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One hundred years ago, Leo Tolstoy lay dying at a
train station in southern Russia. Journalists, acolytes and newsreel
photographers gathered for the passing of the great prophet. Between
3:30 and 5:30 on that freezing November morning, Tolstoy’s wife stood
on the porch outside his death chamber because his acolytes would not
let her in. At one point she begged them to at least admit her into an
anteroom so that the photographers would get the impression she was
being allowed to see her husband on his final day.

There are many reasons to think about Tolstoy on
the centennial of his death. Among them: his ability to see. Tolstoy
had an almost superhuman ability to perceive reality.

As a young man, he was both sensually and
spiritually acute. He drank, gambled and went off in search of
sensations and adventures. But he also experienced piercing religious
crises.

As a soldier, he conceived “a stupendous idea, to
the realisation of which I feel capable of dedicating my whole life.
The idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present
development of mankind: The religion of Christ purged of dogmas and
mysticism.” But when he sat down to write his great novels, his dreams
of saving mankind were bleached out by the vividness of the reality he
saw around him. Readers often comment that the worlds created in those
books are more vivid than the real world around them. With Olympian
detachment and piercing directness, Tolstoy could describe a particular
tablecloth, a particular moment in a particular battle, and the
particular feeling in a girl’s heart before a ball.

He had his biases. In any Tolstoy story, the
simple, rural characters are likely to be good and the urbane ones bad.
But his ability to enter into and recreate the experiences of each of
his characters overwhelms his generalizations.

Isaiah Berlin famously argued that Tolstoy was a
writer in search of Big Truths, but his ability to see reality in all
its particulars destroyed the very theories he hoped to build. By
entering directly into life in all its contradictions, he destroyed his
own peace of mind.

As Tolstoy himself wrote, “The aim of an artist is
not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all
its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” But after “Anna
Karenina,” that changed. He was overwhelmed by the pointlessness of
existence. As his biographer A.N. Wilson surmises, he ran out of things
to write about. He had consumed the material of his life.

So he gave up big novels and became a holy man.
Fulfilling his early ambition, he created his own religion, which
rejected the Jesus story but embraced the teachings of Jesus. He
embraced simplicity, poverty, vegetarianism, abstinence, poverty and
pacifism. He dressed like a peasant. He wrote religious tracts to
attract people to the simple, pure life.

Many contemporary readers like the novel-writing
Tolstoy but regard the holy man as a semi-crackpot. But he was still
Tolstoy, and his later writings were still brilliant. Moreover, he
inspired a worldwide movement, deeply influencing Gandhi among many
others. He emerged as the Russian government’s most potent critic – the
one the czar didn’t dare imprison.

What had changed, though, was his ability to see.
Now a crusader instead of an observer, he was absurd as often as he was
brilliant. He went slumming with the peasantry, making everybody feel
uncomfortable. He’d try to mow the grass (badly), make shoes (worse),
and then he’d return to his mansion for dinner. He was the first
trust-fund hippie. He seemed to lose perspective about himself: “I
alone understand the doctrine of Jesus.” There were many consistencies
running through Tolstoy’s life, but there were also two phases: first,
the novelist; then, the crusader. And each of these activities called
forth its own way of seeing.

As a novelist, Tolstoy was an unsurpassed
observer. But he found that life unfulfilling. As he set out to improve
the world, his ability to perceive it deteriorated. Instead of
conforming his ideas to the particularities of existence, he conformed
his perception of reality to his vision for the world. He preached
universal love but seemed oblivious to the violence he was doing to his
family.

In middle age, it was as a novelist that Tolstoy
achieved his most lasting influence. After all, description is
prescription. If you can get people to see the world as you do, you
have unwittingly framed every subsequent choice.

But public spirited, he also wanted to heal the
world directly. Tolstoy devoted himself to activism and spiritual
improvement – and paid the mental price. After all, most historical
leaders write pallid memoirs not because they are hiding the truth but
because they’ve been engaged in an activity that makes it impossible
for them to see it clearly. Activism is admirable, necessary and
self-undermining – the more passionate, the more self-blinding.

© 2010 New York Times News Service