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Seeking the Truth: The Life of Leo Tolstoy | Historical Documentary | Lucasfilm — Transcript

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0:07Russia, 1812.
0:10On the plains of Borodino, Napoleon’s invading army launches one of the bloodiest battles in history.
0:16A Russian aristocrat, Pierre Bezukhov, suddenly finds himself fighting for his life.
0:23"Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery.
0:28A thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue uniform rushed on him, sword in hand, shouting something.
0:34Instinctively, Pierre seized the man (a French officer)…when just above their heads, terrible and low, a cannon-ball whistled,
0:42and it seemed to Pierre that the French officer’s head had been torn off,
0:45so swiftly had he ducked it.”
0:50But Pierre is not real.
0:52He’s a leading character in the sweeping epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
0:57Many, many writers will list War and Peace as a work that has influenced them
1:03or is their favorite work of literature. Why is that?
1:06Because I think it’s the standard, it’s the standard to which they aspire.
1:09Tolstoy, by writing War and Peace, transformed what the novel could be.
1:15War and Peace forever enlarged the limits of fiction.
1:18And its author, Leo Tolstoy, was just as vast and ambitious and brilliant as his book.
1:25He became a great inspiration morally. I think equally he exists
1:28in the Western and in the Russian tradition as a moral thinker
1:31and as the greatest creator of Russian prose.
1:34You know, this is a man who remade himself over and over and over again in his career.
1:40He never rested on his laurels. He never took anything for granted.
1:43He was really a seeker after truth.
1:5319th century Russia was the largest, most undeveloped and undemocratic country in Europe.
2:00Throughout the century, the Russian empire see-sawed back and forth between reform and repression,
2:06modernization and tradition.
2:08Tolstoy really represented and lived through the entire 19th century.
2:13He was born when Russia was still a serf-owning society. That meant that
2:19a very small percentage of reasonably wealthy people owned a large portion of the serfs, the peasants.
2:27Tolstoy was born into, you know, what could be described as the very highest circles of Russian society.
2:32He was a Count. His relatives were princes and other counts and countesses,
2:38an almost unimaginable level of luxury, servants to take care of his every need,
2:44you know, from the moment he woke up until the moment he went to bed.
2:48Orphaned as a young child and raised by relatives,
2:50at age 19, Tolstoy inherited the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and its 330 serfs.
2:59With his wealth, he could have done nothing his entire life.
3:03Instead he became one of the most prolific and revered writers and thinkers ever.
3:09Tolstoy lived in a world of extremes but what would propel him forward were the extremes within himself.
3:18He was very dissatisfied with himself, you know. He had a very sensual nature.
3:22This is such an elemental split in Tolstoy. He was a person who really loved earthly pleasures.
3:27But at the same time he had a hyper-developed conscience that made him suffer.
3:32So you had this, this, I suppose everybody has this, this split between spirit and flesh.
3:38But that split was very, very extreme in Tolstoy.
3:43Like many other young aristocrats, Tolstoy gambled and lost vast amounts of money.
3:48He drank and visited prostitutes.
3:51Unlike many others, afterwards, he was wracked with guilt.
3:56As the young Leo Tolstoy wrestled with himself, he began to keep a diary.
4:01He first found time to write while being treated in a hospital for venereal disease.
4:06His diary recorded his sins and his resolutions to do better.
4:11He wrote: "Disgusting! Girls, stupid music, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka,
4:18wild shrieks, girls, girls, girls! …But absolutely the last time…”
4:25And his first works of fiction actually grow directly out of almost a diary view of the world.
4:35His first work is called Childhood. And it’s a novel that
4:40depicts the world from the point of view of a child very convincingly.
4:45Another early book, The Cossacks, came from Tolstoy’s experience as an officer in the Crimean War.
4:51He used a fictional character, Olenin, to describe his own feelings.
4:56“At the age of 18, he was free, as only rich young Russians…who had lost their parents at an early age, could be.
5:03Neither physical nor moral fetters of any kind existed for him;
5:07he could do as he liked, lacking nothing, and bound by nothing.”
5:13This is freedom. This is what – this is one of the great experiments of this novel –
5:18what is youthful freedom like? And Tolstoy goes on to say that despite the fact that he loved this freedom,
5:24he had this freedom and he loved it, he was just looking for something to
5:28sacrifice this freedom to. But nothing came along, nothing was good enough.
5:33Tolstoy was in his mid-20s when his early stories announced a powerful new voice to the world.
5:39But in the 1850s, it was a tiny, exclusive world.
5:44Only the aristocrats could read, and all the writers – a handful of men — knew each other.
5:50Ivan Turgenev took the lead in welcoming Tolstoy.
5:54Tolstoy, when he comes back, he leaves the Crimea, he leaves the army and
5:58returns to St. Petersburg and he's a star,
6:00everyone knows him, he's invited to all the salons,
6:03all the other writers want to meet him, it's a clique.
6:06And if you look at those pictures, you know, you have these pictures of Tolstoy standing with all the other
6:11famous writers of the time, and he's so out of place.
6:15Brilliant and arrogant, Tolstoy took pleasure in insulting Turgenev and the others.
6:20He could not take part in anything he wasn’t leading.
6:23He turned his back on the social worlds of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and headed to his estate, Yasnaya Polyana,
6:29which he literally ruled.
6:32Tolstoy would spend most of the rest of his life there.
6:35But he was lonely. He needed a wife.
6:38He didn’t have a family life, he didn’t have a mother and he was dreaming from a very, very early age
6:44what it would be like to have a wife and children
6:46and how ideal the relationship between the husband and wife would be.
6:51Sofya Behrs, daughter of a royal court physician, won Tolstoy’s heart.
6:56She was 17 and he was 34.
7:00At his insistence, they married one week after he proposed.
7:04But first he made her read his diaries,
7:07a chronicle of almost two decades of drinking, gambling, and illicit sex.
7:12She was horrified, but she forgave him.
7:15The great epic marriage of Leo Nikolayevich and Sophie Andreyevna,
7:20a marriage that was marked by deep passion.
7:24There is no other major 19th century writer who made a pact with his wife
7:30at the beginning of their marriage to keep mutual diaries,
7:33that is both would write diaries that are both intimate to each and at the same time available to each.
7:40Reading and writing diaries and fiction would form a cornerstone to their half-century long,
7:45passionate and ultimately tragic marriage.
7:49Tolstoy took his young bride to Yasnaya Polyana,
7:52140 miles from her family in Moscow.
7:55Nine months later, their first child was born.
7:59There would be 12 more.
8:01Marriage and family settled him in a way that nothing else had,
8:05and Tolstoy began the most creative period of his life.
8:09He would write steadily for six years.
8:13The result was War and Peace. None of Tolstoy’s earlier work could have predicted the book’s range and depth.
8:21“On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe
8:24crossed the Russian frontier and war began,
8:27that is, an event took place counter to human reason and to all of human nature."
8:34Some 1,700 pages long,
8:36War and Peace combines the huge sprawling story of Russia’s victory over Napoleon
8:41with the daily lives of several aristocratic Russian families.
8:46When he finished writing, Tolstoy announced that War and Peace was not a novel.
8:51We have to remember what Tolstoy meant by novel when he said War and Peace wasn’t one.
8:55It was the neat European novel
8:58These are novels that have a fixed number of characters where events occur
9:03according to a certain emotional trajectory;
9:07you don’t introduce things that won’t later pay off,
9:11your women usually get married or die – again that’s the conventional cliché
9:15and you have men who pursue careers.
9:20What it is that makes War and Peace so amazing is that
9:23the people you really care about, the people that don’t get killed off like Pierre Bezukhov,
9:27like Natasha Rostova, they outgrew career ambitions amazingly quickly.
9:33What they become are spiritual searchers.
9:38"Natasha was going to her first grand ball.
9:42She…had been in a fever of excitement and activity all day...
9:46She entered the hall, took off her fur cloak and mounted the stairs…
9:50Only then did she remember how she must behave at a ball,
9:54and tried to assume the majestic air she considered indispensable for a girl on such an occasion.
10:00But, fortunately for her, she felt her eyes growing misty,
10:04she saw nothing clearly, her pulse beat a hundred to the minute
10:08and the blood throbbed at her heart...
10:11She moved on almost fainting from excitement
10:14and trying with all her might to conceal it.
10:17And this was the very attitude that became her best."
10:24Tolstoy spends almost no time describing the physical appearance of his characters.
10:29Instead, he just mentions a few facts that are just exactly the perfect facts
10:33to embody this person in your brain.
10:35The trick, as it were, the way Tolstoy’s realism, vivid realism, works is that
10:40we find ourselves agreeing with Tolstoy about those intimate feelings,
10:46and we think to ourselves, or feel to ourselves, “How does he know that?”
10:50Tolstoy is known as a great master of psychological description.
10:55He is able to subdivide human emotional reaction to an event, to an idea,
11:01in such a way that the actual pace of the words on the page reproduces the pace
11:06of the development of the emotion in the human psyche.
11:09In other words as you are reading, the very act of reading reproduces the sequence
11:14of events emotionally that you were experiencing or that the character’s experiencing.
11:21It was Tolstoy’s own life, and those unfolding around him at Yasnaya Polyana, that inspired him.
11:27Throughout his writing career, he would use, reuse, and transform autobiographical events,
11:33incidents, and relationships into art.
11:36The character most like Tolstoy in War and Peace is Pierre Bezukhov,
11:40a wealthy count who sows his wild oats as a young man, then searches for meaning as he grows older.
11:47"Pierre no longer suffered moments of despair, hypochondria, and disgust with life
11:52but the malady that had formerly found expression in such acute attacks
11:56was driven inwards and never left him for a moment.
11:59'What for? Why? What is going on in the world?’
12:03he would ask himself in perplexity several times a day...
12:07’Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same --
12:12only to save oneself from it as best one can,' thought Pierre."
12:19The book follows Pierre for decades, through national crises and everyday events,
12:23until he finally finds happiness in family life.
12:28Though War and Peace is celebrated today, its first readers, who read serialized installments in journals
12:34as Tolstoy was writing it, found its scale and structure confusing.
12:39None of the readers of the journals in which the serialized portions appeared knew when it was over.
12:45People thought that entirely transitory characters were in fact the real heroes
12:51and if the novel had stopped there, they would’ve become the real heroes
12:54but in fact there was no automatic closure principle
12:58in the realistic novel as Tolstoy understood it;
13:01there could always be another chapter added.
13:03War and Peace is interrupted at points by long philosophical digressions
13:09that have absolutely sometimes nothing to do with the events,
13:12so you’d be reading the story of Natasha and then the chapter will end and you’ll turn the page
13:17and there’ll be a long philosophical essay.
13:20Part of life is thinking about life and it was fitting that no only would there be this description of life
13:25but there would also be these abstract reflections culled from
13:30the world that he had created
13:33so it was supposed to be all of life, and therefore every genre.
13:39War and Peace, in both its stories and essays,
13:42ultimately found meaning not in the great events, issues, and people of history
13:46but in the small activities of everyday living.
13:50In a letter, Tolstoy wrote:
13:52“The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably,
13:56but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”
14:03During the six years Tolstoy spent researching and writing War and Peace,
14:07Sofya not only gave birth four times,
14:10but kept the household going so that he could write.
14:13She was a very, very efficient manager and organizer, clearing the decks so that Tolstoy could do his work.
14:22She provided the material conditions so that he could go on and produce
14:2790 volumes of writing, which we have today.
14:33But Sofya did more: she actively helped him.
14:37Beginning with War and Peace, she wrote, by hand, clean manuscript copies for him to revise,
14:43a process that, along with their mutual diaries,
14:46bound the couple even more closely together.
14:49Sofya copied the entire manuscript for War and Peace seven times.
14:55By the end of that process, Sofya and family life had become the absolute center of Tolstoy’s world.
15:01He would make them the center of his next book, Anna Karenina.
15:06In Anna Karenina, his family life and his observations of Sophia Andreyevna and her family,
15:12added immeasurably to his understanding of the female character and of
15:18whole sides of life that he had really not known intimately before.
15:23Anna Karenina, finished in 1877, tells the overlapping stories of two families, one happy, one unhappy.
15:31With its more conventional subject and structure, it was quickly hailed as a perfect novel.
15:38In Anna Karenina, the Tolstoy-like character, Levin, asks
15:42‘What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?’
15:46Tolstoy supplied Levin with answers, but after devoting five years to the novel,
15:52he could no longer find answers for himself, and fell into a deep depression.
15:56He said:
15:57“I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.”
16:03When you’re this kind of an autobiographical writer, you’re always mining yourself.
16:08as you use the material of your own experience and your own soul
16:13you become a bit alienated from that material so you’re constantly using up
16:19that precious spontaneity of your soul.
16:24Tolstoy’s despair went much deeper than creative exhaustion.
16:29In his diary, he wrote how suddenly everything that had been important to him no longer mattered.
16:35He wrote:
16:36"Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere,
16:41or than all the writers in the world.
16:43And what of it?
16:44And I could find no reply at all."
16:48After Anna Karenina he became disgusted with writing that first of all dealt with
16:53just profligate society ladies having affairs, which is what he came to feel Anna Karenina was
16:58but also writing that entertained, that catered to the sort of consumerist or escapist
17:05appetite in readers. It was a reflex against the theme
17:09and the style of the Russian novel that he himself had perfected.
17:14Despite his newfound contempt for writing, Tolstoy faced his personal crisis the only way he knew how.
17:20He wrote.
17:22The resulting, deeply personal work was called A Confession.
17:27He talks about how he undergoes a spiritual crisis and even though he’s a world famous writer
17:33and well respected, and has a family who loves him,
17:37he’s tempted to commit suicide. He says he has to hide his shoelaces so he doesn’t hang himself.
17:42And he gives up hunting so that he doesn’t have the temptation of shooting himself.
17:46And then he begins to read the gospels
17:50and finds in them truths that he thought he always knew but had never really understood.
17:57Even in the wild days of his youth, Tolstoy had been drawn to Christianity.
18:02At age 50, he decided he found the answer to his spiritual crisis in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.
18:09He announced, “I alone understand the doctrine of Jesus.”
18:15Tolstoy kept his Christianity simple:
18:18no miracles, no Son of God, no rituals or institutions,
18:22just words of wisdom to live by.
18:25And he would choose the words.
18:27This is a man who in a deeply conservative religious nation decides to rewrite the gospels.
18:35He had a different idea of spiritual accomplishment than many reformers.
18:41You didn’t topple governments. The only thing that mattered was
18:46how you toppled your own weaknesses. That is, you had to
18:49begin and end, and that “and end” is the crucial phrase here,
18:53begin and end with individual human reformation.
18:59Known by then as one of Russia’s greatest writers,
19:02people paid attention to everything Tolstoy said, wrote, and did.
19:07In the early 1880s, he set out to practice what he preached,
19:11and began to radically transform every part of his life.
19:15I think he began to understand that he might be able to accomplish more in his own person
19:20than he could accomplish through his works.
19:22And it was part of what led to the great tragedy at the end of his life.
19:26He began to have to be an actor.
19:29He gave up wearing fine clothes and went around in his idea of peasant costume.
19:35He plowed fields, he carried his own water, he chopped fire wood,
19:39and a lot of people criticized him for this sort of grandstanding
19:44this playing at being a peasant.
19:47I think Tolstoy’s motivation was very sincere, I think
19:50that he really did feel that there was a tight connection between the sanctity of one’s soul
19:56and the simplicity of one’s life.
19:59In articles, letters, and booklets, he condemned tobacco, alcohol, and eating meat,
20:05and one by one, gave those habits up himself.
20:08He publicly opposed all war, the military draft, and capital punishment.
20:13Critical of institutions of any kind, he called for an end to private property –
20:18including his own.
20:20As an anarchist, and he was an anarchist in the true philosophical sense of the word,
20:25he said, “I don’t have to obey any law I don’t want to obey, because I didn’t participate in the making of that law.”
20:31Tolstoy was extremely radical in this.
20:35Tolstoy insisted that his family join him in a vow of poverty or be left behind.
20:40The changes in him terrified Sofya.
20:45“It was 20 years ago when I was young and happy that I started writing the story of my love for Lyovochka in this diary...
20:52Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family.
20:57I shall carry the memory of that heart-felt, heart-rending cry of his to my grave."
21:04Tolstoy wanted Sofya, his Sofie, to go along with him and she couldn’t.
21:09Having become the wife he wanted her to be in the 1860s,
21:13she couldn’t just throw it all away and become the wife he wanted her to be in the 1880s.
21:20He wanted them to live like peasants. She felt that she had the children to worry about.
21:25If Sofya refused to follow Tolstoy’s teachings, others eagerly volunteered.
21:31Disciples arrived and wouldn’t leave.
21:35One, an aristocrat named Vladimir Chertkov, would become his closest friend,
21:39and set up a publishing house to spread the word of Tolstoy.
21:44Chertkov saw Sofya as an obstacle.
21:47He actively encouraged Tolstoy’s estrangement from her.
21:53By the late 1800s, thanks partly to Chertkov,
21:56Tolstoy had become more famous as a prophet than as a novelist.
22:00People around the world read his booklets and articles.
22:04A young Indian lawyer named Mohandas K. Gandhi exchanged letters with him.
22:10Inspired by Tolstoy’s pacifist message,
22:13Gandhi developed a strategy of non-violent resistance
22:16that eventually freed India from Great Britain.
22:20But most Tolstoyans did little more than read and repeat the master’s teachings,
22:24which was not what Tolstoy had in mind.
22:28It was a cult in many ways, a cult towards which Tolstoy had at best ambivalent feelings.
22:35At one point he turned to someone he was with and he said “Do you see those people? They call themselves Tolstoyans.
22:41Do you know what that means? That means that they have absolutely nothing in common with my philosophy.”
22:49The Tsarist government looked on Tolstoy with alarm,
22:53and began to censor almost everything he wrote.
22:56Competing forces of change and reaction had been rocking Russia since the serfs were freed in the 1860s.
23:03Tolstoy’s teachings directly challenged the Tsar’s authority.
23:07People began to say there were two Tsars in Russia – one was Leo Tolstoy.
23:13The Tsars were no fools. As one of the last Tsars says,
23:16"I’m not going to add a martyr’s crown to his glory."
23:20So they don’t touch him. Tolstoy often said, "I’d love to be forced to sit in the stinking jail,"
23:25he said, "just to suffer from my beliefs, I know that my followers are arrested
23:30for following me, but no one will do me the courtesy."
23:35The Russian Orthodox Church eventually excommunicated Tolstoy, which delighted him.
23:42While many cheered him on, others, like composer Peter Tchaikovsky, thought he was wasting his life.
23:48"Tolstoy is for me the dearest, the deepest, the greatest of all artists.
23:54But this concerns the Tolstoy of yesterday, who has nothing in common with the exasperating
23:59moralist and theorizer of today.”
24:02Tolstoy did continue to write, short stories, novellas and one final novel.
24:07Almost in spite of himself, his spiritual beliefs and his genius came together in these late works.
24:14Tolstoy made fun of people who just read things, especially his things.
24:18He wanted things to be engraved on the psyche, really change your life.
24:22He wanted human beings to become, in and through the process of reading,
24:27better human beings.
24:29But the unifying vision of Tolstoy the writer was beyond the reach of Tolstoy the man.
24:35His personal life was in turmoil, and his family was collapsing around him.
24:40As the years went by, Sofia Andreyevna, who was a highly nervous, intelligent, sensitive woman,
24:46became mentally unbalanced, really,
24:50because of the kind of disruption that, especially Chertkov and the Tolstoyans
24:55were causing in her family.
24:56There was no way that a woman or perhaps any intimate could survive alongside Tolstoy,
25:02given the path he chose to take.
25:09Being Tolstoy was finally, perhaps, too much for Tolstoy himself.
25:15Pressured on one side by Chertkov, on the other by Sofya,
25:18and still driven by his own relentless questioning,
25:21Tolstoy snuck out of his house in the middle of the night, October 28th, 1910.
25:27He was 82.
25:29He boarded a train but fell ill near a village called Astapova.
25:34He was carried into the station-master’s house. Within hours, the entire world knew.
25:40Camera crews arrived to record the great man’s final hours.
25:44He'd written many, many times about his desire to just leave home and become a wanderer,
25:50become a beggar around the world and people were waiting for it,
25:53it was almost like, you know, people would read the newspaper in the morning to find out
25:56whether or not Leo had finally left home.
25:59Everyone, everyone knew it was coming.
26:01The real victim of that final escape was his wife, Sophie Andreyevna.
26:07Tolstoy’s doctors refused this companion of his,
26:11this mother of his children, this maker of his home, this in many ways co-maker of his works,
26:17refused her access to her own husband until he had sunk into his final coma.
26:26She was only allowed into the sickroom after Tolstoy could, by all
26:31eyewitness accounts, no longer recognize her,
26:34and this was a most terrible burden for Tolstoy’s widow to bear.
26:47Thousands attended Tolstoy’s funeral.
26:50His former serfs carried a banner that read, "Dear Lev Nikolayevich,
26:54the memory of your goodness will not die among us, the orphaned peasants of Yasnaya Polyana."
27:04Tolstoy has a kind of commitment to truth. But truth is complicated.
27:10Truth is contradictory. And rather than resolve things in one way or another,
27:16which would have diminished the reality of his own nature,
27:21he chose to act in a contradictory way.
27:25His great gift to us is to remind us of how complicated and mysterious life is.
27:31His last words are, “To seek, always to seek.”
27:35It's such a Tolstoy thing to say because he always, always was seeking some other truth,
27:39some higher truth, some new truth.
27:44The truth that eluded Tolstoy made its way into his writings.
27:49Master and Man, a short story written late in life,
27:52is about finding out what matters most at the last minute.
27:57A wealthy merchant Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov and his servant Nikita
28:02get lost on a sled in a bitter winter storm.
28:05With no hope of rescue soon, the merchant, obsessed all his life with nothing but his possessions,
28:11realizes that Nikita is freezing to death,
28:14and lies on top of him to keep him warm.
28:17While lying there, the merchant has a revelation.
28:20Vasili Andreevich then hears voices, he grows warm, he drowses and then suddenly he wakes up.
28:27"He tried to get up but couldn’t, he tried to move his arm but couldn’t.
28:31To move his leg and also couldn’t. To turn his head, and couldn’t.
28:34He was surprised, but not at all disturbed by this.
28:37He understood that this was death and was not at all disturbed by that either.
28:42He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm and was alive
28:46and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he and this his life was not in him, but in Nikita.
28:52He strained his ears and heard Nikita breathing and even slightly snoring.
28:57Nikita is alive, so I too am alive he said to himself triumphantly.
29:03And he remembered his money, his shop, his house and everything he troubled himself with.
29:09Well that was because he did not know what the real thing was, he thought.
29:14He did not know, but now I know and I know for sure, now I know.
29:26After that, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov neither saw, heard nor felt anything more in this world.
29:33All around him the snow still eddied, the same whirlwinds of snow circled about
29:39covering the dead Vasili Andreevich’s fur coat, the shivering Mahorty, the horse,
29:44the sleigh now scarcely to be seen and Nikita lying at the bottom of it, kept warm beneath his dead master.”
29:57Well that’s Leo Tolstoy at the end of his life.

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