1
An Ambitious Orphan
In May 1878, finishing Anna Karenina and in the early stages of the deepest spiritual crisis he had ever experienced, Tolstoy started drafting his memoirs, which he provisionally called My Life. In one day he wrote several disjointed fragments describing his impressions of certain events from his childhood. He did not complete his memoirs and never returned to these fragments, the first of which was as follows:
Here are my first recollections. I am bound up, I want to free my hands and I cannot do it. I shout and weep and my cries are unpleasant to me, but I cannot stop. There were people bent over me, I do not remember who they were, and it all happened in semi-darkness, but I do remember that there were two of them, they are worried by my cries, but do not unbind me, which I want them to do, and therefore I cry even louder. It seems that for them it is necessary [that I must be bound up], while I know that it is not necessary, and I want to prove it to them and I indulge in crying that repels me, but which is uncontainable. I feel the injustice and cruelty not of people, because they pity me, but of fate and pity for myself. I do not know and shall never know what this was about . . . but it is certain that this was the first and the most powerful impression of my life. And what is memorable is not my cries, or my suffering, but the complex, contradictory nature of the impression. I want freedom, it won’t harm anyone and yet they keep torturing me. They pity me and they tie me up, and I, who needs everything, am weak and they are strong. (CW, XXIII, pp. 469–70)
This episode does not provide material for psychoanalytic speculation. Tolstoy’s ‘first and most powerful impression’ was not extracted from the depths of his subconscious on an analyst’s couch. It is a conscious (re)construction carried out by a fifty-year-old writer. Tolstoy describes himself as a baby, but ‘remembers’ the subtlety and complexity of his lived experience, and the most powerful part of this experience is the feeling of being bound up and unfree. Tolstoy pays special attention to the love and pity shown by the adults towards him, describing their attitude as a kind of cruelty born of care. The infant Tolstoy strives to free himself from this well-intentioned despotism, but is too weak to overcome the power of those who show their concern by not allowing him to move. This struggle was to permeate the author’s entire life right up until his final moments.
A conventional biography usually starts with the family origins of its subject. In the case of Leo (Lev Nikolaevich) Tolstoy, this is both essential and redundant. It is redundant because one of Tolstoy’s greatest novels, War and Peace, provides such a powerful and memorable description of the writer’s ancestors that any reality is bound to pale in comparison. It is essential because Tolstoy’s family history informs the novel and in many ways defines his biography. In what is a hallmark of his writing, Tolstoy blurs the line between fiction and ‘real life’ by marginally changing the names of the characters. Thus the Volkonskys, the real family name of Tolstoy’s mother, transform into the Bolkonskys. The Volkonskys were one of the most aristocratic families of the land, stemming from the ninth-century Varangian prince Rurik, semi-legendary founder of Russian statehood. The wordplay on Tolstoy’s paternal family name is a bit more complex. In an early draft of War and Peace it appears as Tolstov and in later drafts changed into Prostov (‘The Simple one’ in Russian), but this name smacked too much of an eighteenth-century moralistic comedy. By omitting the first letter, Tolstoy arrived at Rostov, a surname sounding like the ancient Russian town, thus underlining the national roots of the family. This change notwithstanding, simplicity remains a fundamental feature of the Rostovs’ way of life in the novel.
Tolstoy in 1878–9.
To a modern reader, the title of count sits oddly with simple habits and democratic origin. However, this title had been awarded to Russian nobles only since the beginning of the eighteenth century and thus pointed to a relatively short family history. In fact, the marriage between Tolstoy’s parents – and the novel’s principal characters – was a misalliance: Princess Maria Volkonsky was a rich heiress; her husband, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, was on the brink of ruin, thanks to his father’s profligate lifestyle. She married at the age of 32, in 1822, a year after the death of her father. By the standards of her time she was already a spinster and, according to Tolstoy, ‘not good looking’. Her husband was four years her junior. In the novel Tolstoy does not conceal the practical reasons behind the marriage but these do not obscure the mutual love in a marriage made in Heaven. We don’t know whether the family life of Tolstoy’s parents resembled the blissful union portrayed in the Epilogue to War and Peace. Even if Tolstoy’s father’s reputation as a womanizer is unfair, we know that he spent most of the time away from home settling endless legal disputes in court or hunting in nearby forests. His wife, meanwhile, had built a special gazebo in the park where she would wait for her missing husband.
For Tolstoy, writing in his unfinished memoirs, his mother was a perfect wife who did not actually love her husband. Her heart fully belonged to her children, especially the eldest, Nikolai, and Leo, her fourth and youngest son. Born on 28 August 1828, Leo was barely two years old when his mother died a few months after the birth of her only daughter Maria.
This early loss had a profound impact on Tolstoy. He worshipped the memory of his mother and made a point of spending time in her favourite corner of the family garden. He would later insist that his wife deliver their children on the same sofa on which he was born and, most importantly, forever longed for the maternal love of which he had been deprived. Tolstoy could not remember his mother and was glad that no portraits of her were preserved by the family, except for a miniature silhouette cut from black paper. His ideal spiritual image of the person he loved most would thus remain untainted by material artefacts. Fighting temptations ‘in the middle period of his life’, Tolstoy recalled that he prayed to the soul of his mother and the prayers always helped.
In 1906, aged 77, Tolstoy wrote in his diary:
Was in the dull miserable state all day. By evening, this state changed to one of emotion – the desire for affection – for love. I felt as in childhood like clinging to a loving pitying creature, and weeping emotionally and being comforted. But who is the creature I could cling to like that. I ran through all the people I love – nobody would do. Who could I cling to? I wanted to be young again and cling to my mother as I imagine her to have been. Yes, yes, my dear mother whom I never called by this name since I could not talk. Yes, she is my highest conception of pure love – not the cold and divine, but a warm, earthly, maternal love. This is what attracts my better, weary soul. Mother dear, caress me. All this is stupid, but it is true. (Ds, pp. 395–6)
An acute awareness of his status as an orphan haunted Tolstoy throughout his life. This was aggravated by the early death of his father in June 1837 when Leo was approaching his ninth birthday. The count died suddenly of a stroke during a trip to Tula. There was a suspicion that he had been poisoned by servants. Later Tolstoy said that he never believed these rumours, but was aware of them and must have been deeply affected by the talk of such a crime. These losses most likely contributed to the extreme shyness and sensitivity of Tolstoy, who was known to his relatives as a crybaby. Young Leo was also lagging behind his brothers in studies and was deeply traumatized by his physical unattractiveness. This self-deprecation persisted through his youth: at least until his marriage Tolstoy did not believe that any woman could ever fall in love with such an ugly person as himself – so much for the image of Tolstoy’s blissful happiness as a boy. Yet, while the image may have not been grounded in reality, it was grounded in his literary imagination.
Silhouette of Tolstoy’s mother, 1800s.
The idyllic picture of his early years is most vividly recreated in Childhood, the 1852 novel that brought Tolstoy national literary fame. This exquisite and touching description of the life of an aristocratic boy abounds with autobiographical details and until the present day informs our perception of Tolstoy’s environment, thoughts and feelings in Yasnaya Polyana (‘The Clear Glade’), the family estate near the city of Tula where he spent his formative years. The idyll he describes in Childhood ends with the sudden death of the narrator’s mother. Adolescence and Youth, the next parts of Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy, tell a very different story of psychological difficulties, doubts and hardships.
In Childhood Tolstoy transforms the first and most tragic loss of his life from the early, crushing yet unremembered trauma of a two-year-old into the formative experience of an eleven-year-old boy. This chronological move enables him to portray the joys of childhood that precede the death of the boy’s mother as pure and unmixed with the feelings of deprivation and loneliness that the real Leo experienced from the dawn of his remembered days. The idyllic world of Childhood is as much of a myth as the ideal family described in the Epilogue to War and Peace.
Yasnaya Polyana also remained for Tolstoy mysteriously connected with the vision of universal happiness. Speaking about Tolstoy’s childhood, no biographer ever fails to mention the story of the green stick. During their games, Leo’s elder brother Nikolai would tell his younger siblings that a magic green stick hidden somewhere nearby would make the person lucky enough to find it able to make all humans happy. Little Leo was deeply impressed. He never abandoned his belief in the green stick and the search for it. Several years before his death, he wrote in his memoirs:
as I knew then, that there is the green stick with the inscription that tells us how to destroy all evil in humans and give them the greatest good, I believe now that this is the truth and it will be opened to humans and give them all that it promises. (CW, XXXIV, p. 386)
Around the same time he chose to call an article on his religious opinions ‘The Green Stick’. In his will, Tolstoy also asked to be buried near the place where as a boy he had searched for this treasure.
Numerous female relatives took care of the orphaned siblings. One of them, Tatiana Ergolskaya, usually called Toinette, became for Leo the spirit of Yasnaya Polyana. Brought up as a poor relative in the family of Tolstoy’s grandparents, Toinette was in love with Tolstoy’s father, her second cousin. In an act of self-sacrifice, she had renounced her feelings to allow her beloved Nikolai to marry an heiress. In 1836, a year before his death, hoping to give his children a stepmother who would never leave them, the widowed count proposed to Ergolskaya. She declined, but nonetheless eagerly shouldered the burden of caring for the Tolstoy children. Leo was her clear favourite. Her dubious status in the family is reflected in an unflattering portrait of Sonya’s role in the Rostov household after Nikolai’s marriage in War and Peace. Ergolskaya lived long enough to read the novel, but her reaction to it remains unknown.
Having declined the opportunity to become the children’s stepmother, Ergolskaya also lost the right to be their legal guardian. The sisters of Tolstoy’s father were both considered closer to their nephews. When one aunt, Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in 1841 the children were entrusted to another, Pelageya (Polina) Yushkova, who lived in Kazan. This town on the Volga river, home to one of the six universities in the Russian Empire, seemed a suitable place for the growing children. Kazan was a natural centre for Oriental studies, given that the town and its surrounding region was home to the Volga Tatars, the empire’s largest Muslim minority. After failing to gain admission on his first attempt, Leo was admitted to the Faculty of Oriental Languages when he applied again in 1844.
The main challenges of Tolstoy’s teenage life coincided with the five and a half years he lived in Kazan. First and foremost, he had to handle the conflict between his powerful sexuality and a no less powerful desire for chastity. He knew very well that it was Eros that had ruined the primordial innocence of humanity. In Childhood, Tolstoy describes with the lofty tenderness of an experienced man the emerging erotic feelings of a ten-year-old boy suddenly kissing a girl’s naked shoulder. Expelled from the paradise of early childhood, he must now deal with less touching and delicate emotions.
In Kazan Tolstoy was relatively free from the control of his relatives. Although not rich, he still had money to spend. At the same time, he was extremely shy and unsure of himself, especially in the company of women of his own social standing. Inevitably this combination of factors made him a regular visitor to brothels. Introduced to paid sex by his elder brother at the age of fifteen, Leo would later recall standing weeping by the bed after losing his virginity. This tension between irresistible lust and revulsion, chiefly for his own bestiality, became a recurrent emotional theme, first in his diaries and then in his prose.
Tellingly, it was while being treated for gonorrhoea at the university clinic in 1847 that Tolstoy began the diary he would continue to keep, on and off, for the next sixty years. The most significant interruption coincided with the period he was working on his two main novels. The diary exposes to harsh scrutiny not only the author’s deeds, but his secret thoughts and desires. The level of maniacal self-absorption and self-flagellation to which Tolstoy subjects himself can be shocking to a modern reader. Seeking to live by the highest moral criteria, he sets himself impossible tasks and, time and again, chastises himself for failing to meet them. Reading the diary, one is reminded of Philippe Lejeune’s observation that ‘a diary is rarely a self-portrait, or if it is taken as one, it sometimes seems like a caricature.’1
Tolstoy’s diary does not represent the person we come to know from many of his letters and the memoirs of his friends and family members: charmingly or caustically witty, tenderly, if sometimes awkwardly, caring about the people he loved, actively generous and kind. The most difficult and sometimes unappealing traits of Tolstoy’s personality most strongly reveal themselves in the intimate spheres of his life: the diary and in his relations with his wife. Often these two spheres overlap.
In his first diary entry we can already observe the outline of Tolstoy’s future struggles with his own persona:
I’ve come to see clearly that the disorderly life that the majority of fashionable people take to be a consequence of youth is nothing other than a consequence of the early corruption of the soul . . . Let a man withdraw from society, let him retreat into himself, and his reason will soon cast aside the spectacles which showed him everything in distorted form and his view of things will become so clear that he will be unable to understand how he had not seen it before. Let reason do its work and it will indicate to you your destiny, and will give you rules with which you can confidently enter society . . . Form your reason so that it would be coherent with the whole, the source of everything, and not with the part, i.e. the society of people, then the society as a part won’t have an influence on you. It is easier to write ten volumes of philosophy than to put one single principle into practice. (Ds, p. 4; CW, XLVI, p. 3)
These early and somewhat amusing deliberations already show Tolstoy in miniature – from any occasion, however trivial it may seem, he is ready to derive major conclusions about humankind. He is certain that proper introspection can serve as a clue to the whole of humanity as any individual person is a part of the whole, and that reason alone is sufficient to perform this work. He believes that the truth is self-evident for a person who is independent from the corrupting influence of society. At the same time, he wants both to enter society and to mend it according to his ideas. He is also confident that philosophy is useful only if it serves practical needs and shapes the moral life of a person.
Further entries are written along the same lines. In one of them, the nineteen-year-old Tolstoy sets himself the task of mastering most of the existing sciences and arts, namely law, medicine, agriculture (both theoretical and practical), history, geography, statistics, mathematics, natural sciences, music and painting. In addition to that, he wants to study six languages and to write a dissertation and essays ‘on all the subjects he was going to study’. To give these ambitions an air of relative realism, Tolstoy explains that he wants to explore these fields with different degrees of depth: in music and painting, for example, he aspires to attain only ‘an average degree of perfection’. One of the most important tasks Tolstoy sets himself is ‘to write down rules’. Within several months he drafted rules for developing the physical will, emotional will, rational will, memory, activity and intellectual faculties. The first rule he prescribed to himself was ‘independence from all extraneous circumstances’ and avoidance of ‘the society of women’ (Ds, pp. 6–7). Predictably, he did not succeed in either.
In his studies Tolstoy always excelled at languages; a quarter of a century later the speed with which he learned ancient Greek seemed unbelievable to classical scholars. He did well in Tatar-Turkish (as the language was listed in the curriculum) and in Arabic, both of which he soon forgot, but failed other subjects including Russian history. Reluctant to resit the exams, Tolstoy applied for a transfer to the law faculty, but did not succeed there either. In 1847, when he came of age and entered his inheritance, he resigned from the university without receiving a degree. Fortunately the partition of the family property among his siblings left him with Yasnaya Polyana. Immediately he rushed back to join his aunt Toinette.
All these sporadic impulses, hopes and disappointments clearly reveal the influence of Rousseau. Tolstoy, as he later confessed, worshipped the Genevan thinker and even dreamt of wearing a medallion with Rousseau’s face. He shared Rousseau’s passionate cult of nature and a belief that the original purity of the human being had been spoilt by the artificial demands of society and civilization. Even more important for Tolstoy was Rousseau’s ideal of absolute transparency of the soul and the ensuing practice of incessant self-scrutiny, as well as his restlessness and constant readiness to run away from everything he owned or had achieved. Unlike Rousseau, however, Tolstoy was never a homeless wanderer. Yasnaya Polyana, through the vastness and beauty of its landscapes, through familial lore and strong ties with people of the land, connected him with the history and essence of Russia. Prodigal sons are doomed to leave their paradise behind, but Tolstoy, though he left it many times, always returned to Yasnaya Polyana. After his very last escape and subsequent death, his body was brought back to be buried in his native soil.
For several years Tolstoy oscillated between Yasnaya Polyana, Tula (where, surprisingly for such a born anarchist, he procured a sinecure in the civil service), Moscow and St Petersburg. In the capitals he aspired to learn manners and behaviour that would make him respectable in high society, but as was often the case with Tolstoy, his diary records both a fascination for the aristocratic world and a countervailing revulsion. Much later, describing the corrupt received opinions of his social milieu, Tolstoy wrote that ‘the kind aunt with whom I lived [Ergolskaya], herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: “Rien ne forme un jeune homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut”’ (CW, XXIII, p. 4).
Tolstoy as a teenager, 1840s – the earliest-known drawing of Tolstoy.
Entrance to Yasnaya Polyana, 1892.
Tolstoy confessed that in ‘yielding to the passions’ he felt that the society approved of him. However, most of the dubious habits he acquired, like drinking, feasting and gambling, were more the marks of a hussar than of polished patrician venality. ‘Improving’ liaisons with high-status women evaded Leo. For more than a decade he sought sexual gratification mostly with prostitutes, servants, peasants, Gypsy and Cossack girls. In Youth, the last part of his autobiographical trilogy, we see that ‘les hommes comme il faut’ interested him more than ‘les femmes comme il faut’.
‘I have never been in love with women,’ he wrote in his diary in November 1851:
I have been very often in love with men . . . I fell in love with men before I had any idea of the possibility of pederasty; but even when I knew about it, the possibility of coitus never occurred to me . . . My love for Islavin spoilt the whole of eight months of my life in Petersburg for me . . . I always loved the sort of people who were cool towards me and only took me for what I was worth . . . Beauty always had a lot of influence on my choice; however, there is the case with Dyakov; but I’ll never forget the night we were travelling from Pirogovo, and wrapped up underneath a travelling rug, I wanted to kiss him and cry. There was sensuality in that feeling, but why it took this course it is impossible to decide, because, as I said, my imagination never painted a lubricious picture; on the contrary I have a terrible aversion to all that. (Ds, p. 32)
As in most cases, one can get more insight into Tolstoy’s personality by listening to what he actually says than by attempting to psychoanalyse him. An ideal male, so different socially from the women that aroused his desire, represents a vision of the person the diarist himself painfully and hopelessly aspired to become. Both Tolstoy’s great novels have the same pairing of lead male characters projecting two halves of the authorial alter ego: the good-hearted, passionate but awkward and slightly boorish Pierre and Levin are juxtaposed with the brilliant and polished noblemen Prince Andrei and Vronsky. The latter, typically of their peers, were army officers. Tolstoy’s brother and mentor Nikolai was also doing military service. It was all but inevitable that, at some point, Leo would try to take the same path.
The general view of Yasnaya Polyana, 1897.
Tolstoy’s life in the army falls into two distinct phases: the Caucasus and the Crimea. In April 1851, having lost more at the gambling table than he could afford to repay, Tolstoy followed Nikolai to the Caucasus. For more than two years he was based in the Cossack settlement at Starogladkovskaya, initially as a sort of intern attached to the regiment and then as an artillery officer. During these years he took part in many raids against the Chechens and deeply immersed himself in the exotic Cossack way of life. By the time Tolstoy arrived at the frontier, the war in the Caucasus between the Russian Empire and parts of the indigenous population had been going on for more than thirty years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia had finally managed to prevail over the Ottoman and Persian empires and establish control of the mostly Christian principalities south of the Caucasus Mountains. However, communications with the newly acquired territories were constantly disrupted by rebellious, mostly Islamic, tribes from the mountains.
Russian troops were quartered in the region to keep the local population under control, but the long, porous border forced the authorities to rely upon the military assistance of the Cossacks, the settlers who for generations had combined military service with farming and agricultural activity on communally owned land. For centuries criminals, runaway serfs and those from the margins of society found refuge in the Cossacks’ settlements on the borders of the empire. Fiercely independent, Cossacks were also significantly richer than the peasants in mainland Russia. Many of them, including the inhabitants of Starogladkovskaya, adhered to the Old Belief, an Orthodox confession that had been much persecuted by the official Church since the mid-seventeenth century. Cossack men lived to fight and hunt, leaving many traditionally male preoccupations, including ploughing, planting, herding and reaping, to their women, who were physically strong, morally independent and enjoyed sexual freedom unheard of among Russian lower classes of the time. Many Russian Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century wrote admiringly about the primitive, natural and warrior lifestyle shared by the Cossacks and Caucasian mountain people. Tolstoy, with his escapist temperament and penchant for all that was natural and rebellious, was fascinated by the world he discovered, describing it often in his works. With his new life came an experience that was arguably to affect his writing even more: regular proximity to death.
Death for Tolstoy was an obsession no less powerful than sex. Having first met death so early in his life, Leo could never avoid thinking about it, waiting for it, fearing and desiring it at the same time. For the soldiers, tribesmen and Cossacks he encountered in the Caucasus, death was a routine experience. Now Tolstoy had plenty of opportunity to watch people dying and, perhaps more importantly, to observe how they lived so close to death: braving it, ignoring it as an everyday preoccupation, coping with the loss of those who had spoken to them only a day, an hour, a few minutes before.
Nearly a decade after his experience in the Caucasus, Tolstoy wrote ‘Three Deaths’, a story that compares the death of a noble lady full of resentment, envy and condemnation for those remaining alive, with the death of a peasant fully reconciled with his own mortality, and that of a tree that readily frees its place for new vegetation. The ability of living creatures to accept death is, Tolstoy suggests, inversely related to how strongly they perceive their own uniqueness in the world. Tolstoy passionately wished to develop a peasant-like, if not tree-like, attitude to death and dissolve himself into a universal life that does not differentiate between individual beings, but his habit of painful soul-searching, need for self-assertion and quest for personal greatness were equally strong.
On 29 March 1852, while at Starogladkovskaya, he wrote in his diary:
I am tormented by the pettiness of my life. – I feel that it is because I am petty myself – but I still have the strength to despise myself, and my life. There is something in me that makes me believe that I wasn’t born to be the same as other people . . . I am still tormented by thirst . . . not for fame – I don’t want fame and I despise it – but to have a big influence on people’s happiness and usefulness. Shall I simply die with this hopeless wish? (Ds, p. 40)
From the beginning Tolstoy’s self-reproach was inseparable from his burning ambition. In the Caucasus he regularly exposed this connection in his diary as he began to suspect that he had stumbled upon the green stick of fable. From late August 1851, before he even left for the Caucasus, Tolstoy had secretly begun to work on his first story. A failed student, dissipated landowner and low-ranking officer was discovering himself as a writer.
It was less exceptional in nineteenth-century Russia for a professional writer to emerge from the ranks of the nobility than in the rest of Western Europe. The Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century had forced the nobility to not only change their facial hair, clothes and manners, but to acquire better education suitable for their new European lifestyles. A new educated elite that constituted the Russian nobility embraced and internalized the Petrine reforms, striving to put itself on an equal footing with its European peers. Europeanized Russian nobles not only produced the formidable officer corps that triumphed over Napoleon, but created the unique culture of Russia’s Golden Age.
Still, these remarkable achievements stood on the foundation of serfdom. Only nobles could own land. They enjoyed nearly unlimited power over the peasants living on their estates. This extended to more than just the fruits of their labour. Serfs could be bought, sold, sent to military service or penal institutions, punished physically or financially and their families could be broken up at their owner’s whim. Under Peter the Great and his immediate successors, when state service was mandatory for the nobles, everyone was subject to at least some form of servitude. This changed in 1762 when the nobility was allowed to choose whether to serve or not. This new freedom unleashed the cultural creativity of the most educated scions of the Russian nobility just as the Enlightenment took flight. The new ideas from Europe were starkly opposed to the moral affront of serfdom. As Russia entered the Golden Age, this contrast began to gnaw at the consciences of the nobility’s brightest minds.
Young officers returning from the Napoleonic wars saw themselves as the liberators of Europe. Now more acutely aware of the lack of freedom at home, they started forming conspiratorial groups to liberate Russia. At first they aspired to help Emperor Alexander I overcome the resistance of the conservatives to the belated reforms. Later a core of conspirators started planning a full-scale military coup d’état. In December 1825, after the emperor’s death, rebellious officers brought their regiments to the Palace Square in St Petersburg and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new monarch. After a day of turmoil, the insurrection was dispersed with cannon. Six months later, with no formal trial, five plot leaders were sent to the gallows and dozens more to hard labour and exile in Siberia.
The Decembrists, as the conspirators came to be known, constituted a tiny minority of the nobility but the most aristocratic families were particularly prominent in their ranks. This self-sacrifice by the most privileged members of an emerging society seized the country’s imagination. In the absence of any political representation or moral guidance from a Church that had long been subservient to the state, literature became the single most important channel for shaping and expressing public opinion. In 1820s and ’30s Russia the dawn of the Romantic age with its search for a national spirit strongly reinforced the perception of the writer as a voice speaking on behalf of the nation before the authorities.
The early 1850s was both a difficult and exciting time to start a literary career. Emperor Nicholas I, eager to suppress any hint of dissent after the European revolutions of 1848, had begun a new round of political repression. Among many others, the young Fedor Dostoevsky was arrested, sentenced to death, pardoned on the brink of execution and sent to Siberia. Censorship became exceptionally severe. ‘Why bother’, said one censor surprised at the temerity of authors who persisted in writing, ‘when we have already decided not to allow anything?’2 The reading public, however, shared a feeling that the end of an epoch was approaching and major changes were in the air. New works were eagerly awaited from a cohort of young writers, including the novelists Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Goncharov, the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, whose plays would come to form the backbone of Russian national theatre.
New writers discussed actual social problems, defying outdated Romantic conventions. They gathered around Sovremennik (The Contemporary), a literary magazine started in the 1830s by the poet Alexander Pushkin and later edited by Nikolai Nekrasov, one of the most universally popular poets of his age, who wrote mostly about the hard lives of Russian peasants. The publication in Sovremennik of Tolstoy’s first novel, Childhood, coincided with the death of Nikolai Gogol, the leading writer of the previous generation, and the arrest of Ivan Turgenev, the most prominent voice of a new generation, for his obituary of Gogol. One can hardly imagine a more powerful symbol both of continuity and change.
Tolstoy’s choice of subject-matter for his literary debut was a brilliant move, both artistically and tactically. The vision of childhood as a lost paradise was one of the most powerful myths of Romantic culture, overwhelmed by nostalgia for a golden age of innocence and unity with nature. In the social landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, one could not imagine a better setting for this world of bliss than a nobleman’s country estate. Rousseau had located the utopian world of Clarence in such an estate. Karl Moor, the charismatic hero of Schiller’s The Robbers, is heir to a family castle to which he longs in vain to return. Yet if Schiller, the son of a doctor, can be said to have launched this trope into Romantic literature, it was Tolstoy, as one to the manor born, who would flesh it out with details from a world he knew so intimately well.
Russia was preparing to part with its Golden Age and was feeling nostalgic in advance. Childhood memories could serve as a safe haven under any censorship regime. At the same time they did not provoke animosity among a liberal or even a radical audience because Tolstoy found an innovative approach to this highly traditional topic. At first he intended to write his book as a conventional memoir, but a grown-up memoirist in the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to see the inhuman social fabric that lay beneath the idyll he was describing. Very soon Tolstoy shifted to the reconstruction of the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of a ten-year-old boy, one of the first such endeavours in world literature. Placing his book on the thin borderline between the autobiographical and fictional, he managed to present his personal experience as universal without losing a feeling of total authenticity. Later this technique would become the unmistakable trademark of Tolstoy’s narratives.
Doubts about his potential as a writer tortured Tolstoy throughout work on his first masterpiece. ‘I am doing nothing and thinking about the landlady,’ he complained on 30 May 1852. ‘Have I the talent to compare with modern Russian writers? Decidedly not.’ Two days later his opinion somewhat shifted:
Although there will be spelling mistakes in Childhood it will still be tolerable. My only thought about it is there are worse stories. I’m still not convinced, however, that I lack talent. I think I lack patience, experience and clarity, and there is nothing great about my feelings or my thoughts – I still have doubts, however, about the latter. (Ds, pp. 44–5)
Tolstoy sent the completed novel to Nekrasov accompanied by a letter marked by his characteristic mixture of extreme shyness and thinly veiled arrogance. He included in the envelope money to pay for return delivery in case of rejection and, in case of acceptance, asked for his initials to be used instead of his full name. He agreed in advance to any cuts Nekrasov would like to make, but insisted that his novel should be published ‘without additions and changes’ (TP, I, p. 50). Nekrasov’s reaction was more than obliging. He immediately published Childhood in the next issue of Sovremennik, expressed his interest in the following parts of the book and praised it highly in a letter to Turgenev, who also quickly came to admire the young writer’s talent.
The critics were equally enthusiastic. Reading the reviews in a peasant hut, Tolstoy, as he later told his wife, was ‘strangled by tears of rapture’.3 In his diaries, apart from reproaching himself for idleness, gambling and sensuality, ‘that did not give him a moment’s peace’, Tolstoy recorded his new belief in a ‘brilliant literary career that is open’ to him if he can ‘work hard’ (Ds, p. 56) and abstain from sex. He was to prove right on one score, even if sexual abstinence remained beyond his power. Tolstoy’s work on Boyhood, a continuation of Childhood, was very intensive, but this did not prevent him from feeling a ‘hopeless aversion’ both to his story and to himself. Boyhood, published in Sovremennik in October 1854, was received with nearly the same kind of acclaim as Childhood. The public was eagerly awaiting new work from this already famous author. Tolstoy would not fail to satisfy their expectations. The new work that was to take his fame to a new level would emerge at a different period in his life when he had lived through sea changes in Russian history that would enrich his experience.
In 1853 the ailing emperor, Nicholas I, declared war on Turkey believing that he could realize a long-cherished imperial dream of establishing Russian control over the parts of the Ottoman Empire located in Europe, their Orthodox populations and the straits leading to the Mediterranean. The emperor failed to make allowance for the strength of European opposition to Russian expansion. This allowed Britain and France to forgo their ancient rivalry and back the Turks in a united military coalition. An Anglo-French army invaded the Crimea and besieged Sebastopol, Russia’s main naval port on the Black Sea.
Decaying autocrats hoping to bury their failures beneath a wave of popular enthusiasm will often go to war. The strategy invariably works well at the early stages of the adventure. Russia in the 1850s was no exception. Tolstoy himself was not immune to outbursts of patriotic feeling. When the start of the Crimean War found him in the Caucasus far from the main battlefields, he applied to be transferred and was sent to the Russian army fighting in Romania. Having found out that nothing of real importance was happening there as well, he applied again for a transfer and, in November 1854, joined Russian troops in the Crimea. His first impressions were favourable. He admired the heroic spirit of the common soldiers and junior officers and was certain the enemy would not be able to capture the city. Within two weeks, however, he had changed his mind and became ‘more convinced than before that Russia must either fall or be completely transformed’ (Ds, p. 83). He considered proposing far-reaching military reforms, but then reverted to the activity he knew best.
Tolstoy’s new military experience was different. In the Caucasus, where the Russian army had an overwhelming edge over the tribesmen, both in numbers and weapons, he had participated only in sporadic raids. Mortal danger was always present and real, but could be reduced, if not avoided, by reasonable caution. The actual casualty rate was relatively low. In Sebastopol Russian officers, soldiers and even the ordinary inhabitants of the city had to withstand regular artillery fire from an enemy using the most sophisticated military technology. Death and mutilation were a daily routine and a matter of pure chance. Those who survived on a given day were just more fortunate than those who were killed or maimed. They remained subject to the same kind of dreadful lottery the next day.
By March 1855, two months after the demise of Nicholas I, apparently broken by military setbacks, Tolstoy finished the first of his Sebastopol stories. It was published in Sovremennik in June under the title ‘Sebastopol in December’. Afraid of losing face, the new emperor Alexander II prolonged the war before finally capitulating in 1856. By this time Tolstoy had published two more stories in Sovremennik: ‘Sebastopol in May’ and ‘Sebastopol in August’.
In his stories Tolstoy portrays a city getting on with its regular life at a time of death and destruction. Peasant women sell buns in the crowd on the embankment within immediate reach of the French artillery. A girl jumps across the street trying not to get her pink dress wet near a noble club that had been turned into a hospital for the wounded. Officers are chasing pretty girls and telling dirty stories, knowing that in an hour they will go to the bastion, possibly never to return. Moreover, Tolstoy showed that the sense of duty and self-sacrifice involved in being ready to die for one’s country are compatible with, indeed are actually inseparable from, self-assertion, petty vanity, desire for promotion or the wish to show off to one’s peers.
Siege of Sebastopol, drawing by Vasily Timm, 1854–5.
Developing the technique he had discovered in Childhood, Tolstoy brought together fictional heroes and a more than real narrator who shares with the reader his personal experience and offers a sort of on-site journalistic reportage accompanied by moralistic comments, psychological observations and philosophical conclusions. This combination allowed him to present almost as documentary evidence the inner motives and impulses of his characters, including the last thoughts and feelings of the dying. The reader familiar with War and Peace or any literary description of twentieth-century wars will struggle to see the striking novelty of Tolstoy’s approach, but the mid-nineteenth-century reading public in Russia or anywhere else had never encountered anything remotely similar. In Childhood Tolstoy found the new techniques to speak about a vanishing civilization. In the Sebastopol stories he discovered ways to describe new warfare with its indiscriminate destruction, blurring of the lines between the battlefield and ordinary life, and indifference to the passing of any single individual, whom he portrays as a mere drop in an ocean of death.
Tolstoy’s narrative strategy remained the same throughout the whole cycle, but the actual content of each story depended upon the stages of war. ‘Sebastopol in December’ was devoted to the unassuming and mundane heroism of the defenders of the city. The new emperor who wept over Childhood read the story and immediately ordered that Tolstoy be transferred to a less dangerous place. He believed that ‘the intellectual glory of his country’ required ‘keeping an eye on the life of this young man’.4 The emperor must have been less thrilled by the later Sebastopol stories. ‘Sebastopol in May’, mauled by the censors, witnessed the birth of a passionate pacifism that would later become one of the pillars of Tolstoy’s worldview along with a growing understanding of the utter futility of sacrifices made by the Russian people. The author ended the story with the telling observation that his only ‘ever beautiful hero’ (CW, IV, p. 59) was truth. In ‘Sebastopol in August’ Tolstoy described the final assault of the French army and the death of the main character, the young, charming and naively patriotic sub-officer who bravely and uselessly did not leave the trenches as the enemy advanced. ‘Something in a greatcoat was lying at the place, where Volodya stood’ (CW, IV, p. 116), the narrator wryly remarks. The story ends with the powerless fury of Russian soldiers leaving the city they had selflessly defended for eleven months.
Tolstoy was a brave and diligent, but not very disciplined officer. One of his peers later remembered that he used to leave his brigade without permission on quiet days to participate in clashes elsewhere and he constantly argued with superiors. After the fall of Sebastopol Tolstoy decided that a military career was not for him. The Sebastopol stories turned a young and promising beginner into the acknowledged leader of Russian literature and, by default, public opinion. Literature was to become ‘his chief and only occupation’. He also aspired to ‘literary fame’ (Ds, p. 93). Like Thackeray, whom he admired, Tolstoy saw in vanity a powerful engine of human behaviour ‘even among the people ready to die for their principles’ (CW, IV, p. 24), but described this human weakness without the indignation of the British satirist. Now he had plenty of opportunities to satisfy his own vanity.
In the autumn of 1855 Tolstoy was granted leave and left his brigade and military service forever. On his way to St Petersburg he confessed in his diary that ‘sexuality torments him’ (Ds, p. 93) and repented for having gambled away an exorbitant amount of money. To repay at least part of the debt, he asked his brother to sell the mansion at Yasnaya Polyana, in which he had been born. The house was disassembled and moved to a neighbouring estate. For the remaining 55 years of his life, Tolstoy had to live in one of the two remaining wings of the building.
Tolstoy both enjoyed and loathed his new-found celebrity. In St Petersburg he was welcomed in the most exclusive literary circles and aristocratic salons. Turgenev, the doyen of Russian literature, invited Tolstoy to stay at his house and was ready to go to Yasnaya Polyana to introduce himself. Willing to acclaim this new genius and recognize his pre-eminence, Turgenev nonetheless wanted to guide his younger colleague, believing that this rough diamond needed polish. Tolstoy, however, was the last person to accept any sort of patronage. He was always ready to argue against received wisdom, especially when pronounced by important people and in an authoritative manner. George Sand was worshipped by Russian radicals for her powerful defence of gender equality, but memoirists recall Tolstoy arguing that her female heroines, if they really existed, should be dragged along the streets of St Petersburg. Another time he insisted that only a man who had imbibed pompous nonsense could admire Homer and Shakespeare. Still, these provocative statements represented minor eccentricities compared with his categorical denial that literary people surrounding him in St Petersburg had any convictions at all.
Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana.
The contributors to Sovremennik, gathering at Nekrasov’s house, were incensed, certain not only of the firmness of their convictions, but that these mattered for the future of Russia:
‘Why then do you come to us’, said Turgenev in a choking high voice (which always happened during passionate debates), recalls a memoirist. ‘You don’t belong here. Go to princess Belosel’skaia-Belozerskaia!’
‘Why should I ask you where to go!’ Tolstoy replied. ‘And even if I leave, the idle talk won’t turn into convictions.’5
For Tolstoy convictions were not a matter for intellectual debates or political articles, but a question of life and death; one should be ready to die for them. He was eager to show his new friends that he preferred not only high society but outright debauchery to literary conversations. As usual, he would afterwards reproach himself for wasting his life so uselessly and foolishly:
We went to Pavlovsk. Disgusting! Wenches. Stupid music, wenches, an artificial nightingale, wenches, heat, cigarette smoke, wenches, vodka, cheese, wild shrieks, wenches, wenches, wenches! Everyone tried to pretend they were enjoying themselves, and they liked the wenches, but without success. (Ds, p. 101).
For a while St Petersburg writers were ready to tolerate Tolstoy’s insolence and dissipated way of life out of respect for his genius. A romance between Tolstoy’s married sister and Turgenev did not help relations with the latter, which continued under strain before finally breaking down in 1861. The quarrel lasted for seventeen years and ended only in 1878 in a touching, if somewhat halfhearted, reconciliation.
Another literary acquaintance that Tolstoy made in St Petersburg soon developed into a lifetime friendship. Afanasii Fet, one of Russia’s finest lyrical poets, who described in his memoirs Tolstoy’s quarrels with Turgenev, was the adopted son of a provincial landowner, Afanasii Shenshin. In a bout of passion, the elder Shenshin had abducted a young German woman, Scharlotta Fet, from her first husband when she was already pregnant. Fet’s close friends including Tolstoy believed that his parents were of Jewish origin. Defying all marital laws, Shenshin contrived to marry Scharlotta, but fourteen years later the forgery was discovered and he had to disinherit the boy, depriving him of noble status, property and even his surname. Deeply traumatized, Fet for many years desperately tried to regain his lost name and social position, initially through military service and then with the help of a loveless marriage of convention and skilful estate management. To achieve these goals he abandoned Maria Lazich, the greatest love of his life, who was hopelessly poor. Tragically, Maria died shortly afterwards (we shall never know whether it was an accident or suicide). At the same time Fet wrote poems full of passionate and tender love for this world coupled with a no less powerful longing for the other. Tolstoy could appreciate this odd combination of poetical madness and militant rationality like no one else. However, he never was able or wanted to take both these qualities apart and to confine them to separate spheres of his life. Already in St Petersburg he was envisaging for himself a new social role.
In March 1856 Alexander II told representatives of the Moscow nobility that the abolition of serfdom was inevitable and needed to be implemented from above before the peasants started to liberate themselves by force. The reform would require Herculean efforts. Land in Russia was owned by the nobles, thus transferring it to peasants would amount to an outright confiscation of property, while liberating serfs without land would immediately create millions of rural poor in a state that lacked a bureaucratic infrastructure that could cope with them. The emperor created a secret commission to deal with the issue, but at the same time urged nobles to take the initiative and settle the issue themselves on their own estates.
In May 1856, equally fed up with writers, wenches and aristocrats, Tolstoy went to Yasnaya Polyana to become a model emancipator. He drafted his plan of liberation and hoped to create a solution that could be replicated by many others. Unfortunately, the peasants were unable to believe that a landowner could offer them an honest deal. They expected a better arrangement from the tsar whom they still trusted. Tolstoy, who was sure that his settlement plan was much more generous than anything the crown would ever be able or willing to offer, was frustrated and incensed. The bitter experience of this miscommunication is evoked in his story ‘The Morning of a Landowner’. The young noble protagonist spends the day trying to alleviate the misery of his peasants and ends it with a ‘mixed feeling of tiredness, shame, powerlessness and repentance’ (CW, IV, p. 167).
The writers of Sovremennik: Tolstoy standing on the left, Turgenev sitting second left, 1856.
On 10 January 1857 Tolstoy received a passport and, for the first time in his life, went abroad. He travelled first to Paris, the acknowledged cultural capital of Europe. After staying there for two months, Tolstoy suddenly left ‘for moral reasons’ and rushed to Switzerland to see the landscapes glorified by Rousseau. There he also met his good friend and second cousin once removed, Alexandra Tolstoy, lady-in-waiting to the new empress. Tolstoy had enjoyed visiting Paris theatres and concerts, but his general impressions were negative. He was especially repulsed by and could never forget a public execution he had witnessed. The self-confident and unabashed sexual licence also created an unfavourable impression on him. Alexandra recalled that the first thing her cousin told her was that in the pension where he lived nineteen couples out of 36 (that is, slightly over half) were unmarried (LNT & AAT, p. 12). One can probably doubt the figures – Tolstoy could hardly have been able to perform an exhaustive sociological survey – but the emotion was genuine. These reactions require an explanation. Why should a man who has witnessed hundreds of deaths on the battlefield be so profoundly shocked by the execution of a convicted murderer? Why was a regular customer of brothels so easily scandalized by mere cohabitation?
Both feelings, however, had the same roots. In a letter from Paris to the critic Vasily Botkin, Tolstoy wrote that he had seen ‘many horrible things in war . . . but if a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes, it would not have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant’ (Ls, I, p. 95). It was the formal, procedural character of the killing that he found so disgusting. In the same way, he was accustomed to struggles with his own sexuality and to succumbing to lust, which caused him ‘physical pain’. He could not, however, reconcile himself with what he regarded as normalized vice that was completely content with itself. He could clearly see the first manifestations of an impersonal modern state so different from the despotism and arbitrariness of Russia, and he did not like it. The stay in Paris strongly contributed to Tolstoy’s anarchistic ideology. In the same letter to Botkin, he claimed that ‘any state is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens’ (Ls, I, pp. 95–6) and that he believed in moral, religious and artistic laws that were not mandatory, but not in political ones.
In many respects, this attitude amounted to a total refutation of modernity. In a letter to Turgenev from Switzerland, Tolstoy pleaded with him not to use the railway, which compared to travelling in a carriage was like a brothel compared to love: ‘convenient, but also inhumanly mechanical and deadly monotonous’ (Ls, I, p. 97). He enjoyed walks in the Swiss mountains for the whole summer and planned to continue his Grand Tour to Germany and Italy. Then, in July, he lost all his money at roulette in Baden-Baden and had to cut short his trip. He returned to ‘delightful Yasnaya’ and ‘disgusting Russia’ with its ‘coarse and deceitful life’ (Ds, p. 127). In a letter to Alexandra Tolstoy he complained about the ‘patriarchal barbarism, thievery and lawlessness’ (Ls, I, p. 63) of his motherland.
Tolstoy blamed the government for this disastrous state of affairs. For too long it had ignored the overwhelming majority of the nation. Now, cynically or stupidly, it was promising benefits that could never be delivered. In a speech in 1858 the emperor reproached the nobility for sabotaging the reform. In response, Tolstoy drafted a memo arguing that the liberation of the serfs had been the historic dream of the nobility, the only estate that had sent its ‘martyrs in 25 and 48 to exile and the gallows’. He ended the note by claiming that ‘if, God forbid, the fire of peasant rebellion, with which the tsar was threatening landowners, were ever to break out, the best thing it could do would be to destroy the government’ (CW, V, pp. 268, 270). In a unique display of caution, Tolstoy burned the memorandum ‘without showing it to anyone’ (Ds, p. 136).
Tolstoy searched for ways to take Russia out of patriarchal barbarity without submitting it to the ‘inhumanly mechanistic’ forces of modern civilization. He still believed that the only way to achieve this was to establish some sort of rapprochement between the educated nobles and the peasants, the only two social classes that lived on the land. He started freeing his serfs, but placed his hopes not in the imminent reform, but in educating future generations. Tolstoy started a school for peasant children in one of the two remaining wings of his house. He felt he needed to learn more about current pedagogical practice so, in the summer of 1860, he left the school to the supervision of his assistant and went abroad to study the experiments in primary education. Tolstoy wanted his school to serve as a national model. Upon his return he resumed teaching, but also inaugurated twenty other schools in the neighbouring villages. He founded the pedagogical magazine Yasnaya Polyana and tried to create a National Society for Education.
Tolstoy devised his own pedagogical system based as much on Rousseau’s Emile as on his own ideas about human nature and the needs of peasant children. He completely abandoned the strict discipline prevalent in nineteenth-century schools and never asked pupils to memorize texts by heart, study calligraphy or learn difficult rules. His school barely had any curriculum at all, instead he relied on free communication between teacher and pupils, engaged children in conversations, joint physical work and physical exercises. He read them books, told stories based on events from Russian history, including the Napoleonic wars, and his own rich and varied experience. The basic sciences were often taught out of the classroom through direct observations of nature. Peasant children were often needed for different sorts of work at home and were free to leave school whenever necessary. Tolstoy wanted to teach his pupils only the things that had practical or moral importance. Corporal punishment, which was the usual practice of the time, was completely forbidden. The school was also open to girls.
Pupils were more than enthusiastic. Tolstoy’s teaching methods could doubtfully be replicated elsewhere, but such a passionate, charismatic and dedicated teacher and the immediate associates he had personally trained could achieve a lot. In 1862 Tolstoy published his famous article ‘Who should learn how to write from whom – peasant children from us or we from the peasant children?’ He expressed admiration for the instinctive creative genius and learning abilities of his pupils. There was, however, less humility on Tolstoy’s part than the title of the article suggested. The process of learning was mutual. To produce writing of such artlessness and simplicity that the great writer was eager to emulate, the peasant children had first to acquire from him not only basic literacy, but the power of imagination, intellectual curiosity and a desire to express themselves. This was exactly the type of communication and trust that Tolstoy the emancipator failed to build with their parents. In one of his pedagogical conversations with his pupils he half jokingly, half seriously, discussed his own wish to renounce his status of a landowner and to start working on the land. Initially incredulous, the children finally started believing their teacher really meant it.
Fascinated by the idea of a miraculous transformation of a barin (landowner) into a muzhik (peasant), children began discussing the prospect of Tolstoy marrying a peasant girl. They understood well that such an outrageous change of social status implied an equally improbable family arrangement. Tolstoy readily engaged in this ridiculous discussion. He was ‘smiling, asking questions, writing something in his notebook’6 and obviously learning from peasant children ‘how to write’. The whole story they were collectively conceiving was strikingly close to some of his literary designs.
Since 1853 Tolstoy had constantly been returning to a story, later known as The Cossacks, dedicated to the part of his life he had not yet transformed into artistic work. The plot was typical of Romantic colonial literature: a young aristocratic officer, whose name Tolstoy changed several times, disappointed with the shallow life of high society, falls in love with a beautiful Cossack girl, or in some versions, a married woman, whose name, Marianna, did not change from the first draft to the last. Tolstoy presents this strong and blatantly erotic passion as an expression of his character’s desire to change his life forever and share the simple, violent and natural life of a Cossack. The outcome of this endeavour was not clear to the author: in some versions the officer fell out of love with Marianna after seducing her, in others he happily married her. Tolstoy was also experimenting with the language, contrasting the sophisticated psychologically nuanced style of the officer’s letters to his friend in St Petersburg with the particularity and directness of Cossack speech.
In parallel with his work on The Cossacks, Tolstoy was also working on an idyllic epic about peasant life in mainland Russia that also revolved around a powerful and sexually attractive woman. The language in these unfinished stories or fragments, provisionally entitled The Idyll and Tikhon and Malanya, is much more thoroughly stylized than in the drafts of The Cossacks, since there is no repentant noble to serve as a narrator. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s loving and idealizing gaze can be perceived in the way he exoticizes peasant life with the detached admiration of an outsider.
These drafts evoke one of the strongest erotic infatuations of Tolstoy’s life, his affair with a married peasant, Aksinya Bazykina. Tolstoy regularly mentions Aksinya in his diaries for 1858–60 with the usual admixture of frenzied desire and revulsion, but the entries also record a fixation on the same person that was much less usual. Thirty years later, in a completely different period of his life, he recalled this passion in a story with a revealing title, ‘The Devil’. This emotional colouring was clearly present in the affair from the very beginning, but at the same time Tolstoy recorded different feelings in his diary:
I am a fool. A beast. Her neck is red with the sun . . . I am in love as never before in my life. I’ve no other thoughts. I am tormented . . . Had Aksinya, but I am repelled by her . . . Aksinya I recall only with revulsion – her shoulders . . . Continue to see Aksinya exclusively . . . She was nowhere about. I looked for her. It’s no longer the feeling of a stag, but of a husband for a wife. It’s strange. I try to reawaken my former feeling of surfeit and I can’t. (Ds, pp. 134–5, 139; CW, XLVIII, p. 25)
Tolstoy’s female characters based on Aksinya totally lack a satanic dimension. Both Malanya and Marianna are inherently chaste, in spite of their sex appeal, liveliness and playfulness. Their seductive power is morally redeemed because it is rooted in the primordial simplicity of the world the author longed to join.
In any case, Tolstoy was unable to complete these works. His preoccupation with taking writing lessons from peasant children betrayed deep dissatisfaction with the course of his own literary activity. He regarded all his new stories like ‘Albert’ and ‘Lucerne’, discussing the inevitable misery and loneliness of a true artist, or the moralistic tale ‘Three Deaths’, or ‘Family Happiness’, where a young woman recalls her romance, conflict and reconciliation with her husband, as outright failures and even ‘abominations’ that he only sent to the magazines for economic reasons. After ‘Family Happiness’ appeared in 1859 he stopped publishing and did his best to conceal from his literary friends that he was writing at all.
Friends, publishers and critics were desperate. Both Turgenev and Fet urged him to resume writing. Nekrasov tried to convince him that he possessed everything needed to write ‘good – simple, calm and clear stories’, not understanding that this is exactly what Tolstoy was reluctant to do. When the critic Alexander Druzhinin, who published the magazine Biblioteka dlia chtenia (Library for Reading), asked Tolstoy for new prose for his magazine, Tolstoy responded that he lacked ‘the content’ that ‘demands to be released and gives audacity, pride and power’ (TP, I, p. 289). He felt ashamed at the age of 31 ‘to write stories, which are very nice and pleasant to read’ (Ls, I, p. 129). He left Russia in 1860, insisting that he had renounced literature and was interested only in methods for teaching in popular schools. However, during this second ‘educational’ trip he started to believe that he had finally discovered the content that he needed.
The rapid changes in the social fabric of Europe that were taking place in the nineteenth century dramatically increased the demand for formal education. An individual could no longer assume he would lead the same life as his parents. The children of the working classes could not rely on the practical training they received from their families. New types of schools were proliferating and new pedagogical ideas being tested. Tolstoy, who was convinced that teaching was his lifelong vocation, was anxious to get first-hand information on the process. The practices he observed left him profoundly disappointed since the European schools he visited were using the same disciplinary practices he loathed at home.
He had another much more personal and traumatic reason for the trip. His eldest brother Nikolai, who since their childhood had served as a guide, mentor and role model for the young Leo, was slowly dying from consumption and the doctors demanded a change of climate. They went initially to the German resort of Bad Soden and then to the south of France, accompanied by their sister Maria and her children. Maria had her share of troubles, her marriage collapsed and her relations with Turgenev went nowhere.
Tolstoy had witnessed people dying and had lost loved ones, but this time he had to experience both. His brother Dmitry also died from consumption in 1856, but Leo was not present at his deathbed and Dmitry never was as close to him as Nikolai. Three weeks after Nikolai’s death Tolstoy wrote to Fet that, while everyone was amazed how quietly his brother had passed away, he was the only one to understand how excruciating it was, as not a single one of the dying man’s feelings had escaped him:
He did not say that he felt the death approaching, but I know he followed its every step and surely knew what still remained to him of life. A few minutes before he died, he dozed off, then suddenly came to and whispered in horror: ‘why, what is that?’ He had seen it – this absorption of the self in nothingness. (Ls, I, p. 141)
The presence of death turned life into an agonizing wait. Tolstoy had acutely felt, perhaps as never before, the pointlessness of existence. At the same time he was fascinated by the mystery of death. In his letter to Sergei, his only brother still alive, he recorded the astonishing impression of beauty and calm on the face of their dead brother released from the terrible suffering of his final days.
From the south of France Tolstoy went to Rome and Florence. Italy had been on the itinerary of his 1857 tour, but he had failed to make it there because of self-inflicted financial problems. In 1860 he was drawn to Italy not so much by its tourist attractions, but by his desire to meet Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a distant relative and a former Decembrist. The ‘martyrs of 1825’, who had sacrificed their privileged positions, families and properties to liberate the serfs, interested Tolstoy through his entire life. In 1895, when the famous painter Ilya Repin asked him to suggest a theme for a historical painting, Tolstoy suggested the five leaders of the uprising being led to the gallows. After Alexander II granted amnesty to the Decembrists in 1856, he began to contemplate a story or novel about them.
One could barely imagine a historical character better suited to Tolstoy’s interests than Volkonsky. A rich aristocrat who owned more than 2,000 serfs, a decorated hero of the Napoleonic wars and a full general, Volkonsky had renounced his dissipated way of life to join the Decembrist conspiracy. Shortly before his arrest he had married Maria Raevskaya, a renowned beauty celebrated by Pushkin, who then followed her husband to Siberia. Having served nearly ten years of hard labour, Volkonsky settled in a remote village where he became a highly successful farmer on the land allotted to him. Later allowed to live in the provincial city of Irkutsk, he preferred the company of merchants and peasants to local high society. He was also deeply eccentric and prone to passionate mystic religiosity.
Trying to recover from the depression that overcame him after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy started to work on The Decembrists, a novel describing the return of an amnestied exile to Moscow in 1856 with his wife and two children. He wanted to contrast the moral vigour of an old man who had experienced terrible hardships with the vanity of Moscow liberal salons, with their empty talk about the problems of the day. He wanted to write about people who remained loyal to their convictions in the face of adversity and proved it with their lives. Both psychologically and linguistically, it was easier for Tolstoy to identify with an old eccentric aristocrat than with peasants or Cossacks. On 16 October 1860, one month after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, ‘The one way to live is to work’ (Ds, p. 142). A month or two later he met Volkonsky and by February 1861 he was able to read three draft chapters of his novel to Turgenev in Paris.
Pleased to see Tolstoy returning to literature, Turgenev enjoyed the chapters. Most likely, he did not see that the new work was directed against him and his literary environment. Three months later, when the two writers met at Fet’s house in Russia, Turgenev proudly told his friends that his natural daughter herself repaired the clothing of beggars. Tolstoy chose not to conceal that he found this repulsive and theatrical. Turgenev promised to ‘punch him in the face’ (Ls, I, p. 150). The quarrel ended with a formal challenge to a duel that, happily for Russian literature, never took place. Relations between the writers, however, were broken, as Tolstoy wrote to Fet in January 1862: ‘Turgenev is a scoundrel who needs thrashing’ (Ls, I, p. 152).
Before heading to Russia, Tolstoy visited London and Brussels. In London he conversed with the political exile and revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen, who was editing the newspaper Bell and the magazine Polar Star, which were smuggled into Russia. The title Polar Star was taken from the Decembrist almanac of the 1820s. In it, Herzen published a great deal of historical material about the Decembrists and chapters from his huge autobiography My Past and Thoughts, where he claimed that his political awakening happened when, at thirteen years old in 1826, he had for the first time heard about the rebels and made the oath to revenge them.
Tolstoy’s political views were different from Herzen’s. Their perception of the Decembrists also differed a lot, but the fascination with the heroic self-sacrifice was equally strong. Tolstoy intended to discuss his future novel with the famous exile, but for unknown reasons, never did. He only wrote about his novel in a letter to Herzen sent from Brussels on 14 March 1861. In the same letter, Tolstoy asked whether Herzen had already read the proclamation abolishing serfdom that had finally been issued in Russia on 19 February 1861. Produced after five years of fierce debates, feuds and conflicts among different high-ranking courtiers and bureaucrats, clans and interest groups, this was a muddled compromise. Tolstoy was predictably disappointed. As he put it, ‘the peasants won’t understand a word, and we won’t believe a word’ (Ls, I, p. 145). Still, he could not fail to grasp that the world around him had irrevocably changed.
Tensions in the literary world were already running high before the proclamation. In the late 1850s the leading writers affiliated to Sovremennik had left the magazine, led by Turgenev, because they were dismayed by the powerful position that had been gained by the magazine’s in-house critics, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov. These sons of priests, former seminarians, militant atheists and political radicals were challenging the long-established monopoly of the educated liberal nobility in Russian social, cultural and literary life. Nekrasov, a noble himself, took the part of the critics both because of his political sympathies and an astute understanding of the market. In a time of turmoil and loosening of censorship, the direct statements of Sovremennik’s critics defined the spirit of the magazine and excited the readers even more than the most exquisite novels.
Tolstoy had severed his exclusive publishing agreement with Sovremennik earlier. When he entered the literary world, Chernyshevsky had welcomed Youth and Boyhood for their subtlety of psychological analysis and coined the term ‘dialectics of the soul’, which became a catchword for Tolstoy’s style. Still, his attitude to Tolstoy betrayed the condescending arrogance of a hard-working professional intellectual towards an aristocratic dilettante. Tolstoy’s reaction was equally arrogant, but much more emotional. In one of his letters to Nekrasov, he called Chernyshevsky a ‘gentleman who smells of lice’ (Ls, I, p. 59). At the same time, his attitude towards noble liberals was hardly more generous. Their compassion for the plight of the poor seemed to him like the mending of a beggar’s clothes by an elegant noble girl under the guidance of an English governess. Returning to Russia in the aftermath of the liberation of serfs, he felt it necessary to settle scores.
Tolstoy’s reputation as a raw genius, together with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, provoked many highly intelligent people to try to educate him. In the 1850s Boris Chicherin, the prominent historian and legal thinker, was arguably the most powerful mind to take on this impossible task. In a letter to Tolstoy written in April 1861, Chicherin declared that he was finishing an article about the abolition of serfdom and chided Tolstoy for hiding himself from the major problems of his time behind the petty preoccupations of teaching illiterate children. On his way home, Tolstoy responded from Dresden:
You regard convictions acquired not by meticulously following a course, but through the sufferings of the whole life and the most passionate quest for truth that is possible for a human being, as the exaltation of self-love and paucity of thought . . . You find it strange to teach dirty children. I can’t understand how someone, if he respects himself, can write an article. Can you say in an article one millionth of what you know and what should be said, or anything new, or any thought that would be just, truly just. (CW, LX, p. 380)
Whatever one thinks about Tolstoy’s pedagogical pursuits, they were highly successful. In the country, where peasants were almost universally illiterate, their children did not have much choice. The peasants anticipating the coming changes were eager to send their children to schools. The rapidly multiplying numbers of young graduates were willing to teach and the pupils were interested in learning. Tolstoy brought to this enterprise his usual diligence and energy. Having issued the first edition of his magazine Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote a letter to Chernyshevsky asking him to review it in Sovremennik, wanting to disseminate his ideas among the readers of the hugely more popular publication.
Chernyshevsky reacted in an article written with his characteristic sense of papal infallibility. He praised Tolstoy for his good intentions, but was profoundly sceptical about the usefulness of such an unsystematic way of teaching. Tolstoy claimed that the educated people do not understand what lower classes need and thus can have no idea what and how to teach them. In response, Chernyshevsky advised him to go first to university and find out what every teacher needed to know.
Conservatives were no less appalled by what they regarded as a dangerous effort to bring millions of people out from under the control of the establishment during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. For several months Tolstoy served in the newly instituted role of civic arbiter, trying to reconcile the interests of the landowners and peasants in the conflicts that were inevitably emerging as the process of reform was being implemented. He coped with this far less well than he had as a teacher. The peasants usually obstinately refused to hear his arguments, which they probably could not understand, while the nobles hated him intensely. In April 1862 Tolstoy resigned from the office citing health reasons. He also started to feel that he could not fully devote himself to his teaching duties.
The letter to Chicherin shows Tolstoy’s preoccupation not only with teaching, but with the question of what actually could or could not be said in words, and what kind of words can express truth. In his magazine, Tolstoy recorded conversations with children about the meaning of art, about the nature of the state and the law, about Russian history and the Napoleonic wars. These descriptions of the opening of young minds to the complexity of the world, their inherent wisdom and inquisitiveness, their different characters and changing attitude to the knowledge they acquired are among the very best pages written by Tolstoy, at least before he started work on his great novels. Knowing Tolstoy’s characteristic blend of documentary effect and artistic idealization, one can only wonder what was actually happening during these lessons.
He was again full of literary plans. During his European journey he wrote ‘Polikushka’, a morbid story about the recruit draft in a village, the destructive force of money and the immense evil produced by a self-righteous and sentimental landlady who believes she is entitled to improve the morality of her peasants. Tolstoy was also working on The Decembrists, The Cossacks and the village idyll Tikhon and Malanya. The tide of literary inspiration was on the rise, but drafts were lying uselessly in his drawer and new plans were tormenting his mind. At the same time he was teaching children, hiring students, propagating new teaching methods and had managed to convince everyone around, and most importantly, himself, that he had discovered his true path in teaching. Tolstoy faced an extremely difficult choice. History, as usual taking the side of the winner, intervened to help him.
The years immediately after the abolition of serfdom were tumultuous. Many villages around Russia saw disjointed but violent rebellions by peasants who believed that the nobles were concealing from them the actual will of the tsar. The atmosphere in the capital was also tense and the radical movement was growing. In May 1862 a series of powerful fires, believed to be the result of arson, broke out in St Petersburg. The government started an investigation and a wave of new arrests. In June Chernyshevsky was arrested for instigating a peasant uprising and Sovremennik was temporarily closed. On 6 July 1862 Tolstoy’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana was searched by the secret police following entirely false accusations that he was keeping an illegal printing press. Nothing suspicious was found, but in the process the police turned the house and the whole village upside down, looked in the barn and the pond, scared his old aunt Toinette and his sister Maria to death and, most outrageously, read Tolstoy’s intimate diary and correspondence.
Tolstoy was absent from Yasnaya Polyana when the secret police came. Having lost two brothers to consumption, he had become anxious about his own health and travelled to the Bashkir villages on the Volga to drink kumys, the horse milk popular among the locals, which was believed to have healing effects. He received the news about the raid on his way back and felt himself insulted as an aristocrat, an anarchist and a Russian patriot who devoted his life to healing social divisions instead of inflaming them – and first and foremost as a human being. ‘How extraordinarily lucky it was, that I wasn’t there’, he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘if I had been, I should probably be on trial for murder by now.’
The school could not continue. For a while Tolstoy considered ‘expatriating’. He reassured his cousin that he would not join Herzen and get engaged in his subversive activities:
Herzen has his way and I have mine. Nor shall I hide. I shall loudly proclaim that I am selling my estate in order to leave Russia, where it is impossible to know a minute in advance that they won’t chain you up or flog you together with your sister, your wife, and your mother – I am going away. (Ls, I, pp. 162, 160)
He did not go into self-imposed exile and actually never again left Russia, not even temporarily. The catastrophe relieved him of his obligations and set him free to follow his calling. Tolstoy was certain that to be able to produce work that would finally satisfy him, he needed to change his lifestyle completely. The only way to achieve this radical transformation, he knew, was to get married.
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