No, not Dracula, or the guy from Sesame Street – my fascination is, and has been – off and on – for about the past 30 years or so, with Count Leo Tolstoy. I was introduced to his work my freshman year at Syracuse, in a World Literature class taught by Tobias Wolff. Toby’s enthusiasm for Tolstoy was overt and infectious. Like all good teachers, he made me want to understand what it was that got him so worked up about this writer.
I don’t remember which was first, but I know we read two of Tolstoy’s works in that class – the novellas, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man. Both were concerned with the theme of death, in very different ways. My inclination is to re-tell both stories, but I’d need to read them again, in order to do the Count any justice.
Suffice it to say, something in his work, and in the little I’ve been able to learn about the man himself, spoke to me on a profound level. His writing connected me with characters from another century, on the other side of the world. They couldn’t have been more different from me, and yet, we were somehow the same. In their relationships with each other, they were exploring the same things I was trying to puzzle through, like how we do or don’t connect, and what it means to love, and be loved.
As a student of arts and sciences, I was able to hone in on empathy and compassion, and the meaning of being a member of the human race. I got steeped in this at Syracuse, not only in my literature classes, but in my side study of theatre, as well. My stepmother, the late Judy Karnes-Fuchs, was fond of saying the world was split up into poets and politicians, and that my father and I were both poets. I think she said this because she thought of herself as one of the politicians, though I think she was more of a poet than she realized.
At any rate, my mother, the late Carol Runyan Fuchs, too, was a poet (quite literally), and I followed in the footsteps of my parents. My liberalism mirrors theirs pretty closely, in that it is unapologetic and based squarely in a sort of democratic, secular humanism. Put in its simplest terms, I return to the imperfect haiku I wrote as a boy of seven: “A dog is made of/love. And so are/you. And so is a bird.”
Tolstoy’s stories are all about love. I finally took on one of his great novels, Anna Karenina, the summer after coming out of the longest relationship of my life up to that point – about eight years. I did some traveling with some friends to Portugal, the U.K. and Rome. I had the book along and devoured it. The novel changed me as I read it; walking with the characters through their lives, I felt as if I was living with them. When I closed the book, I couldn’t talk for a while. I just had to sit quiet for a time.
I’m sorry to say I can’t explain my reaction any better than this. There’s something that happens when you read something that takes you out of your own reality. My mother compared it to listening to a piece of classical music. Toby Wolff described the first time he’d read Raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral as a feeling of levitating above the couch where he'd just finished reading it. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but reading Anna Karenina did give me a sense of connectedness to the family of man, to the human race, that must be close to what people refer to as “spiritual.”
Someday, after my novels have been translated into many languages, read and loved by the multitudes, I’ll take my trip to Yasnaya Polyana, just outside Moscow, and I’ll walk the trails of the Count’s youth, ending at his gravesite. I’ll place a pebble on the tombstone and thank him, before returning home, to my own Clear Meadow, where I hope to find my wife, two boys and their beautiful families waiting for me with open arms and happy hearts.
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