Orwin, Donna Tussing Simply Tolstoy (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 359 Orwin, Donna Tussing. Simply Tolstoy. Great Lives. Simply Charly, New York, 2017. xvii + 121 pp. Suggested reading. $8.99: £7.00 (paperback). In June of Tolstoi’s last summer (1910), a meeting was arranged with a wellknown Russian actor, Pavel Orlenev. Tolstoi was interested in Orlenev because he had risen from humble origins and had the ambition and all the experience needed to organize a theatre for peasant audiences and simple folk in the rural provinces of Russia. Although he had been a great success at ridiculing the foppish pretensions and excesses of culture in the role of Vovo Zvezdintsev in the Korsh production of Tolstoi’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, Orlenev was keen on making the best impression, hoping to increase his chances of another meeting. The forty-one-year-old Orlenev arrived in expensive evening shoes to tread the summer dust of Iasnaia Poliana and a sailor blouse with a low neckline. He smoked his own elegant monogrammed cigarettes. The meeting was a fiasco. According to Orlenev, ‘Tolstoy simplified himself [uprostilsia], but I complicated myself [uslozhnilsia]’. Luckily, Orlenev did get another chance to meet Tolstoi again later that month and this time wisely took the opportunity to recite a simple poem by Ivan Nikitin about the misery of poverty. Tolstoi cried, but then denied being touched by the reading in a cryptic note he made in his diary that night. Thanks to Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ (1953), we know not to make light of Tolstoi’s complexities. To downplay them as mere whim bordering on folly is dangerous, as in the Orlenov example cited above. Tolstoi’s theory and practice of simplification is legendary: in the words of G. K. Chesterton, he worked to simplify everything in the world, ‘from the Bible to a bootjack’. This simplification falls neither into the ready-made category of Nietzsche’s definition of passive nihilism nor is it a simplification of the purpose of life that Chesterton makes it out to be. Nor is it, being at its core a revolt against the ‘hairdresser’ civilization of philistines, only a pale, blissfree and perverted repetition of what has been taught by ascetic Christianity since ancient times. Other critical voices must also be taken into account. The reverend Sergei Bulgakov claimed that Tolstoi only knew simplicity as simplification, not as illumination. Eugéne-Melchior de Vogüé also noted that Tolstoi moved around the human world with a simplicity and naturalness that was not available to other great writers, a simplicity that was transgressive in a novel way. That this novel simplicity was born out of historical contradictions and not Tolstoi’s own achievement is what so endeared Georg Lukács to the spontaneous materiality of Tolstoi’s realism. Most critics, however, either forget or do not know that two words exist in Russian to convey the ideas of ‘simple’ and ‘simply’. The first is ‘prostota’, or simplicity proper, which invokes for native Russian speakers such fundamental SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 360 virtues of human nature as sincerity, truthfulness and modesty. Simplification, on the contrary, is ‘u-proshchenie’, or making the simple simpler than needed, doing something to it that would deform the originally positive. What Tolstoi proposes is something else, the ‘o-proshchenie’, the act of returning to the original prostota. Although there is no space in Donna Orwin’s latest book for anecdotes, such as the episodes with Orlenev, or for comment on specific schools of interpretation, her book brings the original, gloriouss prostota of Tolstoi’s biography, art and thought vividly into focus across the eight chapters covering the main events of Tolstoi’s life and afterlife — without even a trace of the ‘u-proshchenie’ that would seem inevitable in such a short study. This readable introduction, unburdened by the technicalities of specialty studies peculiar to individual disciplines and fields, is a product of the knowledge and skill of a consummate, clear-eyed master. We hear a personal voice in this wise distillation of Orwin’s lifelong dedication to Tolstoi as scholar, mentor and teacher. Based on her incomparably deep knowledge of Tolstoi’s oeuvre, his biography and historical environment, and being as...