A. K. Tolstoy: IEE

"Vices are part of virtue, just as poisonous substances are part of remedies."

"It's good for poetry when a thought is only half-fulfilled, so that readers can complete it — each in their own way."

"Art can only be a 'means' — all of the 'ends'... it contains in itself."

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817–1875) was a touch overshadowed in the world's memory by his distant relatives of the same surname, first by Leo and then, more confusingly, by the twentieth-century writer Aleksey Nikolayevich. He was, in his own century, one of the most significant Russian writers of the post-Pushkin generation: the author of the historical dramatic trilogy on Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor, and Tsar Boris that is still considered the high-water mark of Russian historical drama; the lyric poet whose romances Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Rakhmaninov all set to music; the gothic novelist who gave Russia its first literary vampire; and, with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, the inventor of Kozma Prutkov, the immortal fictional bureaucrat-poet whose pompous aphorisms still circulate in Russian as proverbs. The temperament that produced all of this can pull a careless reader toward EIE (because of the historical drama) or IEI (because of the lyric poetry and the late withdrawal). The base is IEE, and the slight IEI accent colors a few specific registers without governing the whole.

What establishes the IEE core is the contactable sociability that runs across nearly his entire adult life. "Throughout the 1840s, Tolstoy led a busy high society life, full of pleasure trips, salon parties and balls, hunting sprees, and fleeting romances", Wikipedia notes. A decade of that, by every account, was not the EIE's projective social performance, but the natural good company of a man who genuinely enjoyed being in rooms with other people. He was quick verbally, fond of jokes, comfortable in the salon and at the hunt, easy with peers and subordinates. Kozma Prutkov is the pure expression of this side of him — an absurdist comic creation, sustained over decades, full of nonsense deepities and pompous bureaucratic verses played for laughs. The 1851 Fantasia, with the dozen small dogs running about on stage (the titular character herself, Fantasia, is also a dog), was a vaudeville absurdity that parodied the empty nature of romantic comedies on the Russian stage. Tolstoy's satire is not the EIE's sharp, even apocalyptic edge against its targets; it is more like watching the bureaucratic-poetic Prutkovs of the world being themselves, with the writer more enjoying their absurdity rather than condemning it.

The cosmopolitan polymathy reinforces the picture. He spoke French, German, and English fluently at six; learned Italian later; took the Grand Tour of Italy and Germany as a child and met Goethe in Weimar; absorbed Italian Renaissance painting and German Romanticism without strain; translated Goethe ballads in his late period; crossed effortlessly between Russian folkloric material, Slavic gothic, Walter Scott-style historical noves, Shakespearean dramas, religious-mystical hagiography (Ioann Damaskin), and bureaucratic satire without specializing in any of these genres. This is the IEE breadth — the easy movement across heterogeneous domains, the unsystematic but voracious absorption of anything interesting from anywhere. The pure EIE temperament is more focused-mythic; the pure IEI is more intensively-immersed in a smaller emotional territory; only IEE actually roams this widely without losing intensity in any one place.

The most diagnostic feature, though, is the lifelong refusal to be enlisted in any ideological camp. He published in the leftist Sovremennik and broke with them; drifted toward the Slavophiles and broke with Aksakov and Khomyakov too; was personally close to Alexander II and used that closeness mostly to defend persecuted writers against the Tsar's secret police; refused, despite the political pressures of the post-1855 period, to firmly sign on with anyone. Wikipedia notes: "Tolstoy insisted on the artist's total independence from ideology and politics, and felt himself totally free to criticize and mock authorities, a trait that snubbed many people in high places." This is the IEE stance — tolerant of differing positions without being captured by any of them, willing to keep civil terms with people across political breaks (relatively low social-political disgust). EIE's relationship to ideology is much more enthusiastic and switching-but-always-aligned; IEE's is amused detachment combined with genuine friendliness toward ideologues of all stripes. 

The same instinct shaped his behavior toward people in his charge. When the Crimean War broke out in 1855, Tolstoy tried to organize his own militia, bought ammunition, and explored the Baltic coastline planning operations. The militia project failed; he joined the Royal Rifle Regiment as a major; the regiment got as far as Odessa before typhoid killed a thousand of his men and nearly killed him. Logical organization was clearly not his forte. However, even in this he behaved as if his welfare and other people's welfare were not very different problems.

The Sophia Miller relationship runs on the same temperament. Tolstoy met her at a Bolshoy Theater masquerade in 1851. She was the wife of a cavalry colonel and, on every account, an extraordinary person. He referred to her as his harshest and most objective critic and the best friend he'd ever had. That is the IEE pattern — falling for the actual person as a friend-and-companion rather than as a mythic-symbolic figure. IEI romantic devotion has a more idealizing-projective character (more similar to Tolstoy's version of Don Juan story, with one of the more sympathetic versions of the archetype); what Tolstoy felt for Sophia was love of a real woman who was also his best reader.

His poetics work the same way. He used "imperfect" rhymes deliberately, defended them as analogous to the slight imperfections of the Venetian school against Raphael's precision, and prized the improvisational tone — what the critic Yampolsky called "an impression of thoughts being put to paper exactly in the order they appear." The reader is being invited in, not held at a careful distance. That openness is what made his lyrics so easy for so many composers and so many later poets to enter and finish in their own way. 

Maybe he had a small IEI accent — the melancholic-atmospheric note Tolstoy could strike when he wanted to. The same accent is responsible for the gothic-supernatural fiction, which works because it fuses IEE narrative inventiveness with an IEI-style willingness to inhabit interior dread from inside. The accent also partially accounts for the chronic illnesses (although this itself would make any type more depressed), the regular morphine from spring 1875, and the death from a self-administered overdose in September of that year. 

The historical drama trilogy is the feature most likely to pull readers toward an EIE reading, and it doesn't quite require one. He wrote three full historical tragedies in Shakespearean blank verse on the most turbulent period of Russian dynastic history, and the theory behind the project — art as "a mystic link between the human world and the higher spheres where 'eternal ideas dwell'" — has an EIE register. But the handling of the material is more IEE than EIE. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, the best play of all three, is a study of a kind and weak ruler trying to do good in a position that demanded harder qualities, and the play's sympathies are clearly with him against the more competent and ruthless people that surround him. IEE is the type that finds a kind weak king sympathetic and worth a play. He took a great EIE-shaped subject and wrote it from an IEE-shaped sensibility.

It's worthy of note that regardless of who the historical Boris Godunov was, Tolstoy's Boris, as the main anti-hero/anti-villain character of the whole trilogy, is quite a clear LIE. In the late scenes of The Death of Ivan the Terrible, while the boyars are still maneuvering for status and the tsar is dying in increasingly grotesque visions, Godunov is already quickly calculating how the state will need to be held together, what alliances will have to be made, and on what timeline. He is the only figure on stage with a long-horizon model of the political situation. In Tsar Fyodor, he is the indispensable regent behind a kindly but useless monarch, the man who keeps the actual machinery running. By Tsar Boris he is on the throne himself and discovers, in the LIE register, that sometimes, competence and pragmatic vision are not, in fact, enough. The tragedy is precisely that the LIE virtues — efficiency, calculation, forward planning, willingness to be ruthless for a future return — turn out to be insufficient against forces his temperament initially couldn't quite take seriously. Tolstoy gives each of the three central rulers at least a somewhat sympathetic interior even when their actions are catastrophic. Ivan gets the genuine spiritual terror underneath the cruelty, Fyodor gets the dignified pathos of the kind weak king, Godunov gets the modernizing pragmatist trying to drag a recalcitrant country forward. Quite characteristic of IEE ability to look at a person's inherent character from all point of view.

He wrote to Sophia, in the middle of all of it: "You cannot imagine what a storm of rhymes rages in me, what waves of poetry are sweeping through me, longing to break free." The storm produced the trilogy, the romances, the pompous bureaucratic poet Kozma Prutkov, Don Juan, and the line of Russian poetry that followed. He had said exactly what art was for, and he had spent a mostly-cheerful sixty years doing it.