Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction

3. Eating as Pleasure: Tolstoy and Voluptuousness

Eating as Pleasure Tolstoy and Voluptuousness Tolstoy and the Body: From Hedonism to Asceticism Whereas it seems rather oxymoronic, as we saw in the previous chapter, to speak about a “culinary” Dostoevsky, it seems entirely appropriate to link gastronomy and literature in the case of Tolstoy, whose fictional works are replete with memorable food imagery, eating metaphors, and scenes of dining. Indeed, the episode where Levin and Oblonsky go to a Moscow restaurant to share a meal in part 1 of Anna Karenina has become one of the most celebrated, and most closely scrutinized, scenes of dining in all of world literature.1 Unlike the orally fixated characters created by “gastronomic Slavophiles” such as Gogol, Goncharov, and Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, however, the people who inhabit Tolstoy’s fictional universe do not necessarily regress from genital to oral modes of libidinal satisfaction.2 Their creator instead allows gastronomic appetite to accompany—and in some cases even to trigger—carnal desire within them. Whereas in the fictional world of Gogol, Goncharov, and Kvitka-Osnovyanenko one must generally choose either food or sex, in Tolstoy’s world one can enjoy them both. In his works, eating serves not as a substitute for sexual gratification ,butinsteadasitscomplement.AndunlikeDostoevsky , for whom our physical appetite for food and sex operated according to the paradigm of power and manifested itself as violent aggression, Tolstoy depicts the acts of eating and copulating as human activities through which people seek to satisfy their desire for sensual pleasure. As we know from his diaries, letters, essays, and literary 3 eating as pleasure: tolstoy | 99 works, Tolstoy’s attitude toward sensual pleasure was deeply ambivalent . On the one hand, he himself seems to have possessed acute sensual sensibilities and strong physical appetites for the pleasures of the flesh as well as of the palate; at the same time, however, he possessed an equally strong desire for moral and spiritual self-perfection that prompted him to attempt to regulate closely his bodily lusts. Tolstoy’s conceptualization of the human body—as an unruly and dangerous “desiring” machine that must be somehow directed and controlled by instructions from the mind and/or the soul—would thus seem to fit perfectly the Cartesian paradigm of ascetic rationalism, whereby corporeal government (regulation of the body) enables the soul to become liberated from its incarceration within the body.3 His early diaries, for instance, which show him to be what one commentator considers “abnormally sensual,” are filled with entries where he admonishes himself for failing to curb his sensuality, usually when he visits prostitutes, gypsies, or serf girls at night and when he overindulges his weakness for rich, stimulating foods.4 Throughout his life, Judith Armstrong argues , Tolstoy “wages a constant but losing battle with his shameful sexual appetites.”5 “Fromhisyouthtohisoldage,”observesanothercritic, “Tolstoy was body-haunted, obsessed equally by sexual desire and the guilt of sexual satisfaction.”6 In Tolstoy’s literary works, the body’s strong craving for life’s physical pleasures manifests itself in the author ’s portrayal of characters who enjoy intensely felt bodily sensations . “His earlier novels and stories,” G. W. Spence observes in a study of Tolstoy’s asceticism, “often express a very vivid awareness of the beauty and richness of sensuous, physical life.”7 Indeed, Dmitry Merezhkovsky recognized in this Russian writer’s works such a keen intuitive awareness of—and appreciation for—the instinctive, animal life of human beings that he called Tolstoy a “seer of the flesh,” in contradistinction to his most famous contemporary and polar opposite, Dostoevsky , whom Merezhkovsky regarded as a visionary of the spirit.8 According to Merezhkovsky, Tolstoy was naturally blessed with unusually acute sensory perception, much like a dog’s keen sense of smell, a gift that he called “clairvoyance of the flesh.”9 In a similar vein, Thomas Mann argues that Tolstoy’s life, like that of the pagan Goethe, recalls the myth of the giant Antæus, “who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth.”10 Admiring what he calls Tolstoy’s “animalism, his unheard-of interest 100 | slavic sins of the flesh in the life of the body, his genius for bringing home to us man’s physical being,” Mann contends that Tolstoy displays in his art “a sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal,” than does the great German humanist himself.11 Finally, John Bayley asserts that in the early...