Monday 5 July 2010

The Man who would be King


I’ve long loved the plays of William Shakespeare. I’ve seen so many good performances, both in London and in Stratford. Good performances bring out all of the nuances of the drama. But I also enjoy reading them for the pleasure of reading, for the pleasure I take in Shakespeare's mastery of words. I love words; I love to play with words in the way that Shakespeare played with words.

I also love the writing of Lev Tolstoy…most of his writing. I read his essay on Shakespeare, published in 1903, not so much criticism as demolition. It irritated all hell out of me, not simply because he seemed to completely miss the point but because – I must confess- I thought it presumptuous for a Russian, a foreigner, to attack a poet who wrote in a language that was not his own.

I assume Tolstoy read English, though I have no information on the point. But no matter how good he was I doubt if he understood the subtleties of seventeenth century speech, or the way in which Shakespeare contributed to the evolution of English. Just imagine how Russians would feel if I, or any other English person, presumed to rubbish Pushkin!

The issue of language and comprehension was bad enough. But even more unsettling was the meanness and smallness of spirit shown by the author, qualities I don’t normally associate with Tolstoy. What I do associate him with, for all his genius, is selfishness and overwhelming egoism. The egoism, something that most writers suffer from, could have been disregarded, disregarded, that is, if he had not presumed to write in such terms about Shakespeare. Egoism here is the key, as George Orwell recognised in Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, his brilliant rebuttal of the Russian master.

In his essay Tolstoy rails against King Lear with particular animus. Here Orwell spotted the psychological clue behind his ranting on the blasted heath: Tolstoy hates King Lear because he is King Lear; he reproduces Lear in life. Lear’s renunciation was Tolstoy’s renunciation: Lear fled; Tolstoy fled. His end also was curiously like Lear’s:

And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on Shakespeare, even the ending of his life--the sudden unplanned flight across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a cottage in a strange village--seems to have in it a sort of phantom reminiscence of LEAR.

The simple fact is that the play held a mirror up to Tolstoy, showing back a disturbing reflection. The theme is about renunciation, renunciation of power, renunciation of land, the renunciation of wealth, the very core of Tolstoy’s philosophy. Tolstoy renounced the world because he believed that in this, in serving the will of God, he would achieve happiness.

But his renunciation brought him no more happiness that Lear’s gratuitous act. Like Lear he gave up power…but also like Lear he still wanted to be king. Shakespeare, it might be said, had shown the weakness in Tolstoy’s own thought. Perhaps Tolstoy, too, should have been accompanied like Lear by the Fool, someone to tell him that he deserved to be beaten for being old before his time; that he should not have been old before he was wise.

34 comments:

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  5. Ana, What would you say is Tolstoy's best and where would it be in your top ten books?

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  6. ...and if you have time, why?

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  7. Morning, Ana,

    There is a fragment of a poem by Archilochus which says, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" ; and, in his essay, Tolstoy and History, Isaiah Berlin asks, Was Tolstoy a fox? or was he a hedgehog? And, from this one little hedgehoggy fragment, Berlin weaves a foxy account of Tolstoy's life and beliefs.

    Now, as you know fine well, I am not in the least qualified to comment on either literature or history ; but I do feel that we must do justice by our Tolstoy. Berlin says that he was by nature a fox (like Aristotle and Shakespeare) but believed in being a hedgehog (like Plato and Dostoevsky). In fact he had a bit of a butterfly brain, but desired to be more concentrated.

    This split was bound to lead to tensions ; it was also bound to lead him to consciously modelling himself on other writers - and to criticising fellow foxes like Shakespeare, whom perhaps he wished to distance himself from.

    So, perhaps his panning of Shakespeare was not done so much in error as in deliberately seeking a new interpretation.

    Unkind? Perhaps ; but in a sense, all criticism is both unkind and complimentary. So, let's go easy on him and recognise him for what he was : a man who wanted to be all things and one. ;-)

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  8. Nobby, I've read most of his shorter fiction as well as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I do have a blog on my favourite fictions and Tolstoy is not among them. When it comes to Russian writers I far prefer Dostoevsky and Chekhov. I have no doubt at all that Tolstoy is a master, though. War and Peace contains some of the most panoramic scenes in all of literature: the wolf hunt, Natasha's dance and the battle descriptions are beyond comparison. Still the book is spoiled for me by lengthy and tendentious arguments about the philosophy of history. I argued with a Russian friend that the book would suffer no loss at all if the last thirty or so pages were pruned, an act of sacrilege so far as he was concerned!

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  10. Jamie, try to get hold of the essay. I'd love to hear what you think after you've read it. It's as grumpy and curmudgeonly an 'interpretation' as I have ever seen. :-) But for the fact that it was written by Tolstoy I doubt it would ever have been published. Thankfully for his reputation it has largely been forgotten.

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  11. Adam, you are so unfair to yourself. :-)

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  13. Yes, it has a certain romantic appeal. :-))

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  14. Ana, about a hundred years ago, I was pretty ruthless in my criticisms. A shame it was that I never properly understood the trials and pains that curmudgeons have often had to bear, and which made them what they were.

    I shall say a prayer for Tolstoy! In any case,he and Shakey Will are probably the best of mates now. ;-)

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  15. The books that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (founder of the Ahmadiyya Coomunity) sent to Tolstoy which included The Teachings of Islam and How to be free from sin were (I'm fairly sure) in English. He wrote back saying that he particularly liked How to be free from sin and found that 'The ideas are very profound and very true' in The Teachings of Islam. There were a number of disciples who translated these works into English during the lifetime of the founder and dispatched them around the world. As far as I know there were none who spoke or translated Russian at the time but it will be worth my while looking up if works were translated into languages other than English. It could possibly even have been a reply on Tolstoy's behalf but the Ahmadiyya literature catagorically states that the reply was from Tolstoy himself.

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  16. Rehan, that's super; thanks. I once went with a German friend, one who speaks excellent English, to a performance of Henry IV Part I. She said she found the whole thing quite incomprehensible. I can understand, having dipped into some German literature of the seventeenth century.

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  18. Oh, Adam, I personally would not go that far!

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  20. Adam, you are still in your Birth of Tragedy phase. Time to move beyond, to see that idols are merely idols. :-)

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  23. I sometimes think that Nietzsche's writing, post-Wagner, was a lifelong attempt to distance himself from this appalling father-figure, possibly a bit too Freudian though.

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  25. It's just that his obsession with the man continued to the end of his life, almost to the point of derangement in works like Nietsche contra Wagner and Der Fall Wagner.

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  26. Ana, I am not sure if such classics lose some of their power through translation having never read a book in any other language apart from English. My guess is that you have so perhaps you have a view on this?

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  27. So both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer greatly misunderstood Buddhism,by interpreting Nirvana as non-existence. The Buddhist response to them both would be that they failed to understand the system fully because they failed to adopt Buddhist practices aimed at enlightenment - at which point they would have developed the capacity to conceive of Nirvana. 'Sire, Nirvana is', says the Buddhist disciple, Nagasena, 'cognizable by mind: an ariyan disciple, faring along with a mind that is purified, lofty, straight, without obstructions, without temporal desires, sees Nirvana.'

    http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/buddhism.htm

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  28. Nobby, thanks. My own knowledge of the detailed practices of Buddhism is fairly hazy.

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