This new aesthetic was to be based on simplicity, clarity and moral ‘infectiousness’ – that is, effectiveness in influencing the reader’s outlook for good. From the point of view of the later Tolstoy, a simple moral fable which could be readily understood by a newly literate peasant was of far greater value than Anna Karenina, whose moral confusion and structural sophistication now seemed reprehensible. Not many later critics have agreed with the later Tolstoy, but estimates of how much of his post-1880 writing is valuable have varied widely, from the view that none of it beyond Resurrection and a very few stories is worth reading, to the view that anything Tolstoy wrote, even a child’s reading book, must be of some value because it is by Tolstoy. The Centenary Edition (1928–37) of translations by Aylmer Maude (1858–1938) and his wife Louise included a selection of short tales in the folk idiom and a number of simple moral fables but did not attempt to be exhaustive. It excluded, along with most of the ‘reading book material’, a good many more substantial stories published posthumously, and the opportunity has now been taken to include a selection of these in the present edition.
In his essay on Hadji Murad A. D. P. Briggs, referring to the brutal raid on the Chechen village carried out on the orders of Nicholas I, writes: ‘This is not only good storytelling, it is as effective a condemnation of cruel government and militarism as a trunkful of anarchist and pacifist pamphlets.’ The same could be said of at least three of the stories printed below, and it neatly encapsulates the impossibility of separating the ‘literature’ from the ‘pamphlet’ in Tolstoy’s late stories, which are consciously propaganda (literally: ‘things to be propagated’) as well as pieces of literary art.
After the Ball (1903) is a prime example: its raison d’étre is the harrowing description of an army deserter being made to run the gauntlet, a punishment which was effectively a death sentence (although officially capital punishment did not exist in Russia at the time of Nicholas I). This description, and the effect the sight has on the man who witnessed it, provides the moral explosive charge of the story, but it is enclosed within an apparently anodyne tale of rapturous young love. The narrator recalls his youthful passion for Varenka, the daughter of a distinguished army colonel (‘with white, curled moustaches à la Nicholas I’) who is almost as captivating on the dance floor as his lovely daughter, and the account of the ball at which father and daughter dance together is intoxicating in its exuberance – calculatedly so, of course, for early the next morning it is Varenka’s father whom the narrator sees as the officer in charge of the punishment battalion, urging on the soldiers to strike harder and ordering fresh sticks. The story is an elegant theorem: its QED, the brutality of the militaristic state and the disgust it should provoke in all humane people.
What For? (1906), though longer and more complex, is connected to After the Ball by a similar scene of brutal punishment, and to Hadji Murad by the scene in Chapter XV of that story where Tolstoy depicts the Tsar’s loathing for the Poles and shows him sentencing a Polish exile to death by running the gauntlet. What For? is, like Hadji Murad, a miniature historical novel, if on a more modest scale. It ends with another bitter attack on Nicholas I, whose reign was the high-water mark of Russian militarism and chauvinism, but even in the days of Nicholas II this story would not have been considered publishable: it undermines the whole edifice of Great Russian patriotism and raises uncomfortable thoughts about political freedom by telling the story of the Polish insurrection of 1830 from an exclusively Polish point of view – a deeply shocking act in Russian eyes. If the result is somewhat simplistic, reading in places like an adventure story for school children, with a relatively happy ending, this is very likely in keeping with Tolstoy’s design for a story which would entertain but also educate, to be read by young people – or by adults for whom literacy was only a recently won achievement.
The most ambitious by far of these four stories is The Forged Coupon. The idea of the story seems to have been in Tolstoy’s mind for quite a long time: it is mentioned in a list of titles in 1895, and was ‘half finished in rough’ early in 1904. These dates place it in the same creative era as Hadji Murad. While this story is more clearly didactic than Hadji Murad, and less elegantly shaped, it shares with its more famous brother the honour of being Tolstoy’s last exercise in the epic genre – if ‘epic’ can look forward to the linear, moralistic story-telling of Brecht, as well as back to War and Peace, The Cossacks and Homer.
