Today is Wednesday, November 21, 2007, the 325th day of the year. This is the birthdate of Voltaire (1694) and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863), and the anniversary of the death of Count Leo Tolstoy (1910).
I heard an interesting story about the death of Tolstoy. Apparently, as he and his wife aged (they were married for 48 years), they both became mistrustful. She was seized of the idea that he had written her out of his will. He insisted that he there was no new will, but she was so possessed of this idea that she searched his study. When the 82-year-old Tolstoy caught her rummaging through his stuff, he blew up and fled. He caught pneumonia and died on the train trip.
I heard an interesting story about the death of Tolstoy. Apparently, as he and his wife aged (they were married for 48 years), they both became mistrustful. She was seized of the idea that he had written her out of his will. He insisted that he there was no new will, but she was so possessed of this idea that she searched his study. When the 82-year-old Tolstoy caught her rummaging through his stuff, he blew up and fled. He caught pneumonia and died on the train trip.
Another writer, a Latin poet, died 1902 years before Tolstoy. Horace - Quintus Horatius Flaccus - was born in 65 B.C.E. and died in 8 C.E. He was, therefore, 21 when Julius Caesar was assassinated, and he lived through the closing years of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Empire.
Maecenas atavis edite
Maecenas, sprung from an ancient line of kings,
my stronghold, my pride, and my delight,
some like to collect Olympic dust
on their chariots, and if their scorching wheels
graze the turning-post and they win the palm of glory,
they become lords of the earth and rise to the gods;
one man is pleased if the fickle mob of Roman citizens
competes to lift him up to triple honours;
another, if he stores away in his own granary
the sweepings from all the threshing-floors of Libya;
the man who enjoys cleaving his ancestral fields
with the mattock, you could never move, not with the legacy
of Attalus, to become a frightened sailor
cutting the Myrtoan sea with Cyprian timbers;
the merchant, terrified at the brawl of African gale
with Icarian waves, is all for leisure and the countryside
round his own home town, but he is soon rebuilding
his shattered ships – he cannot learn to endure poverty;
there is a man who sees no objection to drinking
old Massic wine or taking time out of the day,
stretched out sometimes under the green arbutus,
sometimes by a gently welling spring of sacred water;
many enjoy the camp, the sound of the trumpet merged
in the bugle, the wars that mothers
abhor; the huntsman stays out under a cold sky,
and forgets his tender wife the moment
his faithful dogs catch sight of a hind
or a Marsian boar bursts his delicate nets.
Horace , Odes, Book I, I
Translated by David West (1997)
Maecenas atavis edite
Maecenas, sprung from an ancient line of kings,
my stronghold, my pride, and my delight,
some like to collect Olympic dust
on their chariots, and if their scorching wheels
graze the turning-post and they win the palm of glory,
they become lords of the earth and rise to the gods;
one man is pleased if the fickle mob of Roman citizens
competes to lift him up to triple honours;
another, if he stores away in his own granary
the sweepings from all the threshing-floors of Libya;
the man who enjoys cleaving his ancestral fields
with the mattock, you could never move, not with the legacy
of Attalus, to become a frightened sailor
cutting the Myrtoan sea with Cyprian timbers;
the merchant, terrified at the brawl of African gale
with Icarian waves, is all for leisure and the countryside
round his own home town, but he is soon rebuilding
his shattered ships – he cannot learn to endure poverty;
there is a man who sees no objection to drinking
old Massic wine or taking time out of the day,
stretched out sometimes under the green arbutus,
sometimes by a gently welling spring of sacred water;
many enjoy the camp, the sound of the trumpet merged
in the bugle, the wars that mothers
abhor; the huntsman stays out under a cold sky,
and forgets his tender wife the moment
his faithful dogs catch sight of a hind
or a Marsian boar bursts his delicate nets.
Horace , Odes, Book I, I
Translated by David West (1997)
The sentiment in the third verse of that poem is found again, with a sardonic twist, in the first stanza and the ending of this one:
Beatus ille
Fortunate the man who, free from cares,
like men of old still works
his father's fields with his own oxen,
encumbered by no debt.
No soldier he, aroused by bugle's blare,
nor does he fear the angry sea.
The Forum he avoids and lofty doors
of powerful citizens....'
When Alfius the money lender said all this,
resolved at last, at last, to be a countryman,
he called in all his money on the Ides -
and on the Kalends now he tries to place it out again.
Horace, Epodes, II
Translated by David West (1997)
1 comment:
Tolstoy apparently defined "cranky geezer" in his last years. And everyone agrees that his wife wasn't much better.
I can't remember where I read it, but, as you relate, his wife was convinced that she and their children were going to be written out of his will. Tolstoy in turn decided that his family was spying on him, and catching his wife rummaging through his papers confirmed that for him. So, he left in a huff. (Or, more likely, a carriage, the huff being in the shop for a tuneup. Yuk, yuk.)
It's an odd and sad ending: A Russian icon, the literary giant of his day, a member of the nobility, died alone of exposure-induced pneumonia on a train platform while attempting to run away from home.
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