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Int. J. Psychoanal.

(2002) 83, 407

THE THREAD OF DEPRESSION THROUGHOUT


THE LIFE AND WORKS OF LEO TOLSTOY
ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER, Paris

Tolstoy, the author of two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, remains a
writer of genius. Yet, after writing War and Peace, his existence had been torn apart by
a serious depression. This depression, which was melancholic in character, almost
destroyed him and, once he had nished Anna Karenina, led him to want to renounce
not only sexuality but also literary creation and material possessions. Through
examining Tolstoys life and work, the author tries to uncover the underground paths of
this depression, which emerged brutally in the middle of his life, and to understand why
his creative genius dried up. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy turned away from his
artistic work, declaring that art is not only useless but even harmful , and thereafter
devoted himself to philosophical, political and religious writings. These new sublimations would help him to recover his health.

A gifted novelist, Tolstoy touched an immense number of readers. Following their triumph in Russia, his two great novels, War
and Peace and Anna Karenina, were translated and read the world over. The lyrical
realism and simplicity of his writings convey,
even today, a timeless emotion.
The prestige and fame of the great novelist
have left the vast majority of his readers with
the unfailing image of an artist of genius.
And yet, an attentive reader of War and Peace
will already detect the presence of issues that
were to take on a much greater importance in
Anna Karenina: world-weariness, depression,
anxiety and an obsession with suicide. The
scale of War and Peaces success was remarkable. Tolstoy was surprised by this success,
but also by the feelings of disillusionment
and abandonment that overcame him at the
time and that left him distraught, weary and
empty. I shall never again write such verbose
drivel as War and Peace! he wrote to a
friend.
It was a turning point in his life and the

start of a depression that was to last for ten


years. During what his commentators considered to be no more than a moral crisis, the
writer was to renounce literary creation in
order to devote himself to philosophical and
religious writings. Overcome by an obsession
with death and the temptation of suicide, he
nevertheless regained suf cient inspiration to
write Anna Karenina. During this period
from 1869 to 1880he experienced anxiety
crises, breakdown and despair, along with
ever more violent moments of depression. All
these signs suggest that this crisis represented
a very signi cant turning point in his psychic
life.
By the end of the crisis, Tolstoy was no
longer the same person. He declared his
conversion complete. It is a transformation
that was always in my soul , he wrote in A
Confession. If one wishes to understand this
transformation, the diary he kept throughout
his life, his ctional works and the many
biographies dedicated to him form an immense and rich source of material.

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ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

A brief biographical sketch will give an


overall insight into his life, permitting a better
appreciation of the links between his life and
his works, and enabling us to pinpoint the
factors that, like an underground current that
suddenly emerges at the surface, heralded the
birth of his depression.
Tolstoy came from a long line of Russian
nobility. Born in 1828, he was the fourth son
of Marie Volkonski and Nicholas Tolstoy.
The couple lived in Yasnaya Polyana, the
house and estate of his mother, which Leo
Tolstoy was later to inherit and where he
would spend his whole life.
His mother died when he was only 18
months old. It was a terrible and violent
death: she had just given birth to a baby
daughter when she fell seriously ill. Sensing
she was nearing the end of her life, she asked
to see her children one last time. Tolstoy was
described as being terri ed, eeing from the
sight of his dazed and dying mother. He had
been a breastfed child: this moment of panic,
intermingled with the distress of weaning and
the arrival of another child, must have formed
the initial trauma in his life. For Tolstoy,
death, an enigmatic event, was always to
remain something dreaded, a subject of anxiety, terror and fascination. Throughout his
work one can nd the traces of his desire to
uncover this mystery.
Thus, in War and Peace, he describes the
moment when Princess Marya enters the
room where her father has just died:

yet eventful time at Yasnaya Polyana, the


hospitable home where swimming, picnics,
walks in the forest and evenings of music
alternated with hours of study spent with his
private tutors.
His father died of pulmonary tuberculosis
when Tolstoy was 9 and two of his brothers
were later to succumb to this illness, leaving
him with a dread of this illness for his whole
life.
The Tolstoy children left for Kazan to live
under the guardianship of one of their aunts.
Thus began a period of indecision and doubt
for Tolstoy. Already, ts of depression would
suddenly extinguish his joie de vivre. At
university, he became bored and failed his
law exams, although it was here that his
passion for literature was born. Suddenly, he
decided to return to Yasnaya Polyana, which
now belonged to him, in order to take charge
of the estate.
Tolstoy kept a diary from the age of 19.
From that time on, it re ected his tormented
mood: feelings of ecstasy, effusion and exaltation alternated with apathy, doubt, questions as to the meaning of life and a
haunting feeling of guilt. In his attempts to
control the contradictory urges that were
tearing him apart, he took merciless moral
resolutions, only to later accuse himself of
having transgressed them:

She approached him, and repressing the terror that


seized her, she pressed her lips to his cheek. But she
stepped back immediately. All the tenderness she had
been feeling for him vanished instantly and was
replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay there
before her. No, he is no more! He is not, but here
where he was is something unfamiliar and hostile,
some dreadful, terrifying and repellent mystery!
(1869, p. 146).

19 June 1850: Did nearly everything yesterday:


dissatis ed with only one thing. I can t overcome my
lust, all the less so because this passion has turned
into a habit (1979 [1850], p. 56).

Of his childhoodfor him a time of


innocencehe had only sunny memories: he
was later to describe in his rst piece of
writing, Childhood, this both untroubled and

17 June 1850: I am not carrying out my plans. Why


not? I don t understand. I ll try harder.

Why was sexuality the object of such


agonising guilt for him? Speaking later of the
time when he returned to St Petersburg to
meet his friends and his passion for gambling,
alcohol and nights spent with the gypsies,
he castigated what he called his vices, his
dishonour and debauchery, which he described as criminal.
And so he decided to follow in the

DEPRESSION AND LEO TOLSTOY


footsteps of his brother Nicolas, an army
of cer serving in the war against the Chechens. The enthusiasm brought about by this
adventurous life was followed by a general
feeling of malaise, and a morose and depressive mood. It was then that he wrote his rst
stories: Childhood, Boyhood and Youth
(1857).
Returning to Yasnaya Polyana, he set up a
school for the village children and settled
down to run the estate. He had, however, long
felt a desire to marry and start a family. He
was very much taken with 18-year-old Sophie
Bers, a young woman he had known for years,
and he married her in 1862. His passionate
and turbulent relationship with her was to
form a constant theme throughout his writings.
These early years were a time of happiness
and stability for him. Five children were born
between 1863 and 1871, and his depressive
mood disappeared. It was then that he began
to write his rst great novel War and Peace.
He was lled by what he called the exhilaration of creation . Sophie worked with him,
writing as he dictated, correcting and copying
out the text.
This colossal work took all his strength.
But he had to nish the book in order to
destroy the fabric linking his life and his
fantastical universe to the characters that had
personi ed them. Bereavement from his work
brought about a libidinal haemorrhage in
Tolstoy that unbalanced him, making him
vulnerable and destroying his stability. He
wrote the following to his friend Strakhov:
I am in a tortured state of mind where excessive
plans, self-doubt and unremitting work intermingle;
perhaps I will never write again! My health is not
good. Never in my life have I felt so sad. I fear what
will happen next . . . (1986 [22 May], 1869).

In fact, something happened suddenly,


marking the start of the crisis that was to last
for ten years. In September 1869, he embarked on a journey that was to take him far
from home. Stopping in the village of Arza-

409

mas for the night, he experienced an anxiety


crisis so violent that he believed he had gone
mad: he felt he had met his own death. He
described this moment in Memoirs of a
Madman:
An explosion inside me caused me unspeakable
terror . . . something inexpressible was shattering my
spirit yet not completely: . . . something tearing me
apart without tearing me apart. It was harrowing,
painfully sharp, and awful (1880, p. 84).

On his return, this terror did not leave him


in peace. Successive bereavements around
him only fed this anxiety: in two years, three
of his children died. Desperate, he lost the
will to live and became haunted by suicide.
And yet his inspiration returned once more
in Anna Karenina. This novel took seven
years to write, from 1872 to 1879. Throughout this time, depression continued to gnaw
away at him. Not only did the phenomenal
success of the novel give him cold comfort,
he also decided to give up literary creation,
which now seemed to him useless, encouraging pride and vanity. This was the moment
of his moral revolution. In 1881, at the age of
53, he declared his conversion complete.
He had nally found a way out of the
crisis but he had also lost his vitality and
joie de vivre. He devoted himself to writing
innumerable and turgid religious and philosophical works, preaching chastity, nonviolence and love of thy neighbour. He
embraced religion with the same passion he
devoted to everything he embarked upon,
rebelling against dogma and castigating
orthodox ritual. The violence he so condemned was revealed in the vindictive and
iconoclastic tone of his writings. In 1901,
Tolstoy was excommunicated.
And yet he was still to write a number of
stories that have the quality of great novels:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Servant,
Father Sergius. In his last work, Resurrection
(1899), his literary talent remained intact but
was mixed with the moral, religious and
philosophical issues that had occupied him
since the crisis . He had decided that the

410

ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

royalties from this book would be used for


humanitarian purposes, and this decision enabled him to gain a pleasure out of creating
this novel that for years he had forbidden
himself. After his conversion, he not only
wished to deprive himself of the pleasure of
literary creation: he also wished to deprive
himself of sexual pleasure.

Misogyny
There is something dreadful and sacrilegious in carnal union , Tolstoy wrote in
1870 (1979 [14 February 1870]). He was 42
years old at the time. The simultaneous
fascination and horror that sexuality inspired
in him fuelled a misogyny that was already
visible in War and Peace. It was to be
violently expressed in Anna Karenina.
During the seven years it took to write
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced very
painful moments of depression. His deepest
con icts were expressed in this novel. Depression made him vulnerable and weakened
his defences. His censorship was less severe
and his unconscious fantasies were revealed,
only thinly veiled by the ction. From the
beginning of the novel, signs and omens
predict the violent death of Anna. The scene
of her rst sexual encounter with Vronski
places death at the heart of love, like a
maggot in fruit:
Pale, his lower jaw quivering, he besought her to be
calm. He felt what a murderer must feel, when he
sees the body he has robbed of life. That body,
robbed by him of life, was their love, the rst stage of
their love. There was something awful and revolting
at the memory of what had been bought at this fearful
price of shame. But in spite of all the murderers
horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it
to pieces, hide the body, must use what he had gained
by his murder. And, as with fury the murderer falls
on the body and drags it and hacks at it, so he covered
her face and shoulders with kisses. All is over ,
she said (1877, p. 187).

In a breathtaking reversal, the love scene


becomes a scene of brutish murder as tritely

bloody as a hunting scene. The murder fantasy, surfacing suddenly in the consciousness,
breaks the charm. Erotic pleasure is followed
by collapse, guilt and despair.
It is thus that the fantasy around which the
heart of the novel revolves links sexual desire
to the desire for murder, culminating in
Annas suicide. Desperate, torn apart by a
haunting jealousy, she ends up throwing
herself under a train, crushed to death.
Sexuality is both omnipresent and doggedly rejected: it was this dilemma that
tortured Tolstoy following his crisis . It
seemed to him that women exercised a demonic attraction over him, depriving him of
the sense of his own integrity and causing a
fear of dispossession and disintegration of the
ego. Prior to the crisis , in spite of the
already apparent divide between the affectionate side and the erotic side of love, an
oedipal construct seems to have been established. The anxieties of the ego remained
focused on the fantasy of castration and guilt.
But this guilt was already extremely pervasive and it was expressed in excessive
self-accusations regarding what he called
criminal debauchery .
Until his marriage, Tolstoy had enjoyed
very free sexual experiences: it seems clear
that he established no true object relation.
However, when he fell madly in love with
Sophie Bers, he felt a state of elation that
moved him deeply: Ive been in love , he
wrote in his diary, but never like this: this is
more than an emotionthis is an inner force
possessing me (1979 [24 March 1863],
p. 549). He had rediscovered the young
plaited girl of his teenage dreams. The best
years of his life followed his marriage to
Sophie. Being in love provided a kind of
narcissistic refuelling that enabled his vocation as a writer to be con rmed and accomplished in an explosion of creativity. He
wrote War and Peace. Sublimation through
writing enabled him to transform and develop
the contradictory urges that had begun to
threaten his stability.
But the main objectthe object nally

DEPRESSION AND LEO TOLSTOY


rediscovered in his love of Sophiewas soon
to be lost. This love simultaneously ful lled
and infuriated him: he could not bear the
otherness of the object. Moreover, the birth of
ve children in the space of seven years took
up virtually all of his wifes time. His neurotic
structure cracked, revealing a narcissistic
weakness that was to be painfully con rmed
on nishing War and Peace. It was in Anna
Karenina, which Tolstoy wrote after a long
period of sorrowful emptiness, that the key to
understanding his misogyny is found: sexual
desire arouses desire for murder. A destructive ood of impulses unacceptable to the ego
caused a fear of loss of the self. He was thus
compelled towards defence mechanisms of a
psychotic naturesplitting and projection
which were not able to protect him from the
fear of death and self-accusations and never
managed to relieve his guilt. He feared that
sexual relations would drain him of his energy, preventing him from working on his
spiritual uplifting. He feared a destructive
decline. This conviction pushed him to
preach chastity to an almost ridiculous point:
What should a man and woman living within
matrimony do? Aspire together to free themselves from their temptations, to purify themselves, to replace carnal pleasure with a pure
brother/sister relationship , wrote Tolstoy in
the postface to The Kreutzer Sonata (1891).
The blazing hatred apparent in this story
astonished even Tolstoy himself. He wrote in
his diary:
What I have written is as new to me as it is to those
reading it. It has aroused such malice in me . . . these
terrible words appal me. I would never have believed
myself capable of uttering such dreadful things, so
crude, I am amazed that they have been created by
me (1979 [1889], p. 1035).

It was as if the cathartic function of writing


had had such a powerful effect that Tolstoy
himself was surprised and felt overcome by
this hateful violence, even though it is well
known that literary creation displaces, distorts and transforms the psychic reality.
Sexual arousal was felt in an almost hal-

411

lucinatory manner, as if it were foreign to


him, in a confusion of the internal psychic
space and the external reality. The drive
produced in him a traumatic effect that
prevented him from thinking and caused him
to project its origin externally. In 1890, he
wrote in his diary: Eruptions of sexual desire
cause confusion or rather an absence of ideas:
the link with the world is lost. Chance, darkness, powerlessness (1979 [1890], p. 216).
This hatred of women surfaced at the time
that his melancholic depression manifested
itself, when Tolstoy had just nished writing
War and Peace. It was a painful bereavement
as if, by nishing the novel, he had to cut off
a part of his body. On 10 May 1869, he wrote
to his friend, the poet Fet, I did not write the
epilogue to War and Peace, it was torn from
within me (1986 [1869]). Indeed, the epilogue is characterised by a depressive feeling of
renunciation and disillusion: there is a perceptible nostalgia for an inspiration that is no
more, a passion exhausted.
This bereavement was echoed by other
painful losses. The Tolstoy family was already a large one: six children had been born
within a space of nine years. But, from 1872
onwards, the deaths began: Petia and Nicolas
died at a young age; Varia, the eighth child,
lived but a few hours. As for the cousin of
Tolstoys father, who had brought up the
children following the death of their mother,
she died two years later, as did their Aunt
Pauline Youchkov who lived with them. His
father and two of his brothers had died of
tuberculosis. The death anxiety that had long
tormented him now became insistent.
For Karl Abraham, the psychic life of the
melancholic always revolves around their
mother (1924/1973, p. 284). It is, in fact, in
his relationship with his maternal imago that
the deepest roots of his hatred of women can
be found.
As described above, the death of his
mother happened suddenly, following the
birth of a little girl when Tolstoy was 18
months old. He was told that he ran away
screaming at the sight of his dying mother. It

412

ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

is possible that this traumatic experience,


taking place at the very moment of weaning,
may have overwhelmed his capacity for
elaboration and shattered his psychic bereavement mechanisms, and that Tolstoy
remained xated by a maternal image linked
to violence and the blood of childbirthand
the pain of abandonment. In childbirth you ll
die, ma am, you ll die! exclaims Anna
Kareninas valet in a nightmare.
Tolstoy may have remained xated at a
primitive oral stage with its succession of
cannibalistic fantasies that were extremely
alarming in terms of their destructive taking
over of the object. The presence in him of the
dead object, faecalised, formed a psychic pole
of attraction and fascination due to the libidinal stimulation linked to the original trauma. Thus the eroticised image of his mother
and the fantasy of murder were linked into a
single obsession. The image of his mother
became confused with that of death, the same
image that, like a ghost, appeared to him
during the night in Arzamas.
In A Confession, an autobiographical narrative published in 1881, Tolstoy described with
clinical precision how he felt progressively
torn apart, then prostrated by an intolerable
psychic pain:
And thus it was that I, a man in good health, began to
feel that I could go on living no longer. An invincible
force was leading me to release myself, one way or
another, from life. The force that was leading me
from life . . . was a force similar to my former desire
for life, but pulling in the opposite direction.
Suddenly, my life stopped. I was breathing, eating,
drinking, sleeping. But this was not living: I had no
more desires. I had reached the end and could clearly
see that before me lay nothing but death (p. 31).

The powerful vitality that had animated


him now deserted him.
Obsessional neurosis follows guilt , wrote
Guy Rosolato. This paranoid xation may
enable the melancholia to be considered as an
internalised paranoia: the introjected object
and the Superego become poles of struggle
between persecutor and persecuted (1975).

And so Tolstoy tortured himself, the superego mercilessly judging the ego identi ed
with the object: his mother. This maternal
imago, a source of arousal and anxiety,
instilled in him a femininity that threatened
his integrity. This feminine pole was linked to
his moral masochism.
In The economic problem of masochism ,
Freud re ects on the origins of moral masochism, which he links to unconscious guilt
feelings. He remarks that, the suffering
accompanying neurosis is precisely the factor
that enables it to become useful to the masochistic tendency: it is a question of being able
to maintain a certain level of suffering
(1924, p. 294). This was undoubtedly the
origin of the drive that pushed Tolstoy to
constantly transgress the boundaries he imposed upon himself and which he wanted to
impose upon others. However, while the
sadism of the superego remained ercely
present in the consciousness, the masochism
remained unconscious.
In Memoirs of a Madman, Tolstoy shares
memories that illuminate the origins of his
masochistic tendencies: here these relate to
erogenous masochism. He describes moments
in his childhood when he was invaded by a
fantasy that caused in him an unspeakable
anxiety and crying t . One such t was
caused by a violent argument between his
nanny and the steward:
Their shouting frightened me, frightened me greatly.
I felt an unspeakable terror invading me. I hid my
head under the covers and at the same time a vision
came to my mind: that of a small boy who could only
just be made out and a man ogging him with a
vengeance. The face of the man seemed monstrous to
me: he hit him crying, You won t do that again! You
won t do that again! it was THAT which hit me: I
began to sob, sob, and it was a long time before
anyone could calm me. Were these inexplicable sobs
of a child not the rst sign of my current madness?
(1880, p. 421).

Here, guilt related to masturbation is


almost consciously linked in the narrative
to the crises of arousal and anxiety that

DEPRESSION AND LEO TOLSTOY


accompanied this childhood memory in
which, thinly veiled, can be found the fantasy
described by Freud in A child is being
beaten (1919). Later, this fantasy was to be
suppressed but the guilt would persist, linked
to the presence of incestuous desire in the
unconscious, relating to his passive attitude
towards the father gure. This desire for
surrender was to change him and nd
its solution sublimated in his religious
conversion.

Recourse to the father


Tolstoy had long been attracted by the
mystical quest of the Strannicks , those
wandering saints who, begging for a living,
went from monastery to monastery in search
of a state in which man, in search of his
spiritual essence, shed all belongings, all
social links and even identity and name. He
wanted to divest himself of the considerable
sums of money that his writing brought in by
making a gift of his work to the Russian
people, and considered leaving his wife,
children and home to devote himself to his
spiritual search. But the bonds linking him
with his family remained so strong that it was
not until he was 83 years of age that he
decided to leave them. That was a separation
he was not to survive.
It was by turning to the father gure that
Tolstoy was to free himself from the in uence
and threat of the struggle with the maternal
imago he carried within him. He managed to
transform and overcome his melancholic
identi cation with his mother by investing in
a new object: his love and his hatred were
from now on to be directed towards a father
from whom he was able to keep some distance. Melancholic depression had led him to
regress to the most archaic anxieties, while
recourse to the father offered him support, a
buttress against this regression, and brought
him back to less destructive con icts, linked
to the issue of castration. This evolution
enabled him to escape from torturing anxi-

413

eties and the temptation to suicide, but the


struggle between the spirit and the esh was
to continue along the same lines as before.
More than ever convinced that all bad came
from bodily desires, he thus felt the need to
continue to punish himself, so feeding his
need for morti cation.
Recourse to the father took two different
forms. On the one hand, he turned fervently
towards religious faith. His dialogue with
God brought him peace and relief. On the
other hand, he formed a very intense emotional tie with one of his followers, Vladimir
Grigorievitch Tchertkov, who became his
spiritual son , and was to have a growing
in uence over him.

The religious search and the mystical


quest
Tolstoy had always felt close to a spiritual
entity whose presence he perceived during
states of ecstatic fusion with nature. But it
was at the time of his depression that faith in
God became his real recourse against the
threat of collapse. In A Confession he wrote,
To know God was the same as living. God
was life: I was saved from suicide (1881,
p. 93).
In his diary, many passages show how the
image of the father is involved in his relationship with Goda relationship of mystical
identi cation:
One needs to be perfect, like the father. One needs to
be like the father: it is clear that I can only consider
myself as one with him. The Father and I, as one; and
when one has learned that: that I am the same thing
as the Father, what spiritual strength that arouses!
(1979 [9 December 1889], p. 1085).

And further on:


Life is found in the aspiration for overcoming separation, for blending in with the Whole. And it is this
approach of fusion that is the joy of our life
(p. 1086).

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ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

Wounded, aching, weakened by depression,


Tolstoy now sought experiences of elation in
which the ego was one with the ideal. It was
sometimes a desperate way of ghting against
a return to anxiety, against the restive urges,
his insistent sexuality, his violence, his cruelty.
These experiences of fusion with the divine
satis ed the grandiose narcissistic aspirations
that coexisted with his need for morti cation
and humility. These reactional tendencies
betrayed the source of their drive in the
violence with which he preached submission
to God, and devotion to the victims of famine
and social injustice. Tolstoy was rebellious, a
rebel who questioned the Tsars authority and
that of the Church Fathers: his dissent from
religious dogma was virtually blasphemous.
He rebelled against exploitation of the moujiks and against laws that, by instituting social
inequality, encouraged scandalous abuses of
power. He also undertook large-scale humanitarian actions in support of the starving
peasants, and wrote subversive pamphlets,
such as The Slavery of our Times, which
contained precise formulae for destroying the
state institutions. Only his immense fame
protected him from the Tsars reprisals.
All these activities indicated that Tolstoy
was turning towards a new sublimation, the
religious and moral nature of which relieved
his guilt feelings. Social and humanitarian
concerns were thus added to his passionate
cathexis in a religious ideal. As for literary
creation, this now seemed to him something
useless, encouraging pride and vanity
(1897, p. 105).
He now had nothing but contempt for his
writings, and this contempt inspired in him a
sarcasm towards a large number of literary
works whose worth is recognised by all. In
What is Art?, published in 1897, he denounces the lie and arti ce of artistic activity . He also declares that, Everything is
exaggerated in Shakespeare, the actions, their
consequences, the characters comments,
which at all times prevent any possibility of
artistic emotion. One thing is doubtless: he

was no artist and his works were no works of


art (1897, p. 348). His rigid moralism
imposed limits upon him and destroyed his
artistic sensibility.
In What is Art? he declares that, The art of
the wealthy classes during the late nineteenth
century has become impoverished and contents itself with expressing feelings of vanity,
boredom with life and, above all, sexual
desire (1897, p. 241).
Before the crisis , Tolstoy, for whom
sexual desire had always been a source of
inner con ict, disturbance and guilt, had
found stability in its diversion through sublimation. By transforming a part of his sexual
libido into narcissistic libido, this formed an
element of internal cohesion and stability for
the ego. His melancholic depression had
disturbed this balance and released the forces
of destruction. It seems that his conversion
may well have protected Tolstoy from a
serious psychotic imbalance, and that this
new psychic organisation would thus have to
involve a reduction in his creative faculties,
like the scar left by a wound.

Vladimir Grigorievitch Tchertkov


His religious conversion led Tolstoy to an
inner dialogue with a paternal image that was
for him a permanent source of nostalgia, but
also a model and a support. But his recourse
to the father was also to take another form: it
was at the moment when, coming out of
depression, he felt the vital need for a new
love object that he met Vladimir Grigorievitch Tchertkov, a former of cer in the Tsars
Cavalry Guards who had abandoned his
career to be closer to the peasants and help
his fellow men. He wanted to put his life and
his fortune at Tolstoys service.
A very intense emotional bond was formed
between the two men. Tchertkov was to devote himself entirely to the publication and
dissemination of Tolstoys works and became
essential to him in the devotion and love he
gave him. In this relationship, Tolstoy found

DEPRESSION AND LEO TOLSTOY


both a beloved son and a father, constantly
demanding superego.
Tchertkov became intrusive and demanding, and his in uence over Tolstoy increased
with time. And so the roles gradually began
to reverse: the disciple began to take the
position of the master he claimed to serve.
Tolstoy, worn out by exhausting illnessesin
1902 he suffered from pneumonia followed
by typhoid feverbegan to submit to Tchertkovs demands in a relationship in which
sado-masochism and unconscious homosexuality played a large part.
For many years, Tchertkov put moral
pressure on him to separate from his wife, in
accordance with his ascetic ideals. He certainly contributed to the virtual breakdown of
the couples relationship.

Leo and Sophie Tolstoy: a love/hate


relationship
Tolstoys relationship with his wife had for
a long time been marked by suffering. He was
torn between an ego ideal whose tyrannical
demands pushed him to chastity and renunciation, and passionate drives he could
neither accept nor include. Although he had
turned his back on literary creation to invest
in other forms of sublimation, and in spite of
the growing importance of his friendship with
Tchertkov, he was still doing battle with a
terrifying maternal image that was both a
death threat and a source of arousal and
sadistic fantasies. And yet, in order to escape
his depression, he felt obliged to free himself
from this feminine identi cation. It was this
con ict, a source of suffering and anxiety,
which continued to feed his misogyny. His
attachment to his wife nonetheless retained
the violence and intensity of the primary
relationship with his mother. The deeper this
attachment became, the more he felt it to be a
trap and the more he yearned to escape from
it.
Tchertkov gradually became a erce adversary of the Countess Tolstoy, with whom he

415

established a relationship of hatred and rivalry. He used his in uence over Tolstoy to
convince him to draw up, unbeknown to his
wife, a will that disinherited her, and he
pushed him to leave her. It was then that
Tolstoy became aware of the harmful pressure
Tchertkov was exerting over him. This man,
in whom he had placed all his trust, now
appeared as a danger and a threat to him: he
felt extremely guilty at having been in uenced by him to disinherit his wife and
family.
The nancial interest that royalties for
the publication and distribution of Tolstoys
colossal work represented fuelled the rivalry
and stirred up hatred between Tchertkov and
the Countess Tolstoy.
Tolstoy had long held the idea of leaving
his wife, children and home. Each time
an overly violent con ict erupted between
Sophie and him, he felt he should leaveto
escape the suffering but also to devote
himself to his spiritual search. He imagined
that he would thus nally concretise his desire
to separate himself from the maternal image
he had not been able to put to rest, in spite of
his efforts and renunciations. Having lost
con dence in Tchertkov and exhausted by the
incessant quarrels, the pressure became intolerable for him. This time, he felt he could no
longer live with his wife. What he did not yet
know was that neither could he live without
her.
Similarly, he would be unable to bear his
exile from Yasnaya Polyana, the maternal
refuge to which he had always returned. In
days gone by, he had written on return from a
trip, How have we, this house and I, managed
to stay apart so long?

Tolstoys death
On 24 September 1910, Tolstoy wrote in
his diary, They are tearing me apart: I want
to escape them all (1979 [1910], p. 936). On
the night of 2728 October, a cold and rainy
night, Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana with his

416

ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

doctor and took shelter with his sister Mary at


the Chamardino convent. There he learned
that, following his departure, his wife had
attempted to commit suicide. Undecided, torn
between his concern for her and the fear that
she would nd him, he boarded a trainin
spite of the lack of comfort and the cold
weatherwithout knowing precisely where
he was going. Suddenly, he was seized by an
illness: his fever rose, pneumonia broke out
and he had to stop at the tiny station of
Astapovo, where he died on 7 November
1910.

Changes in the sublimation


In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his
Childhood, Freud re ects on the relationship
between the pathography of the artist and
his creative genius and he notes that the
particularities of his psychic working in no
way explain his talent. He goes as far as to
say: the nature of the artistic function is also
inaccessible to us along psycho-analytic lines
. . . Even if psycho-analysis does not throw
light on the fact of Leonardos artistic powers,
it at least renders its manifestations and its
limitations intelligible to us (1910, p. 136).
In fact, psychoanalysis does not claim to
explain genius: there is no difference between
Tolstoys and any other human destiny.
The interest in following the thread of
depression throughout the course of his life
and works is that of glimpsing the particular
path that led Tolstoy to use this banal destiny
to create his unique work. But artistic sublimation and its metamorphosis into a religious and mystical quest, following the
writing of two great novels, arouses a certain
number of questions and comments, whilst
leaving the enigma of literary creation itself
intact.
To Tolstoy, the maternal image presents
two contradictory sides. Its bene cial aspect
inspires his creation and offers him an exceptional ability to identify with the turmoil of
adolescent femininity: this is the ineffable

charm that emanates from Natasha Rostov in


War and Peace. But its dark, evil side, at the
time of the crisis , becomes maddeningly
persecutory and invasive: the result would be
his recourse to the father.
With Tolstoy, questions arise regarding the
methods of sublimation rst a terri c success, then downfall. He seemed endowed with
a particularly powerful drive constitution: the
intensity and violence of psychic con icts
that erupted in him put him in an unstable
economic situation, threatening his stability.
It is here that the common source to both
pathology and sublimation can be found. For
a time, sublimation through writing acted on
the partial drives, inhibited their aim, displaced and desexualised, relieving the feeling
of a haunting and dreadful guilt.
Tolstoy himself described what was taking
place within him when he wrote Anna
Karenina:
In virtually everything I wrote, I was driven by the
need to gather ideas linked to each other; . . . each
one of them, expressed separately by means of words,
loses its meaning, is terribly impoverished, if it is
removed from the sequence in which it is found; as
for this sequence, it is formed, I think by something
other than an idea and it is impossible to express the
content directly. One needs to guide the reader
through this in nite labyrinth of sequenceswhich
is precisely the essence of arttowards the laws that
are their guiding principles (Letter to Strakhov [25
May 1876], 1986, pp. 31415).

This in nite labyrinth of sequences is


reminiscent of that mysterious path that leads
the writer from unconscious representations
to text. The fantasies that inspired him retain
the marks of primary processes that will be
perceived by the reader, contributing to the
emotion aroused through reading.
But Tolstoy had not yet managed to establish a suf ciently protective distance through
his writing. He sometimes felt threatened
within by what emerged from him in certain
moments of inspiration.
It is possible that the prospect of this
unconscious fantasy breaking into the ego,

DEPRESSION AND LEO TOLSTOY


brought about by writing, added to the
unspeakable anxieties that appeared after
writing War and Peace and contributed to
drying up Tolstoys creativity, which was
perceived as a vital danger, a threat to the
ego. Numerous passages in Tolstoys two
major novels reveal in him a disposition
towards a state of depersonalisation that
encouraged the emergence of images and
thoughts from the preconscious, the thinly
veiled expression of forbidden desires. At the
time when the depression manifested itself,
he had to block the path of these forbidden
desires at all costs. And in order to do this he
had to give up writing.

417

Tolstoi, der Autor von zwei Meisterwerken Krieg


und Frieden und Anna Karenina bleibt ein genialer
Schriftsteller. Jedoch, nachdem er Krieg und Frieden
geschrieben hatte, wurde seine Existenz von einer
tiefen Depression zerrissen. Diese melancholische
Depression zerbrach ihn fast und fuhrte ihn dazu,
nachdem er Anna Karenina beendet hatte, nicht nur
der Sexualitat, sondern auch literarischem Schaffen
und seinen materiellen Besitzen zu entsagen. Indem
der Autor Tolstois Leben und Werk erortert, versucht
er den Untergrundweg seiner Depression aufzudecken, die massiv in der Mitte seines Lebens auftrat,
und er versucht zu verstehen, warum sein kreativer
Genius austrocknete. Wie Leonardo da Vinci, wandte
sich Tolstoi von seiner kunstlerischen Arbeit ab,
erklarte, dass Kunst nicht nur nutzlos, sondern auch
schadlich sei , und danach widmete er sich philosophischen, politischen und religiosen Schriften. Diese
neuen Sublimierungen wurden ihm dazu verhelfen,
seine Gesundheit wiederzuerlangen.

Translations of summary
Tolsto reste ecrivain de ge nie, l auteur de deux
chefs-d oeuvre: Guerre et Paix et Anna Karenine.
Pourtant, apre`s la n de l ecriture de Guerre et Paix,
une depression grave a dechire son existence. Cette
de pression a` caracte`re melancolique a failli le briser
et l a amene, apre`s avoir acheve Anna Karenine, a`
vouloir renoncer non seulement a` la sexualite, mais
aussi a` la creation litteraire et a` la possession de ses
biens. Interrogeant la vie et l oeuvre de Tolsto,
l auteur tente de de couvrir le cheminement souterrain de cette depression qui va emerger brutalement
au milieu de sa vie, et de comprendre le tarissement
de son ge nie createur. Comme Leonard de Vinci,
Tolsto se detourne de son oeuvre artistique: il
declare que l art est une chose non sculement
inutile, mais meme nuisible , et va se consacrer a` des
ecrits philosophiques, politiques et religieux: sa
guerison passe par ces nouvelles sublimations.

Esencialmente, Tolstoi sigue siendo para todos un


escritor genial, el autor de dos obras maestras:
Guerra y Paz y Ana Karenina. Sin embargo, cuando
este autor acabo de escribir Guerra y Paz, una
depresion grave desgarro su existencia. La depresion,
de tipo melancolico, lo dejo derrumbado y lo llevo
una vez acabada Ana Kareninaa querer renunciar
no solo a la sexualidad, sino tambien a la creacion
literaria y la posesion de sus bienes. Si nos interrogamos sobre la vida y la obra de Tolstoi, vemos que
el autor intenta descubrir que camino subterraneo ha
seguido esta depresion que emergio, brutalmente, en
la mitad de su vida; y tambien comprender el declive
de su genio creador. Como Leonardo da Vinci,
Tolstoi se aparto de su obra artstica. Declaro que el
arte no solo es algo inutil, sino incluso perjudicial y
se consagro a escritos loso cos, polticos y religiosos. Estas nuevas sublimaciones le ayudaran a
recobrar su salud.

R efer ences
Abraham, K. (1924). Les Etats maniacode pressifs et les etapes pregenitales de la
libido. In Oeuvres comple`tes. Paris: Payot,
1973, vol. II, p. 284.
Anargyros, A. (1999). Tolsto: la de chirure.
Lausanne: Delechaux and Niestle.
Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of his Childhood. S.E. 11.
(1918). The taboo of virginity. S.E. 11.
(1919). A child is being beaten. S.E. 17.
(1924). The economic problem of maso-

chism. S.E. 19.


Rosolato, G. (1975). L axe narcissique des
de pressions. Nouv. Rev. Psychanal, 11:
534.
Tolstoy, N. (1857). Enfance, adolescence,
jeunesse [Childhood, Boyhood, Youth].
Trans. Sylvie Luneau. Paris: Gallimard,
1990.
(1869). Guerre et Paix [War and Peace].
Trans. Sylvie Luneau. La Pleiade. Paris:
Gallimard, 1990.

418

ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER

(1877). Anna Karenine [Anna Karenina]. Trans. Henri Mongault. Folio.


Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
(1880). Memoires d un fou [Memoirs of
a Madman]. Trans. J. Bienstock. Paris:
Stock, 1908.
(1881). A Confession. Trans. Luba Jurgendson. Paris: Pygmalion, 1998.
(1891). The Kreutzer Sonata (La Sonate
a Kreutzer) Trans. Sylvie Luneau, La

ANNIE ANARGYROS-KLINGER
2002
56 Boulevard Arago
75013 Paris
France
(Initial version received 18/7/00)
(Final version received 15/2/01)
Translated by Elaine Bolton

Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.


(1897). What is Art? [Qu est-ce que
l art?]. Trans. Maya Minoustchine. Paris:
Gallimard, 1971.
(1979). Journaux et carnets T. III
III [Diary 1847 1910]. Trans. Gustave
Aucouturier. La Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard.
(1986). Leon TolstoyLetters [Leon
TolstoiLettres]. Paris: Gallimard.

Copyright # Institute of Psychoanalysis, London,

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