The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 131

voice of a Gogolian narrator. Dostoevsky the novelist remained a newspaper man.

Tolstoy’s temperament and experiences were different. So was the “break” in his life. It was triggered by observation and moral outrage rather than by punitive acts against his person, and was coerced, as it were, from the inside. Tolstoy’s long life (1828–1910) also became the stuff of myth – but not because of its events. On the surface, it was the privileged high-born biography of its time. Born a wealthy count on the large Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, he lost his mother at age two (probably the definitive shock of his life). He droppedoutof aprovincialuniversityat ageeighteen,caroused,gambled,wom-anized, compulsively recorded these lapses in his diary and vowed to reform, joined the army and saw action at Sevastopol during the Crimean War (spring 1855), visited Petersburg, toured Western Europe (to pay homage to his beloved Rousseau), caroused, gambled, womanized, all the while reading voraciously in four languages. In 1851, Tolstoy began to write up quasi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood, his wanderings abroad, and his military experiences. In 1862, at age thirty-four, he married, settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, started a family, and began to write in earnest. Like Dostoevsky, he was blessed with a devoted wife who became his indispensable secretary and household manager. Unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy turned away from his wife after his spiritual conversion: she came to represent for him the vanity of fame as well as the persistence of the “animal principle,” and he resented his continuing desire for both. For forty-eight years, Tolstoy lived and worked at Yasnaya Polyana. Five of the couple’s thirteen children died in infancy or early childhood. But overall his was a secure, prosperous, healthy, fertile, productive life. Nothing punitive was imposed on it from the outside; it was a life without sacrificial events or material want. A natural aristocrat and patriarch, Tolstoy did what he wanted to do. He appeared to take for granted the pleasures and pitfalls of abundance: an excess of vigor, wealth, appetite, children, freedom, words. This man to whom everything had been given created an event by taking something away.

Indeed, taking away and giving up could bring only positive gains. To Tolstoy’s uncompromisingly logical mind with its belief in Rousseau’s doctrine of natural good, evil was acquired, unnatural, a byproduct of bad contracts or bad habits. Evil might well disappear once we shed the habits and material burdens that sustain it. As always, Tolstoy began with himself. His own formal “break” with the world of privilege came in 1880, at age fifty-one, at the peak of his fame. He marked it by a highly publicized Confession in which he discredited, one by one, each of the earlier phases in his quest for the meaning of life: self-perfection, pedagogy,fame, family, belief in progress, science, faith through