Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination

7. From Lovesickness to Shamesickness: Tolstoy's Solution

7 / F R O M L O V E S I C K N E S S T O S H A M E S I C K N E S S : T O L S T O Y ’ S S O L U T I O N LEV TOLSTOY DID NOT SHARE CHERNYSHEVSKY’S OPTIMISTIC BELIEF IN THE universal applicability of the natural sciences. While Tolstoy was clearly interested in science, especially mathematics and later physics and chemistry, and while his own method of dissecting the human psyche has often been labeled scientific, he was deeply disturbed by the positivist and strictly materialist orientation of contemporary science that eliminated from consideration the notion of the soul and freedom of will.1 Not only are his diary and notebooks of the 1860s and 1870s rife with critical ruminations on modern science (I discuss one such entry in chapter 5), but also his works of fiction address these concerns, both directly and indirectly.2 In the second “philosophical ”epilogueof War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1865–69),dedicatedprimarily to questions of freedom and necessity, Tolstoy specifically attacks the radicals ’ tendency to extend the methods of the natural sciences to other realms: In our time the majority of so-called advanced people—that is, the crowd of ignoramuses—have taken the work of the naturalists who deal with one side of the question for a solution of the whole problem. They say and write in print that the soul and freedom do not exist, for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang 1 5 8 from the apes. . . . They do not see that the role of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as an instrument for the illumination of one side of it. . . . The question of how man’s consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.3 For Tolstoy, medicine reveals the epistemological and methodological limitations of the natural sciences most poignantly because it purports to deal with a unique, psychologically complex living being endowed with a moral feeling while it takes into consideration only (or mostly) a human’s biological side. It is not surprising then that some of Tolstoy’s most memorable portrayals of medicine’s impotence come in episodes that involve diagnosing and treating lovesickness or related psychogenic disorders. By incorporating konsilium scenes in both of his major novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina (1875–77), Tolstoy subversively joins both the Russian (and European ) literary tradition of lovesickness and the raging contemporaneous controversy on human nature and positivist science. Tolstoy, in other words, turns the ancient topos into a powerful polemical device. In War and Peace, when describing Natasha Rostova’s illness after her failed attempt to elope with Anatol’ Kuragin, Tolstoy overtly mocks the doctors’ futile attempts to diagnose and treat the heroine and insists that life, and specifically human life, in its uniqueness and unlimited complexity, does not fit the finite procrustean bed of generalizing and classifying scientific thought: Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation [konsiliumami], talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live person [zhivoi chelovek] can be known, for every live person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal , novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine—not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable TOLSTOY’S SOLUTION / 159 combinations of the suffering of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he cannot do magic) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received...