From meer.com/en
By Elizaveta Burnashova
Is it possible to capture ‘life as it is’?
When you write an entry in your diary, what do you usually write about? Do you expound on the secret thoughts and feelings that have filled the landscape of your mind during the day? Or do you just note matter-of-factly, “Slept badly. Finished the project at work. Meeting Monica for dinner”? When thinking about the world’s great writers, one would probably expect their diaries to be more of the former—highly poetic, intricate, and deep. However, that is not always the case. One notable example would be Leo Tolstoy, who kept a diary that resembled more a highly detailed logbook of his mundane endeavours than a complex literary product of a genius mind. But why would someone like Tolstoy—a wizard with words, one of the most acclaimed writers of all time—keep such a plain, non-literary diary?
The answer could be quite simple: because Tolstoy, like many writers of his time, was a fervent realist. The Realist movement in the arts, including literature, emerged around the 1850s as a response to (and, for the most part, a negation of) the preceding Romanticism movement. Romantics tended to focus on the individual and his struggles in a society that does not understand him, to use rich symbolism to depict the various states of his inner self and to occasionally tread onto the territory of the supernatural, exotic, and sublime. The realists, on the other hand, attempted to give a truthful, unaltered portrayal of reality, often addressing societal issues as well as personal ones and avoiding, for the most part, artificial, fictitious elements.
For Leo Tolstoy, authentically picturing reality seemed to be a passion he developed at a very young age. The diaries he kept in the days of his early youth were quite peculiar: they consisted of pages divided vertically in half, with one side titled ‘The Past’ and the other ‘The Future.’ In ‘The Future’ column, he listed everything that he intended to do the next day—curiously, not only about the outside world but also about his inner reality: the tasks of paying visits or completing his writing were listed next to such goals as ‘not being lazy’ or ‘not having unholy thoughts.’ Then, in the ‘The Past’ column, which he filled out the next day, he stated whether he succeeded or not. The Present, as we can see, is surprisingly excluded from this format and exists exclusively as a conjuncture between the Past and the Future, a line of ink dividing the page in half.
Such a way of keeping a diary allowed Tolstoy to keep his journal very close to life, stating only events that took place and avoiding any speculative narration or ungrounded dreaming. But over time, Tolstoy grew tired of this approach: he had kept a diary of a similar nature for almost ten years (until 1857), and in his later entries mentioned that although he would now rather write down “what is happening inside of me and how it’s happening; those things I never told anyone, the things no one knows,” he simply cannot help but fall back into the habitual log-keeping manner.
It seems like the same dilemma—explaining fully everything that is hidden inside while also portraying in a truthful and sufficiently detailed manner the events taking place on the outside—was the key problem that Tolstoy faced when working on his most ambitious project: portraying ‘life as it is.’. His most acclaimed novels, such as War and Peace or Anna Karenina, are celebrated not in the least for their immersive realism and psychological believability, for their masterful portrayal of complex characters, detailed social settings, and the nuances of human emotions.
In these works, Tolstoy manages to tell stories that seem utterly real, even though we know that they are fiction; he finds a way to make his readers forget about the conventionalities of a literary text, ignore all the omitted details and generalizations, and feel like they are peeking right into the private lives of real people—or into the internal workings of a whole nation’s history. But the intricate balance that supports the astonishing verisimilitude of Tolstoy’s texts was a lesson learned from failure, namely—from his bold attempt to depict ‘life as it is’ that resulted in an abandoned and unpublished short story and a subsequent change of approach to his writing. The failed story I am referring to is “The Story of Yesterday.”
Tolstoy’s first novel, *Childhood, was published in 1852; while being a piece of highly self-reflective, psychologically accurate, and largely autobiographical writing, the novel was nevertheless quite expressionistic in style, seamlessly blending fact and fiction. This approach was the first step away from the meticulous, true-to-life writing style that we saw in his diaries and in that previous literary experiment that never saw the light of “day—“The Story of Yesterday,” which he worked on a year before Childhood. In this unfinished short story, Tolstoy attempted to recreate one day exactly as it was, with no fiction at all; expectedly, he failed. The problem he encountered was that of narrative time.
Let us look at the first page of this unusual text. The narrator begins the story of his one day by stating the time when he woke up, but as he does that, he feels compelled to explain why he woke up so late—because he went to bed after midnight. That, in turn, prompts him to note that he has a rule to never go to sleep later than midnight and that he breaks this rule around three times a week. Already in this first paragraph, the narrator must leave the present moment in the narrative (waking up), go to a certain point in the past (staying up late last night) that explains why the present moment is the way it is, and then abandon the narrative time altogether (mentioning a rule that exists outside of time).
This pattern of circular, rather than linear, time repeats itself countless times throughout the short story: the narrator begins his description but feels that to perceive ‘life as it is,’ as the subject perceives it within the text, the reader needs to have as much context and background as the subject himself, which makes him constantly step aside from the narrative and add more and more details and explanations to the text. For Tolstoy, the present moment in a text cannot exist without the past—the same as in his diaries—but this seemingly necessary stepping aside from the narrative time to explain some piece of background is what eventually causes the text to crumble: the narrative ends up being buried under layers of details and digressions, and what started as a literary text slowly turns into a rather chaotic historiographical sketch.
As was mentioned before, “The Story of Yesterday” was never finished: after three weeks of writing, Tolstoy was still stuck in the morning of his described day, so he eventually gave up. His next literary endeavor, Childhood, already exhibited significantly less excessive detailing and constant backtracking than his ‘Life as It Is’ short story. As he kept refining his literary style and finding appropriate ways of depicting reality without drowning the text in unnecessary detail, Tolstoy ultimately created several masterpieces that can serve as nearly perfect examples for what a century later would be described by Roland Barthes as the ‘reality effect.’
Barthes explained that the new realism that appeared in the XIXth century was essentially characterized by the fact that a referent and a signifier collided directly, expelling the signified from the sign, and “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism”.
This means that the details that are given in the text for seemingly no reason (as they do not contribute to any structural development of the text) are necessary for the creation of the ‘effect of reality’—an’ implicit verisimilitude, or, as Barthes puts it, "that unavowed ‘vraisemblance". According to Barthes, oversaturation of a text with true-to-life details that are justified solely by the fact that they are true-to-life is only acceptable in historical discourse—which is well illustrated by Tolstoy’s failed attempt—but literary texts instead must employ the ‘effect of reality’ without attempting to convey the entire reality exactly as it is.
Tolstoy, who lived almost a century before Barthes’ publication, instinctively understood this principle. While working on War and Peace, he wrote about “the necessity of lies, which arises from the need to describe actions of thousands of people scattered across thousands of miles.” So, the idea of the ‘reality’ effect’—substituting millions of real details with just a few that would themselves signify the Real—was indeed one that he arrived at in the course of his literary career. Although he did not succeed in his attempt to write down one single day in all its intricacy and complexity, this ambitious project was one of the pivotal moments for his development as a realist writer, which ultimately helped him create his profoundly authentic and strikingly lifelike masterpieces.
References
Bartes, R. “The Reality Effect.” French literary theory today: a reader, 1982, pp. 11–17.
Паперно, И. Если бы можно было рассказать себя...: дневники Л.Н. Толстого». НЛО, no. 61, 2003.
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