The Meaning of Life According to Lev Tolstoy and Emile Zola

224 Pages·2015·1.46 MB·English

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2005
Pessimism, Religion, and the Individual in
History: The Meaning of Life According to
Lev Tolstoy and Émile Zola
Francis Miller Pfost Jr.
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
PESSIMISM, RELIGION, AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN HISTORY:
THE MEANING OF LIFE ACCORDING TO LEV TOLSTOY AND ÉMILE ZOLA
By
FRANCIS MILLER PFOST JR.
A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Fall Semester, 2005
Copyright ©2005
Francis Miller Pfost Jr.
All Rights Reserved
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Francis Miller Pfost, Jr. defended on 3
November 2005.

Antoine Spacagna
Professor Directing Dissertation

David Kirby
Outside Committee Member

Joe Allaire
Committee Member

Nina Efimov
Committee Member
Approved:

William J. Cloonan, Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee
members.
ii
To my parents,
Francis Miller Pfost and Mary Jane Channell Pfost,
whose love and support made this effort possible
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract v
INTRODUCTION 1
PART ONE: LEV TOLSTOY AND THE SPIRITUAL APPROACH
INTRODUCTION 2
1. EARLY IMPRESSIONS AND WRITINGS TO 1851 3
2. THE MILITARY PERIOD 1851-1856 17
3. DEATHS, FOREIGN TRIPS, AND MARRIAGE: THE PRELUDE TO
WAR AND PEACE 1856-1863 49
4. WAR AND PEACE 1863-1869/1873 61
5. THE ARZAMAS HORROR AND ANNA KARENINA 1869-1879 72
6. A CONFESSION 1879-1882 83
7. RELIGIOUS WRITING, LATER FICTION, AND AN UNFINISHED MADMAN
1882-1910 91
8. THE UNFINISHED MADMAN’S QUEST: NOT A CONCLUSION, JUST AN ENDING 146
PART TWO: ÉMILE ZOLA AND THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
INTRODUCTION 150
1. YOUTH, CAREER, AND WORKS BEFORE THE ROUGON-MACQUART 1840-1868 151
2. THE ROUGON-MACQUART NOVELS 1868-1893 174
3. THE LAST NOVELS, DREYFUS, AND A PREMATURE END 1893-1902 185
CONCLUSION 190
APPENDIX - TOLSTOY TRANSLATIONS 191
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON L. N. TOLSTOY 201
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ÉMILE ZOLA 210
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 218
iv
ABSTRACT
Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev
Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s
relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy
and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly
affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their life-long search for answers
to humanity’s greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history
or even his own fate.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), after a self-admitted privileged existence full of hedonism
and nihilism, at the age of fifty came to the conclusion that the purpose of an individual’s life was
to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, that is, to struggle to achieve the highest state of personal
and individual morality, love, and faith within one’s capability to do so, whatever the desperate
circumstances of history or one’s own existence. Tolstoy’s entire creative work, from his earliest
philosophical writings to his last, from Childhood to The Cause of It All, was dedicated to the
didacticism of this spiritual premise, and like the main characters in his works, Tolstoy came to
understand that the meaning of human life is based on Christ’s message of selfless love,
which alone comes from God and distinguishes the individual immortal soul from each mortal,
animal person who inhabits this earth.
Émile Zola (1840-1902), in the era of Charles Darwin, scientific discovery, and exploration of the
earth environment, took a scientific, naturalistic, and deterministic approach to the same problem.
A youthful life dominated by crushing poverty and grief led the main focus of Zola’s creative work,
the twenty-novel saga of the Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893), to deal in mostly pessimistic and
graphic terms with the hopeless lives and fates of individuals of the lower classes of the French
Second Empire (1851-1870) and its fall. His last two series of novels, the Trois villes [Three
Cities] (1894-1898) and the Quatre Évangiles [Four Gospels] (1899-1902), have a more
optimistic, sometimes utopian outlook as they treat the moral and religious problems of ordinary
people in the latter nineteenth and future twentieth centuries as well as the conflict between
science and religion. In the latter part of his life, especially with the advent of the Dreyfus Affair in
1894, Zola became more concerned with the moral progress of individuals, especially as
examples and leaders for the spiritual and social development of humanity. For Émile Zola
reason guided by science and the continual discovery of natural truths was to provide the way to
the meaning of life based on the true Christian teaching of pure, or selfless love.

v
INTRODUCTION
Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev
Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s
relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy
and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly
affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their life-long search for answers
to humanity’s greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history
or even his own fate. How these two great writers and thinkers of yesteryear approached the
fundamental question of the meaning of human life and what they discovered present an
instructive guide for people of any age, of any epoch, of any era, of any time.
1
PART ONE
LEV TOLSTOY AND THE SPIRITUAL APPROACH
INTRODUCTION
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), after a self-admitted privileged existence full of hedonism
and nihilism, at the age of fifty came to the conclusion that the purpose of an individual’s life was
to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and to achieve the highest state of personal and individual
morality, love, and faith within one’s capability to do so, whatever the desperate circumstances of
history or one’s own existence. Tolstoy’s entire creative work, from his earliest philosophical
writings to his last, from Childhood to The Cause of It All, was dedicated to the didacticism of this
spiritual premise, that of the individual struggling, sometimes gallantly, sometimes not, for the high
standard of personal Christian morality despite crippling pessimism and doubt, a poor
environment, great calamities, or unjust societal exigencies. Like the main characters in his
works, Tolstoy came to understand that the meaning of human life is based on Christ’s message
of selfless love, which alone comes from God and distinguishes the individual immortal soul from
each mortal, animal person who inhabits this earth. This enlightenment came about as the result
of his own quest to discover the purpose of human existence, a struggle which began in earnest
very early in the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.
2
CHAPTER ONE
EARLY IMPRESSIONS AND WRITINGS TO 1851
In his earliest memories of his life, it is significant that Lev Nikolaevich remembers a struggle. In
his First Reminiscences Tolstoy records:
“Here are my first reminiscences, which I am not able to arrange in order, not knowing what
came before and what after. Of some of them I don’t even know whether they happened in a
dream or in reality. Here they are: I am bound, I would like to free my arms and I cannot do it. I
scream and cry, and my cries are unpleasant to myself, but I cannot stop. Somebody bends
down over me, I do not remember who. All is in a half light, but I remember that there are two
people, and my cries affect them. They are disturbed by my cries, but they do not unbind me as I
wish, and I cry still louder. They think that this is necessary (that is, that I should be bound), but I
know it is not necessary, and I want to prove it to them, and I am overcome with cries, distasteful
to myself but unrestrainable. I feel the injustice and the cruelty, not of people, for they pity me, but
of fate, and I feel sorry for myself. I do not know and never will find out what it was, whether I was
swathed as a baby at the breast and tried to get my arm free, or whether I was swathed when I
was more than a year old, so that I would not scratch myself, or whether, as it happens in dreams,
that I gathered many impressions into this one memory. But it is certain that this was the first and
most powerful impression of life. It is not my cries that I remember, nor my suffering, but the
complexity and contrast of the impression. I would like freedom, it interferes with no one else, and
they torture me. They are sorry for me, and they bind me, and I who need everything, I am weak,
while they are strong.”1

1Lev Tolstoy, L. N. Tolstoy:Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [L. N. Tolstoy:
Complete Collection of Works], 91 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura,
1928-1964), vol. 23, pp. 469-470. This authoritative work was begun under the
general editorship of V. G. Chertkov, Tolstoy’s long-time secretary and friend.
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. This excerpt is from a
text called Moya zhizn [My Life], also known as Pervye vospominaniya [First
Reminiscences], which was included in Pavel I Biryukov, Leo Tolstoy: His Life
and Work (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), pp. 35-36. Tolstoy himself
assisted and, to some extent, edited this work by his friend Biryukov (also
known as Paul Birukoff). It includes many quotes and citations from Tolstoy’s
works, letters, and diaries, including the full texts of his First
Reminiscences, published in 1879 and which are quoted here, and his later
Reminiscences, written in 1905 specifically as a contribution to Biryukov’s
biography of him. See Biryukov, Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work, pp. xi-xix.
3
Here Tolstoy’s struggle is not only for the freedom to exist in the unknown world into which he
was born, but also for some acknowledgement of his right to exist and of his right to some
freedom of movement from those much more powerful than he. It is the essence of the problem
and the purpose of human existence. In a later paragraph Tolstoy describes the difficulties which
human beings have to understand this problem, which represents the inconceivable:
“... It is strange and horrible to think that from my birth until the age of three or four years,
during the time when I was fed from the breast, when I was weaned, when I began to crawl, to
walk, to speak, however much I look for them in my memory, I can find no other impressions
except these two. When did I originate? When did I begin to live? And why am I happy to
imagine myself at that time, when it was horrible for me, as it is still horrible to many, to imagine
myself then when I again enter that state of death from which there will be no recollections that
can be expressed in words? Was I not alive during those first years when I learned to look, to
listen, to understand, and to speak, when I slept, took the breast and kissed it, and laughed, and
made my mother happy? I lived, and lived blissfully! Did I not then acquire all that by which I now
live, and acquired so much and so quickly, that in all the rest of my life I have not acquired a
hundredth part of it? From a five-year-old child to my present self there is only one step. From a
new-born infant to a five-year-old child, there is an awesome distance. From the embryo to the
infant an unfathomable distance. But from non-existence to the embryo, the distance is not only
unfathomable, but inconceivable. Not only are space and time and causation the essence of
forms of thought, and not only is the essence of life outside these forms, but all of our life is a
greater and greater subjection of oneself to these forms, and then again liberation from them.”2
Certainly Tolstoy wrote the quoted parts of his First Reminiscences (1879) and Reminiscences
(1905) when he was much older than when he had these impressions in his very early life. He
stated as much when he said that his earliest impressions could have been from a later dream.
But there is no doubt that at a very early age Lev Nikolaevich was concerned with the purpose not
only of his own life, but also with the purposes of the lives of other people on this earth.
As a child of the age of five, Tolstoy together with his eleven-year-old brother Nikolai began to
contemplate the secret of human happiness. Lev had always been impressed with Nikolai’s ability
to tell stories, and when the older Tolstoy brother told his younger sibling “that he possessed a
secret by means of which ... all men would become happy: there would be no more disease, no
trouble, no one would be angry with anybody, all would love one another, and all would become
ant-brothers,”3 the younger Tolstoy became so enthralled by the quest for this secret that it would
2
L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter Pss v 91t), vol. 23, pp.
470-471. See also Biryukov, pp. 36-37.
3Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, 2 vols. (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1987), Volume I, pp. 17-19. The term ant-brothers referred to
a childish corruption of the Moravian Brothers, a religious sect for which the
Russian name is similar to the Russian word for “ant,” or “muravéy.” Tolstoy
believed that his brother Nikolai had been reading and hearing about the Masons
and the Moravian Brothers and had combined stories of their rituals and their
striving for the happiness of mankind with his own imagination to form his
invented concepts of the Ant Brotherhood and the Secret Green Stick. In his
stories Nikolai also included the legend of the Fanfaronov Mountain, a secret
place where members of the Ant Brotherhood would be taken if they fulfilled all
the requirements of their secret society. But no one ever went to this
undetermined location. See L. N. Tolstoy, Vospominaniya [Reminiscences], pp.
426-428, in Volume XIV of Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati-dvukh tomakh
[Collection of Works in Twenty-two Volumes] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya
literatura, 1978-1985). The Ant Brotherhood and Green Stick legends are still
highlighted in permanent monuments on the Tolstoy estate in Yasnaya Polyana.
4