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p That Tolstoy loves nature and portrays it with a mastery which, it would seem, no one else has as yet attained, is known by all who read his works. Nature is not described, but lives in our great writer. Sometimes it is even one of the characters in the narrative, as it were: remember the incomparable scene of the Rostovs’ Christmas ride in War and Peace.

p The beauty of nature finds a most profound connoisseur in Tolstoy. His notes on a journey around Switzerland, cited by Mr. P. Biryukov,  [559•*  contain the following expressive lines:

_p “It is a remarkable thing that I lived in Clarens for two months, but each time in the morning, or especially just before evening after dinner, when I opened the shutters of the window on which the shade had already fallen and looked out at the lake and beyond to the blue mountains reflected in it, the beauty blinded me and

p acted upon me instantly with an unexpected force__ Sometimes,

p sitting alone in the shady little garden and gazing endlessly at these shores and this lake, I even felt a kind of physical sensation, as the beauty poured through my eyes into my soul."

p But this extremely sensitive man, who feels nature’s beauty pouring "through his eyes" into his soul, is by no means delighted by every beautiful landscape. Thus, after climbing to the top of one of the mountains near Montreux (the Rocher de Naye, if I am not mistaken), he writes: "I do not like these so-called majestic and famous views: they are somehow cold.” Tolstoy likes only those views of nature that arouse in him the awareness of his oneness with it. He says so himself in the same travel notes:

p “I love nature when it surrounds me on all sides and then stretches out endlessly into the distance, but when I am in it. I like it when I am surrounded on all sides by hot air, and this hot air swirls off into the endless distance, when the very lush blades of grass which 1 have crushed by sitting on them make the verdure of endless meadows, when the very leaves which, stirred by the wind, pass shadows over my face, form the blue haze of a distant 560 forest, when the very air which you breathe makes the deep blue of the endless sky, when you are not alone in exulting and rejoicing in nature, when around you myriads of insects hum and hover, lady-birds cling and crawl, and ’birds are carolling all about."

_p Anyone who has been to Clarens will recall that for all its rare beauty the view of the lake and hills there has nothing coldly majestic about it, but is, on the contrary, remarkable for its extremely attractive gentleness. This is why our Tolstoy liked the Clarens scenery; this is why it filled his soul with an acute joy of living. "I immediately wanted to love,” he says. "I even felt within me love of myself, I regretted the past and put my hopes on the future, and living became a joy for me, I wanted to live for a long, long time, and the thought of death acquired a childish, poetic horror."

p This horror at the thought of death is highly characteristic of Tolstoy.

p We know that this feeling played a very large part in developing those views which together constitute what is popularly termed Tolstoyism. But I do not intend to touch upon this part here. Here I am concerned only with the interesting fact that, at least at a certain period of his life, Tolstoy experienced a horror of death most strongly when he was most enjoying the awareness of his oneness with nature.

p This is by no means the case with everyone. There are people who see nothing particularly terrible in the fact that with time they will have to merge completely with nature, dissolve in it once and for all. And the more clearly they are aware under this or that impression of their oneness with nature, the less frightening the thought of death becomes. Shelley, to whom belong the profoundly poetic words uttered by him on the death of Keats: "He is made one with Nature”, was probably such a person. So was Ludwig Feuerbach, who said in one of his couplets:

p Fiircht’ dich nicht vor dem Tod. Du verbleibst ja stets in der
Heimat Auf dem vertrauten Grund, welcher dich liebend umfangt.  [560•* 

p I am sure that natural scenery like that in Clarens would have strengthened greatly in Feuerbach’s soul the feeling that dictated this couplet to him. This was not so with Tolstoy, as we know. The Clarens views intensified his fear of death. Enjoying the awareness of his oneness with nature, he shudders with horror at the idea that the time will come when the difference between his “self” and the beautiful “non-self” which is the nature around him will disappear. In his Todesgcdanken Feuerbach proves 561 with true German thoroughness from four different points of view the invalidity of the idea of personal immortality. For a long time, if not always, Tolstoy believed (see his Confession) that if there was no immortality, it was not worth living.

p Tolstoy felt quite differently from Feuerbach and Shelley. This is a matter of “character”, of course. But it is interesting that at different historical periods people have had different attitudes towards the idea of death. Saint Augustine said that for the Romans the glory of Rome took the place of immortality. And this aspect of the matter was also pointed out to his readers by the selfsame Feuerbach who said that the desire for personal immortality became established in the souls of Europeans only from the time of the Reformation, which was a religious expression of the individualism characteristic of the new age. Finally, the truth of the same idea is proved by Tolstoy himself in his own way—i.e., with the help of vivid artistic images—in his famous story Three Deaths. There the dying gentlewoman shows great fear of death, whereas the incurably ill coachman Fyodor seems to be totally alien to this feeling. This is the result of a difference—not in the historical, but in the social position. In modern Europe the upper classes have always been far more individualistic than the lower classes. And the more deeply individualism penetrates the human soul, the more firmly the fear of death becomes entrenched in it.

Tolstoy is one of the most brilliant and most extreme representatives of individualism of modern times. Individualism has left a most profound imprint both on all his literary works and, in particular, on his publicistic views. It is not surprising that it has also affected his attitude to nature. No matter how much Tolstoy loved nature, he could not have found Feuerbach’s arguments against the idea of personal immortality in the least con vincing. This idea was for him a psychological necessity. And if together with the desire for immortality there was in his soul, one might say, a pagan awareness of his oneness with nature, this awareness resulted only in the fact that he could not console himself with the idea of immortality in the next world as the early Christians did. No, this kind of immortality held little attraction for him. What he wanted was immortality in which the difference between his own “self” and the beautiful “non-self” of nature would continue to exist forever. What he wanted was immortality in which he would not cease to feel around him the hot air that "swirls off into the endless distance" and "makes the deep blue of the endless sky”. What he wanted was immortality in which "myriads of insects hum and hover, lady-birds cling and crawl, and birds are carolling all about" on and on. In short, he could find nothing comforting in the Christian idea of immortality

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562 of the soul: what he wanted was immortality oj the body. And perhaps the greatest tragedy of his life was the obvious truth that such immortality was impossible.

This is not praise, of course. And, naturally, it is not blame. It is simply a reference to a fact that all who wish to understand the psychology of the great Russian writer should take into account.