José L Recio: TOLSTOY'S VARIEGATED CRISIS

José L Recio is a shortlist winner nominee of the 2024 Adelaide Literary Award Contest in the category of Essays, with her work titled Tolstoy's Variegated Midlife Crisis .

Jose L Recio was born and raised in Spain, where he studied medicine and began a career in neurological sciences. When he was in his mid-thirties, he joined the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA on an International Fellowship. Personal circumstances induced him to make a change in career orientation; he became an American Board Certified Psychiatrist. He has practiced in Southern and Northern California. More recently, he has developed an interest in creative writing. His short stories had appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Los Acentos Review, The Literary Nest, and With Painted Words Magazine, among others. He and his wife currently live in Los Angeles.

Tolstoy's Variegated Midlife Crisis

In A Confession, a book Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1872, he describes his struggle to find the meaning of his life, his crisis of faith, and his fear of annihilation after death. This book, translated into English by Aylmer Maude, his contemporary, interests me primary for what the editor of the Dover edition of 2005 expresses in his introductory note that the chief value of A Confession lies in its honest, unsparing and inspirational story of one man’s search for inner peace.

The book has motivated me to raise the hypothetical question of whether today’s scientific and technological progress would have influenced Tolstoy during his period of emotional and psychological turmoil if he had lived nearer our time.

Lyóf (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into a wealthy aristocratic Russian family and raised in the estate his parents owned at Yásnaya Polyána, near Tula, a city about a hundred miles south of Moscow. He, his three older brothers, and a younger sister received educational instruction primarily from German and French tutors. According to Aylmer Maude, his biographer, Tolstoy’s childhood was a happy one. Tolstoy himself described his early life experiences in a book entitled Childhood.

At sixteen, Leo left Yásnaya Polyána for Kazan, in eastern Russia, to start, along with his brothers, his formal education. He focused on European and Turco-Tartar languages, Russian history and literature, logic, and mathematics. Aylmer Maude tells us about his behavior at that time: “He is still remembered by old inhabitants as having been present at all the balls, soirées, and aristocratic parties, a welcome guest everywhere.”

Tolstoy wrote A Confession when he was fifty-one years old. The opening paragraph reads: “I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith […] But […] at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.” Still a child (in 1838), he says in this book, he heard from a school pupil who visited them that there was no God and that all they were taught was a mere invention, a declaration Tolstoy admits he found plausible. He also declares that he read Voltaire at a young age and found his discourse entertaining. Leo Tolstoy declares in A Confession that his religious faith gradually faded out under the influence of knowledge and life experience, which conflicts with it. However, though he intellectually rejected the Christian doctrine, he admitted to having an indefinable sense of God´s presence, which led him to write in his book, “I believed in a god, or rather I did not deny God.”

When Tolstoy concluded his studies in Kazan, he returned to Yásnaya Polyána and set a school for the local peasant children in his home. But after a year, he quit his teaching duties and volunteered to serve in the army, where he spent seven years, first in the Caucasus, and later, in the Crimean war. During these years, he wrote Childhood, Memoirs of a Billiard Marker, and Sevastopol (three sketches about the war). And a year later, he published The Snow Storm, Two Hussars, and Youth. Tolstoy’s literary abilities were recognized in Russia by writers such as Tourgénef, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gorky, and others. Aylmer Maude, in his essay Leo Tolstoy: a Short Biography, quotes from Tolstoy’s diary from that time: “I am honest, that is to say, I love goodness and have formed a habit of loving it, but there is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame.”

From the age of twenty-eight through thirty-three, Tolstoy traveled to Europe to learn European literature and educational systems. In this period, his brother Nicholas, five-and-a-half years his senior, died of tuberculosis (1860) in France. After his death, Leo Tolstoy, who had been with his brother when he died, wrote in his diary: “It is nearly a month since Nicholas died. That event has torn me terribly from life.” Although Leo Tolstoy was not new to the loss of loved ones (his parents, his brother Demetrius, and his paternal grandmother and custodian, all had died), it was the loss of his brother Nicholas that filled him with grief and fear of death. The thought that nothing of him would remain after his death terrified him, and he found no consolation in living. What for? he writes to his friend, the poet Fet. And in his diary, Tolstoy reasons that since death will inevitably come and nothing will remain (of his affairs) and he won’t exist why go on making any effort?

Tolstoy returned to Russia from Europe in September 1862. Two years later, he married Sofya Behrs, the daughter of a German-Russian physician from Moscow, whom he had met in 1856 when she was a child. When they married, he was thirty-four and his wife eighteen. They settled in Yásnaya Polyána and raised their children (they had thirteen children of whom five died in childhood). In addition, Tolstoy created new schools, implemented his educational principles, and published War and Peace (1869) and Ana Karenina (1877). In the latter novel, Tolstoy attributes to Levin, the male protagonist, the same existential concerns he, as the author, had since Nicholas’s death. This reference indicates that Tolstoy’s psychological struggle, although generally understood as a midlife crisis, had, in fact, started earlier.

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Given Tolstoy’s intellectual and moral concerns as he manifests them in A Confession, regret for his motivation to write his books preceded his ultimate crisis. He names fame and money, “for the sake of which I wrote,” as his principal motives. To publish books, he admits, “It was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil.” His observations about his fellow writers in Russia and Europe made him doubt their sincerity and true intention for literary production. He perceived a discrepancy between the authors’ lifestyles and what they wrote and concluded that these educated people justified their actions in the name of social ‘progress.’ He rebelled against those societal values—which, on the other hand, he also possessed.

Nevertheless, despite his reproach, Tolstoy maintained his lifestyle until the day he witnessed, by chance, a public execution in Paris. He saw the head part from the body and how the executioners thumped them separately into the box. He understood, “not with my mind but with my whole being,” that no theory of civil progress could justify such an act, and therefore, “the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.” This insight and Nicholas’ death drove Tolstoy to reconsider the purpose of his life.

Tolstoy saw death not only as the end of life but also of self-consciousness. Yet, despite his disenchantment with life, after he married, he fervently gave himself to accomplish the family, literary, educational, and administrative goals that he set for himself while living in Yásnaya. He declares in the book that he gave himself to the accomplishment of these duties to the maximum of his abilities. But, he also admits to having the feeling all along of missing something, “as if neglecting to address the question of the purpose of living.”

In his late forties, Tolstoy had the feeling of something dreadful forthcoming, like a volcano about to erupt when the magma, accumulated in the heart of the mountain, has no other course but to reach the peak and jet out. Despite the security of family life, he experienced moments of feeling perplexed, as if he did not know what to do with his life. Tolstoy understood that his uneasiness derived from his need to find the meaning of his life. “Before occupying myself with my estate, the education of my children, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it.” Finding answers to his questions became a necessary condition to keep on living, and he tried to answer them, for Tolstoy believed he could not live without a “higher purpose.”—in his book, he admits to recurrent suicidal thoughts.

In his quest to find answers to his questions, Tolstoy looked into the experimental and natural sciences but found no answers. He then turned to philosophy (Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer), and again he was unsuccessful. He entered a vicious circle: he neither answered his questions nor could he live without the answers. However, Tolstoy refused to accept the idea that life is meaningless.

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Implicit in Tolstoy’s inquiries—“What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow?” is the desire to transcend. In A Confession, he affirms that though we live in a temporary world in which no permanent success is possible, we also have a spiritual nature, a divine spark. This claim contains the Christian message that humans have a soul, linked to the divinity, which will prevail after death. In contrast, the concept of Transhumanism, introduced in the mid-twentieth century by Julian Huxley, is that humankind can transcend by manipulating genes. Although a controversial idea, it is to wonder if it would have appealed to Tolstoy.

Contemporary futurists maintain that death can be avoided by creating a virtual mind. However, many specialists see this designed way of transcending as a fantasy. The writer Melanie Challenger sustain that humans are essentially embodied creatures, capable of experiencing organismic reactions, which speaks of intricate mind-brain-body connections. Any attempt to modify this network through artificial manipulation, such as brain electrode implants for computerized intervention, etc., will result in something different from a human being because it would lose the subconscious and other genuine human attributes, such as feeling love and empathy. Returning to Tolstoy, it is reasonable to ask, given his anguish to find a permanent meaning to his life, what direction he would have taken in his quest—had he had the opportunity to live nearer our time.

When Leo Tolstoy concluded that scientific (logical) thinking would never answer his questions, he returned to faith as a viewpoint from which he could understand the meaning of life. Tolstoy’s sense of the presence of God prevailed even after he learned that Kant and Schopenhauer could not demonstrate His existence. Despite his conviction that the religious practices of the Russian peasants, whose faith he chose to accept, were heavily superstitious, he humbled himself. He started searching for God based on feeling, not reasoning. His sense of the presence of God brought him joy and a desire to live. What more do you seek? This is He, he heard a voice within him.

From these subjective experiences, Tolstoy concluded, “To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.” He realized that the feeling brought on by this revelation was the same he had experienced in his early years. “There was only this difference,” he clarifies, “that then (in childhood) all this was accepted unconsciously, while now (during his crisis) I knew that without it I could not live.”

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Over half a century after Tolstoy wrote A Confession, Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, addressed the topic of the meaning of life in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1945). Tolstoy and Frankl emphasize that understanding life’s meaning is vital to all human beings. They accept the impossibility of human intelligence in penetrating the after-death world and finding the ultimate meaning of man’s life. Viktor Frankl says in his book that “what matters is the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.” His deductions derived from his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Tolstoy, by contrast, pursued the understanding of the meaning of life under a perspective of a hypothetical higher hierarchy. In other words, Tolstoy conceptualized the purpose of human life within the Monotheistic perspective of finite-infinite relationships, while Frankl did it in the realm of the finite.

In his book, Tolstoy distinguishes between ‘animal instincts’ and a human spiritual quality that separates us from the rest of the animals. In her book (How to Be Animal), Melanie Challenger quotes George Kateb, an American political philosopher, declaring that we are ‘the only animal species that is not only animal, the only species that is partly not natural.’ And the International Committee on Human Dignity affirms that we are people with souls that may give us immortality. These views suggest that humans are unique but difficult to define beings. Although science has shown that all known life forms on earth have the same basic biochemistry, humans’ lives are still different from those of any other species.

Accepting Tolstoy’s claim that no scientific, philosophical, or Church-gathered knowledge has offered any definitive answer to the meaning of life, what direction would he have taken during his struggle if he had known the advances from later scientists and humanists? Considering Tolstoy’s powerful intellect, it is puzzling that he found the peace of mind he wanted not through reasoning but revelation. In A Confession, he writes, “I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, about God, faith, life, and salvation, when knowledge of faith revealed itself to me.” His biographer documents that after the publication of A Confession, Tolstoy was known primarily as a moralist and educator rather than a novelist.

What course would Tolstoy’s reasoning have taken if he had known about current scientific and technological advances? Mauricio Wiesenthal, a Spanish author, published a book on Tolstoy’s literary profile in 2011 in which he documents Tolstoy bought a Remington typewriter in his old age. His daughters, Tatiana and Alexandra, learned how to type, and they transcribed their father’s handwritten manuscripts. It seems logical that over time, the PC would have replaced Tolstoy’s typewriter if his life span had been longer. Psychologists agree that our new digital technologies are changing people’s minds and lifestyles. The expectation is that advances in medical investigation, such as the concept and practice of cryonics—the preservation after the death of human bodies at shallow temperatures with the hope of reviving the tissues' functions in the future—will make it possible to revive and restore total health for those same bodies, an expectation that one might argue implies the hope of transcending, which Tolstoy might have chosen to examine.

Jose L Recio