he is oblivious to social inequality, he is all the more sensitive to the moral distinctions that accompany it. He is an unself- conscious perceiver of adults whose unselfconsciousness makes him a
22 Toltoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, p. 9.
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keen judge of their actions. He does not initiate the action in Child- hood: he responds to it morally or "sentimentally" (for natural virtue is sentiment). Pity for unselfconscious adults is the sentiment with which he responds most often: pity for his kindly German tutor Karl Ivanych, with whom we first see Nikolen'ka's mother; for God's fool Grisha, who prophesies his mother's death; and for the old nurse Natal'ia Savishna whose grief at her death proves deeper than Nikolen'ka's. All that Nikolen'ka perceives, or the narrator remembers, expresses itself in the opposition nature versus culture and its variant, the opposition child- hood versus adulthood. A third opposition, country versus city, grows out of the other two when Nikolen'ka is separated from his mother. Nikolen'ka undergoes two separations from his mother, on which the entire story is constructed. The first one occurs when, with his father, Nikolen'ka departs from the country for Moscow; the second and final one occurs when, on his departure from Moscow for the country, death cuts him off from his mother forever.
In Moscow it turns out that even children, who remain unselfcon- scious in the country, may be radically infected with the self-conscious- ness of adults. There Nikolen'ka sees Karl Ivanych in contrast with his cousins' tutor Herr Frost, whom their mother, Princess Komakova, allows to beat them. Nikolen'ka's grandmother, who speaks for country manners, sharply asks the Princess, ". .. what delicacy of sentiment can you expect from your children after that?"23 Nikolen'ka's cousins are not, in fact, capable of the pity Nikolen'ka feels for Karl Ivanych. They do not play imaginative games like the ones Nikolen'ka played with his brother in the country. Incipient inequality even leads them to humiliate a poor boy in their midst. When Nikolen'ka leaves the coun- try for Moscow, he also leaves his mother and just after his separation, in the very middle of the book, comes a lyric interlude entitled "Child- hood." Entirely in the imperfective present, the narrator describes, as though it were an habitual occurrence, how his mother once woke him from a light sleep before bedtime.
It is quiet and half-dark in the room; my nerves are excited by tickling and waking up; mother is sitting close beside me; she touches me; I smell her scent and her hair. All this makes me jump up, press my head to her breast and breathlessly say, "Oh, dear, dear, mommy, how I love you!"
She smiles her sad, lovely smile, takes my head in her hands, kisses my forehead and puts me on her lap.
"So you love me very much?" She is silent for a moment, then she says, "Make sure you love me always, and never forget me. If you lose your mother, you won't forget her, will you, Nikolen'ka?"
She kisses me still more tenderly. 23 Ibid., t. 52.
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"Stop! Don't even say that, my darling, my dearest!," I cry out, kissing her knees, and tears stream from my eyes, tears of love and rapture.24
Once Nikolen'ka is in Moscow, the promise to love his mother always and never to forget her gives rise to the first real guilt Nikolen'ka has ever known. For his grandmother's nameday Nikolen'ka composes a quatrain which he ends, for the sake of rhyme, "To please her we will strive while here, / And love her as our mother dear!"-and so, Niko- len'ka thinks, he breaks his promise. "I was beside myself at the thought that . . . my good-for-nothing verses would be read aloud, together with the words, 'as our mother dear', which would prove beyond a doubt that I never loved her and had forgotten her."25 To the amused reader, who accepts the conventionality of rhyme, the guilt to which these verses give rise seems excessive. Not so to Nikolen'ka who, in accord with Rousseau, views the rhyme as a falsehood. For if the facul- ty of language itself develops only in society, then the convention of rhyme must be wholly artificial. Society has so motivated Nikolen'ka to distinguish himself that, child though he is, he falsifies the expression of his deepest sentiment. The real pathos of this episode is, however, that his mother's request, "If you lose your mother... ," anticipates his loss of her in the end, and it is not the only. such anticipation. The book opens with a scene in which the narrator describes how Karl Ivanych, like Nikolen'ka's mother in the scene mentioned before, once woke Nikolen'ka from his sleep. This time Nikolen'ka sheds tears of an- noyance, not tears of rapture, and to excuse his behavior, he tells Karl Ivanych that he dreamed of his mother's death. When, later the same day, he first hears that he is to leave for Moscow, he thinks to himself,
24 Ibid., p. 44. 25 Ibid., p. 49. One might quite aptly observe here that the perfection of
Nikolen'ka's faculties in Moscow society has brought with it the corruption of his mores. But this does not take place without the transformation of his natural love of self into vain self-love (amour-propre), a transformation which involves more than the faculties of language and reason. In Paul de Man's interpretation of the Discourse on Inequality, metaphor understood as an inherent property of all language is the ultimate cause of social corruption, and not property, which is only the immediate cause. "The passage from literal greed to the institutional, con- ceptual law protecting the right of property runs parallel to the transition from the spontaneous to the conceptual metaphor," writes de Man, and adds the footnote, "Thus confirming the semantic validity of the word-play, in French, 'sens propre' and 'propriete." ("Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse," in David Thorbum and Geoffrey Hartmann, eds., Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continu- ities [Ithaca, 1973], p. 112.) By this logic John Charvet (footnote 12, above), in whose interpretation amour-propre is the ultimate cause of social corruption, might have added that his interpretation confirms the semantic validity of the word play "amour-propre" and "propriete." To maintain, as de Man does, that the basic idea of the Discourse on Inequality is that language is about language, is to make the mistake Tolstoi warns against in his journal for April-May 1851, "Pourquoi dire des subtilites, quand il y a encore tant de grosses v6rites A dire."
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"So that's what my dream meantl ... Dear God, if only nothing worse happensl"26 In another scene Nikolen'ka's father kisses his wife before he leaves with Nikolen'ka for Moscow. "'Enough my dear', said father, 'we aren't parting forever.' " "'But still it's sad', said mother in a voice that trembled with tears."27 All such references to the first separation from his mother sound retrospectively like anticipations of the final separation, whereas Grisha's prophecy of her death sounds initially like a mere reference to the departure for Moscow. The narrator has in- voluntarily presented his memories in such a way as to attribute the guilt he felt at his mother's death to the time before it occurred. These memories impose on the narrator's past a self-conscious and entirely literary construct through which he looks back at himself and judges himself guilty.
The narrator's guilt lurks behind the grief Nikolen'ka feels when, in the chapter entitled "Grief," he stands by his mother's funeral bier. Here the narrator considers whether or not Nikolen'ka felt true grief at his mother's death. By true grief he understands a grief that excludes all sentiments which result from consciousness of grief. Nikolen'ka is alone in the room except for a deacon whose monotonous voice in a far corer makes him forget the deacon is there. He climbs up on a chair and looks down on his mother's face, which he at first identifies merely as "something transparent and waxen in color." Then, when he recog- nizes that thing as his mother's face, he cringes with horror, but the memory of her face as it was in life enables his imagination to compen- sate for reality. Thus the ocular image of a transparent and yellowish thing alternates for some time with the remembered image of his mother's face until the narrator tells us, "At last my imagination tired, it ceased to delude me; consciousness of reality also vanished, and I for- got myself altogether. I do not know how long I remained in that posi- tion, or what constituted it; I know only that for a long time I lost con- sciousness of my existence and experienced a kind of exalted, inexpres- sibly pleasant, and sad enjoyment."28 At this point, there occurs some- thing apparently incidental which is perhaps the most significant oc- currence in the whole book. The door creaks as a new deacon comes in to relieve the one already in the corer. Nikolen'ka becomes conscious of how he may appear to the new deacon and, to impress him with his grief, begins to weep. The narrator comments,
As I call to memory my impressions, I find that only that minute of self-forgetfulness was true grief. Before and after the burial I never ceased to cry and was sad but ... I despised myself because I did not ^ Ibid., p. 13. 27 Ibid., p. 41. 28 Ibid., p. 85.
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experience exclusively the sentiment of woe, and tried to hide all others; for that reason my sorrow was insincere and unnatural. Above all, I ex- perienced a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy, and tried to arouse the consciousness of my unhappiness, and that egoistic senti- ment did more to stifle true sorrow in me than did any other.29
Clearly this is an adult's memory of a child's experience, in which the child probably felt less the guilt expressed by the narrator than shame at being caught dry-eyed at his mother's bier. That Nikolen'ka should have been dry-eyed would come as no surprise to Rousseau, whose 1Emile might have provided the scene with this epigraph: "smile has never feigned to weep at anyone's death because he does not know what it is to die."30 Nikolen'ka is unselfconscious like smile only until the society of others in the form of a new deacon makes him self- conscious. Then, as when he wrote, "To please her we will strive while here / And love her as our mother dear," self-consciousness leads him to falsify the expression of his deepest sentiment. Yet just at points such as this one, where Tolstoi appears most similar to Rousseau, the dif- ference between them becomes most pronounced. If at first Nikolen'ka, like ]imile, does not know what it is to die, it is clear that Nikolen'ka uses his imagination to resist that knowledge. At his mother's funeral service the cry of a peasant child who sees her face breaks down Niko- len'ka's resistance, and he, too, lets out a cry which the narrator ex- plains as follows: ". . . The thought that the same face which, a few days before, had been filled with beauty and tenderness, the face of the one I loved more than anything in the world, could awaken horror, revealed to me, as though for the first time, the bitter truth and filled my soul with despair."31
Although self-consciousness prevents Nikolen'ka from feeling true grief at his mother's death, nothing can prevent him from feeling horror at it. Natal'ia Savishna, who lacks all self-consciousness, not only feels true grief but accepts her own death instinctively when she, too, dies shortly thereafter. It is her death which elicits from the narrator this judgment: "She accomplished the best and greatest thing in life-she died without regrets or fears."32 The problem of life becomes, as in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the problem of death; hence Tolstoi's autobiographic "Notes of a Madman" as well as the stories "Alesha the Pot" (really Natalia Savishna's story retold), "The Death of Ivan IIich" and "Master and Man." In each instance to accept one's own death is somehow inexplicably to become unselfconscious and, in effect, like Natal'ia Savishna. To be unselfconscious is to be free from choice and in
29 Ibid., pp. 85-86. 30 Rousseau, vol. 4, smile, p. 505. 31 Tolstoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, p. 88. 32 Ibid., p. 95.
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that sense "good" so that, like man in his original state, one neither sins nor is conscious of sin. As a child Nikolen'ka ought not to sin but, as we have seen, the narrator attributes guilt to him at his mother's death. Hence, at the point when Nikolen'ka comes to the knowledge of death, he also comes to the knowledge of sin, and there is a certain emotional plausibility about this experience. An adult who loses a parent may well feel guilt, but he is already conscious that the wages of Adam's sin are death for all men. A child who, like Nikolen'ka, first becomes conscious of sin at his mother's death, feels as though he were the first one ever to sin. By Rousseau's analogy between the development of the individual and the evolution of the species, the child's fall recapitulates Adam's fall. Thus Childhood so fuses Tolstoi's autobiography with Rousseau's philosophy that the remembered guilt which the narrator once felt at his mother's death provides an objective correlative for Rousseau's myth of exile. At the end of Childhood the narrator invokes Natal'ia Savishna and his mother with this question, "Can Providence have united me with those two beings only that I should eternally re- gret them?"33 The narrator's regret betrays his failure to regain the Eden in which he knew no grief, but it also confirms his success in telling the story of how he came to grief.
It would be a mistake to ignore that Childhood and The Cossacks are linked biographically as well as ideologically. Whereas Childhood began to take shape in 1851 when Tolstoi visited his brother Nikolai in the Caucasus, The Cossacks developed over a period of ten years out of the same visit. In 'The Cossacks which, like Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was never completed as a book-length work, Tolstoi collides head-on with a moral situation which he had experienced in the Cau- casus but had not and perhaps could not entirely work out. The young Tolstoi, who, in Childhood, had uncritically accepted Rousseau's Dis- course on Inequality with its myth of exile, now sets out to re-evaluate the crucial problem of moral freedom. In order to do so he first of all makes his principal character an adult who, unlike the child hero of Childhood, has to make choices that affect others. He places this char- acter in the traditional romantic situation of the European among savages; that is, engages him, like the hero of Pushkin's Gypsies, in conflict with one of the savages and her betrothed. But he goes further than this, he makes of this character a reader of Marlinskii and Ler- montov, whose Caucasian novels had turned Rousseau's indictment of culture into a convention of literature.
If inequality, or evil, originated in society, then is the guilt of society not in practice the guilt of all the individuals who constitute society? If, moreover, an individual accepts Rousseau's theory, will he not tend
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~8 Ibid., p. 95.
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to think himself better than anyone else? By Rousseau's theory, he plus any one individual (except his mother)t will constitute a society. The original introduction to Childhood smacks of this tendency where Tolstoi writes, "Although I am convinced that I am no worse than most people, I may yet seem to be the lowest of the low because I have been sincere. [But inasmuch as I have been sincere in my confession, the reader interpolates, am I not in fact the highest of the high?] I ask you to be my confessor and my judge as I confide to you in these memoirs." Rousseau, who recognizes only the Supreme Being as his confessor, proudly challenges the innumerable throng of his fellow men to out- confess him. "Let each of them in turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity, and then let any one of them who dares tell Thee, 'I was a better man than he."' This is the confession of a narcissistic penitent who would absolve his own sins in the very act of confessing them. Tolstoi, who probably sensed the narcissism in his original introduction, actually submitted a different one for publication. He may also have sensed that Childhood, though written in a humbler tone than Rousseau's, is itself an attempt to go back to the Eden of childhood by confessing the sin of his fall. In it he confesses his self- consciousness, but the very activity of confessing one's self-conscious- ness is, if not altogether narcissistic, at least highly self-conscious.
Childhood finds its complement in The Cossacks, which substitutes the past of the species for what, in Childhood, was the past of the indi- vidual. Whereas Childhood gives an unselfconscious, child's-eye view of culture, The Cossacks gives a self-conscious, cultivated view of na- ture. The narrator of Childhood is separated from his past by time; Olenin is separated from the Cossacks by a thousand versts of space which stand for time. When Olenin leaves for the Caucasus, he means to cast off his identity as a Muscovite aristocrat, together with his debts to those he leaves behind: several restaurateurs, a tailor and a woman who loved him but whom he, like other Byronic heroes, cannot love. As Childhood is punctuated by Nikolen'ka's departures from the coun- try for Moscow and from Moscow for the country, the story here is constructed on Olenin's departures from Moscow for the Caucasus and from the Caucasus for Moscow. What Olenin planned as a mere escape from himself takes on the quality of a pilgrimage in the strict sense, a redemptive journey like the one made by the narrator of Childhood into his past. It begins in the corrupt city (in Childhood, in the narra- tor's corrupt present), passes through a pristine wilderness (the past) and finally leads back towards the city (or the present).34 But once
34 The terminology of the "redemptive journey" and its three stages comes from Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London, 1964), pp. 69,71.
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Olenin has reached the Caucasus, he can no more live the life of the Cossacks than the narrator of Childhood can relive the life of Niko- len'ka; not because time is irreversible but because the self-conscious- ness it brings with it is irredeemable.
To emphasize that his Caucasian novel is free of romantic cliches about the Caucasus, Tolstoi attributes to his principal character the literary preconceptions of his readers. Marlinskii had given them, on the one hand, a grandiose Caucasian landscape, hyperbolically de- scribed; Lermontov, on the other hand, had given them a disenchanted hero who remains unmoved by its beauty. Olenin has read Marlinskii's hyperbolic descriptions of the mountains and because he has read them he is disenchanted when, at dusk, he first sees the mountains. "... He thought the special beauty of the snow peaks, of which he had so often been told, was as much an invention as Bach's music and the love of women .. ."35 But at dawn the mountains overcome his preconceptions and he discerns in them the physical symbol of the moral beauty of nature. It is with these mountains that he associates the Cossack woman Mar'iana he will come to love: both are truly beautiful, not falsely beautiful like the romantic ideals of the other Russian officer, Beletskii, who, not accidentally, reads Dumas's Trois Mousquetaires. With the mountains and Mar'iana Tolstoi turns the conventions of literature back into an indictment of culture and takes sides with Rousseau against Rousseau's own progeny, the romantics.
Because Olenin finds the Cossack community, or stanitsa, still at Rousseau's intermediate period of man's descent from nature, most situations in The Cossacks provide textbook examples from his Dis- course on Inequality. At first sight Olenin singles out Mar'iana as the potential heroine of his own Byronic romance. "'This is she'," he thinks to himself, only to add, "'But there will be others like her'."36 Although there are in fact other, more accessible Cossack women, Mar'iana is betrothed to the young dzhigit Lukashka. This Olenin learns from the old hunter Eroshka, who initiates Olenin into Cossack life. Men are animals in Eroshka's eyes, and men ought to hunt animals only out of need. The boar has one law, he tells Olenin, and the hunter has an- other, but they are both God's creatures. Here this unselfconscious philosopher of nature echoes the Discourse on Inequality, which reads:
... As [animals] share something of our nature by virtue of the sensi- tivity with which they are endowed, one will judge that they too ought to participate in natural right, and that man is subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged to do no
'3 Tolstoi, vol. 6, Kazaki, p. 13. 36 Ibid., p. 41.
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harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sensitive being, a quality which, being common to beast and man, ought at least to give the one the right not to be uselessly mis- treated by the other.37
Just as man may hunt animals out of need, so he may love women but, here also, only out of need. Men have their own laws but those laws are not God's law, which is that everything was created for man's need. From this Eroshka concludes, "There's no sin in anything," but as for man's laws, he says, "That's all false . ."38, a phrase which, when he repeats it at the end of the book, will sound like a judgment of Olenin. Whether Christian or Muslim, all men will die like animals and grass will grow on their graves. Alone in a stag's lair from which he and Eroshka startled a stag (in Russian, olen') the day before, Olenin meditates on Eroshka's dictum. He has sought out the stag's lair as a refuge from the sun, crawled (on all fours) under a bush and literally taken the stag's place, where he surrenders himself to the mosquitoes. " ... one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and for some reason all humming something around me, and every one of them as much a particular Dmitrii Olenin as I am . . .' And it be- came clear to him that he was not at all a Russian aristocrat, a member of Moscow society, friend and relative of someone or other, but just the same mosquito ... or stag, as the ones living around him now. 'Just like them, as Old Eroshka said, I'll live and die. And he was right: only grass will grow'."39 Here as in Childhood the problem of life becomes the problem of death which, at one with himself and with nature, Olenin lears to accept in a pantheistic experience. Yet the conclusion he draws from this experience is one which neither Eroshka nor any other Cossack could understand.
"Why am I happy and what have I lived for till now?" Because he has lived for himself, Olenin concludes that he must now live for others. "That is what happiness is, ... happiness is to live for others. That is evident."40 But it is evident to the reader that Olenin is lying in a stag's lair, not living for others. In this asocial state Olenin experiences the desire to live for others as an instinct, but nature, in which he experi- ences the revelation, is a state to which moral categories do not pertain. It will turn out that he has mistaken the moral principle of self-denial for the natural instinct of pity, of which Rousseau says, "Benevolence and friendship itself strictly defined, are the products of a constant pity
37 Rousseau, vol. 3, Sur lindgalitd, p. 126. 38 Tolstoi, vol. 6, Kazaki, p. 56. 39 Ibid., p. 77. 40 Ibid.
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fixed on a particular object: for is desiring that someone not suffer any- thing but desiring that he be happy?"41 Shortly after his experience in the stag's lair, Olenin comes across Lukashka, who killed a Chechen the night before; the Chechen's brother, who has come to trade for the body, will kill (or seem to kill) Lukashka at the end of the book. By contrast with Eroshka, who largely represents the natural aspects of patriarchal society, Lukashka represents its more corrupt aspects. Blood revenge is to him a matter of course and, although Olenin envies him his happiness with Mar'iana, he pities Lukashka his triumph over the Chechen. Olenin feels his own happiness will be complete only when he can live for someone else. Why not live for his rival Lukashka? To marry Mar'iana, Lukashka must have a horse. Olenin chooses to give him the horse, and thereby Mar'iana as well.
Olenin's triumph over himself contrasts sharply with Lukashka's tri- umph over the Chechen although, when Olenin boasts to Lukashka of having many other horses, his self-denial is momentarily diminished. On the other hand Olenin is disappointed that Lukashka expresses no appreciation for his self-denial: Lukashka lives by the natural instinct of self-preservation which, in his case, appears to be less softened by pity than in Eroshka's, and he promptly trades Olenin's gift horse for a better one. Rousseau says of pity, "Instead of that sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it inspires all men with this other maxim of natural goodness much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the first, Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others."42 Even if, in trying to follow the principle of self-denial, Olenin risks hypocrisy, the principle itself obliges him to make a choice, the choice to deny himself Mar'iana. Yet the other Russian officer, Beletskii, who has acquired a Cossack mis- tress, soon tempts Olenin beyond his strength and Olenin goes back on his choice. Olenin is clearly Beletskii's moral superior and, even in going back on his choice, he does not lapse into the Byronic pattern of seduction. Having given Lukashka the horse he needs to marry Mar'iana, Olenin goes a step further than Beletskii: he proposes to make Mar'iana his wife. To justify this proposal, Olenin writes himself a letter in which he addresses the Muscovite aristocrat he once was. Just as Olenin de- duced the moral principle of self-denial by crawling on all fours into the stag's lair, he now abandons himself to his natural instincts by writing himself a letter. He writes that he at first refused to Russify Mar'iana by casting her in the role of his wife, or to deceive himself by playing the role of a Cossack like Lukashka. It was because he knew
41 Rousseau, vol. 3, Sur l'ingalite, p. 155. 42 Ibid., p. 156.
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both these roles to be false that, in choosing to give Lukashka a horse, he denied himself Mar'iana. But now he feels that happiness is not to live for others (he has tried this and only been unhappy). "Happiness," as he redefines it in his letter, "is to be with nature, to see her, to talk with her." I use the feminine pronoun in my translation because Olenin goes on, "Perhaps what I love in Mar'iana is nature, the personification of all that is beautiful in nature; but I have no will of my own; in me some elemental force loves her; all God's world, all nature forces this love into my soul and says, lovel ... In loving her, I feel I am an in- alienable part of all God's happy world."43 So, in choosing to marry Mar'iana, Olenin has not in fact made a choice: he has acquiesced in his instincts and become at one with nature as he was in the stag's lair.
Alone in the stag's lair, where he was free from choice, Olenin was so happy that he "instinctively" wanted to make a choice. But once he finds his way back into society, where he is free to choose, he cannot bear the responsibility of self-denial. Olenin's proposal to marry Mar'i- ana expresses the need to recreate, in social relations, the asocial state he enjoyed in the stag's lair; and in his letter, he describes the real Mar'iana in mythic terms, as "a magnificent woman in the primal beauty in which the first woman must have emerged from the Creator's hands."44 In expressing the need to recreate, in his relations with Mar'i- ana, the asocial state he enjoyed in the stag's lair, Olenin lapses into the fundamental contradiction of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Ideal social relations would restore nature insofar as they would allow man to live as though alone and free from choice, but they would at the same time destroy nature insofar as they would require him to live with others and hence to make choices. However happy Olenin may have been in the stag's lair where he was free from choice, he could not instinctively have wanted to live for others: as a man whose faculty of reason has been perfected in society, and whose mores have thereby been corrupted, he can at best act spontaneously, not instinctively. There is nothing in the description of Olenin's experience in the stag's lair to suggest, however, that Tolstoi regards it as in any way less na- tural than the experience of man in his original state. Only when Olenin undertakes, in his letter, to live by the natural sentiment of pity do we find out that Olenin himself now regards self-denial as hypocritical. The end result of this turn to nature will be the same as if Olenin had denied himself Mar'iana except that, whereas he might have ennobled himself by self-denial, he will now expose himself to ridicule. If, on the one hand, Olenin does not Russify Mar'iana by making her the wife of
43 Tolstoi, vol. 6, Kazaki, p. 123. 44 Ibid., p. 120.
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a Russian officer or, on the other hand, deceive himself by playing the role of a Lukashka, how does Olenin foresee his life with Mar'iana? Fortunately, when Lukashka lies wounded by the Chechen at the end of the book, Mar'iana herself relieves Olenin of the need for foresight. She scorns Olenin's proposal to make her his wife and, in conversation with Eroshka, turns her back on Olenin as he forlornly departs for Mos- cow. It is clearly a matter of indifference to the Cossacks whether he will ever return and, as the book stands, it is a matter of indifference to the reader too.
The refusal to accept the fundamental contradiction of the Discourse on Inequality as an insoluble paradox runs throughout all of Tolstoi, from the "Philosophical Remarks on the Discourses of J. J. Rousseau" (an unfinished commentary of 1847 which includes only the first, not the second discourse), to the entry in his journal for June 6, 1905, where he writes, "They compare me with Rousseau. I owe much to Rousseau and I love him, but there is a great difference between us. The differ- ence is that Rousseau rejects all civilization whereas I reject pseudo- Christian civilization." Rousseau always supposes the possibility of an- other, radically different civilization on other foundations than those of society as he knows it. But Tolstoi supposes, with the hindsight of the French Revolution and the Decembrist Revolt, that this other, radically different civilization is, if not yet actual, still latent in each individual, as the title of his tract "The Kingdom of God Is within You" suggests. The young Tolstoi presumably understands that to be free from choice and to be free to choose are mutually exclusive propositions: if he did not understand that, he would not perceive the situation of the Euro- pean among savages as a dilemma to be parodied. Yet he does not per- ceive that, as a consequence of Rousseau's ideas, it is not natural to be moral: if he did perceive that, he could not describe Olenin in the stag's lair as both free from choice and free to choose at the same time. As soon as Olenin lies down in the stag's place, Tolstoi leaves no doubt that it is not only natural to be moral, it is also natural to be Christian. "... Suddenly such a strange sense of causeless happiness and love for everything came over [Olenin] that, out of an old habit acquired in childhood, he began to cross himself and to thank someone."45 In sub- stituting the postulate of man's original innocence for the doctrine of original sin, Rousseau arrived at a structure of ideas from which tradi- tional moral values, preeminently Christian in origin, do not logically spring. He provided a basis in natural law for the maxim, "Do what is best for yourself with the least possible harm to others"; he did not intend to provide a basis for the maxim, "Do unto others as you would
45 Ibid., p. 76.
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have them do unto you." Such "rational" principles as self-denial de- pend on freedom either to acquiesce in one's instincts or to resist them, yet the principle of self-denial is the very one which Tolstoi believes Olenin ought to follow by instinct.
Once Olenin has botched his attempts to act on principle and to live by instinct, Mar'iana brings Tolstoi's parody of the Byronic hero and his tragedy to its conclusion. Like the narrator of Childhood, the By- ronic hero of Tolstoi's parody has sinned and, although Tolstoi denies him the opportunity to confess, his repentant attitude towards sin can be traced back to the earlier book. The sentimentalist insisted on con- fession itself as sufficient penitence for the sins confessed, but the Byronic hero neither repents nor confesses sins which he does not rec- ognize. His ability to defy the judgment of others through crime raises him above society. Were Olenin a Byronic hero like Lermontov's Pech- orin, he would turn his back on Mar'iana, not she on him.46 The im- portance of female characters in the young Tolstoi far exceeds the im- portance of the Byronic hero, and the affirmation of romantic ideas far outweighs all ridicule of the Byronic hero by parody. The male char- acters both in The Cossacks and in Childhood are defined by their re- lation to the primary female characters, Nikolen'ka's mother and Mari- ana. Just as The Cossacks is based on Olenin's frustrated urge to unite with Mariana, so Childhood is constructed on Nikolen'ka's fear of separation from his mother. Mar'iana chastely foregoes the unmarried Cossack woman's right to take a lover, even though her would-be lover is Lukashka, her husband-to-be. Nikolen'ka's mother, "the angel,"47 is not only chaste in body like Mar'iana, she is so chaste in mind that she
46 I can find no evidence that Tolstoi ever read Byron at all, however often he may mention him; as for Pushkin, he first read The Gypsies six years after he be- gan The Cossacks, and then only in Merimee's French prose version (Molodoi Tolstoi, pp. 36-37)1 This is all the more reason why neither Tolstoi's nor any other Byronic hero is to be confused with the real Byron, whom biographical critics avant la lettre compared with Rousseau, and who parodied their comparisons in his Detached Thoughts for 15 October 1821. "My mother before I was twenty- would have it that I was like Rousseau--and Madame de Stael used to say so too in 1813-and the Edin[burgh] Review had something of ye sort in its critique of the 4th Canto of Ch[ildle Ha[rold]e.-I can't see any point of resemblance-he wrote prose-I verse-he was of the people-I of the Aristocracy-he was a philos- opher-I am none-he published his first work at forty-I mine at eighteen,-his first essay brought him universal applause-mine the contrary-he married his housekeeper-I could not keep house with my wife-he thought all the world in a plot against him; my little world seems to think me in a plot against it-if I may judge by their abuse in print and coterie .. .-Altogether, I think myself justified in thinking the comparison not well founded. I don't say this out of pique-for Rous- seau was a great man-and the thing if true were flattering enough-but I have no idea of being pleased with a chimera.-" Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron's Letters and Journals (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 9: 11-12.
47 Tolstoi, vol. 1, Detstvo, pp. 56, 81, 86,90.
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blinds herself to her husband's infidelity to her. These female characters are good in the sense that they are thoroughly, not just relatively moral like Rousseau's savages or Tolstoi's Cossacks. They embody a Victorian ideal of perfect wife- and motherhood which, in terms of the Discourse on Inequality, can only be unnatural. Yet, unnatural though their per- fection may be, both Mar'iana and Nikolen'ka's mother represent for Tolstoi the Edenic state of nature from which Olenin and the narrator of Childhood are cut off by their histories of past choices.
In 'The Cossacks, as in Childhood, the surest moral insight occurs when the principal character is alone and free from choice; in both of them the principal character fails to act on that insight when he re- enters the society of others. The distinction between pre-romantic sentimentalism and the Byronic hero's full-blown romanticism breaks down with time in Tolstoi's work, but the fundamental structure of Rousseau's ideas endures. Behind Tolstoi's characters there still lurks the figure not so much of natural man (who is, after all, an animal), as of a civilized man for whom choice comes naturally. In Childhood and The Cossacks the problem is how to come to terms with society but, as Tolstoi matures, the children in his work will successfully grow up, marry the right woman (like Tolstoi himself) and reconcile culture with nature in the family. War and Peace will restore what is, for Tolstoi, the Edenic past of Russia, in which choices were easier to make. 1818 is itself a mythical childhood when, by contrast with the corrupt so- cieties of the West, Russia represented nature. If Pierre Bezukhov makes a wrong choice (to marry Helene, for example), the action of War and Peace will put it right. But when Tolstoi's contemporary, Anna Karenina, makes a wrong choice in the Westernized Russia of the 1870s, her choice, unlike Bezukhov's, will prove to be fatal. The profound mistrust of free will that we have seen in Rousseau's Dis- course on Inequality prepared the author of Anna Karenina for Schop- enhauer's conception of the will as destruction. It seems in no way in- consistent to argue that although, as Eikhenbaum maintains, Tolstoi was a nineteenth-century writer of eighteenth-century culture, he was also a romantic; because Tolstoi selected, from among the ideas which the eighteenth century offered him, a uniquely romantic contradiction to resolve.
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