Towards the end of 1880, when he was fifty-two, Tolstoy one day approached the young tutor who lived in his house at Yasnaya Polyana, and in great agitation asked him to do him a service. The tutor, seeing Tolstoy so moved, asked what he could possibly do for him. In an unready voice Tolstoy replied: "Save me, I am falling!" The tutor, in alarm, inquired what was the matter, to which Tolstoy replied: "I am overcome by sexual desire and feel a complete lack of power to retrain myself. I am in danger of yielding to the temptation. Help me!"
"I am a weak man myself," replied the tutor. "How can I help you?"
"You can, if only you won't refuse!"
"But what must I do to help you?"
"This! Come with me on my daily walks. We will go out together and talk, and the temptation will not occur to me."
They set out together, and Tolstoy told the tutor how during his daily walks he had encountered Domna, a young woman of twenty-two who had recently been engaged as the servants' cook. This Domna was a tall, healthy, attractive young woman with a fine figure and beautiful complexion, though not otherwise particularly handsome. At first for some days he had found it pleasant to watch her. Then he had followed her and whittled to her. After that he had walked and talked with her, and at last had arranged a rendezvous with her. The spot was in a distant alley on the estate; to reach it from the house one had to pass the windows of the children's schoolroom. When setting out past those windows next day to keep the appointment, he had gone through a terrible struggle between the temptation and his conscience. Just then his second son had called to him through the window, reminding him of a Greek lesson that had been fixed for that day, and this had detained Tolstoy. He woke as it were, and was glad to have been saved from keeping the appointment. But the temptation dill tormented him. He tried the effect of prayer, but it did not free him. He suffered but felt powerless and as if he might yield at any moment. So as a last resource he resolved to try the effect of making a full confession to someone—giving all particulars of the strength of the temptation that oppressed him and of his own weakness. He wished to feel as thoroughly ashamed of himself as possible, and he had decided to ask the tutor to accompany him on his daily walk, which usually he took alone. He also arranged that Domna should be removed to another place.
After the danger was over Tolstoy seldom referred to the incident unless to those who spoke to him of their own sexual difficulties, but on one occasion he wrote a full account of it to a friend.
The incident resulted in his writing this story, The Devil—the hero of which yields to a temptation such as that Tolstoy had encountered. It was composed some ten years later, but was not published during Tolstoy's lifetime; nor did it appear in the English edition of his posthumous works issued by Nelson & Sons. It is now translated into English for the first time. Tolstoy had vividly imagined the consequences that might have resulted from yielding to the temptation, and used that mental experience for his story, employing fictitious characters placed in surroundings with which he was familiar and such as those amid which the incident had occurred.
The relations of the sexes in Russian society of his day resembled that in English society to-day more than in English society of that period—when, both in literature and in life, repression and suppression of passion was more common. When in Kreutzer Sonata and in The Devil he expressed the views he held, Tolstoy was consciously opposing the current of life around him, and these works also run counter to the movement of our own society to-day. That however does not detract from the value of the work. The belief that ill-results follow from the indulgence of the sexual instincts is not an obsolete eccentricity but a belief held by many men in many ages, and it receives sufficient confirmation from experience to make it certain that it is a view which has to be reckoned with.
The ancient conception of a bitter strife between the flesh and the spirit and of woman as the devil's chief agent in achieving man's spiritual destruction, is alien to the modern outlook, and to-day it is often not understood how and why men ever held such beliefs; but both in The Kreutzer Sonata and in this story Tolstoy makes us realize how easily and naturally men of a certain temperament may come to those convictions. Without adopting that view one is enabled to realize what others have felt, and to perceive how probable is a reaction from the unrestraint of to-day; as happened after the libertinage of the Restoration period.
I do not think there is any other important story of Tolstoy's that has not yet been translated. He left several trunks full of manuscripts, chiefly early drafts of works that had been published during his lifetime or commencements of stories he abandoned; but before his death he expressed the opinion that, except some passages in his Diaries, there was little or nothing worth publishing among those remains. He was indeed a great artist, and his mastery showed itself in knowing what to strike out, omit, and withhold. His published writings are voluminous, but among them there is little (except perhaps some of the later repetitions of his non-resistance doctrine) that we could willingly spare. But if the mass of documents which while he lived he had the good sense to suppress are now to be published, together with a large amount of didactic correspondence, it is likely to injure rather than to enhance his literary reputation. There is a disquieting rumour that this is to take place, in the form of an edition of his works extending to one hundred volumes. Not even that calamity will depose him from the place he securely holds as the greatest and most influential of Russian writers, but it will be an obstacle rather than a help to those who want to become acquainted with the works on which he wished his reputation to rest. The present story is an exception. It is so characteristic of him, and so closely connected with an event that influenced him, that it would be a pity for it not to be known, especially as it is one of the few posthumous works he left in a completed state; even in this case we do not know which of the two endings he wrote he would have adopted had he published it himself.
The foot-notes are by the translator.
AYLMER MAUDE
GREAT BADDOW, CHELMSFORD
September 12, 1925.