SAINTS AND SINNERS IN LITERATURE

If I had a double portion of Leo Tolstoy’s dynamic facility in prose, I would ferment an urgent awakening in contemporary literature.

The grand prodigy of Russian literature, who strode out his peers in both literary prowess and spiritual devotion, was lauded in life and honoured in posterity but his ideas are still to provoke corresponding attention on the modern arena.

Aside being the greatest writer of his time, Tolstoy stands out as a man of conviction who refused to efface the frame between conscience and convenience, against the example of his contemporaries who banked on the downgrade of morality to buy popularity.

Although he is best known for his universally renowned novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, it is Tolstoy’s latter works which merit closer recognition because of their direct proximity to mankind’s quest for the meaning of life.

Prefatory remarks to his “Confession” are a masterly homage to the Tolstoyan monument, as the elderly writer who had achieved everything but contentment for all his exploits, probed the definitive problem of human existence with imposing clarity and authority evocative of Ecclesiastes:

“Here unfolds the drama of a soul who has sought from his earliest years the path to truth or, as the author refers to it, the meaning of life. This is a soul striving with all the strength of his inner energy toward the light which shapes him and his edification.

“It is truly a magnificent drama for anyone whose living soul has the power to understand and perceive its inner meaning; it is written by the hand of one who has himself lived through all its internal collisions, torments and agonies,” writes his translator David Patterson.

The foregoing can be safely extended to a comprehensive appraisal for Tolstoy’s latter inventory. Devotional sensibility became the framing point of Tolstoy’s work after a midlife spiritual crisis which led him to renounce his secular projects as wasted years and chart a fresh trail towards the elucidation of the ultimate existential question.

Up in arms

The appearance of “A Confession,” initially banned in Russia, marked Tolstoy’s turning point.

Contrariwise his seminal masterpiece, the legendary sage of Yesnaya Polyana’s own life ceased to be a cyclic alternation of war and peace. He became an isolate at war with the world right to the end.

Tolstoy, whose career concurred with a growing tide of perversion in the arts, spent the latter segment of his life a bitter man in a relentless duel against authorities in art, learning, religion and media for their counterfeit discharge of responsibility which had come to taint these social engines.

Always the military man, having manned the front in some of Russia’s most gruelling battles as a young man, Tolstoy devoted prolific effort to fighting his contemporaries in art and the media for ushering society on this fatal spiral.

Perhaps, one of the famous face-offs in literature was Tolstoy’s feud with his compatriot Emile Zola, a pseudo-scientific exponent of the secularisation of literature whose work commanded fanfare in post-revolutionary France.

Tolstoy had been complicit in the compromise and owed his early acclaim to it, before his work took a Christian slant after the spiritual crisis.

Looking back in disillusioned hindsight, he regretted having been hostage to the pride and presumption of teaching others without knowing what he was teaching them.

Detached from the quest for acquisition and appeal, which had dealt a death-knell on the didactic function of art as the language of social cohesion, Tolstoy recounted the perils of this diversion:

“In order to acquire the fame and the money I was writing for, it was necessary to conceal what was good and to flaunt what was bad. And that is what I did.

“Time after time I would scheme in my writings to conceal under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good which gave meaning to my life. And I succeeded in this and was praised,” he confessed.

Hitches in the social engines of Tolstoy’s time still command the arena, with only isolates still manning the fort to foil the tide.

Before the Blackout

If, as Shakespeare said, the world is a stage and all men are actors, then most writers are craftier than their characters because they play to the tune of controversy and popularity till reckoning time catches up, rather late in most cases.

D.H Lawrence widely regarded the greatest writer of the 20^th century, bled the most putrefying obscenity and blasphemy, with two of his novels “The Rainbow” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” banned on grounds of dirty language.

Towards his death, an older and wiser Lawrence wrote: “All that matters is to be at one with the living God.”

Nokolai Gogol burnt his sequel to “Dead Souls” in entranced conviction shortly before his death.

Formerly an avowed atheist, C.S Lewis met God after an agonising search for meaning which had proven futile, devoid of a divine anchor.

“That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed,” Lewis wrote subsequent to his conversion.

According to the historian Paul Johnson, the poster-boy of atheism Ernest Hemingway derided the idea of God, regarded religion as a menace to humanity and shunned it at the earliest possible moment.

At the high point of his atheistic enlightenment, Hemingway “pushed two shells into the twelve-gauge Boss shotgun, put the end of the barrel into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains.”

Likewise Tolstoy was the object of a tug between life and death during his midlife crisis.

 “With all my strength I struggled to get away from life. The thought of suicide came to me as naturally then as the thought of improving life had come to me before,” Tolstoy writes in “Confession.”

 Acceptance of the Christian faith eventually ushered Tolstoy from death to life and became the launch-pad of several incisive, philosophical works, including “A Confession,” “The Kingdom of God is within You,” “What I Believe,” and “What then Must We Do?”

Base elements

Crossing over beyond his midlife crisis, Tolstoy confessed that spiritual bankruptcy was a rabid contagion in literature as a pillar institution. This view is more current than most readers suspect.

 In most of the trending literature, inordinate accent is highlighted on base elements of human nature while virtue is written off by amoral complacency.

Condoning right and condemning wrong is the conspicuously missing dimension, thereby unhinging the floodgates of hell for the proliferation of every vice.

Mercenary cross-aggrandisement among writers continues to upstage the truth.

 A flaw is apprehended by Tolstoy whereby writers brand themselves as mediums in the generation of knowledge while justifying their own ignorance as an operational necessity. 

Tolstoy’s Confession blows the cover on this ploy to forestall criticism, facilitating the decimation of sensitivity and fermenting the diffusion of sensuality.

“In order to avoid the obvious question – “What do I know and what can I teach?” – the theory explained that it is not necessary to know anything and that the artist and the poet teach unconsciously,” Tolstoy relates. 

Irish satirist Jonathan Swift debunks this fallacy in the “Battle of the Books”: “Wit without knowledge being a sort of cream, which gathers in a night to the top, and by a skilful hand may be soon whipped into froth; but once scummed away, what appears underneath will be fit for nothing but to be thrown to the hogs.”

Counterfeit art

Tolstoy warns in a closely-themed treatise “What is Art?”: “The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength.”

“And this is what people of our day and of our circle should understand in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art with which we are deluged.”

Even then, when conservatism was still to go obsolete, Tolstoy’s reservations about art were met with forthright derision by most of his peers.

A circle of hostile contemporaries, chiefly Zola, upbraided Tolstoy for being out of touch with the moral transition submerging the terrain of the time.

Zola, who had savagely attacked Tolstoy as having a “crack in the head” in a widely publicised newspaper interview, gave cold shrift to Tolstoy’s standpoint:

“Tolstoy’s opinion will not make us stray from the path we are following: that is because as a thinker, he is detached from reality; as a creative force, people have exaggerated his worth.”

Had Tolstoy conveyed his opinion in this age, he would come across as a hardwired extremist; perhaps the boring sort of writer which Shimmer Chinodya says must be dragged to the marketplace and flogged in public.

Billy Graham concurs with Tolstoy in “The Jesus Generation” that if we put lids on our sewer holes, then we must also rein in the immorality filtering into our society through literature and other media.

Most mainstream publishers today will not furrow a brow to go through what they brand overtly fanatic manuscripts. Yet from their stables, they industriously retail religious packages; religious in the sense that God features in their work as a sub-character in stale jokes.

Corporate conspiracy

Corporate conspiracy, confesses a former New York Tribune editor, is the blight across the arena, noting that the modern writer now labours “to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

 “We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes,” John Swinton told fellow writers in 1953.

 Writing is bound to degenerate when it reneges into a mere commercial enterprise. While financial considerations are imperative, the overall dynamic is lost when art is subjugated to profiteering.

“The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous,” Tolstoy laments in “What is Art?”

The magnification or mortification of an idea in contemporary circles no longer borders on the merit of the idea but its corresponding business interest to writers and publishers.

Redefining the Arena

Tolstoy mastered art into an interface where others could make meaning of their lives and endeavour for the ideal.

Inseparable from the Christian sensibility which informs the body of his latter work, Tolstoy advocates for a return to faith without which it is impossible make meaning of our lives.

“The religious perception of our time is already so sufficiently distinct of mankind that people have now only to reject the false theory of art according to which enjoyment is considered to be the purpose of art, and religious perception will naturally take its place as the guide of the art of our time.

“And as soon as the religious perception, which already unconsciously directs the life of man, is consciously acknowledged, then immediately and naturally the division of art into art for the lower and art for the upper classes will disappear. 

“There will be one common, brotherly universal art, and first that art will, naturally, be rejected which transmits feelings incompatible with the religious perception of our time, feelings which do not but divide men, and then that insignificant, exclusive art will be rejected to which an importance is now attached to which it has no right.”

The contemporary arena has degenerated into a lunatic asylum in which morality is a remote sensibility. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s foregoing prescription is an ethical imperative long overdue.