Global Lit: Tolstoy's Folk Tales

Leo Tolstoy, who lived and worked in Russia during the Enlightenment, Romantic, Realist, and Naturalist periods (even a bit into the Modernist era), is one of the most influential writers in the world. 

His early writing, from the Romantic era, while readable, is not as interesting as the work he creates during the era of Realism.

These Realist works include War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, both great massive novels, written after Tolstoy (who spent a somewhat dissolute youth, doing badly in school and dropping out the university, and then getting badly into debt partying & gambling in Moscow) spent some time in the army.  

After this, he travelled to Western Europe, where he met other artists and writers, including Victor Huge (author of Les Miserables) and other political artists who had influence on him – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for instance, author of the famous statement “Property is theft,” and who was about to publish a book, La Guerre et La Paix. 

(Proudhon is another enormously influential man: he’s the proponent of most of the anarchist thought that existed in the 19^th century and today.  If you’ve ever seen this symbol painted on a wall --

 -- you can thank Proudhon.) 

Among other things, this trip turned Tolstoy into an anarchist and a political writer: his work from this point on will start from the point of view that governments exist not just to exploit but to destroy their subjects: that government is the enemy.

Contrast this with the Enlightenment thinkers who wrote the American Constitution, who while they did build safeguards into their government, nevertheless held that government was a solution, that it was the path to building a more perfect union.

Shortly after writing his two great novels (and they are both great – read them when you have time), in the 1870s, Tolstoy had a spiritual crisis, which results in the next stage of his life and art.

He had already been trying out the ideas of anarchism and revolution on his estate – starting free schools for the children of the serfs, run on anarchistic philosophies; giving away his money and belongings to beggars on the streets (his wife was annoyed about this); dressing like a peasant and not a Russian nobleman – but after his spiritual conversion, he begins attempting to practice the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. 

He also practices vegetarianism, practices sexual abstinence (or tries to), and begins to endorse the principal of non-violent resistance.

This last was possibly his most important and most lasting political world influence: his work on the subject influenced Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and through Gandhi and King, millions of others.

Just before his death, Tolstoy abandoned all his wealth to follow Christ.

He writes at this time a number of works, including the famous Death of Ivan Ilyich and the book of short stories in which the two we are reading are to be found. These are deliberate imitations of folk tales.

Tolstoy at this point has denounced his earlier works, the great novels, calling them showy and unreal.  In these stories he is attempting to tell the truth as plainly as possible.  He sees the narrative of the folk tale as the vehicle by which he can do this.  Notice the similarity of these tales to parables – for Tolstoy, religion and politics were the same thing.

Notice also the notion (common to Romantics) that the folk tale is a clearer and more certain route to the truth. 

This is the idea that uneducated people are more real, somehow, that civilized and educated people, because they are closed to nature, are closer to natural man, and therefore more likely to have access to real truths. 

This is part of the Romantic conviction [still with us in America today] that more education makes you more ignorant, somehow less able to see or understand what is true.

Folk tales

The attraction to folk tales / folk literature arises during the end of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic era.  It stems from the (mainly Romantic) belief that poor and Indigenous people and their cultures are (somehow) more authentic than middle-class or wealthy, literature people and their cultures.

Many of the folk tales we have now were collected by Romantics, including (for instance) Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the tales of Brer Rabbit, first collected and written down by Robert Roosevelt, and later transcribed by Joel Chandler Harris.

You’ll remember that Romantics celebrate the Other and the Exotic and Nature – for all these reasons, the Romantics loved folk tales and fairy tales, since they believed that these works were “more natural,” and therefore “more authentic” works of literature.

Folk tales in their original form are oral literature.  This is to say, they are stories that existed before literacy, before writing, when people (folk) were passing on their cultural stories and knowledge in an oral form.

Common features of the folk tale, which Tolstoy imitates:

·        Usually not placed in real time – we’re in magic time: Not, “In the Summer of 1849,” or “Just before the Civil War,” but “In a galaxy far far away”; or “Once upon a time”; or “Once There Was”, etc.

·        Generally an idealized or distant landscape.  Not here is the essential point. It’s not down the block, but off in another or a distant country, or in the past.

·        Characters are not real people.  They’re lazy sons or wicked stepmothers or lost children or simple farmers or tricksters or scary wolves: they’re archetypes, used to illustrate points.

·        Formulaic plot devices – there will be a journey, there will be elements we recognize (rash promises, three wishes, three mistakes, a bad mother, a bad king, mysterious strangers, magic numbers (3, 7, 9, 4 being the most common), the need to be kind to strangers, etc.

·        Common themes repeat: be kind to [or wary of] strangers, respect your parents, take care of your children, don’t go out into the woods/the world alone, family is more important than wealth

·        There is almost always a moral: the point is clearly made, and you hardly ever have to figure out what it is.

·        Folktales are occasionally subversive – that is, they sometimes encourage disruption of the established order.  This is especially true of trickster tales, but can be true of any folktale.

The Three Questions:

In a style very much like a parable or a Zen koan, Tolstoy tells of a king who needs answers.  He tries the places you would expect to find answers (his political advisors, his religious leader, his military experts) but while he gets answers, none of the answers tally.

So he tries another expected source: the wise man in the woods.

Notice that the king approaches the wise man correctly: on foot, alone, unarmed, unguarded, not dressed like a king.

Notice that, once he has reached the wise man, he acts correctly: doing work what needs doing without being asked to do it, being respectful, acting not like a king, but like someone who wants to learn.  (Notice also that the wise man acts like a wise man – it’s a tiny touch, but a great one: he doesn’t answer the questions; he doesn’t tell the king what to do.  Why do you suppose this is?)

When the assassin shows up (of course, we don’t know he’s an assassin at first) notice again that the king acts right; and it is because of his right action that events develop well. (What would have happened if the king had known this was an assassin?  How would events have changed?  What point is Tolstoy making here?)

Then, at the end, after the very sweet scene between the King and his former enemy (now his servant, and don’t think Tolstoy’s not making a wicked barbed point there), the king still needs to wise man to interpret the moral of the story for him.  Note that it’s a very Buddhist moral!  Be here now! 

But it’s also very Judeo-Christian – see Ecclesiastes 9.10: Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might; for there is no work nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, to which you go.

“How Much Land Does A Man Need?”

Again, we can see the folk tale/fable form here, starting with the opening scene, which parallels a number of folk tales (country mouse/town mouse, for instance) and then the Devil overhearing Pahom’s rash statement (rash statements/rash promises are both common motifs in folk tales).

But soon we are in a fairly realistic sort of story about a man who once was content; however, once he begins to have a bit of property, a bit of wealth, what happens?

It’s Buddha again.  Once desire gets its seeds in you, you’re lost.  

Notice what Pahom gives up in order to attain land – wealth – as we move through the story.  Look at the very first thing, very nearly, which he gives up.  Tolstoy states it so straightforwardly that sometimes it slips past us – but besides selling and some bees, he and his wife “hire out one of their sons for labor and took his wages in advance.”  What this means is that they sell their son into bondage, literally: they make him an indentured servant for some period of time.  (The story doesn’t say how long.)  Pahom gives away a child to get some land.

Notice the next thing he loses: his community.  He turns against his fellow commune members, begins bringing them to court and getting fines levied against them (which he knows they cannot afford) because their cattle stray onto his land.  He does this, the story tells us, even though he knows his fellows can’t help it – they don’t have any way to keep their animals off his land. 

But I have to teach them a lesson, he thinks to himself – well, what lesson?  He’s just admitted to himself that they are not at fault.  What’s he trying to teach them?

What he does teach them is to hate and dislike him, and soon he is so unwelcome in the community that he and his wife sell up and leave (we don’t hear whether the son they’ve sold goes with them).  In this community, too, though Pahom has a lot of land, he is isolated (quarreling with the peasants, going to court) and unhappy – why?  He can’t get enough land. 

And so it goes, until finally he leaves his wife and goes to visit the mystical Others, the Bashkirs, who agree to let him have as much land as he wants, and can walk around in one day.

(Notice the description of the Bashkirs.  Unlike Pahom, they don’t farm.  They don’t work much at all – the women make kumiss and cheese, that’s all, and the men take care of the horses.  Most of the time they spend doing – what?  Especially as opposed to Pahom, who by this point has nothing left in his life except money/land, the Bashkirs have community, leisure, pleasure in life – all they need.  Do they “own” the land their horses run on?  Not in the sense that Pahom recognizes (that’s what that little debate over deeds and papers is about). 

Yet in another sense, they do; in the same sense that when Pahom was part of the commune, he and the commune owned their land in common.  Not because they could buy and sell it – they could not – but because they could, along with everyone else, make use of it.

What the Bashkirs have, which Pahom no longer has, is life.  They don’t own land, or have things; they have a life, and live it.  This is why they find him so funny.  He is looking at the wrong things; his focus is wrong.  He’s like a man collecting pictures of wealth when real wealth rises around him.]

Pahom, even as he paces out the land that he owns, notice, is thinking of what he will get next.

In the end, of course, what does he get?  Well, what we all get.  So he gave up everything for, really, what?  ß This is Tolstoy’s point.  

It’s the same point he makes in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”  Ivan Ilyich is a guy who spends his entire life doing the right thing: goes to the right schools, the right parties, courts the right girl, gets the right job, makes the right compromises with his profession (he’s a lawyer and then a judge) in order to advance financially, has the right number of kids – and then finds himself dying, and is astonished to discover that that was it.  That was his life.  He gave up everything – his entire life – for what?  A nice house in Moscow and a wife and kids he doesn’t actually like?  A job he never really wanted to do?  Now he’s got three days to live and – well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?  Ivan Ilyich screams for the last three days of his life.  It’s a fairly horrific story, as Tolstoy means it to me.

Whatever you find to do, make sure it’s worth doing, and do it with all your might, because this right here, where you are now, who you’re with now, what’s before you now – that’s it.  You don’t get another shot. ß That’s Tolstoy’s message.