During his exile in Spain Di Benedetto published two collections of short fiction, Absurdos (1978) and Cuentos de exilio (1983). Some of the pieces in Absurdos had been written in prison and smuggled out. The recurring theme of these late stories is guilt and punishment, usually self-punishment, often for a transgression one cannot remember. The best known, a masterpiece in its own right, is ‘Aballay’, made into a film in 2011, about a gaucho who decides to pay for his sins in the manner of the Christian saint Simeon Stylites. Since the pampas has no marble columns, Aballay is reduced to doing penitence on horseback, never dismounting.
These sad, often heartbreaking late stories, some no more than a page in length – images, broken memories – make it clear that Di Benedetto experienced exile not just as an enforced absence from his homeland but as a profoundly internalized sentence that had somehow been pronounced upon him, an expulsion from the real world into a shadowy afterlife.
Sombras, nada mas … (1985), his last work, can most charitably be looked on as the trace of an experiment not carried all the way through. Finding one’s way through Sombras is no easy task. Narrators and characters merge one into another, as do dream and represented reality; the work as a whole tries doggedly but fails to locate its own raison d’être. A mark of its failure is that Di Benedetto felt compelled to provide a key explaining how the book was put together and offering guidance on how to read it.
Zama ends with its hero mutilated, unable to write, waiting in effect for the coming of the man who a century and a half later will tell his story. Like Manuel Fernández burying his manuscript, Di Benedetto – in a brief testament penned shortly before his death – affirmed that his books were written for future generations. How prophetic this modest boast will be, only time will tell.
13. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
In 1884, at the height of his fame as a novelist, Leo Tolstoy produced a strange autobiographical document which, because of its controversial comments on religion, had to be published abroad. Entitled Confession, it told of a spiritual crisis that he had undergone in 1877 during which his life had ceased to have any meaning and he had come within a hair’s breadth of committing suicide.
Even before 1877, he further confessed, he had begun to lose faith in the value of artistic endeavour and the importance of his own writing. This set him apart from his contemporaries, who seemed to believe that, religion having lost its relevance to the modern world, the artist should take over from the priest as moral and spiritual guide. Art should be the new religion, they said, great works of art the new scriptures. He could not agree. How could artists, who in his experience were usually bad and immoral people, act as moral guides to humankind?
Nevertheless, despite his doubts about his vocation, he had gone on writing and publishing, receiving acclamation and monetary reward for work that he privately considered to be worthless.
We should think twice before conceding to Tolstoy the right he claims in Confession to dismiss his earlier literary works. 1877, the year of his spiritual crisis, was also the year in which Anna Karenina was completed. It is inconceivable that the man who wrote that novel was not committed, heart and soul, to its writing, that on the contrary he secretly believed the pages issuing from his hand were worthless. Confession is a powerful piece of writing with an air of urgent sincerity that sweeps the reader along. No less than in the case of Anna Karenina, one must believe that the man who wrote Confession was committed, heart and soul, to its writing. But the fact that in Confession Tolstoy in effect calls the author of Anna Karenina an impostor, writing in bad faith, does not mean that the author of Anna Karenina was truly an impostor. Confession has no right to claim that, by its nature as autobiography, it speaks a more authoritative truth than a mere novel can speak. Indeed, for anyone who takes seriously the religious pretensions of art, which would include the belief that beauty and truth are one and the same thing, Anna Karenina must speak a higher truth than Confession, since it is by far the more ambitious of the two works, by far the more beautiful aesthetic construct. But one does not have to elevate art to the status of a religion to know that Anna Karenina is not false at its core. Anna Karenina is true through and through. The only point of contention is what kind of truth it tells.
What does Anna Karenina say to its readers? What, crudely speaking, is the message of the novel? Ever since Tolstoy’s day this has been a live issue. To the vast majority of readers today, Anna Karenina is the story of a beautiful woman who abandons a joyless marriage for the sake of love, but then has to suffer the punishment of being driven out of society, and in despair commits suicide. In other words, the novel speaks uncritically on Anna’s side. An extreme variant of this uncritical reading sees Anna (like her spiritual sister Emma Bovary) as a rebel against an oppressive patriarchal order who is ultimately punished by her male author by being killed off. In the reading of the story that Tolstoy himself handed down, however, Anna forsakes her husband and child to follow the selfish path of personal fulfilment and ends her life, predictably, in a moral wilderness. Readers should take Anna as an example not of how to live but of how not to live.
The crisis of 1877, insofar as it concerned Tolstoy the writer as distinct from Tolstoy the man, resolved itself into a single ethical question: How shall I use my gifts to do good to my fellow man? For two decades Tolstoy wrestled with this question, testing a range of answers of which the clearest and simplest (though not necessarily the truest) was that it was his duty to bring to the modern world the essential teachings of Jesus, in a language that the simplest peasant could understand. Accordingly, almost all of Tolstoy’s post-1877 writing is Christian in inspiration and suspicious of aesthetic artifice.
The first work embodying this newly formulated attitude toward art and the artistic vocation was the story ‘Master and Man’ (1881), which tells of a prosperous merchant named Brekhunov who undertakes a risky cross-country journey by horse-sled in the dead of winter in order to settle a deal that will bring in big profits. Despite many warnings Brekhunov persists in his foolish enterprise, and ends up freezing to death.
The ‘man’ (rabotnik, worker) whom Brekhunov takes along on his journey, a peasant named Nikita, sees the calamity into which his master’s greed – as well as his incompetence as a navigator – is leading them, yet follows him and obeys his commands. The fact that Nikita alone survives the night in the open is not the consequence of any action on his part. In a deep sense, Nikita does not care what happens to him, but puts himself in the hands of God. ‘Besides masters like Vassily Andreich [Brekhunov] whom he had served here, he always felt himself dependent in this life on the chief master … and … that master would not mistreat him’.1
Brekhunov is a bad person, self-centred, dishonest, avaricious, reckless, and domineering. He treats Nikita as a member of a lower species, on a par with the horse that draws their sled, a creature to whom life is not as important as it is to him, Brekhunov, who is involved in so many important business deals. At the height of the snowstorm, in an effort to save himself, he rides off on the horse, leaving Nikita behind, though he knows that Nikita, who is wearing only a threadbare caftan and boots with holes, will probably freeze to death. Justifying himself, he reflects: ‘As for him [Nikita] … it’s all the same if he dies. What kind of life has he got! He won’t feel sorry for his life, but for me, thank God, there’s something to live for’. (p. 243)
The horse, the third actor in the drama, conveys Brekhunov not to safety and warmth but in a circle back to the freezing peasant. Then there occurs something totally unpredictable. Brekhunov opens his double fur coat and lies down on top of Nikita, warming him with his own body. He lies there until morning comes, the storm abates, and rescuers arrive. By that time the master who had everything to live for is dead, while the man of no importance survives.
The Christian message of the story is crystal clear: he who loses himself shall save himself; the workings of divine mercy are inscrutable. What makes ‘Master and Man’ a tri
umph of art is less obvious because it is so paradoxical. Tolstoy is usually thought of as a realist; War and Peace and Anna Karenina are admired as masterpieces of realism. One of the tenets of realism is that acts have causes, from which it follows that the novelist has a duty to supply plausible psychological motives for the actions of his characters. But Brekhunov sacrifices his life for no reason at all. His sacrifice is, in the words of the English idiom, ‘out of character’, implausible, even unbelievable. Yet it is implausible or unbelievable only to the secular mind. The believer understands that Brekhunov acts out of character because God has spoken to him, because the divine has intervened in his life. In bringing God as an actor into his story, Tolstoy has issued a challenge to the rational, secular basis of fictional realism.
The novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is the best known and most admired of Tolstoy’s late works. When he read it for the first time, the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was overwhelmed. In his diary he wrote: ‘More than ever I am convinced that the greatest author-painter who has ever lived is Leo Tolstoy … Patriotism has no part in my belief in Tolstoy’s immense, almost divine importance.’2
Ivan Ilyich evokes this kind of reaction because of the impression it gives, via the remorseless pace of its narrative and the stripped-down texture of its prose, that its author is impatient with the fictions with which we customarily clothe life in order to make it bearable – the fiction, for example, that as we near death we can count on the loving care of our family, or the fiction that either medical science or divine mercy or both will ensure that our last days do not become an unrelieved storm of agony and terror.
Ivan Ilyich Golovin is an unremarkable man, a legal bureaucrat who makes up for an unhappy marriage by burying himself in his work. Fortunately his career flourishes; at home he is able to achieve some sort of truce with his sour wife. Then suddenly, for no good reason and far too early in life, he is struck down by a seemingly undiagnosable illness. His doctors cannot help him – in his eyes, they do not even try. Abandoned by his family, who disapprove of his unseemly suffering as a breach of social decorum, he is left to face his death supported only by the young manservant Gerasim, who cleans up his excrement and takes the edge off the pain by sitting for hours on end with Ivan Ilyich’s legs hoisted on his shoulders. When Ivan Ilyich tries to thank him, Gerasim brushes the thanks aside. What he is doing for Ivan Ilyich someone will do for him, he says, when his time comes.
At last Ivan’s sufferings come to an end. As his wife reports after his death, with characteristic selfishness: ‘For three whole days he screamed incessantly. It was unbearable. I can’t understand how I endured it … Ah, what I’ve endured!’3
‘The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life was most simple and ordinary and most terrible,’ we read at the beginning of the story. (p. 47) The words ‘most simple and ordinary’ belong to Ivan Ilyich. The words ‘most terrible’ come from Tolstoy himself, and constitute an indictment of an unenlightened life, a life wasted in futile, meaningless pursuits.
Yet, when it comes, Ivan’s death, which has threatened to be as meaningless as his life, turns out to be not entirely unenlightened. On the third day of his screaming he is ‘suddenly’ struck as if by a physical force, and realizes that the end is near. His son, a timorous boy who spends his days locked up in his room masturbating, approaches the deathbed, presses his lips to Ivan’s hand, and weeps. At that instant a revelation comes to Ivan: that he has not lived a good life, but also that there is still time to put it right. He opens his eyes, sees his son as if for the first time, and feels sorry for him. He looks at his wife and feels sorry for her too. He tries to say the word ‘Forgive’, but cannot pronounce it. Nonetheless, all is ‘suddenly’ resolved. The pain is gone. The terror of death is gone. The physical death-agony, the contortions of the expiring body, will continue for hours; but release from the world has already come. (p. 90)
The key word, here as in ‘Master and Man’, is ‘suddenly’. Whatever it is that ‘suddenly’ happens to Brekhunov or to Ivan Ilyich is unforeseeable and at the same time inescapable. The grace of God manifests itself, and suddenly, all at once, the world is new. In both of these stories Tolstoy pits his powerful rhetoric of salvation against the commonsense scepticism of the consumer of fiction, who like Ivan Ilyich in his heyday looks to works of literature for civilized entertainment and no more.
14. On Zbigniew Herbert
Zbigniew Herbert lived most of his life (1924–98) under regimes that were inimical to what we can loosely call freedom of expression. His writing bears evidence of his historical situation as a man trying to live out a poetic and intellectual vocation in a hostile environment. The traces can sometimes be overt – for example, in his satiric counter-attacks on the regime – but are more usually concealed by ironic masks or Aesopian language.
Herbert was not a poet-martyr as, say, Osip Mandelstam was. Nevertheless, the record shows a lifetime of principled opposition first to the Nazis, then to the Communists. Until well into his thirties he led a fringe existence, with none of the rewards that someone of his education and talents might have expected. After the 1956 thaw, his growing reputation opened up opportunities for travel outside Poland and eventually led to residencies, fellowships and visiting professorships in the West. But unlike his contemporary Czeslaw Milosz he chose against exile.
The unspectacular, unheroic species of integrity and stubbornness that characterizes Herbert’s life weaves its thread through his poetry too. For the sake of brevity (a Herbertian virtue) I will call this theme the faithful life, picking up the word faithful from the last line of ‘The Envoy of Mr Cogito’, a poem to which I will return (the line reads simply ‘Be faithful Go’).1 The faithful life is not the same as the life of faith: the difference between the two (namely that you do not need to have faith to be faithful) might be called central to Herbert’s ethic, were it not for the fact that privileging the faithful life over the life of faith and erecting it into a credo, an article of faith, would at once qualify it for sceptical interrogation of the Herbertian variety.
In Herbert’s oeuvre there is a steady stream of poems that turn on an opposition between purity (purity of theory, purity of doctrine), which he aligns with the divine or angelic, and the impure, the messy, the human. The best known of these is ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ (1961). Apollo, who is a god and therefore inhuman and therefore without human feelings, flays alive the satyr Marsyas, reacting to Marsyas’ prolonged howl of agony with nothing but a fastidious shudder. Apollo has won the musical contest (Marsyas is undergoing the fate of the loser), but Marsyas’ howl, rudimentary though it may be as music, expresses every atom of his exposed (skinned) human (ungodlike) being with a petrifying intensity that the god cannot equal.
This is only one of a number of poems that put the case for the human in its unequal contest with the divine. The world that God has created, and that carries the imprint of divine reason, may be perfect in theory but is hard to bear in reality (‘In the Studio’). Even the next world turns out to be pretty unendurable by human standards. As new arrivals discover at the heavenly gates, not the tiniest memento of their old life will be allowed to accompany them; even babes are to be removed from their mothers’ arms ‘since as it turns out / we shall be saved each one alone’. God’s Heaven turns out to have an uncanny resemblance to Auschwitz (‘At the Gate of the Valley’).
What is wrong with systems, to Herbert, is that they are systems. What is wrong with laws is that they are laws. Beware of angels and other executives of perfection. The only angel even tentatively to be counted on the side of humanity is the seventh one, Shemkel, who is kept in the squad only out of respect for the sacred number seven. ‘Black nervous / in his old threadbare nimbus’, Shemkel has been fined many times for illegal importation of sinners (‘The Seventh Angel’).
Marxism, one need barely point out, is deeply coloured by Christian eschatology. The world of achieved communism in which each will receive according to his need and
the state (earthly power) will have withered away, is, literally, heaven on earth. Herbert’s satirical reports on heaven are inevitably also reports on life in the workers’ state. In heaven, because the materials to hand are human and therefore imperfect, certain compromises have to be made. Forgone are the luminous circles, the choirs of angels, etc.; what we end up with is an afterlife not too different from life in People’s Poland (‘Report from Paradise’).
The most interesting of Herbert’s afterlife poems comes from the 1983 collection Report from a Besieged City, arguably the strongest of the nine collections he published. In a poem called ‘Mr Cogito’s Eschatological Premonitions’, his persona Mr Cogito reflects on life after death and on what kind of resistance he will be capable of mounting when he has at last to confront the heartless, bloodless angels and their demand that he give up his humanity. Smell, taste, even hearing – these he will be prepared to relinquish. But to hold on to the senses of sight and touch he will be prepared to suffer torture:
to the end he will defend
the splendid sensation of pain
and a couple of faded images
in the pit of a burned-out eye.
Who knows, thinks Mr Cogito to himself, maybe the angelic interrogators will at last give up, declare him ‘unfit / for heavenly / service’, and let him return
along an overgrown path
on the shore of a white sea
to the cave of the beginning.