Those sticky little leaves

Here in New England, we cherish every sign of spring’s arrival. (Even those of us with hideous allergies enjoy it between sneezes.) So  it doesn’t surprise me that Russian authors, with their even longer and darker winters, honor it extravagantly. And while their characters experience the sunshine and new leaves, spring also drifts into a metaphor for all kinds of renewal.

That slip into metaphor is so natural it feels effortless–for us as for the Russians. Even people who aren’t inclined towards metaphor feel it in our culture, with spring festivals that range from May Day to Easter (Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess, transformed a bird into a rabbit that continued to lay eggs). Most of us look at the determined shoots of green in our yards and think of all that life-force—what Dylan Thomas calls “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It also, the speaker of that poem says, “drives my green age.” With springtime weddings and graduations, we celebrate the flowering of youth and possibility. 

One of my favorite scenes in literature relies on springtime’s double power as fact and metaphor. Early in War and Peace, Andrei Bolkhonsky (one of the novel’s two male protagonists) endures twin catastrophes that make him lose his faith in marriage, in the glory of battle, and in himself. In his late twenties and early thirties, he plods from day to day because he feels he has to. He stays busy by running his farm; he tries not to harm anyone. Then, one spring, as he sets out on a journey to another landowner, he spots an enormous oak. Though surrounded by birches that are unfurling pale-green leaves, the scarred and gnarled oak still sports bare branches “Spring, love, and happiness!” the oak seems to say to Andrei in that moment. “And how is it that you’re not bored with the same stupid senseless deception! Always the same, and always a deception!” Understanding the oak as a metaphor for himself, Andrei congratulates himself on knowing what the oak knows—that youth was an illusion and that now their lives are over.

But during his visit to the other landowner, Andrei sees the lovely, lively young Natasha out in the fields. That night, he hears her sing to the moonlight. And on his way home, he comes across the oak again, without recognizing it at first.

The old oak, quite transformed, spreading out a canopy of juicy, dark greenery, basked, barely swaying, in the rays of the evening sun. Of the gnarled fingers, the scars, the old grief and mistrust—nothing could be seen. Juicy green leaves . . . broke through the stiff, hundred-year-old bark, and it was impossible to believe this old fellow had produced them. “Yes, it’s the same oak,” though Prince Andrei, and suddenly a causeless springtime feeling of joy and renewal came over him. . . “No life isn’t over at the age of thirty-one,” [he] suddenly decided definitively, immutably.

                                           (Volume II, Part iii. Chapter 3, in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation)

Don’t you love the final two words of that passage? With the gentlest irony, Tolstoy implies, with a nudge, “Yes, Andrei has changed his mind—and maybe he’ll change it again in the future. If he does, he’ll change it just as suddenly, just as ‘definitively’ and ‘immutably.’” Then the author’s voice seems to whisper, “And aren’t you happy for him? Don’t you love him for being a young man whose heart can start over?”

(Also, as a sidenote, maybe you can also see why I’m not a big fan of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. Maybe that’s the way Tolstoy wrote that passage, with the awkward, unwieldy order of the clauses about the oak tree. And an argument could be made that a translator should follow the author, even when he’s awkward. But I suspect the passage sounded better in Tolstoy’s Russian.)

Anyway, Andrei’s love for Natasha eventually breaks his heart. That’s the way of spring and youth. They come, and they go. Age and winter always follow. (So, after the winter and loss, do spring and renewal. Andrei and Natasha will have their chance to heal the rift.)

As a writer of depth, complexity, and a relentless drive towards truth, Tolstoy acknowledges those ups and downs, those alternations of spring and winter, hope and loss. He also stages them so that we readers think about what those rhythms mean for human beings. (Can we rely on them for happiness? Or even for meaning?)

But here’s an irony. Even when we know from long experience that spring will pass, we respond to it with a lift of the heart. And this is the kind of insight that Dostoevsky is really good at. (Tolstoy always knows more than his characters. Dostoevsky gives his characters astonishing knowledge about themselves—not that it helps them most of the time.)

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan (the intellectual one of the three brothers) is torn for the entire novel between his spontaneous love for life and his belief in “logic” (by which he means a scientific and skeptical worldview). At a lunch with his younger brother, not long before he tells his famous “Grand Inquisitor” story, Ivan confides that, despite the universe is a clockwork mechanism, he’s full of the “Karamazov” life force. In a kind of ecstasy, he raves, “I want to live, and I do live, even if be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me. . . Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength.” Almost immediately afterwards, when Ivan remembers how angry he is with God and his father, he retreats into ironic self-mockery. He proclaims that it’s disgusting to keep living after thirty. Later still, he becomes seriously ill from the tension between these two warring sides of himself. But when faced with his loving younger brother, Ivan’s first impulse is to let himself get “drunk with [his] own tenderness” about life.

So Tolstoy and Dostoevsky beautifully portray our deep human responses to nature’s rhythms but don’t stop there. They also suggest that these natural drives are not enough to base a life on. However real and necessary these impulses are, they’re not sufficient. Not by themselves. Not for a Russian, and probably not for us, either. We humans are natural creatures, yes. But once nature has evolved us into consciousness, consciousness then presents its own demands, with its own rules and rhythms.

Which prompts a tough question: if spring isn’t enough, what is? In other words, how do we experience and meet the demands of consciousness? How do we honor its rules and rhythms? And how can we synthesize these twin aspects of our human nature? Or are they eternally at war?

Good questions. Maybe in a week or two, I’ll look at Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s answers. Their answers won’t be for everyone—we all have to figure this stuff out for ourselves—but they’re powerful. If nothing else, these two writers provide insights that are provocative and intelligent enough to provide us with excellent backboards to ping our own ideas off….