Reading Tolstoy Before I Die - Figuring Out What's What Before Eternity Under The Cold, Hard Ground

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, wonders at God's supreme irony, having created Man, a sentient, intelligent, insightful, and creative being, then granted him but a few short years of life before consigning him for all eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

What was the purpose of Creation, if this was all there was to it?  Even multiplied by the tens of thousands of people who lived and who would live, this short sojourn was nothing - an insignificant bit in the endless, timeless reaches of the universe. 

Nipped in the bud, thought Levin, clipped and forgotten, a beautiful rose left to wither and die.  A beautiful woman full of charm, elegance, and sophistication taken after barely reaching the age of maturity, full of expressiveness and allure.

Levin was Tolstoy's alter ego, for the author spent his entire life looking for answers. Two things are true about Leo Tolstoy in 1879, wrote Thomas Larson in the Los Angeles Review of Books. First, he had mostly given up on fiction, having published his two titanic novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The latter book exhausted him physically and morally: not long after its appearance, he termed his saga of adultery “an abomination.” 

He found novel writing to be a poor substitute for confronting religious issues and his existential lot. Second, because of his early literary acclaim and the immoral lifestyle it had spawned and enabled, he was miserable. He was so ashamed of himself that post-Karenina his ambivalent atheism collapsed and he sought a new relationship to the “truth.” He abdicated the throne of novelist and took up the mantle of religious critic — on the side of Christianity and against it.

Larson goes on: Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy lost his religion at 18. After a life of debauchery, in his early 50s, he wanted religion — or some source of intellectual security — back. In 1882, he published his Confession, a retrospective analysis of the previous five years in which his midlife crisis of faith unbalanced his literary and philosophical bearing. It is among the oddest of Christian tell-alls, a treatise searching for its own focal truth. Throughout, he hungers for spiritual fortitude: “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” 

At the end of almost fifty years of spiritual quest, he gives up.  If tens of millions of people in the world, living and dead, have found and believed in God, there must be something to it.  His character Levin is backed into the same corner, but decides that he cannot let the quest go at that.  Doing good, he said, gives meaning to life. 

 

Jean-Paul Sartre concluded the same thing.  Well-known for his existentialism, often branded as a spiritless nihilism, he added a caveat.  If a man followed his instincts, and found purpose for the expression of will, and added good to the world, then life need not be a meaningless, random affair. 

Peter Goldberg had been brought up in a strict Jewish family - not Orthodox, but very disciplined Conservative, and they celebrated the High Holidays, sat seder every Friday, and went to temple regularly.  Peter had been circumcised, bar mitzvahed, and since childhood had led a spiritually inspired life. 

He practiced law and was never bothered by its sometimes questionable results.  After all, both the law of the Torah and secular law were about due process rather than results.  As a criminal attorney it was not for Peter to take or decline cases on the basis of his conclusions but on the merits of the case.  His conscience was completely clear thanks to his Judaism, the fundamental soundness of the Torah, and his respect for Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. 

A sane man of stability and unshakeable moral rectitude and faith, he felt it was not for him to question God's plan; but as a criminal attorney, witness to humanity's worst and most horrible crimes, his patience with the Creator was often challenged.  He, like Konstantin Levin wondered how a perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful God could have let such malignity loose in the world. 

Dostoevsky pondered this very issue and in The Brothers Karamazov Ivan challenges his monastic brother.  How could your God have created...have permitted such horrendous, malicious, depraved abuse of children, he asks?.  If Christ came to earth on a mission of mercy, why was he in the temple chasing the money changers and not addressing the real, heinous sins of the world?  His catch-all forgiveness of sins and universal promise of redemption simply did not answer the question.  He was derelict, and only enabled the creation of the Church, an autocratic, self-interested, venal institution promising only miracles, mystery, and authority. 

 

As time went on, Peter Goldberg's faith showed signs of weakness.  These existential questions were not those to be posed by an observant Jew.  God in all his majesty and depthless wisdom should never be challenged, Job notwithstanding. 

But Goldberg could not ignore Job and his respectful challenge of God who tested his faith with one horrible plague after another.  How could Yahweh express such doubts and in such a penitential way?  He was the one who created man and must have known what he had done. 

Worse, why did he exterminate every last human being on earth except Noah and his family in such a hateful, vengeful act; and why did he kill every last man, woman, and children in Sodom and Gomorrah for the sins of a few?

'You're getting morbid', his wife Rachel said to him over dinner. 'You look peaked'. 

Goldberg knew that these doubts, at first niggling and irritating, had become corrosive.  Whenever he was asked to defend a murderer, particularly one of the most sadistic, inhuman kind, he hesitated.  Why should I defend these cretins whom God himself created? Why should I spend my energies doing God's work?  Why didn't he strike these child murderers dead on the spot? And why on earth had he created them in the first place?

Tolstoy again came to mind in The Death of Ivan Ilyich a story about a man who thought he could cheat death.  Ivan constructs his life to avoid entanglements, complications, and sticky patches.  His is a passionless, indifferent, and diffident life; so when he is struck with terminal cancer and begins to reflect on his carefully ordered life, he sees nothingness.  He will die alone without legacy, without history, and without an emotional memoir of any value.  He has an epiphany in the moments before death.  'Ah, death', he says, 'That's all there is to it?', a final cleansing of the slate before eternity. 

'I must figure out what's what before I die', Goldberg said to himself, but how?  Tolstoy spent nearly fifty years reading history, religion, science, and philosophy and came up with nothing.  The Bible suggests that God and his Creation are unknowable, but that was only an anodyne to those seeking but who would find no answers. There must be some key, some Rosetta Stone, a Da Vinci code, apocrypha that held the answer. 

Like most older men he wondered how he got this old so quickly.  God's irony was to have increased the length of a man's life but condemned him to be unable to remember it.  Luckily he still had all his marbles, but that was cold comfort when hours of contemplation and intellectual digging turned up absolutely nothing.  

'You've led a good life, Peter', his wife consoled him. 'Let it go at that'; but of course Goldberg could not.  He was not built that way, and had not one complaisant, stoic bone in his body.  He would figure death out come hell or high water. 

Hundreds came to his funeral, and many spoke in elegiac tones about his exemplary life - the law, his faith, his family; but like in most such ceremonies, no one reached inside to his private thoughts which in this case might have been some measure of sustenance to the congregation of older men and women facing the same eternal end. 

Only one, his brother Herman, made reference to Tolstoy, but only in regard to Goldberg's lively intelligence and literary interest.  Better leave it at that, thought Goldberg's wife.  A man's last struggles are deeply private, insoluble, and often terrifying.  A passionate reader, good at the bar, a devoted father. More than enough.