This essay was originally published in April 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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When he died at the age of forty-six, George Orwell left a busy life behind him. Colonial official, novelist, journalist, reviewer, anti-fascist soldier in the radical POUM unit (which he did not choose but was assigned to, although he later regretted that he never joined), gadfly, broadcaster for the BBC, and at times a slightly equivocal presence after the war when often unwittingly socialists and ex-socialists of various hues signed up and worked with organisations funded and manipulated by the CIA. Orwell had more reasons than most, because he had witnessed the cruelty and folly that Stalinism inflicted on the Spanish Republic. Notable for all these activities as he was, which he achieved in spite of being wounded in the neck in Spain and then developing tuberculosis, his greatest claim to fame must surely have been the quality and sheer volume of his output as an essayist (Essays, edited and introduction by John Carey, Everyman’s Library: 2002). These essays are selected by various publishers using various criteria, quite understandably because Orwell’s interests crisscross the various categories we use to define the constituent parts of our intellectual life – useful and even necessary categories, but they should not let us forget that they are all highly interconnected. 

Last year, Pushkin Press published a collection of four essays by Orwell (Inside the Whale. On Writers and Writing), two of which are long and one quite short, but I wish to examine principally the essay of about thirty pages called “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” for the simple reason that it has so many themes: amongst others the ability of readers to fully appreciate literature written in a language other than their own, the relationship between politics and religion, the fact that we often judge novels and plays not by their intrinsic worth but in line with how their content aligns with our own prejudices. Moreover Orwell uses suspense to keep us guessing about the fascinating discovery he has uncovered about Tolstoy’s dislike of Shakespeare and King Lear in particular. So I can do no better than follow the master’s example and do the same thing in this essay, which for those of us who have come to socialism through Tolstoy (an unusual event in our times, I think) strikes at the absolute foundation of our credo. 

The reader of this essay will almost definitely be surprised by the way Tolstoy sets about destroying Shakespeare’s reputation, even if it is not successful and raises the question of why such venom. Orwell summarises his view of King Lear as “finding it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, ‘wild ravings’, ‘mirthless jokes’, anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.”

Orwell spends some time on going through Tolstoy’s criticisms, though the reader has probably lost interest in the subject in itself, and is more interested in how this literary theatre involving Tolstoy, Lear, Shakespeare and Orwell himself is going to be resolved. Along the way it is worth mentioning a couple of things: firstly Tolstoy found that the English bard’s “language is uniformly exaggerated and ridiculous.” This is not surprising as he was a realist and increasingly so, ending up with Resurrection which takes a great deal from the naturalists such as Émile Zola, while Dostoyevsky was not a realist writer or rather he went past realism and introduced the extreme characters of both Shakespeare and Dickens, which takes us for a moment to another of Orwell’s essays in the collection, “Charles Dickens”, which argues that the characters, often verging on the grotesque, remain within the boundaries of the author’s petit-bourgeois prejudices (everyone has a go at the poor petit bourgeoisie). Orwell is right: so much more could be done with those characters, and Dostoyevsky certainly does make the most of his, but so does A.H. Tammsaare whose second volume of his Truth and Justice pentalogy I have been editing recently. It’s more likely that the Estonian got those characters from the Russian and not the Englishman, although he is more humorous than both, but there is some of that in Dickens as is his pathos. Dostoyevsky and Tammsaare bring the mankind’s eternal questions down to earth and give them a good kicking in the absurdity of our messy lives, while Dickens ultimately wanted to reassure his readers (Orwell claims that he had no political aims other than that everyone should start being nicer to each other). Secondly and more seriously – still according to Orwell whom I at least take to be a pretty reliable source – Tolstoy considered the Dreyfus Affair to be a storm in a teacup and an epidemic of irrationalism. History, sadly, has proved him wrong, but this really does surprise me, as in Hadji Murat Tolstoy was more explicit in condemning Western imperialism than Conrad. It seems on the evidence provided by Orwell that King Lear really did drive the grand old man crazy – as crazy as Lear himself. 

At this stage Orwell – the character Orwell in his own essay – suddenly goes off in a different direction, and claims that we can’t reject Tolstoy’s views as there is no objective way of assessing literary worth – even though up to this point he has been doing a pretty good job of it. Orwell was a reviewer and surely he and we ourselves could and can live with the fact that it is not an exact science but this doesn’t make aesthetic judgement entirely redundant. But no, Orwell insists that “there is no test of literary merit except survival.” This assertion is repeated quite often in his essay on Dickens, in which case Dickens whom he defended has to be reassessed, because where is the mass readership for those wonderful long sentences of his? And what of Chaucer whose language is no longer spoken? It seems that Tolstoy was not alone in developing some strange ideas towards the end of his life, though of course Orwell died tragically young and before he could really make a fool of himself in old age – but still his death was a loss for him and for us. 

Orwell has already given us a clue of where he is going, but here he decides that he has to keep our attention, so he slips in another teaser: “Is it not possible that he bore an especial enmity towards this particular play because he was aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the resemblance between Lear’s story and his own?” Is Orwell going to tell us? Not yet. He then comes centre stage again, and having said that survival is the only reliable yardstick for literary merit, announces that, “Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots. One wicked daughter would have been quite enough…” Just as King Lear is a very good play – surely one of the best – so is Orwell’s essay successful in spite of, or perhaps even because of, such inconsistencies. Orwell’s is an essay that makes you think, and that is a yardstick I always like to use – amongst others. 

In another turning point in this drama for four characters, Orwell turns on Tolstoy and in spite of having partly established that Tolstoy is not arguing rationally but out of some strange sense of having been slighted by a man who had died nearly three centuries before he did, Orwell appears to accuse him over a good few pages of having become a religious bigot in later life. Whilst it’s true that elements of puritanism emerge in his later years (his attitude to sex for instance), Tolstoy’s conversion was political and not religious. An upholder of Christian ethics, he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church and that would have caused him no pain. If the English protestant missionary who appears at the end of Resurrection is anything to go by, Tolstoy was not a supporter of other principal Christian churches either. Victor Hugo and Proudhon were his principal influences, and I’ve always been of the opinion that Zola influenced him at the end, and this is often overlooked because Resurrection is not widely read compared with the other novels, and is also generally dismissed. I have read four or five versions of the novel (I can’t remember exactly) and they were all different, such was the mangling imposed by the Tsarist censors. The most effective perhaps was the first one I read, and that was heavily abridged but almost definitely came from an uncensored version. Strangely for an American edition all of the religious stuff had been stripped out but the most shocking episodes of social depravation kept. It seems that Tolstoy was wrong about Shakespeare and Orwell about Tolstoy. This should not surprise us as none of us, however well read, can avoid misunderstanding some of the books we read because each book requires its own key, and the further away it is culturally the harder it is to find that key. This is not an argument against translation and learning other languages; quite the opposite, it is a strong argument in favour. 

Nevertheless Orwell does come up with some excellent analogies: “Clearly,” he writes of Tolstoy, “he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can’t you sit still like I do?’” I think that there was a bit of that, but then Orwell spoils it by claiming that Tolstoy was arrogant and violent on the basis of an English biographer who appears not to have “survived” and who seems, on the basis of a few lines on Wikipedia, to have concentrated on the private lives of his subjects at least in the case of John Ruskin. One of the worst moralisms is that of judging people in the past on the basis of necessarily limited material, particularly in the case of writers and artists. Now that Orwell himself comes in for a degree of posthumous moral questioning, he may feel that in the case of both him and Tolstoy, we have their works – and their actions – and they are enough to establish that these were quite exceptional and moral men. I don’t say that they were saints, because I couldn’t possibly know but the reasons why we still speak of them are enough for us to hold them in high esteem. 

Orwell and Tolstoy are in agreement on one thing: Shakespeare wrote without any purpose and had no political axe to grind. And I could not disagree more. But first we have to take into account that scholarship has moved on since then, and all sorts of theories have emerged such as the one that he was secretly a Catholic. I have no views on that, as I haven’t read the books and I am not particularly attracted to doing so, but the idea of a writer with no purpose probably belongs to the past. From the 1560s the wild and inventive days of publishing were over and output was strictly controlled as in an authoritarian state today – and de facto in all states, I would add, but sometimes with more nuanced and subtle methods. 

When I think of Shakespeare’s tragedies and some of the history plays, it seems to me that he was obsessed with the state and the monarch who represented it. This runs through his output from Titus Andronicus to Hamlet, the latter being a much improved and more complex version of the first. It was not that the monarch was always right, but because the monarch had certain responsibilities and considerations that had to be observed. This was a topos in Italian literature, partly because Italians blamed their loss of independence on the fragmentation and instability of their states, which were often not monarchies (though increasingly as the sixteenth century progressed, monarchies took over). Briefly leaping forward for a century or two, in The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith – a Tory like Samuel Johnson – admitted that a monarch was a tyrant, but in the absence of monarchy or in a weak monarchy, there are many tyrants. Better to have one tyrant than a whole lot of them. That problem was also one that Machiavelli – a republican – was trying to get to grips with. He had a horror of feudal lords and the disruption they caused to people and to trade. So what has King Lear done? He has not only abdicated, which is something a monarch should never do, but he has also fragmented the state, which is even worse. Every state has enemies and a state that fragments will weaken each of the new entities. He had also, as Orwell points out, done this not out of generosity but out of a desire for a peaceful life without foregoing any of his privileges (Orwell admits that King Lear is one of the few plays – in his opinion – that have a purpose to them). 

In Hamlet, Denmark has an enemy and there is a reference to a battle with the Norwegians in which many men died for what was no more than a field. International politics were also a source of disorder. The state is subverted by the murder of Hamlet’s father, but does it matter? Order has been maintained. The problem with Hamlet is that he thinks, or worse, he thinks some of the time and at others he becomes emotional and angry as any hotblooded prince ought to be. He causes more disorder by his indecisiveness than his uncle had by murder. He had been quite relaxed about his uncle’s succession until he meets the ghost. It is the knowing that makes things so difficult, and as an intellectual he cannot act, but his moments of instinctive anger cause further death and discord. This is about so much more than the state – this is art as it should be and it leaves Titus Andronicus far behind, yet Shakespeare doesn’t seem to consider Fortinbras’s annexation of Denmark to be a political problem. We could speculate that the union for Shakespeare was to be good for both countries, just as Macbeth establishes that the Anglo-Saxon Scottish line was a better choice than Macbeth’s Gaelic-Norwegian one (Macbeth or mac beatha means “son of life”). Political art can never be just politics (or it becomes didactic agitprop). It has to be something more, and this is also true of Tolstoy’s works, even the later ones. 

Finally Orwell fully reveals his take on Tolstoy’s strange and apparently quite manic essay: “But isn’t [Lear’s story] curiously similar to Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt – a sincere attempt, though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hope for.” These parallel renunciations constitute a remarkable connection, and Orwell speculates on whether Tolstoy was conscious of this as he wrote his rant against Shakespeare, but of course there are some striking differences between them too. Lear was thinking of comfortable old age, whilst Tolstoy was seeking exactly the opposite. Lear was petulant and cruel in his treatment of Cordelia after she raised her objection, Tolstoy was not a monarch but a very successful writer and thinker who wanted to put his beliefs into practice and set an example, which he did. It is difficult to understand why the socialist author Orwell was so dismissive of the Russian author, particularly when he tells us at the beginning of the essay that he went to a great deal of trouble to find an English translation of the pamphlet on Shakespeare – and how reliable would that translation have been? 

Could it be that there is a remarkable chain of similar reactions? Was Orwell, who also came from a privileged background and renounced his privileges to be down and out in London and Paris, and various other places, envious of Tolstoy’s success, because the old man was not the failure the old-Etonian claims he was? Tolstoy made those sacrifices and his ideas were propagated around the world, and most notably found a disciple in Gandhi. The fact that non-violence is now more associated with his disciple than with himself is of no importance at all. “Envious” is perhaps too strong a word, and “dislike” is perhaps the better word. Not so much dislike of Tolstoy as of his ideas, and Tolstoy was someone who attracted and repelled at the same time. His pacifism didn’t go down well with Orwell as the final pages of the essay show. He is not primarily writing about Tolstoy but what Tolstoy represents, as he considers such “creeds as pacifism and anarchism” to conceal a secret desire to dominate or at least behave in a fanatical manner. An assertion for which he provides no rational argument – merely a hunch or a prejudice. 

We can agree with Orwell that you cannot change this violent world completely through moral pacifism, as it would have to reach every human being on the planet, and that would be impossible. I would argue that international law could be put in place to avoid war, and that of course would ultimately require some kind of enforcement through legal procedures and policing by parties not involved in any dispute, as occurs within nations. We are a long way from that and probably going in the wrong direction, while the wealthier nations spend increasing sums on weapons in a world already awash with them. But non-violence is perhaps the only remaining weapon for grassroots action. In recent decades it has already achieved a great deal, though Western “democracies” have successfully undermined all the achievements of the Arab Spring and they are quietly strangling democracy in Tunisia where it all started. In a world where the powerful have so much technology at their disposal Tolstoy’s non-violence is not only the moral choice but also the pragmatic one. 

It's not the case that Tolstoy is completely right and Orwell completely wrong, or vice versa. Their views and concerns are part of a dialogue. Listening to a programme on environmentalism on the Italian radio the other day, I was introduced to the curious concept of conspiratio (-ionis), the Latin word which eventually gave us the word “conspiracy”. Apparently its roots go back to the early Christians and its original meaning which was of course “breathing together”. We breathe the same air, and the air moves around the whole world. This is the air we all need and we all rely on. The early Christians probably weren’t environmentalists and instead were interested in its figurative meaning: we have to breathe if we’re going to speak, and speech can produce ideas, which can cover the whole world. They don’t just come out of us individuals but also out of our past. Every idea is a response to another idea or reality. Conspiratio is perhaps a more poetic way of defining the dialectic. To be honest, I am not hopeful because the market’s grip on the planet just seems overwhelming, but we have to hope and all we have are ideas and our willingness to campaign in a non-violent manner. As I have said before, ideas are intangible but also as hard as steel and sometimes more powerful – though usually only fleetingly. 
 

Allan Cameron, Italy, April 2022

Header image: photograph by Darcy Moore, Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)