Remembering George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"

In recently turning my attention to Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare I found my thoughts returning to Orwell's counterblast at Tolstoy, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," which ran in Polemic back in 1947.

I remember regarding the piece with distaste because of its biographical-psychological approach--grubbing about in the life of the author, digging up dirt (Orwell does not hesitate to reference Tolstoy's sex life), and using that dirt to dismiss his opinions. In criticizing Orwell for all this I will not go so far as to say that seedy, pathetic motives are never relevant to understanding the work of a writer, even a great one, but in my experience, at least, such motives are less often relevant than some people seem to think, and that we see the approach as much as we do is more often a testament to sheer nastiness rather than its interpretive value--while the nastiness is in this case undeniable. In this particular piece Orwell held that Shakespeare's King Lear (to which Tolstoy devoted most of his attention), far from being so unaffecting as Tolstoy claims the play to be, hit too close to home for Tolstoy, whose later years struck Orwell as being too much like Lear's for that play to be bearable to him, and indeed, excite more than ordinary dislike for its author.

Yet there was another, significant aspect to Orwell's criticism of Lear--namely that Tolstoy was a sort of figure about which Orwell had become exceedingly cynical, namely a person who wanted to change the world for the better. Indeed, one can see in Orwell's sneers a pack of right-wing clichés directed against the type--that the person in question does not want "to work an improvement in earthly life" but "to bring it an end and put something different in its place"; that the alleged opponent of oppression is really a tyrant himself, and, if they are at all serious about their purported abjuring of violence, given to an even more insidious moral manipulation that is more important than anything else they are or aspire to do, with Orwell specifically attacking pacifism and anarchism (to both of which the later Tolstoy subscribed in his idiosyncratic fashion) as ideologies that "encourage this habit of mind." Besides making him cynical about Tolstoy Orwell saw this, too, playing its part in Orwell's hatred of Shakespeare, who was all too this-worldly a figure for such. And if anything all this seemed affirmed for me by the fact that the darker, more pessimistic, more reactionary aspects of Tolstoy's thought, so plainly evident in a work like War and Peace, and distilled so forcefully by a critic like Isaiah Berlin who finds so much common ground between Orwell and that "apostle of darkness" Joseph de Maistre (in his classic, "The Hedgehog and The Fox"), form no part of Orwell's argument with Tolstoy.

Indeed, it all seems very reflective of the fact that Orwell was well into that frame of mind that, in spite of the socialist he had been and which he (is supposed to have) remained, saw him produce a work that the right so easily claimed as, as Isaac Deutscher put it, "an ideological super-weapon of the Cold War," and so identified Orwell not with the struggle for a better world to which a younger Orwell had devoted himself, but the conservative's condemnation of such struggle to the point that Orwell's very name is synonymous with dystopia.

It does not even seem inconceivable that, in a moment when anti-Communism in many minds was conflated with anti-Russian sentiment generally, Tolstoy's nationality itself figured into Orwell's reaction, and Tolstoy's standing suffered with it (in spite of Tolstoy's having been as disdainful of Marx as he was any other major thinker of the nineteenth century, as he made clear in the very essay for which Orwell took him to task).

Certainly that is what happening now in this era of "New" Cold War, which is seeing the cancel-minded set their sights on Tolstoy.