If Christ was born in a manger, then one of his most outstanding disciples, the contradictory, inexhaustible ruler Count Tolstoy, chose an equally humble place to lay his life: the little red house of Ozolin, the Astapovo stationmaster, railroad worker. And if at the birth of the Savior three kings from the East came to worship him, carrying many different gifts and appeasing one of the most beautiful pages of the myth, on the death of the literary giant a whole people (its workers and ignorant peasants, that’s right), but also the time different power formations: Church, State, Police) gathered before his bed of pain to pay their respects, plotted around his figure and wrote one of the most famous chapters. folk literature history. This is the essence of Tolstoy is dead, a work by Vladimir Pozner published in French in 1935 and not yet published in our country.
Pozner constructs his account of Tolstoy’s death using two materials. On the one hand, the huge telegraph archive that swept the country until that moment of autumn, since the news that the author, the glory of the Russian homeland, parked his venerable, vast and sickly humanity in Astapovo. 1910 An unnamed railway station in Lipetsk Oblast. On the other hand, fragments from the private diaries and correspondence of both Tolstoy and his wife of forty-eight years, Sofia Behrs, that allow us to take a relentless X-ray, are almost Bergmanian if I allow the anachronism. The story of a marriage in which it is impossible to envision the author’s work without the heights of happiness and the depths of pain, and whose adventures are echoed in some of his most notorious productions, especially the Kreutzer Sonata.
Based on these documents, it is pertinent to note that Pozner’s work is not more of a work of imagination than of montage, that selection rather than transportation underlines the modern character of the work (reliable, real, primary sources make up a fictional structure). , fictional, second-rate text) and seems to be a hybrid between journalism and dramaturgy. It is worth saying that all the information about Count Tolstoy’s escape and his end is there, available, raw, waiting to spill, and Pozner’s job consists in putting it in order using simple and at the same time very effective techniques. perspective from the point of view of the attention they create in the reader. Thus fragmentation, speed and changing perspective serve to establish an altarpiece, a great tragicomic representation that consumes the seven days between Tolstoy’s arrival at the Astapovo station and his death; It is implied that they were the main actors in Russia of the last years of tsarism.
Pozner manages to highlight certain themes in this colorful ensemble. The most important of these is, of course, the family, perhaps the subject of Tolstoyan production. Tolstoy’s complex relationship with Sofía Behrs reveals its paradigmatic elements here. The enmity between the spouse and Tolstoy’s publisher, Chertkov, arises; the biological fertility of the couple and their thirteen children is revealed, which plunges the count into Augustinian anguish and compels the countess to express her disgust at the bondage of the body; A woman’s subordination appears on a man who cancels more than his identity and suffers one more of the patriarch’s many contradictions. In this battlefield called the family, the paradoxical tone of the Count’s experiences is embodied with singular harshness. Its owner’s wealth contradicts Spartan ideals; the search for a personal gospel in dialogue with national literature’s responsibility as primus inter pares; his desire for a chaste and pure life contradicts his angry masculinity; in short, the enduring tension between the certainty of being the living marble of the soul of an empire and the desire to live like a Carthusian, or at least a Stoic.
But with this nourishment that is the family, Pozner opens the palette of his painting from the logic of an approach to the function of literature at least in the nineteenth century to a subject that is at least as fruitful and thought-provoking: the novel. Balzaquiana as a precipitate of the private lives of nations and the achievements and aspirations of the classes that make up the social network. This theme is the role writers play within the economic, civic, and institutional structure that welcomes them, and the role they play as spokespersons for a community’s sensibility, intelligence, and meaning. Reading from that pulpit, Tolstoy is dead, sending the contemporary reader into a world that has recently become extinct, a world where the performance of literature produces more than idea and doxa, and structures itself as one of the staple foods of being historical. Accepting this hypothesis, Tolstoy’s death appears once again as the disappearance of a symbol, a spiritual father, a much larger vessel of human life than usual. The figure of the author rises to almost sublime heights in the case at hand, not only as a seismographer of the events of an era, but also as a medium, a ventriloquist of millions. So, on the way to the train that takes Tolstoy’s body to Yasnaya Polyana, on the shoulders of his children, as the devout inhabitants of Astapovo watch the author of War and Peace pass, their departure is more than the climax of the war. business. It is a photograph of a world that will not return, where writers embody the spirit of their time with the same intensity and legitimacy as princes and statesmen.