Tolstoy was one of the greatest novelists of all time and also a social reformer with his followers sometimes being called ´Tolstoyians´. He was as famous as the Tsar in Russia during his lifetime. He was a huge landowner and became very critical of landowners and their properties while continuing to live in his original house. He continued to live there until his flight from his house in the middle of the night, just before his death. He was a massively contradictory personality, as many great artists are. He was an out-of-control gambler, a sex addict, into his third decade of life with an extremely high sex drive. He went from sexual addiction to puritanism. He was a good soldier but had death anxiety. He turned his back on riches for poor people’s lifestyle. He had a tendency to go from one extreme to the other. He went against institutional religion and created his own form. He was oppositional and defiant. He had some insight because he said ´surrounded by human offal and the biggest offal of all is me´, (Troyat, 1967). He also asked ´am I am monster? I am probably lacking something´, (Troyat, 1967). Many great writers have contradictory personalities, (Fitzgerald, 2004) but Tolstoy was probably the most contradictory of them all. These contradictions were critical to the superb literature that he produced, possibly the greatest literature of all, for example, ´Anna Karenina´ and ´War and Peace´.
Background and childhood:
He had private education and was a shy child. He became a university drop out. For many years, he led a wild out-of-control life, became a gambling addict, engaged in promiscuity, abused alcohol and was delinquent in a variety of ways. He showed evidence of conduct disorder and antisocial personality. Nobody could give up such an extreme, debased addicted antisocial lifestyle except by a mechanism of conversion, for example, conversion to his own brand of religion. Tolstoy said ´I believe in one, incomprehensible God´. Indeed to many people, Tolstoy was incomprehensible himself. Troyat (1967) stated that a Tolstoy novel was ´dominated by the idea that a man’s real life begins when the spiritual forces in him triumph over his animal nature´. This of course, is the central event in his own personal history. His time in the army gave him experience of military life and battles.
Travelling:
He went on a kind of ´Grand Tour´ between 1857 and 1861 and met many great writers.
Personality:
He described himself as a young man, (Troyat, 1967) as ´awkward, untidy, socially uncouth … irritable and tiresome to others, immodest, intolerant and shy´ … a ´boar´ … ´unstable´, ´stupidly aggressive´ … ´I am so lazy that idleness has become an ineradicable habit with me. Yet, there is one thing I love more than virtue: fame´. Many of these traits could fit with autism. He also stated that because of his incessant gambling ´I am sick of myself that I would like to forget I even exist´ (Troyat, 1967). In conversation, he was often oppositional with people, contradicted people and engaged in endless quarrelling. He was easily bored and needed novelty-seeking and sensation-seeking, which he got in his writing (Fitzgerald, 2008). He was very undiplomatic. He did not even bother to go to his brother’s funeral, and simply made excuses for this. He threatened someone who criticised his work to a duel but didn’t carry it out. He was described as a ´megalomaniac´, (Troyat, 1967). During his out-of-control period, he tended to build ´castles in the air´ (Troyat, 1967). He was at that time, the eternal optimist. He would say ´I know you won’t believe me, but I’ve changed´ (Troyat, 1967). Of course, at that time, he hadn’t changed. He always showed vicious misogyny and ´regarded women as a necessary evil´ (Troyat, 1967). He blamed women for his sex addiction. He was a very emotional man and found it hard to control his emotions. He had a piercing gaze, which is common enough in persons on the autism spectrum. He was fascinated by colour and was a sharp observer. Some accusations that he made against himself include ´vanity´, ´boasting´, ´sloth´, ´deceitfulness´, ´waiting for miracles´, ´contrariness´, ´excessive self-confidence´, ´passion for gambling´ (Troyat, 1967) were correct. He made some progress with some of these traits when he converted to peasant values. It’s hardly surprising that he had at one time, VD.
Teacher:
He became fascinated with the education of peasant children. He dressed like the parents of those children in shabby clothes and refused the privileges of the nobility. He gave up alcoholic drinks, refused to eat meat. He took on a more ascetic life. In history, a number of Christian Saints behaved in the same way.
Personality and marriage:
He was impulsive and rushed in marriage to an eighteen-year-old at a time when he had lost all his teeth and was in his third decade. Both wanted to be loved by the other, but they didn’t manage to achieve this. In Tolstoy’s novels, he shows a great understanding of the female mind, but could not apply this knowledge to his wife. After an initial period, he could only see marriage as a prison with his wife as a jailer. For Tolstoy, marriage was a kind of death in life and a destroyer of creativity and was simply human bondage. He had severe deficits in the marriage, in personal and social relating and gross empathy deficits and an incapacity to love his wife. He lacked a Theory of Mind in terms of understanding his wife and the hurt he was causing her. It was a most terrible emotional marriage for her. He could only think of the pain she caused him and indeed, he often drove her to behavioural outbursts, threats of suicide, immaturity and what they called at that time, hysteria. Of course, Tolstoy was emotionally immature himself. He damaged the marriage right away by forcing her to read his diary of all his sexual and abusive exploits. Tolstoy forced her into thirteen pregnancies, and it was lucky that she did not die from constant childbearing, as so many women did. It’s hardly surprising that in one late pregnancy, she tried to abort herself. In relation to the pregnancies, Tolstoy was sadistic and callous. He was also a depressive spouse. Tolstoy stated, when in a melancholic state ´art is not only useless but even harmful´ (Anargyros-Klinger, 2002). His wife thought he had a ´mystics stare´, (Troyat, 1967). This peculiar stare is common enough in ASD. Tolstoy also showed ´coldness towards his children´ (Troyat, 1967). Tolstoy (Meyers, 2005) told her that the very air ´around (her) was infected´. In some ways, they could not live with each other and could not live without each other. They would both threaten to leave the home. Neither couple could understand the other. Certainly, Tolstoy was right in the novel, ´Anna Karenina´ that ´all happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion´. Tolstoy created in his own marriage, a colossally unhappy marital state. Even worse, he made a savage and direct attack in his novel, ´The Kreutzer Sonata´, about a man murdering his spouse. Readers saw this novel as related to his wife and his marital situation. She was massively humiliated. Then, Tolstoy moved out of the marital bed which further humiliated her. He was extremely misogynistic. Tolstoy wrote (Meyers, 2005) that ´woman is generally stupid … she cannot understand the simplest thing … (and) for seventy years, I have been lowering and lowering my opinion of women … they should stop ruining´ life. His wife (Meyers, 2005) said ´he is a beast, a murderer, I cannot look at him´. Finally, Tolstoy left home in the middle of the night and stopped at Astapovo Railroad Station. He became ill, refused to see his wife and died. The marriage had lasted about fifty years and was a sadomasochistic marriage. Sometimes, these sadomasochistic marriages have very long duration. They quarrelled about ´sex, love, property, art, family and religion´, for about fifty years (Meyers, 2005).
Narrow interests:
He wrote a vast amount and did not like wasting time on social chit-chat as his wife did. He hated himself for the time he wasted on this. Life was meaningless for him if he was not writing. Nevertheless, his wife was important in completing novels and on one occasion, she ´copied the almost illegible manuscript of a massive novel seven times´ (Meyers, 2005). This bordered on masochism.
Peasant life - The life of the peasant:
Meyers (2005) notes that in 1883, Tolstoy ´came to the conclusion that property was evil and suddenly decided to give up the management of his house, his land and literary copyrights´. This became an obsession for the rest of his life, and he handed all the work of his assets and estate over to his spouse. He began to dress like a peasant and developed followers which were called, ´Tolstoyians´ many of whom exploited him and invaded his home which upset his wife. He was naïve about their exploitation of him. He became a kind of ´saint-like´ figure. The contradiction was that he still lived in the estate.
Conclusion:
He was extremely eccentric and showed evidence of a pathological creative personality. There was also evidence of the autism spectrum with severe social relationship problems with severe social reciprocity problems, some naivety, gross empathy deficits, Theory of Mind deficits especially in his marriage, narrow interests and a piercing gaze. He was extremely visual, which is often one of the strengths of ASD. Its very difficult to put great geniuses like Tolstoy into a single category because they are in many ways, all over the place and this is what gives them their great creativity.
- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
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