Syed Nasir Ershad

Last week I said that the point of art is to refute whatever it is we have made up our minds about. Leo Tolstoy, the famous novelist with a tendency to radicalize, wrote a cautionary fable about a meretricious society woman who had an adulterous affair with a worthless cavalry officer and ended up throwing herself under a train. He chose as the novel’s epigraph, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” The novel is a well-known one to all, Anna Karenina, which no one reads in order to savour the Lord’s vengeance. Whatever Tolstoy intended as a moralist, his art tells a different story. Not because Anna is a society lady whom we happen to like despite everything, but because her adultery is costly and affecting, ruinous and exhilarating, beyond the words of preachers.
Art is a thing of flux, or it is nothing. It weighs one line against another, finds the vitality of this colour by presenting it in the company of that, presents lives as they are actually lived, not in the vacuum of a belief system, but in fits and starts of aspiration and failure, forever wanting more and falling short, of use to us as examples only in that they show the standard is of no use to us at all. For this reason, though there are such things as political novels, they only become good novels when their politics surrender to art.
It doesn’t follow from what is said that we should hand over the reins of political power to artists. They would not make a better job of it. But we would all make a better job of thinking about politics – indeed of thinking about anything – if we refused that daisy-chain of affiliation which the ideologist hang around our necks, with the promise that we will never again have to make a decision of our own. Only believe certain “A” and it will follow, as night follows day, that we will believe “B”, and so on through the corrupt alphabet of the doctrinaire. As though a single code can crack the mystery of life, and we can purchase every article of faith we need – anti-colonialism, anti-monarchism, environmentalism, ecofeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism, libertarianism, vegetarianism, absurdism – for the price of one.
Our beliefs should come as a surprise to us, and a shock to one another, just as Anna Karenina’s humanity came as a surprise to Leo Tolstoy and his principles of ascetic renunciation based on the teachings of his religious belief. Otherwise, we are no better than those historians who went on hymning the praises of the Soviet Union in the face of the show trials and the gulags and assassinations, because their systems of thought would not permit them to do otherwise.
They are the dead men, who peg out their postulates on a single line, and cannot start again each day, noting the flowers individually, finding beauty in what will not cohere, and giving thanks for everything that makes a fool of their convictions. We can learn a lot about the art of politics and art of living from Tolstoy’s writings, like Anna Karenina or War and Peace. It acutely observes vanity and folly, sexual jealousy and family relationships. But we can also learn from the life of the master novelist himself who was born in a noble family, led a very fruitful life and died in a rail station. Should we be happy for him? Or sad.