Tolstoy

TOLSTOY

Henri Troy at

The task of writing a biography on a subjcct as monumentally eomplex as Leo Tolstoy demands of an author a combination of talents almost Tol- stoyan in breadth and scope. Henri Troyat is such an author, and this biography of Tolstoy, says Genet in The New Yorker, "is at last the final, complete portrait of the man as he surely was."

Under M. Troyat's guidance, one is led to understand why Tolstoy is considered one of the most bizarre personalities of modern times; why he was regarded by his contemporaries not only as a literary giant but also as a gargantuan enigma. Tolstoy fascinated the people of his own time. In these pages, that fascination is reborn in the story of a man who was the personification of Man at all times, who was in reality two men, "one saint, the other a libertine —clothed in the same skin and constantly at war." Troyat views Tolstoy with affection, respect, and often with amusement. For as a writer, lover, husband, father, and cult leader, this extraordinary human being was a mass of contradictions. He was a man

(Continued on back flap)

Book Club 054 Edition

Tolstoy

Also by I lenri Troyat

(Published in English)

Fiction

ONE MINUS TWO JUDITH MADRIER MOUNTAIN

WHILE THE EARTH ENDURES MY FATHER'S HOUSE THE RED AND THE WHITE STRANGERS ON THE EARTH THE SEED AND THE FRUIT AMELIE IN LOVE AMELIE AND PIERRF. ELIZABETH

TENDER AND VIOLENT ELIZABETH THE ENCOUNTER THE LIGHT OF THE JUST

BROTHERHOOD OF THE RED POPPY THE BARONESS EXTREME FRIENDSHIP

Non-Fiction

FIREBRAND: THE LIFE OF DOSTOYEVSKY PUSHKIN: A BIOGRAPHY

DAILY LIFE IN RUSSIA UNDER THE LAST TSAR

Leo Tolstoy at the time he was writing War and Peace (i868)

by H enri Troyat

Translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux

Doubleday <5> Company, Inc. Garden City, New York

Tolstoi was published in France by Librairic Arthcmc Fayard in 1965

Copyright © 1967 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America

Contents

PART I. THE TERMS OF THE PROBLEM

Before Leo Tolstoy 3

Childhood 14

The World Outside 25

Kazan 41

Wild Oats 55

PART II. A TIME OF VIOLENCE

The Caucasus 77

Sevastopol 109

Introduction to Civilian Life 132

PART III. TRAVEL, ROMANCE AND PEDAGOGY

Discovery of Europe 169

A Few False Starts 187

Second Trip Abroad 205

"Arbiter of the Peace" and Schoolmaster 219

PART IV. SONYA

Betrothal 243

A Terrifying Happiness 266

The Great Labor 286

War and Peace 314

The Night at Arzamas 332

PART V. CONFLICT

Interim 341

Anna Karenina 376

Art and Faith 391

The Horrors of the City; the Appeal of the "Dark Ones" 435

PART VI. Tnis LOATnSOME FLESH . . .

The Temptation of Sainthood 461

The Kreutzer Sonata 488

Famine and Strife 510

Sonya's Folly; What Is Art? 536

PART VII. THE APOSTLE OF NON-VIOLENCE

Resurrection; the Dukhobors 561

Excommunication; the Crimea 584

The Russo-Japanese War 613

PART VIII. THE SOLUTION

Days Pass, and a Birthday 629

Re-enter Chertkov 646

Last Will and Testament 668

Flight 699 Post Mortem 730

APPENDICES

Biographical Notes 735

Notes to the Text 745

Bibliography 768

Index 774

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece. Leo Tolstoy at the time he was working on War and Peace (1868). Novosti Press Agency

Nicholas Tolstoy, father of Leo Tolstoy. Bibliothdque

Nationale, Paris

Tolstoy as a student. Bibliothdque Nationale, Paris

Tolstoy and his three brothers. Pushkin House, Lenin

grad

Leo Tolstoy, 1856. Bibliothdque Nationale, Paris

Sofya Behrs. Schnapp, Institut d'Etudes Slaves, Paris

Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, 1881. Roger Jean Segalat

Tolstoy and his family, 1887

The house at Yasnaya Polyana

Ivan S. Turgenev. Novosti Press Agency

A galley proof of Resurrection, corrected by the author

Tolstoy and his daughter Alexandra. Bibliothdque Na

tionale, Paris

Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Bibliothdque Nationale,

Paris

Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. Bibliothdque Nationale,

Paris

Tolstoy and his daughter Tatyana. Bureau of Soviet

Information, Paris

Tolstoy at his worktablc

Tolstoy telling a story to two of his grandchildren.

Giraudon

Tolstoy, Chertkov and a group of Tolstoyans. Institut

d'Etudes Slaves, Paris

Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, 1908. V. G. Chertkov

Tolstoy playing chess. Novosti Press Agency

Tolstoy on his birthday, 1908. K. Boulla, Novosti Press

Agency

Tolstoy and Dr. Makovitsky. Bureau of Soviet Informa

tion, Paris

Tolstoy as a pilgrim. Nahinias, Institut (TEtudes Slaves,

Paris

The room in which Tolstoy died

Tolstoy's grave at Yasnaya Polyana. V. Malychev, Bureau

of Soviet Information, Paris

PART I

Terms of the Problem

1. Before Leo Tolstoy

Napoleon and Alexander I might exchange sociable letters or recall their ambassadors, promise their peoples peace or plunge them into war, sacrifice thousands of soldiers at Eylau or embrace at Tilsit; but old Prince Nicholas Sergeyevich Volkonsky, who had been living in retirement on his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana since 1800, turned a deaf ear to the clamor of a world in which he 110 longer had a place. No one knew quite why he had suddenly withdrawn from public life. Some of the people who knew him best intimated that he had too much character to remain in the shadow of the throne: years before, he had refused to marry young Varenka Engelhardt, niece—and mistress—of Potemkin, the dreaded favorite of Catherine II, with the comment, "Whatever possessed him to imagine that I would marry his whore?" Yet, despite this arrogant retort, or perhaps because of it, the empress had favored him. Appointed captain in the Guards, he accompanied her to Mogilev to meet Joseph II of Austria. Then, rising swiftly through the ranks, he became ambassador extraordinary to the king of Prussia, commander of the Azov Musketeers, and finally general and military governor of Arkhangelsk, on the shores of the White Sea. This little-to-be-envicd post in a glacial climate had been conferred upon him by Tsar Paul I, who succeeded Catherine the Great, but whether as a mark of special favor or disgrace it was impossible to tell. In any event, Prince Volkonsky wasted no time in coming to blows with his new sovereign, whose splenetic and capricious temperament had already terrified all Russia. When, after some trivial professional incident, he received a letter from the emperor omitting the traditional "I remain your benevolent sovereign" at the bottom of the page, he surmised that his career was at an end and, taking the initiative, quickly asked to be relieved of active duty.

Oncc settled at Yasnaya Polyana,^- this cultivated, dynamic and fiercely proud man resolved never to set foot outside it again. lie liked to say that he needed nobody and nothing and that anyone who wanted to sec him could make the trip, as his estate was only one hundred and thirty miles from Moscow.t Often, as though to convince himself of his own importance, he shut himself up in his sitting room to pore over his family tree. Hie trunk, from which serpentine limbs curlcd out laden with illustrious names, was held by St. Michael, prince of Chernigov. According to this document, the Volkonskys descended from the famous Prince Rurik, one of whose offspring had been given a holding, in the fourteenth century', in the government of Tula on the banks of the Volkona River. One Prince Volkonsky (Fyodor Ivano- vich) died a hero at the battle of Kulikovo, in the war of independence with the Tatars of the Golden Horde; another (Sergey Fyodorovich) was a general in the Seven Years' War, and would have been killed but for a little icon he wore around his neck, which stopped the enemy shell.¹

In recognition of the services rendered to the State by tin's great family, Prince Nicholas Sergeyevich Volkonsky had been granted the privilege of keeping two armed sentinels at Yasnaya Polyana. Day and night they paced back and forth in their shabby uniforms, guns over their left shoulders and shakos askew, between the two little towers of whitewashed brick, topped by buckler-shaped roofs, which flanked the entrance to the estate. Peasants and tradesmen, and even honored guests, were reminded by these soldiers that although the master of the house had withdrawn from the world and was no longer influential at court, all in the government of Tula owed him their respect. His serfs loved and feared him. He gave them advice on cultivating the land and saw that they were decently housed, fed and clothcd; lie shielded them from badgering by the provincial administrative authorities, and organized festivities for them. His severity was proverbial, but his muzhiks were never beaten. At seven o'clock every morning, eight serf-musicians in wide blouses, breeches, white stockings and pumps would assemble in front of their music stands near an ancient elm. A little boy would cry out, "He's awake!" as he went by carrying a pitcher of hot water. Thereupon the orchestra tuned up, and the opening chords of a Haydn symphony rose to the windows of the princely bed-

• The Russian word yasny means "luminous" or "clear" and yasen is an ash tree, so some translate Yasnaya Polyana by "Clear Glade" and others, less poetic but closer to the tnith, bv "Ash Glade."

t One hundred and ninety-six vcrsts. One verst equals 3500 feet, or approximately .66 mile.

chambcr. At the end of their aubade the musicians dispersed, one going off to feed the pigs, another to knit stockings in the servants' hall, a third to spade in the garden.

Visitors to the house, whatever their rank, were made to await the "Grand Levee" in the antechamber. And when the double doors of the dressing room swung open at last, there was not one among the assembly who did not feel something akin to fear at the sight of the little, withered old man tottering stiffly toward him out of the depths of the ages, in a powdered wig above heavy black brows that shaded an expression of sparkling youth. lie speedily dispatched the importunate callers and set off for a walk or drive around his estate, of which he was very proud. The grounds were extensive, overgrown and untidy, with avenues of venerable lime trees, giant lilacs, disheveled ciders, clumps of hazel and birch and dark families of larch. There were four ponds stockcd with carp, a deep stream—the Voronka—an orchard and a hamlet of a dozen isbas. The master's house, built of wood and embellished by a peristyle of columns and a neo-classical pediment, was always freshly painted white. It was flanked by two pavilions. The view from the top of the hill looked out on a calm, rolling landscape crossed by the old Kiev highway, from which the monotonous creak of carts and the cries of drivers on their way to Tula could be heard during the warm season.

Prince Volkonsky loved nature, books, music and rare flowers, which he grew in his greenhouses, and he loathed hunting. He held superstition and inactivity to be the roots of all evil. lie combatted the former by reading the French Encyclopedists, and he warded off the latter by writing his memoirs—which he did standing at a tall desk—by studying mathematics, and by turning snuffboxes—foot on the pedal, hand guiding the gouge and eyes sparkling with glee—in a cloud of pale sawdust and curly shavings.

But most of his time was devoted to the education of his daughter and only child Marya, offspring of his marriage to Princess Katerina Dmitricvna Trubetskoy. The princess died in 1792 when Marya was just two years old.t The prince remained a widower and grew to dote upon this lackluster, ungainly and docile child. However, as he had a horror of emotional effusions he maintained a lofty reserve in her presence. Above all, he wanted her to have a well-furnished mind; in addition to French, which all people of good society preferred to Russian, he accordingly had her learn English, German and Italian. She had taste, played the piano prettily and was interested in the history of art. Lastly,

t Princess Marya Nikolaycvna Volkonsky was bom on November 10, 1790.

her father himself taught her algebra and geometry, with such zest and intensity that she grew faint as he leaned over her, exuding a sour smell of pommadcd decrepitude, and assailed her with questions and reprimands. Well, if he could not make a mathematician of her, at least he could hope to fashion her in his own image, give her self-control and a clear and logical mind and prepare her to sail unruffled through life's stormy seas. From her association with this caustic and domineering old man, Marya learned to hide her feelings; but at heart she remained an emotional girl with a penchant for daydreaming. She cared for the poor, read French novels and thought it natural to devote her existence to the worship of her father. The idea of marriage did not even cross her mind: the prince would never consent to let her go! Besides, she was not pretty. She had her father's heavy brows, and flushed scarlet whenever anything annoyed her. Nobody was interested in her. It was as though the steely glare of Nicholas Sergeyevich Volkonsky repulsed all the young men for twenty miles around. Only one had found favor in his eyes: a son of Prince Sergey Fyodorovich Golitsin and that same Varenka Engelhardt, Potemkin's niece and mistress, whom he had refused to marry in his youth. The two men had become friends late in life and, to consolidate their mutual esteem, resolved to many their children, without consulting them. As a first step family portraits were exchanged, painted by serfs on the two estates. Marya, to whom nobody had ever paid court, was ecstatic at the thought of this mysterious suitor whom she had hardly ever glimpsed, but whose father, begirt with the ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew, and mother, opulent, red-haired and covered with jewels, already presided in effigy over the drawing room at Yasnaya Polyana. When her excitement had reached fever pitch, a dreadful blow fell: her fiancЈ died of typhoid fever. For her, this was a sign from God: she was not to think of any man other than her father. She swallowed her tears as she had been taught, but looked wistfully back to this nascent love, whose purity and melancholy were so reminiscent of the romantic reading of her childhood. Now, imprisoned in her remote province, she knew she was destined to die an old maid and tried not to let the fact make her too unhappy. After all, life at Yasnaya Polyana was very pleasant. Her father had given her two young companions to entertain her. She preferred Mile. Louise Ildnissienne,® a mischievous, lively young Frenchwoman but, "I manage very well with both of them," she wrote. "I play music, giggle and frolic about with one, and talk of noble feel-

• Mile. Bouricnne, in War and Peace.

ings and deplore frivolity with the other; and both of them are terribly fond of me."²

Sometimes, wearying of the cooing of these turtledoves, Marya would slip across to the outbuildings to talk to the passing pilgrims. They stopped off there to eat and sleep, unknown to the prince, who was reputed to have no patience with visionary vagabonds. Hirsute and lice- infested, their packs 011 their backs and their eyes full of sky, they walked from one end of Russia to the other to rcach some miraculous monastery. Without believing a word of their tales, Marya marveled at the strength of their faith. If only she, too, could break her bonds and set off to roam the world! But she was riveted to Yasnaya Polyana. And she was growing old and faded. When she compared herself with her companions, she hated her plain, prematurely old face with its heavy brows and weary mouth. "I shall go to some town to pray," she wrote, "and then, before I have time to settle down and become attached to it, I shall move on. I shall walk until my feet give way beneath me, I shall lie clown and die somewhere, and rcach at last that eternal, peaceful haven where there are no more sorrows or sighs."

She dreamed of ending her life, but it was her father who died. On February 3, 1821 she suddenly found herself alone in the world. She was thirty-one years old and until that day she had lived with the sole aim of coddling the master of Yasnaya Polyana in his old age. With him gone, she was cast adrift and rudderless; she could see nothing of the slightest attraction in the days ahead. Her need to dedicate herself now encountered nothing but empty space. Seeking an outlet for her surplus affection, she took it into her head to marry Louise Henis- sienne's sister to one of her cousins, Prince Michael Alexandrovich Volkonsky.

The rest of the family howled "Misalliance!," but Marya stood her ground, sold one of her estates, and put the money in her companion's name to help the young couple. Bulgakov, postmaster-general of Moscow, wrote indignantly to his brother: "After losing all hope of tasting the joys of wedlock herself, the princess, daughter of the late Prince Nicholas Sergeyevich—an ugly old maid with bushy eyebrows—has given part of her property to an Englishwoman (a Frenchwoman) who lives with her."

Louise Ildnissicnne's sister and Prince Michael Alexandrovich Volkonsky were married in Moscow in April 1821. Marya made a special trip; she was the only member of the fiance's numerous kin to attend the religious ceremony. As she watched the two young people being blessed by the priest, her heart contracted within her. Her thoughts were turning more and more often to love, marriage, motherhood. Was she really to be deprived of these simple joys, the common lot of woman?

In Moscow she lived in the family house, which, although it was much too big for her, held fewer reminders of the old prince than Yasnaya Polyana. Her friends exhorted her to go out and enjoy herself. One day in a drawing room, she found herself face to face with a man of average height, who had wavy hair, a mclancholy expression and a mustache brushed demurely downward. He wore his uniform well and spoke French correctly. He was introduced to Marya: Count Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy. Marya found him quite pleasant but, as always, allowed nothing of her feelings to show. This meeting was not an accident. 'Hie very next day negotiations with a view to matrimony got under way between the plenipotentiaries of the two parties.

To tell the truth, Count Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy was not overjoyed by the prospect of a union with a person who, in addition to being dismayingly homely, was Eve years older than he. But he was on the brink of bankruptcy and a rich marriage was the only thing that could save him. The great name he bore would have rccommcndcd him to any heiress in Russia. 'Hie Tolstoys claimcd dcsccndancy from a Lithuanian knight named Indris, who had settled and been baptized at Chernigov in the fourteenth century; his great-grandson was given the name of Tolstoy, or "The Stout," by Grand Duke Basil the Blind. One Peter Andrcyevich Tolstoy had been appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Peter the Great, and then head of the Secret Chancellery; in 1724 he was raised to the nobility for his services, although this did not prevent him from ending his days in prison for plotting against Catherine II. Less ambitious than his ancestors, Ilya Tolstoy contented himself with squandering his fortune and that of his wife, ncc Gorcliakov, by sending his laundry to be washed in Holland, having his fish shipped directly from the Black Sea, giving balls and theatrical performances on his estate near Belyev, losing substantial sums at hombre and whist— until the day when, crippled with debt, he acccptcd a post as governor of Kazan for want of anything better. In the meantime his son Nicholas, just eighteen years old, had gone off on a sudden impulse to join the army. The year was 1812, Napoleon was marching on Russia, the young were afire with patriotism. From standard-bearer in a regiment of hussars, Nicholas soon became an aide-de-camp to General Gorchakov —a close relative of his mother—but despite this powerful protector, he did not shine in the campaign of 1813. Shortly after the blockade of Erfurt he was taken prisoner by the French on his way back from a mission to St. Petersburg. He was liberated in 1814 when the allied troops entered Paris, returned to Russia, and was made a major, then a lieutenant-colonel. Was this security at last? No; the extravagance of old Count Ilya Tolstoy in his post as governor of Kazan had assumed such proportions that there could no longer be any question of his son honorably pursuing a military career. The family was ruined, the Belyev estate mortgaged. Nicholas, smelling bankruptcy in the air, resigned his commission and went to live with his parents at Kazan. Aline and Pelagya, his two sisters, had married while he was away, the first to Count Ostcn-Sakcn and the second to V. I. Yushkov, and left home. Even without them, the household had preserved its appeal, thanks to a distant cousin—'Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskaya, nicknamed "Toi- nette." She was a poor orphan, who had been taken in by the Tolstoys when a child and brought up with their own children. She was the same age as Nicholas, and mutely adored him. Thick brown braids framed her handsome, slightly severe face, and her brown eyes sparkled like agate. Her bearing was full of grace and energy. When her cousin first came back to Kazan, she thought he was going to ask for her hand. But for the moment, although Nicholas was aware of the discreet affection she had borne him for so many years, he was interested only in having fun. Every salon in town clamored for him, lie was the life of ever)' party. Dancing and playing, he forgot the sorry state of the family affairs. After all, his father set a perfect example of irresponsibility: the budget of the government of Kazan was being increasingly imperiled by his mismanagement and disreputable dealings, yet old Count llya Tolstoy kept smiling through it all; everything, he thought, would come right in the end. A committee of investigation appointed by the Russian Senate suddenly decided to look into his accounts. Horror-stricken, he fell ill and died before lie had time to write out his defense. Some people even claimed he committed suicide.

Overnight, Nicholas Tolstoy, who had scarcely given a thought to money in the past, opened his eyes upon an abyss. lie auctioned off his land and moved into a mcxlcst apartment in Moscow with his cousin Toinette and his mother and, to provide for them, grudgingly accepted a post as deputy director of the Veterans' Orphanage. Toinette ran the household, and took care of her aunt—read to her, endured every whim of the spoiled, tyrannical, pernickety old woman. The dominant feature of Toinctte's personality was a need to suffer for the happiness of others; her all-embracing affcction encompassed both the countess, from whom she tried to hide the truth about the family's financial predicament, and the servants, with whom she was kind and firm. But her cousin Nicholas Tolstoy was always at the center of her mind, superb and unattainable. He held no secrets for her; she did not idealize him, and cherished his very faults. He was far from being "a paragon of virtue." At sixteen his parents had offered him one of their servant girls, to teach him the facts of life. A child, Mishcnka, was born of this liaison, and subsequently became a postilion and died a pauper.⁸ While in his regiment the count had also had numerous affairs, to which he made covert allusion in Toinctte's presence. She hoped that, wearying of so many different adventures and sobered by a shortage of ready cash, it would occur to him that she alone could make him happy. And, it was true, there were days when he looked at her so tenderly that she was thrown into a flutter of confusion. But he never talked about their future. He was accustomed to life on a grander scale and he chafed against his straitened circumstances. Having to count his money made him misanthropic. He sometimes stayed in his room for hours, smoking his pipe. The countess moaned that a good marriage was the only thing that could save them. Toinctte thought back to the time when, as a little girl, she had been carried away by the story of Mucius Scaevola, and resolved to prove to her cousins that she, too, was capable of heroism, which she did by applying a red-hot iron ruler to her forearm. She did not utter a sound while her flesh smoked, and she still bore the scar; she smiled at it ruefully and thought that the time had come once again to demonstrate her strength of character. When the family began talking about this Marya Nikolayevna Volkonsky, who was so homely, almost middle-aged, with the heavy eyebrows and the great fortune, she stifled her jealousy and urged Nicholas Tolstoy to make a marriage of reason.

On July 9, 1822 Princess Marya Nikolayevna Volkonsky, heiress to the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, married Count Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy. Her dowry comprised eight hundred male peasant serfs in the governments of Tula and Orel; her fiance had nothing to offer but his name and his elegant bearing.

This loveless union proved, nevertheless, to be a harmonious one. True, Marya was not passionately in love with her husband, but she felt affection and esteem for him and something akin to gratitude. And he in turn was not long to discover a quality of integrity in his wife that far outweighed any outward graces, and acknowledged her as his moral and intellectual superior. Indeed, her self-control must have been quite remarkable, to get along with her in-laws. Now that her son's position was secure, the old countess regretted that he had not married someone more dazzling. And she was unhappy because he was neglecting her for his wife. She was jealous and showed it. And Toinette, who was also living with the young couple, silently suffered the daily torture of their wedded bliss. She spied on Marya's every move, tried to find some reason to hate her and couldn't and, subdued by the newcomer's kindly and placid nature, no longer knew whether to rejoice at Nicholas' happiness or despair because he was sharing it with someone else.

On June 31, 1823, Countess Marya gave birth to a son, Nicholas— "Coco"—and it seemed to her that her cup was full. The child became the center of her universe. She asked her husband to hand in his resignation and, in 1824, the entire family left Moscow to settle at Yasnaya Polyana.

Nicholas Tolstoy, who had hitherto shown scant interest in agriculture, became transformed into a country squire. A tradition-bound conservative, he spurned all newfangled methods of farming, but he was always out in the fields, chatting paternally with his serfs; he gave them advice when it was time to sow and only seldom, and reluctantly, issued orders to whip a man guilty of insubordination or negligence. In the autumn he often set off with his borzois at dawn and did not come home until nightfall, exhausted, elated and covered with dirt. His high spirits and vivacity exploded at table. But he was also known to shut himself up in his library to read. There, Buffon consorted with the Vaudevilles du XVllIe sikcle, The Travels of Young Anacharsis stood next to Cuvier, and the History of the Popes alongside the Songs of the Freemasons. He swallowed it all pell-mell and said he would not buy any more books until he had read the ones he had. When he was obliged to leave Yasnaya Polyana and go to Moscow to deal with the numerous lawsuits which his father's creditors had brought against the estate, Marya and he exchanged epistles of restrained affection. At a time when lyrical outpourings between married couples were the rule, Nicholas Tolstoy began his letters simply, "My tender friend," and his wife replied, "My tender friend," and signed herself, "Your devoted Marya." True, she made up for lost time alone in her room, composing French verses in which the prosody was approximative but the sentiments high-flown:

O wedded lovel Our hearts' most gentle bond! The source and nurse of our most cherished pleasures! With thy celestial flame, inspire our souls forever, And in thy peace let our desires be crowned . . . Yes, my heart confirms it, this envied destiny Heaven in its goodness has kept for you and me And these two names now joined, Nicholas and Marie, Will ever signify two souls joined happily.

These exercises were interspersed with meditations on the serious problems of life. Marya liked to compose maxims, also in French, to consult in time of crisis: "The generous impulses of youth must become the principles of adulthood . . . ," "When we are very young we seek everything outside ourselves . . . but, gradually, everything sends us back inside . . . ," "Often, we might resist our own passions, but are swept away by those of others . . ."

Before little Nicholas was three years old she had a second son, Sergey (February 17, 1826). The following year, another birth: Dmitry (April 23, 1827) and, one year later, a fourth heir to the great name of Tolstoy was entered in the parish records: "On August 28, 1828,! in the village of Yasnaya Polyana, at the home of Count Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy, a son, Leo, was bom, and baptized on the twenty-ninth by Vasily Mazhaisky, priest, assisted by the deacon Arkhip Ivanov, the sacristan Alexander Yodorov and the cantor Fyodor Grigoryev; the godparents arc Simon Ivanovich Yasikov, landowner in the district of Belyev, and Countess Pelagya Tolstoy."

After being convinced at thirty-two that she would end her days a spinster, Marya Tolstoy could not get used to the joy of finding herself, at thirty-eight, the mother of four children. She loved them more than she ever loved her father, more than she loved her husband. Leaving Toinette to manage the household, she gave herself up body and soul to her task as educator. She doted upon the last-bom, Leo, "little Benjamin"; but Nicholas, the eldest—"Coco"—received her most ardent attention. Like her father before her, she wanted him to become a man of exceptional abilities. Every evening she recorded his words and deeds in a diary, noted his shortcomings, considered the best ways of correcting them. Her chief fear was that he should prove oversensitive. When lie was four she upbraided him for weeping over a tale of a wounded bird or the sight of a dogfight. She wanted him to be brave, "as befits the son of a father who served his country valiantly." To reward him for progress in reading she gave him numbered slips of paper bearing such notes as "Very good . . . ," "Passable . . . ," "Very slow at the beginning, good on the following page . . ."

After a ccrtain amount of friction, perfect harmony had been established between Marya, her mother-in-law and Toinette. On a trip, Marya wrote to the latter: "Dear Toinette, how can you imagine that I am able to forget you or stop thinking of you just because I am in pleasant surroundings elsewhere? You know that when I love, nothing can efface those dear to me from my heart." And elsewhere: "You are so kind to me and so fond of my little sparrow that I feel that when I talk about him, I give as much joy to you as I do to myself." Her sons

t This date, like all the others in this book, is given according to the Russian Julian calendar, which is twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth ccntury, and thirteen days in the twentieth.

were growing, handsome and healthy, the estate was beginning to prosper under Nicholas' management, and the future only looked more rosy when the young woman found, in 1829, that she was once again with child. This fifth pregnancy did not prevent her from leading a very- active life. When the children were in bed, she would play the piano— a concerto by Field or the Pathetique sonata—read aloud, give her cousin an Italian lesson or discuss with her the principles of Rousseau's Emile. Nicholas would join them in the drawing room and entertain them with his hunting tales and jokes. He drew on his pipe as he talked and peered through the windows into the dark grounds outside—and now and then they heard the night watchman going down the drive, striking his metal plate. Late in February 1830 there was a great to-do in the house. The black leather divan which Marya had adopted for her deliveries was carried into her room⁴ where, on March 2, she gave birth to a girl, also called Marya.

Soon after, the mother's health declined. She had been exhausted by childbearing. She ran a continual fever and complained of violent headaches. The servants said she was certainly going to lose her mind. After taking communion, she asked to see her loved ones, to bid them farewell. The family assembled around her bed. In his nurse's arms little- Leo, twenty-three months old, screamed in terror at the sight of the livid mask whose eyes, full of tears, were fixed upon him with unbearable tenderness. He did not recognize his mother. He hated this strange woman. The nurse took him back to his bedroom where he grew calm again amidst his toys.⁵ Countess Marya Nikolayevna Tolstoy died on August 4, 1830.

Left a widower, Nicholas Tolstoy fully realized how large a place this woman he married in cold blood had occupied in his life during the last eight years. What was to become of the children and the house without her? Perhaps the time had come to give a second chance to his cousin Toinette, previously rejected on financial grounds. For the sake of appearances, he let a few years go by and then asked her to be his wife. She was deeply touched, for she had gone on loving him in secret, but refused out of loyalty to the deceased. The evening of their conversation, she wrote on a scrap of paper, "August 16, 1836. Today Nicholas made me a singular proposal: to be his wife and a mother to his children, and never to leave them. I refused the first and promised to fulfill the second as long as I shall live." She put the note away in a little pearl-embroidered purse, and nothing more was ever said by her or her cousin of a project which, by bringing them together, would probably have destroyed their respect for each other.

2. Childhood

The harder little Leo tried to remember his mother, the more she eluded him. He tried to identify her by questioning those who had known her, but in vain. They told him she was good, gentle, upright, proud, intelligent, and an excellent storyteller, but he could not attach a face to this assortment of qualities, and as though to deepen the mystery, there was not a single portrait of her in the house. Only a silhouette cut out of black paper, showing her at the age of ten or twelve, with a round forehead and a round chin, her hair in a veil at the nape of her neck. I lis whole life long Leo Tolstoy tried to instill life into this frustrating profile. He grew older, but his mother remained a little girl. Driven by his need for love, he finally came to think of her as a mythical being to whom he had recourse in times of distress and upon whom he relied for supernatural assistance. Only a few years before his death he wrote, "... I walk in the garden and I think of my mother, of Maman; I do not remember her, but she has always been an ideal of saintliness for me. I have never heard a single disparaging remark about her."¹ And also, "Felt dull and sad all day. Toward evening the mood changed into a desire for caresses, for tenderness. I wanted, as when I was a child, to nestle against some tender and compassionate being and weep with love and be consoled . . . become a tiny boy, close to my mother, the way I imagine her. Yes, yes, my Maman, whom I was never able to call that because I did not know how to talk when she died. She is my highest image of love—not cold, divine love, but warm, earthly love, maternal. . . . Maman, hold me, baby me! ... All that is madness, but it is all true."²

Although Leo Tolstoy could not remember his mother, he did remember—or thought he did—things that happened even before her death. "I am all bound up; I want to stretch out my arms and I cannot," he wrote in his Reminiscences. "I scream and cry and I hate my own screaming, but I cannot stop. People are leaning over me—I can't remember who—and everything is shrouded in semi-darkness. There are two of them. My screaming affects them; they arc anxious; but they do not release me as I want them to, and I scream still louder." His second memory was a brighter one. He was sitting in a wooden tub, surrounded by a sourish smell, while a servant-woman rubbed his body with bran. "For the first time," he wrote in the same work, "I bccamc aware of and liked my little body with the ribs sticking out on my chest, and the dark, smooth wooden tub, and my nurse's sleeves rolled up, and the warm, steaming, agitated water and its lapping noise and, most of all, the polished feeling of the wet rim of the tub when I ran my little hands along it. It is strange and frightening to think that from the day I was born until I was three years old, all the time I was nursing and being weaned, beginning to crawl and walk and talk, however I rack my brains, I can remember nothing but these two impressions. . . . From the child of five to rnc there is only a step. From the embryo to the newborn child an abyss. And from non-existence to the embryo, not an abyss but the inconceivable."

Gradually, however, the shadows moving around him assumed form. He could attach names to the faces. At five he was living contentedly in his little upstairs room with his sister Marya and Dunya, a little girl the family had adopted, when the grownups decided it was time for him to join his older brothers downstairs and pass from the hands of his nurse into those of the German tutor, Fyodor Ivanovich Rosscl. lie was frightened to tears at the thought of this change, and Aunt Toi- nctte tried to pacify him as she dressed him in his new clothes—a real boy's outfit, in denim, with braces. When she had finished, she kissed him. "I remember her," he wrote, "being rather small and thick-set, with brown hair and an expression of kindness, tenderness, compassion. . . . I saw that she was feeling the same thing as I—it was sad, very sad, but it had to be." She led him down the stairs. When he appeared, hanging back and sniffling, his brothers called him a blubber-puss. But their insults fell unheeded. He was oblivious to all but his terror of Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel, who had pale eyes behind big spectacles, an aquiline nose and a tasselcd cap, and wore a quilted, flower-patterned dressing gown that he changed for a dark blue redingote before coming to table.

This awesome-looking personage soon revealed itself to be the most good-natured and soft-hearted man alive. His German accent, when he spoke Russian, was utterly comical; sometimes he lost his temper, shouted and struck his pupils with a ruler or a pair of braces, but his tantrums inspired laughter more than tears. lie was supposed to instruct tlic children in all subjects, but he chiefly taught them the "language of Goethe." Their instructor in the "language of Voltaire" was Aunt Toinette. At five Leo Tolstoy knew the French alphabet as well as the Russian; and he said later that he often thought directly in French.

But for the time being, he was bent only on having fun with his brothers who, after teasing him, accepted him as one of their group. He loved the smile and big dark eyes and curious whims of Dmitry, closest to his own age; he looked up to Nicholas, who was five years his senior; but Sergey, two years older than he, was the one he worshiped—handsome Sergey, remote and strange, who was always singing, drew extraordinary roosters with colored pencils, and raised chickens in secret. "I copied him, I loved him, I wanted to be him,"³ wrote Tolstoy. But Sergey paled before Nicholas, when it came to inventing a new game. Nicholas had such a lively imagination that he could tell fantastic or droll stories for hours on end, making them up out of thin air and embellishing them with drawings of homed and mustachioed devils. One day he told his brothers that he knew a secret, and when the secret was unveiled all sickness would vanish from the earth and love would flower in every heart, and all men, happy at last, would become Ant Brothers.* While awaiting this glorious apocalypse, the boys used to sit together under shawl-draped chairs, where, huddling in the shadows, they felt a sense of profound mystery. Little Leo in particular, cuddling into the tribal heat and smell, held his breath and listened to the beating of his own heart, and was moved to tears by the thought of the "brotherhood of ants." He would dearly have loved to know the chief secret thanks to which all men would bccome healthy and never quarrel again, but Nicholas said it was carved on a green stick, and the green stick was buried on the edge of a ravine in the old Zakaz forest. "I used to believe," he later wrote, "that there was a green stick on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men and bring them everything good, and I still believe today that there is such a truth, that it will be revealed to men, and will fulfill its promise." And, remembering where the green stick was supposedly hidden, he added, "Since my body has to be buried somewhere, I have asked that it be in that place, in memory of Nicholas."

Another time, Nicholas promised his brothers to take them up Fan-

• As Tolstoy observed in his Reminiscences, Nicholas probably meant to say "Moravian Brothers," which was the name of a religious sect that flourished in Bohemia in the sixteenth century. The confusion in the child's mind arose from the fact that the Russian word for ant is muravey, which is phonetically similar to "Moravian." faron Mountain. But anyone who wanted to join the expedition must first stand in a comer of the room and "not think of the white bear"; then he must walk, without missing a step, along a crack between the floorboards; the third condition was not to have seen a hare, "dead, alive or roasted," for a whole year and to swear he would never tell what he learned there. If anyone passed all these trials—and others, more difficult, to be set later—his wish would come true at the top of the mountain. They all made a wish for the future: Sergey wanted to learn to model horses and hens in wax; Dmitry wanted to draw objects life-size, like real painters did; Leo did not know what to choose and said he would like to draw the same thing, only in miniature.

On the outskirts of this cnchantcd world, tutelary divinities Stood guard. First, in Maman's place, there was Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskaya, Aunt Toinette, who cherished the children of Yasnaya Polyana as though they were her own. Leo Tolstoy wrote, "Her chief influence upon me was, from childhood, to make me feel the spiritual joy of loving. I could see and sense how happy she was to love, and I understood this happiness. Secondly, she taught me to appreciate a withdrawn and quiet life. . . . 'llie main features of this life were the absence of material carcs, pleasant relations with other people . . . and the absence of hurry or any sense of the passing of time."⁴ In Aunt Toinctte's room there were jars full of raisins and cookies and dates and candy standing in a row. No treat w^fas sweeter to little Leo than those she dispensed on great occasions to reward him for being good. lie also loved to lie down behind her on the drawing-room sofa, breathing in her perfume, melting into her warmth, laying his check against the small brown hand, "barred by an energetic vein," that hung limply- down from the armrest.

Less close to the children than she, Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy appeared to his youngest son as a paragon of elegance, strength and good humor. I Tow handsome lie was as he set out for town in a redingote and narrow trousers, or went hunting amidst his playful wolfhounds, or inhaled his pipe, slowly and deeply, with eyes half-closed and a bluish haze above his head! Sometimes he came into the boys' room, quickly sketched something with a sure hand, exchanged three or four words of German with Fyodor Ivanovich Rosscl, commanded Leo, his "big pouf," to recite a poem by Pushkin—"Farewell, free element! ..." or "Napoleon," criticized his bombastic delivery, told a funny story, and whirled about and vanished, leaving them all entranced.

The morning hours in the classroom with the tutor passed quickly, and afterward they could go outdoors to play. The grounds were so vast that the children found some new corner to explore every day. During the warm weather they fished for crayfish in the Voronka, tore their skin chasing each other through the brambles, went to visit the horses in the stable and the dogs in the kennel, picked mushrooms and blackberries, chattered with the ragged serf-children, tanned and shy; and in the winter there were skating parties and snowball fights. As soon as they came indoors they had to wash and change and go to the drawing room, where Grandmother, Aunt Alexandra, Aunt Toinette, little Pashenka and Fyodor Ivanovich Rdssel were waiting for Papa to emerge from his study so they could go in to dinner. There he was at last, sturdy and energetic, "with his red neck and soft flat-heeled boots" and eyes sparkling with childish merriment. While he was kissing Grandmother's hand, the painted, dark-red double doors swung open and there in the doorway stood Foka Demidich, the major-domo, one-time second violin in the late Prince Volkonsky's orchestra. Hunched into a navy-blue redingote, he furrowed his brow and declaimed in a rusty voice that dinner was served. Even-body stood up. Papa gave his arm to Grandmother, and the aunts, children, friends and tutor crowded together behind them. 'Hie family filed into the dining room, where a footman stood behind each chair, clutching a plate to his heart. When guests were present, their own servants were posted behind their backs and served them throughout the meal, 'llie table was covered with a coarse linen cloth, the work of local weavers, and on it stood carafes of water, jugs of kvass, old silver spoons, wooden-handled iron knives and forks and plain glasses. The soup was served in the pantry and the footmen handed out the piroshki that went with it, one by one. With the first mouthful the conversation became animated, crackled among the tablemates. Papa ate, joked and drank, his cheeks on fire. At every witticism the children burst out laughing. From the beginning their minds were fixed 011 one thing: dessert—fritters, milk pudding, fried doughnuts, cream cheese and sour cream! Now and then Leo stole a glance at old Tikhon, former flutist in Prince Volkonsky's orchestra. Livid, waxen and shriveled, he stood behind Grandmother's chair, clasping a plate to his bosom, and followed the master's discussion so intently that his shaved lips sometimes gaped wide and his eyes grew round in amazement.

When the meal was over, Tikhon brought the master's pipe, already lighted, and tiptoed away. But he soon reappeared in the mirror that reflected a corner of the paternal study. Yielding to temptation, he would steal a pinch of tobacco from the soft rose-shaped leather pouch Nicholas Ilich had left on his desk. He deserved a scolding a hundred times over, but his magnanimous master merely smiled. Wild with gratitude, Leo caught hold of his father's white hand, which had a pink spot on the fleshy part of the palm, and kissed it.

In the afternoon, when the weather was fine, there were outings in the carriage with the aunts and the tutor, to the hamlet of Grumond, two miles away from Yasnaya Polyana. The canopied charabanc with its leather apron and the high-springed yellow cabriolet jounced along the rutted paths of the forest of Zakaz, in single file. The children shouted and sang, the horses flicked their cars. At the end of the road Matryona the cow-girl was waiting for them with black bread, sour cream and raw milk.

Winter evenings also had their charm. The entire family shut itself up, shivering, into the main house, Isolated by snow and silence. The tile stoves crackled. Time passed with delectable slowness. Numb with contentment, little Leo told himself that no house in the whole world was more beautiful than the one in which he had been born. Yet the amenities here were primitive; apart from a few mahogany stands and one or two winged armchairs, all the furniture had been hewn and put together by the muzhiks; the only note of luxury was the gilt of the frames around the mirrors and paintings. Even the children's shoes were made by the village cobbler.

Before going to bed they said good-night to the grownups and kissed their hands. If they had been good, they were allowed a few extra minutes in the drawing room. Grandmother, with a ruchcd lxmnct on her head, laid out her eternal "traveler's solitaire" on a little table. Beside her on the divan sat the wife of a Tula gunsmith whom she had adopted for a friend and who wore cartridge belts over her jacket. The gunsmith's wife spun wool and, now and then, she would knock her spindle against the wall, in which she had finally gouged a hole. One aunt read aloud, the other knitted or did needlepoint; Papa, his pipe between his teeth, stared absently at the cards and, curled up on a chair, Milka, his whippet, blinked and yawned.

When the grownups gave the children the order to retire, the fun was not yet over for at least one of them: it was the custom in the family for them to take turns spending the night with their grandmother, Pelagya Nikolayevna. The instant he entered her room, Leo fell into a state of ecstasy. He watched her—corpulent and white, in her nightdress and white cap—as she washed her hands. To amuse him she made soap bubbles between her wrinkled yellow fingers. An old man sat in the window bay: Leo Stepanovich, whom Prince Volkonsky had bought long ago for his gifts as a storyteller. He was blind, which was why lie was also allowed to be present during Ilcr Highness' toilette. A bowl containing some scraps from the master's meal was brought to him there. When Pelagya Nikolaycvna had completed her ablutions she climbed up into her bed, Leo jumped into his, and a maid put out the candles, leaving only a vigil light burning in the corner in front of the icons. In this eerie light the matriarch, leaning back against her pillows, her head upright under her white nightcap, looked down on the world as from a throne of snow. Ilcr shadow wavered on the wall. 'Hie blind man began his tale in a drawling voice: "Once there was a powerful king who had an only son . . ."

Leo, fascinated by this hieratic grandmother, did not listen: was she asleep, or did she hear everything that was said? lie could not tell. Sometimes the bard, draped in his cloak, deferentially asked, "Do you command me to procccd?" The reply snapped down, dictatorial, from the summit of the bed: "Yes; go on." And he resumed his tale, mixing Russian folklore with tales from Scheherazade. Lulled by the monotonous murmur, Leo's eyes closed, and he carried away into his dreams a mask of an ancient queen under a beribboned lace cap.

In the morning Grandmother made more soap bubbles between her fingers without losing a whit of her majesty. Sometimes she took the children to gather hazelnuts. She would climb into the famous yellow cabriolet and two servants—Petrushka and Matyusha—would harness themselves to the shafts and pull her along the paths. In the woods they reverently bent down the branches for their mistress, who chose the ripest nuts and stuffed them in a bag. Her grandsons raced around her, scavenging and squabbling. "I remember Grandmother," Tolstoy later wrote, "the hazel grove, the pungent smell of its leaves, the servants, the yellow cabriolet, the sun, and they all melt together into a single impression of radiance."⁵ In reality, Pelagya Nikolayevna was a narrow-minded woman, capricious and despotic, hard on those who served her but indulgent to the point of spinelcssness with her son and grandchildren.

Alexandra Ilinichna, called Aunt Aline—the sister of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy—was a very different proposition. She had married Count Ostcn-Sakcn when she was very young, and shortly after their wedding he had gone berserk and tried to kill her. The first time he wounded her with a pistol shot; and the second time, while she was recovering, he came into her room and tried to cut out her tongue with a razor. While the maniac was being shut up in an asylum, his wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to a stillborn child. Ilcr relatives were afraid she would not be able to bear the awful news, and gave out that the baby was alive; they brought her a girl child, Pashenka, to whom a servant, the wife of the Tolstoy cook, had just given birth. The real mother did not dream of protesting against a decision from such high quarters, and so Pashenka was raised in the master's house, not learning the secret of her birth until long afterward. The hapless Aline must have been crushed when she learned of the subterfuge; but she tried not to blame anyone and to remain as fond of Pashenka as before, and sought consolation in prayer. Having lost her husband and her home, she lived in her brother's house, voluntarily did without comfort and service, scrupulously observed all fasts, gave her money to the poor, read nothing but the lives of the saints, and spent her time talking to the pilgrims, the simpletons, monks, nuns and half-mad holy men who stopped at the house to rest between stations on a pilgrimage. It was said that she had been very pretty and coquettish in her youth, that her blue eyes had turned many young men's heads at the balls, that she had played the harp and could rccite French verse. How was one to believe it, looking at this mummy draped in dark cloth, who dedicated body and soul to God? Little Leo smcllcd a very particular acid odor in the wake of his Aunt Aline which was due, he thought, to the 'lack of attention the old lady paid to her toilette."

'llie odor given off by Prascovya Isaycvna, the housekeeper, was one of sweetish resin: one of her duties, as official responsible for administering enemas to the children, was to collect their chamberpots in her room and burn lozenges from the Far East in them. She said the lozenges, which she called "Ochakov essence," had been brought back by Leo's grandfather when he went to fight the Turks, "on horse, on foot and ever)' other way." She had known this grandfather very well; long ago, he had refused to let her marry Tikhon, the flutist-serf; she had held Maman in her arms; she was a hundred, a thousand, years old; nothing could leave the cupboards, chests, cellar or storerooms without her personal authorization. . . . When Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy became engaged to Princess Marya, the princess wanted to free Prascovya Isayevna in return for her services. When she saw the paper containing her release, Prascovya Isaycvna bristled and cried out, with tears in her eyes, "I guess you must not like me, mistress, since you're sending me away!" And so she stayed on in the house, a servant.

Among the other servants, there was Tatyana Philippovna, the children's maid, tiny and dark-skinned; the old nursemaid Anushka, who had only one tooth in the middle of her mouth; Nicholas Philippich, the coachman, surrounded by the rich aroma of horse dung; Akim, the gardener's assistant, an inoffensive simpleton who addressed God as "my doctor, my druggist"—in all, some thirty persons, most of whom had no specific duties and loitered about in the pantry and halls, warming themselves by the stoves, gossiping around the samovars and snoring in unused rooms. In addition to this permanent staff, there were the guests who came for a few days and forgot to go away again, poor relations and their servants, orphans and wards taken in some softhearted evening, Russian, French and German tutors, whose turnover was more rapid—a large floating population basking in the master's bounty, feeding at his table and singing his praises.

The number of inmates doubled at the approach of the holidays. For Christmas and the New Year, neighbors, servants and peasants dressed up in costumes and flocked into the big house, led by old Gregory scraping at his fiddle. The disguises were always the same: a bear and his trainer, bandits and Turks, muzhiks dressed as women or women dressed as muzhiks. They went from room to room, bowed low before the masters, and received small presents. The two aunts dressed the children, who were quarreling by the costume trunk over who was to wear the gem-studded belt and who the gold-embroidered muslin jacket. Staring into the mirror, with a turban on his head and a black mustache drawn on his face with burnt cork, little Leo, paralyzed with admiration, imagined that he was seeing one of those heroes whose exploits the blind storyteller related to put Grandmother to sleep. But, to his disgust, when his make-up was washed off again there was die same old baby face, with its shapeless nose and thick lips and little gray eyes. A big, fat boy, a "patapouf," like Papa said.

When the holidays were over, a large contingent of guests lingered on in the house. Even in such a capacious residence—thirty-two rooms, counting the outbuildings!—privacy was impossible. Everyone was entangled in the joys and tribulations of everyone else. Even had one wanted to think only of one's own affairs, other faces and other troubles assailed you at every turn in the corridor, drawing room, stable, village.

One day Prascovya Isayevna, the housekeeper, scolded Leo and rubbed his nose on a napkin he had inadvertently soiled. Choking with anger, he ran to hide on the balcony. "By what right does that servant- woman dare to speak familiarly to me, me, her master, and strike me in the face with a wet napkin as though I were some little muzhik?"⁶ he thought. But he found nothing to retort when a stablcboy reprimanded him for whipping the old horse Raven to make him go. "Ah, my little master, there's no pity in you!" Scarlet with shame, Leo slid off the horse's back and, "kissing the animal on the neck, begged his pardon for mistreating him."⁷ Sometimes a conversation overheard among the grownups would also leave him peqjlexed. Temyashev, a neighbor visiting Yasnaya Polyana, told in Leo's presence how he had sent his cook to the army for twenty-five years because the fellow had

t And not forty-two, as Tolstoy mistakenly says in his Reminiscences.

taken it into his head to eat meat during Lent. Some time later, this same Temyashev was announced in the drawing room one winter evening when the family was having its tea by the light of two candles, lie strode into the room and fell to his knees; the long pipe in his hand struck the floor and sparks flew up; in the sudden illumination Leo saw his anxious facc. Still prostrated, Temyashev explained to Nicholas Ilich l'olstoy that he had brought his illegitimate daughter Dunyechka to be raised by him. This little scene was part of a prearranged agreement between the two men: Temyashev was a confirmed bachelor, who had more money than he knew what to do with, and two illegitimate children; he wanted to bequeath part of his fortune to them, but under the law his sisters would inherit it all. To get round the difficulty, he had conceived the plan of signing a fictitious sale contract for one of his estates in the name of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy; after his death Tolstoy would legitimize the transaction by paying back the three hundred thousand rubles he received to the orphans. 'Hie papers were signed then and there and, as a pledge of mutual trust, Dunyechka, blank-eyed and sniveling, remained behind in the house with her nursemaid Eupraxya, a thick, bony, wrinkled old woman "whose Adam's-apple hung down and swung like a turkey gobbler's." Inside these folds of flesh there was a hard ball, which she condcsccndcd to let the children touch.

"Childhood candor, carefree heart, need to love, and faith: shall I ever find you again?" wrote Leo Tolstoy. "What time could be better than that when the two highest virtues, innocent joy and a limitless need to love, are the only mainsprings of life?" When he was little he believed a current of love was passing perpetually between his family and the rest of the world, even though the grownups were occasionally a disappointment to him. Curled up under the blankets in the glow of the vigil light burning below the icon, he thought, "I love Nanny; Nanny loves me and she loves Mitya (Dmitry); I love Mitya; Mitya loves me and he loves Nanny; and Nanny loves Aunt Toinette and me and Papa; and everybody loves and everybody is happy."⁸ But if everybody was happy, how was one to explain the fact that Christ died crucified, as Aunt Toinette said?

"Auntie, why did they torture him?"

"They were wickcd people."

"But he was good, so good! . . . Why did they beat him? Did it hurt him, Auntie, did it hurt him?"⁹

Nor was Christ the only one to be pitied. Hadn't he heard that gentle Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel was going to have his dog killed just because its paw had been crushed? Leo could not bear the thought of this unjust execution; his tears welled up again. His brothers began to call him "Lyova Ryova," "Leo Cry-Baby." His mother, who had been such a stickler for strength of character, would certainly have been horrified by this son who had so little control over his emotions. The fact was that he felt everything more intensely than the others. A melody plunged him into morbid melancholy, the stable smells enthralled him, he thrilled to feci a dog's cold muzzle under his fingers, he wanted to drink the wind that lashed his face in the fields and cat the earth whose color and smell in the springtime made him dizzy with joy. In Childhood¹⁰ he wrote, "The sounds of voices and hoofs and carts, the gay piercing call of quail and buzzing of insccts circling round, and the smell of wormwood tufts and the straw and horses' sweat, and the thousand different shadows and colors which the burning sun set off on the pale yellow fields, the blue line of the forest and the pink-tinged white clouds, and the white gossamer floating in the air or lying on the stubble—I saw it all, I heard it, I felt it." And thus he moved with equal zest, eyes wide open, nostrils flaring and ears cocked, from ants to plants, plants to horses and horses to men. This free and gay life would assuredly never endl However, the grownups were already saying that it was impossible to give the children a decent education at Yasnaya Polyana. The oldest boy, Nicholas, was going on fourteen, and Leo, the youngest, was eight. The lessons of good old Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel were no longer enough, they said, to fill these young minds thirsting for knowledge. They needed real professors, who would force them to study seriously. To Leo's sorrow and anxiety, his father told him in the last day's of 1836 that all of them would soon be moving to Moscow.

3. The World Outside

On January 10, 1837 the family and oldest servants gathered in the drawing room for the leave-taking prayer. Everybody sat in a circle for a minute without speaking, then they rose and crossed themselves facing the icon, and those who were leaving went out onto the steps, one by one. As they passed, weeping serfs caught at the children's hands and kissed them on the shoulder, and Leo inhaled, with a mixture of sadness and repulsion, the "odor of grease" given off by the bent heads. He had a lump in his throat. Leave the house! To go where? Find what? Luckily, all the people he loved were coming too. Papa, with an authority that must have reminded him of his days of military glory, assigned them to their places in the coaches lined up before the peristyle. Grandmother, Aunt Toinette, Aunt Aline and her adopted child Pashenka, the five Tolstoy children, the count's ward Dunycchka, the tutors and, lastly, thirty servants, crowded into the covered sledges and tarantasses. Dogs whined and barked in the snow around the motionless teams. A groom led the relay horses out of the stables by their bridles. A few servants, red-nosed from the cold, lashed the baggage into place on the coaches with heavy ropes. A11 order rang out, and the convoy slowly moved off, gliding between a hedge of muzhiks in sheepskin coats and women in striped kerchiefs, and, passing between the two towers that marked the entrance to the estate, turned onto the road used by the rest of the world. When he could no longer see his birthplace, Leo nearly burst into sobs. A little later he consoled himself with the thought that lie was wearing "a new suit, with trousers that had straps under the heel."

One hundred and thirty miles—a surface of packed, crustcd snow going across barren plains and through frail birch groves. At even' relay they drank scalding tea at the inn, hung thick with the smell of smoke, leather and cabbage. Grandmother's coach was in the lead, hoisted up on its high wheels, as comfortable as a house. There was food inside to last for ten days, a medicine kit, dressing case, and a night commode, so that the passengers might relieve themselves without getting out of the coach. Frozen by the wind, footmen clung to jutting platforms on either side of the box. The carriage was so monumentally big that it could not get through the archway of the post- house at Serpukhov, but apart from that, the trip went off without incident. They slept in the upstairs rooms of the inns, which were cold and full of bedbugs. The next morning—for the last lap of the journey—Papa invited each of his sons in turn to sit with him in his sledge. It was at his father's side that Leo entered Moscow at last, after a four-day voyage.

Golden cupolas blazed in the sun. The low hum of a hive rose up from the city. Bells rang out from time to time. 'ITie caravan entered the suburbs, where the snow was no longer so white. Suddenly, the twisting, narrow streets, little wooden houses, broken palisades and thronged open-air markets gave way to broad avenues, stone mansions and haughty churches with pink, blue, green or buttercup-yellow facades. The village became a city. Papa called out the names of the monuments as proudly as though he owned them. A many-colorcd crowd hurried along the sidewalks: merchants in cloaks, peasants in bark shoes, uniformed officers, gentlemen dressed in "European style," shopgirls in kerchiefs and ladies in hats ... No one paid any attention to the travelers. This fact plunged Leo into bewilderment. At Yasnaya Polyana the Tolstoys were the center of the earth. Why, in Moscow, did no one seem to notice them at all? Why did nobody take off his hat when they went by? "For the first time," he wrote in Boyhood, "it became clear to me that we (our family, that is) were not the only people on earth, that all the world's interests did not converge upon us and that there was another life, that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing about us and did not even know we existed." Instead of turning away from these strangers, he became fascinated by their mystery. "How do they live, what do they live on?" he wondered. "IIow do they bring up their children? How do they punish them?"

The caravan entered the Prcchistcnskaya district, silent and stately, close to the center of town, went down Plyuchika Street, parallel to the river, turned into a courtyard and stopped, in front of a handsome house two and a half stories high, with a long empire facade pierced by eleven windows.

Having spent all his life in the country, Leo could not get used to having neighbors ten feet away. One couldn't feel at home any more, in this overcrowded city that pressed in on one from all sides. 'Ilie house was cold and impersonal, inhospitable. Papa often dined out and traveled a great deal. Leo's older brothers were preparing for their university entrance examinations. Leo went for walks with Fyodor Ivanovich Rosscl, abscntmindcdly learned his lessons, and dreamed of possessing one day an imagination equal to that of the blind storyteller whom Grandmother unfortunately had had to leave behind when they camc to Moscow. Very soon he convinced himself that he too had wonderful stories to tell. He had only to pick up a pen. After stitching together a notebook, he covered it with blue paper and wrote the title in fat letters on the first page: "Grandfather's Tales." At the bottom of the page, the publisher's name: "The Children's Library." 1"hen, in a laborious hand, he began:

"In the town of P . . . there lived an old man ninety years of age who had served under five emperors, who had seen more than one hundred battles, who held the rank of coloncl, who had ten decorations paid for in blood for he had ten wounds and walked on crutches having only one leg, and had three scars on his forehead while one of his fingers, the middle one, had fallen at Braila. He had five children: two little lasses and three young fellows, lie called them, although the eldest already had four children and four grandchildren. . . ."

The story went on in this vein for eighteen pages and stopped abruptly when its author wearied of his numerous heroes.

Then, too, the family atmosphere in mid-1837 may not have been conducive to creativity. For some time now, Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy had been worried about his health. He drank a good deal, coughed, spat blood. Shortly after signing the fictitious sale contract for his neighbor Temyashev's estate at Pirogovo, he learned of the latter's death. As he expected they would, the dead man's sisters immediately attacked the contract that reduced their share of the inheritance in favor of the two orphan girls. Exasperated by their pettifogging maneuvers, Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy assembled his papers, took two servants, and set out for Tula to contend with his adversaries. He covered the distance—one hundred and five miles—in twenty-four hours, which was a feat at the time. At nine in the evening of the following day, June 21, he fell down dead in the middle of the street, of an attack of apoplexy.*

The news filled little Leo with grief and fright. At church, however, during the first requiem mass, a sense of importance began to mingle

• As neither money nor papers were found on him, his servants were suspccted of killing him; after an inquest, however, the final verdict was death through natural causcs.

with his sorrow; he thought that he cut an interesting figure in his mourning clothes, that everybody felt sorry for him because he was an orphan, and that he had a part to play in the world. Besides, since he had not been present when his father died, he still half-expected to see him again. lie constantly thought he recognized him on the street among the passers-by. Every time he saw a stocky man whose face was a little flushed, his heart thudded with love.f "I loved my father very much," Leo Tolstoy wrote in his Reminiscences, "but I did not leam how strong that love was until he died."

Aunt Toinette's despair is shown by a note in her hand: "June 21, 1837. A terrible day for me ... I have lost what was most dear to me in all the world, the only being who loved me, who always treated me with the most affectionate and sincere consideration and who has taken all my happiness away with him. The only tiling that binds me to life is that now I shall live for his children."¹

Nicholas Ilich's mother bore her bereavement with less fortitude. She wept from morning to evening and, when night came, ordered the door of her son's room opened, smiled at his ghost and held conversations with him: "Come, little one, come closer, my sweet! I am so glad you have come! They told me you were no more! How absurd! As if you could die before me!"² Or she would suddenly cry out against God for dealing so harshly with her, when she had done nothing wTong. The frightened children listened from afar to her outbursts and her sobbing and hysterical laughter. They were forbidden to go near her when she was having one of her fits.

Pclagya Nikolaycvna was a long time recovering her self-possession. The guardianship of the children was entrusted to his older sister, the pious Aunt Aline. She solemnly agreed to undertake this task, but her first allegiance was to the Lord: she had no practical sense, and allowed the family affairs to go to rack and ruin because she could not bring herself to believe in human wickcdness. In this unorganized household, where three women in black were vainly trying to keep life going, the children smcllcd medicine wherever they went, and longed for their happy years at Yasnaya Polyana. To keep up the pretense for them, or to deceive herself, the matriarch insisted upon continuing the old formal dinner tradition. As before, the children waited in silence for the moment to go in to table. A door suddenly opened, the swish of a gown was heard, and Grandmother appeared, regal and stem, her skull hidden by a lace cap with lavender ribbons. The moment she let herself sink into her armchair, the rest of the family clattered into theirs. Hie

t Compare with the feelings of little Sergey in Anna Karenina, when he refuses to believe his mother's death.

major-domo filled the soup plates and handed them out, making allowance for the rank and age of each. Leo's mouth watered and he squinted in impatience.

Later, to divert the children, Pelagya Nikolayevna allowed them to go to the theater even though they were still in mourning. Dazzled by the huge red-plush and gilt nave, Leo was unable to decide where the entertainment was. Instead of watching the stage he looked at the boxes across from him; the audience interested him more than the actors. Instinctively, he turned toward truth, toward life. So many attentive, sober, mysterious faces! These strangers sitting there in rows fascinatcd him even more because he had hardly ever been out in society before. On Christmas Day, at the home of the vastly rich Shipov, he felt that he and his brothers had been invited out of charity, because they were orphans. And as though to prove the fact, the presents they received were a shoddy lot; the most handsome toys on the tree went to the nephews of Prince Gorchakov, former minister of war.

This humiliation paled, however, beside another that Leo had been suffering for the last few months, at the hands of a newcomer in the house: M. Prosper dc St. Thomas. The pedagogical competence of old Fyodor Ivanovich Rosscl having proved increasingly inadequate, Grandmother decided to dismiss him and engage a Frenchman in his stead. Stunned by his disgrace, the miserable outcast began by demanding, in addition to his wages, repayment for the little gifts he had presented to various members of the family; then, dissolving in tears, he begged to be kept on without payment. Grandmother stood fast, though, and he was forced to relinquish his post to Prosper dc St. Thomas. While his former pupils made a poor show of dissembling their sorrow, he pointed out each of them in turn to his successor, saying, "Sergey is a good boy, he will do well but he must be watched. . . . Leo is too tender-hearted, you will get nothing out of him by threats, but everything by kindness. Please, I ask you, love them, treat them well. . . ." Prosper de St. Thomas commented drily: "Be assured, mein Ilerr, that I shall find the way to bring them to heel."³

Prosper dc St. Thomas was a short little man of twenty-five, blond, muscular and active, good-looking and with a bettcr-than-average education, but he was full of his own importance and favored strong-arm techniques with his pupils. Perhaps, like many of his fellow countrymen who had come to seek their fortunes in Russia, he dreamed of capturing the heart of some wealthy heiress and marrying her. In the meantime, he spent his pocket money on patent-leather boots and silk waistcoats and wore violet-scented powder; his spccch was full of grace- notes and frills and he "played his role of pedagogue to the hilt." He was not the only tutor in the household, however. In all, the Tolstoys employed eleven teachers, not counting the dancing-master. According to Aunt Toincttc's account book, these gentlemen's honoraria for 1837-38 totaled 8304 rubles,J a very considerable sum at the time. But the executive director of studies was Prosper de St. Thomas.

Beneath his stiff, sarcastic exterior, the man's judgment was not unsound. Speaking of his pupils, he said: "Nicholas is both willing and able; Sergey is able but not willing; Dmitry is willing but not able; and Leo is neither." And, it was true, Leo was a poor student, he did not understand problems in arithmetic and made no attempt to memorize the names and dates his masters stuffed into his head. And yet, behind his laziness, it was easy to detect a sensitivity and imagination that were altogether out of the ordinary. Prosper de St. Thomas himself had to agree. "That boy has a head," he said one day. "He's a young Moli&re." But it required more than flattery to win the boy over. From the start he had hated this foreign schoolmaster for his self-centered- ness, pretentiousness and conceit. When St. Thomas wanted to punish one of his pupils, he would puff up his chest, fling out one arm and cry, "On your knees, you good-for-nothing!" "I stood there, livid with anger," Tolstoy wrote in Boyhood, "and told myself I would die on the spot sooner than kneel in front of him; but he leaned on my shoulders with all his strength, bent my back and forced me to my knees." The harder St. Thomas worked to humiliate the boy, the more he rebelled against his teacher's heavy-handed authority. As an act of defiance, one morning he stuck out his tongue at St. Thomas, who promptly grabbed him by the hand, locked him into a dark closet and threatened to use a whip on him. He did not really intend to beat the boy, knowing how strongly his family opposed corporal punishment. But Leo was already imagining himself dishonored, debased, presenting his naked backside to his heartless, violet-scented schoolmaster. Flogged, like a muzhik. Anything but that! Seated on a chest in the darkness, his eyes brimming with tears and his throat contracted with rage, he let himself be carried away by a wild dream. He imagined himself poor, orphaned, leaving his birthplace, enlisting in the hussars, going off to war, massacring his enemies, and collapsing, covered with wounds and the single cry of "Victor)'!" on his lips. Later, lie recovered, was promoted to the rank of general, and was walking down the Tver Boulevard with

t About that time the ruble was listed at So.52. This relation is based on the price of rubles, in terms of sterling, in St. Petersburg and the price of dollars, also in terms of sterling, in New York. The value of the dollar in i860 was about five times greater than in 1967 (using 1949 as the base year). Very approximately, then, 8304 rubles would equal $23,500 in today's dollars. This method of calculation is used throughout.

his ami in a sling one day when he met the emperor, who congratulated him on his bravery. Leaning casually upon his saber, he requested, as a reward for his heroic deeds, the favor of annihilating his enemy, "the alien St. Thomas." Of course, the emperor consented, and then it was Leo's turn, towering above his ex-tutor, to bellow, "On your knees, you good-for-nothing!" "But suddenly," he wrote, "it occurs to me that the real St. J6romc [St. Thomas] will come through that door any minute with the rod, and I see that I am not a general who has saved his fatherland but the most wretched, the most pitiable of creatures."⁴ And, the moment after he was brought back to reality, he sailed off on the wings of another fancy: he was dead, lamented by all his loved ones, and beside his coqjse stood St. Thomas, overcome with remorse, begging forgiveness of his family. He was told: "You are the one responsible for his loss; you terrified him; he could not bear the humiliation you inflicted upon him. Begone, dog!"⁵

It was while ruminating thus bitterly in the dark that Leo experienced his first religious doubts. If God were just, why was St. Thomas not punished for his wickedness on the spot? Why go on living in a world in which might was stronger than right? It must be so pleasant to die and fly away to dwell among the pure souls! Lost in his tears, he repeated over and over in a half-whisper, "We are flying away, higher and higher!" When he was released from his confinement twenty-four hours later, the desire to leave the earth still tormented him. He imagined that all he had to do was crouch down and hug his arms around his knees. One day he could stand it no longer and jumped out of his third-floor bedroom window. The cook found him lying senseless on the ground. By some miracle, none of his bones was broken, and all he got for his fall was a mild concussion. After eighteen hours of deep sleep, he awoke as though nothing had happened. Later, he confessed that he had jumped out the window less in an attempt to fly than to "impress the others." "I remember," he wrote, "that I was continually preoccupied with myself: I was always conscious, rightly or wrongly, of what people thought of me, and worried about the feelings I inspired in those around me, and this spoiled all my pleasure." Often his sclf-consciousncss helped him to overcome his fears. When he went to the riding school with his brothers, he demanded that the riding- master give him a lesson, too. Once 011 the horse's back lie took fright, but he clenched his teeth and hung on. With every jolt he slid inexorably earthward, but he did not utter a sound. Finally, he fell. Would they laugh at him? Choking down his tears, he asked to be put back in the saddle, set off at a trot, and fell 110 more.

Ilis need to attract attention by performing some spectacular deed was intensified by his ccrtainty that nobody could love him for his looks. lie had hoped his features would improve with time, but at nine, at ten, he still had his cauliflower nose and little steely eyes set deep in their sockets.⁰ Weary of asking God, in his nightly prayers, to make him as handsome as his brother Sergey, he decided he would be unusual, if nothing else. Seizing a pair of scissors he cut off his eyebrows, which he judged too thick. But they grew back coarser than ever. No doubt about it; the Almighty did not intend him to have any face but his own, crude, hairy and red.

This sense of his unsightlincss became more acute in the presence of Sonya Koloshin, a distant cousin, who was also nine years old, had silky blond hair and periwinkle eyes. Dazzled by the vivacious little girl, he dreamed of spending his life with her "in a black closet." The first time they spoke to each other in the familiar form he felt "a kind of intoxication." But he was shy and did not dare tell her that he admired and loved her. "I could not hope she would reciprocate," he wrote in Childhood, "and I did not even dream of it: my soul did not require so much, to be ecstatically happy. I did not see that in exchange for the love that filled me with delight one might demand still greater happiness, or desire anything more than that this feeling might go on forever." One night in bed, too agitated to sleep, he turned to his brother Sergey and told him in a low voice, in the dark, that he was "terribly much in love with Sonya"; but his brother sneered at this pla- tonic passion and said that in Leo's place he would "covcr the girl's fingers with kisses, and then her eyes, her lips, feet . . ." Horrified, Leo hid his face in the pillow to avoid hearing any more of such "foolishness."⁶

Later, he bccamc equally enamored of little Lyubov Islavin, and once, in a fit of jealousy, he pushed her so hard that she fell off the balcony. She was injured by the fall and limped for some time afterward.!

Leo's passion for girls did not prevent him from being attracted to certain boys of his age as well. He was subjugated by physical beauty, regardless of sex. In The Cossacks he wrote that there was "something akin to love"⁷ between Olenin and Lukashka; in War and Peace he describes the young officcr Ilin, who "tried to imitate Rostov and

⁰ On May 10, 1852, when he was twenty-four, he wrote in his diary, "Aquiline noses drive me to distraction. They seem to me to possess all the strength of character and good fortune in the world."

t Lyubov Islavin later married Dr. Behrs and had a daughter; and it was to this girl, Sonya, that Leo Tolstoy proposed in 1862. Thus he bccamc the son-in-law of the woman he had loved when he was a child and had pushed off the balcony to punish her for talking to other boys.

adored him like a woman in love";⁸ and he wrote in his diary, on November 29, 1851, "I have often been in love with a man. My first love was for the two Musin-Pushkin brothers." He was so obsessed by these two boys, Sasha and Alyosha Musin-Pushkin, that he sometimes wept when he thought of them and prayed God to show them to him in his dreams if he had not seen them during the day. "Besides the passionate attraction I felt for him," he wrote of one of them in Childhood, "his presence aroused in me an equal degree of terror of causing him any unhappiness, offending him, or displeasing him. Perhaps this was because he always wore such a haughty expression, or because, despising my own looks, I attached too much importance to beauty in others, or more probably—and this is an infallible sign of love—because I feared him as much as I loved him. The first time he spoke to me I was so overwhelmed by this unhoped-for good fortune that I turned pale, I blushed, I could say nothing in reply. ... No word was ever spoken between us in allusion to my love, but he was conscious of his power over me and, involuntarily but tyrannically, took advantage of it in our childish relations."⁹

Most of the time the Tolstoys and the Musin-Pushkin brothers played with lead soldiers, inventing military episodes: marches, battles, bivouacs and floggings. Full-scale novels were composed there on the table and rug, in a clutter of colorful figurines and cardboard boxes.

A more singular amusement consisted in burning pieces of paper in chamberpots.

On May 25, 1838, while the children were engaged in this pursuit, they heard rapid footsteps coming down the hall. In the midst of their laughter the door flew open and Prosper de St. Thomas appeared, pale, his lower jaw trembling. "Your grandmother is dead," lie said sharply. The children were struck dumb. Leo was filled with a holy terror. For the second time in eleven months a loved one had gone out of his life. Of course, he had known Grandmother was ill for weeks; when he went to visit her, lying in her bed, he had seen that she was very pale and her hands were swollen with hydropsy; but he had supposed she could go on living like that for ages.

This time, unlike the days after his father's death, he was present throughout all the preparations for the burial. Undertakers in black coats congregated in the house early in the morning. A glass-topped coffin arrived. The boy stared at his ancestor inside the big box on the table: stretched out full lenglh, with waxen facc and hooked nose, a white bonnet on her head, her expression was stern, remote and dissatisfied. She was still listening to the blind storyteller's legends. But when Leo kissed her forehead lie felt the icy skin under his lips and fled from the room with a cry. The next day, his grief undiminished, he nevertheless felt a strange thrill of joy as he put on a black mourning suit edged with white crqie and heard the visitors talking about him and his brothers in compassionate tones: "The father is hardly cold in his grave and the grandmother goes after him! Now they really are orphans."¹⁰ Leo was obsessed by the thought of death. In the air he sniffed smells of incense and wilted flowers that made his throat contract. "The inert body reminds me sharply and unpleasantly that I too shall have to die one day—a feeling that is usually mistaken for grief," lie wrote in Boyhood. "I do not miss Grandmother, and I doubt that anyone really docs."^u

As long as the old lady was alive, neither Aunt Toinette nor Aunt Aline had dared to curtail the style of living to which she had so long been accustomed. But the moment the funeral was over, they resolved in the interests of economy to divide the family. Of the five Tolstoy children, only the two eldest, Nicholas and Sergey (aged fifteen and twelve), would remain in Moscow with Aunt Aline and St. Thomas; the younger children, Dmitry, Leo and Marya (eleven, ten and eight) would return to Yasnaya Polyana with Aunt Toinette. A small apartment was rented for the urbanites, and the others set out on July 6, 1838. Four coaches, harnessed troika style, bore them southward.

Leo's satisfaction at returning to the big house of his infancy, and the meadows, trees, river and ponds, was increased by the fact that one hundred and thirty miles now separated him from the abhorred St. Thomas. For his lessons there was soft-hearted, ignorant Fyodor Ivano- vich Rossel, restored to favor, and then a seminarian, and later a few unprepossessing and inoffensive tutors. But his most profitable lessons were those he learned from the peasants. He listened to their talk with friendly curiosity, and could not understand their resignation in the face of poverty. One of them—young Mitka Kopilov, who had been Count Tolstoy's coachman—was obliged to return to his aged father and resume the hard life of a muzhik when the Tolstoy family cut down its expenses. In one month the elegant house servant in silken blouse and velvet coat was transformed into a ragged bark-shod laborer. He plowed and scythed and sowed with laughing face and bright eyes, and never uttered a complaint. Nor did Kuzma, the groom, complain when Andrey Ilin, the strapping steward, led him away to the barn. As the two men passed him, Leo asked them what they were going to do. Kuzma hung his head and Andrey Ilin muttered, "I'm going to punish him." Leo was stupefied by this announcement. "I wondered then," he wrote in his Reminiscences, "whether I was too stupid to understand the reason for it or whether it was they, the adults, who were stupid. I finally persuaded myself that the grownups knew more about everything than I did, and that this was the way things had to be." That evening, however, when he told Aunt Toinette about the incident, she burst out, "Why did you not prevent it?" This added to his bewilderment. He did not think it was possible for him to intervene in a matter of such consequcnce. Sincc the beginning of time there had been serfs to obey and masters to command, and a few strokes now and then had never lessened the friendship that flourished between owners and muzhiks. Besides, at Yasnaya Polyana there was never any talk of physical punishment. Hence, this was an exceptional measure. Crimson with shame, as though he himself had been whipped, Leo told himself that he had been lacking in charity. Now it was too late! Poor Kuzma must be off having ointment put on his back to ease the pain. Next time . . . ^rlhe child comforted himself with long-term promises, but most often the generous impulses that sprang from his heart were throttled by the unconscious egotism of the young lord. The weather had been exceptionally dry that year, the harvest promised to be scanty, famine was threatening, and the animals' food was rationed; but he and his brother Dmitry stole into the peasants' fields to pull up oats and take them back to the stable to feed their own horses. "My brother and I did this while there were people who had not eaten for two days, whose sole source of sustenance was those same oats. I did not feel guilty about it, it didn't occur to me that it was wrong."¹²

When autumn camc Aunt Toinette and the three orphans returned to Moscow. They were to attend the ceremony of the laying of the cornerstone of Holy Savior Cathedral by Tsar Nicholas I, and to congratulate the eldest Tolstoy son, who had just been admitted to the Department of Philosophy at Moscow University.

During the three-day trip Leo renewed his acquaintance with the Russia of the open roads: jingling bells, crcaking axles and the smell of moth-eaten cloth, long convoys dragging through the dust, pilgrims on foot with their sacks on their backs, swift troikas bearing some ministerial courier, slanting figures engraved 011 the mile-posts. Sometimes they met another caleche, and the boy said to himself, "In two seconds, the faces looking at us with friendly curiosity two lengths away will have flashed past. It seems strange that these faces have nothing to do with me and that I may never see them again."¹³ Or, unexpectedly, there in the middle of the fields stood the red-roofed house of a country squire. "Who lives in that house?" Leo wondered. "Are there any children, a father and mother, a schoolmaster? Why shouldn't we go up and meet its owners?" Too late! 'ihe house was far behind and a village had taken its place. "It smellcd of smoke and tar and cracknel. . . . The harness bells did not ring out as they did in the open country. Thatched-roofcd isbas filed past on cither side."¹⁴

In Moscow, Leo's thirst for new faces and excitement was satisfied beyond his wildest dreams. On September 10, 1838 he saw—from a great distance, it is true—'lsar Nicholas I laving the cornerstone of the cathedral. The military parade that followed thrilled him to the bone. He wanted to march in step with the music and die for his country.

His devotion to the monarchy should by rights have been accompanied by an equal devotion to the Church, but although he was brought up in the Orthodox religion, his faith was not unshakable. Out of respcct for the grownups he believed what they told him about God and the saints but, underneath it all, he was perfectly prepared to believe the opposite, and so he was not unduly astonished when one of his comrades, Volodya Milyutin, sententiously announced that the pupils in his class at the lyc6e had reached the conclusion that God did not exist and that everything they had been taught about Him was "false and made-up." The Tolstoy brothers discusscd the news among themselves and judged it to be interesting, "perhaps even true." Of course Nicholas, now a university student, led the debate with all the authority- of his seventeen years. He had made new friends, with whom lie smoked pipes, exchanged incomprehensible witticisms and laughed noisily while slapping his thighs.

Ignored by these high-powered brains from the University of Moscow, Leo sought in himself an explanation for the mysteries that surrounded him. Even Prosper de St. Thomas, who had been wont to call him "lazy" and a "good-for-nothing," was astonished by his intellectual precocity'. Lazy he still was, for studying galled him; but instead of mathematics, history and geography lessons, he explored his own conscience with a degree of insight that was uncanny in a boy of twelve. Between two games of hide-and-seek, he meditated upon his character, man's destiny, the disintegration of matter and the immortality of the soul. He was bowled over, blinded, by totally contradictory ideas. He had no sooner adopted one set of rules for life than he discovered another, still more attractive. In order to train his will-power and resist pain in the true Stoic manner, he would hold the big Tatishchev dictionary out at arm's length, or, hiding in a storeroom, tear off his shirt and scourge himself with a rope or, after scorching his hands at the stove, plunge them into the snow. The following week, it would be the Epicureans: he decided that death might come upon him unawares at any moment and that, this being the case, the only attitude possible for a man was to make the most of the present with no thought for the morrow. Implementing this conclusion, he neglected his studies, flung away his notebooks and, draped across his bed, devoured light novels and gingerbread until he made himself sick. Sometimes, in a fit of wrath, he would summon God to prove His existence by performing a miracle then and there, and the next minute, not having received a satisfactory response, proclaimed himself an atheist. This coldly rational decision did not prevent him from wondering, when he looked at a circle chalked on the blackboard, whether in view of the existence of symmetry, which is a phenomenon pleasing to the eye, our present life must not be preceded by another, of which we remember nothing, and followed by a third, of which we can guess nothing. Perhaps he had been a horse, before becoming a human. All things considered, however, the philosophical system that appealed to him most was skepticism. "I imagined," he wrote in Boyhood, "that there was nothing and nobody in the universe except me, that objects were not objects but appearances, visible only when I paid attention to them and vanishing the instant I stopped thinking about them. . . . 'Ihere were moments when I became so possessed by this idte fixe that I would whirl around, hoping to ambush the void where I was not."

This perpetual self-analysis refined his intellect, but it taxed his nerves. Suddenly he would ask himself, "What am I thinking about? I am thinking about what I am thinking!—-And now what am I thinking about?—I think that I am thinking about what I am thinking about." Ilis brain began to reel and he saw a scries of mirrors multiplying liis thought into infinity. "My mind broke down, beyond the limits of reason," he went on. "However, my vanity was enormously flattered by my philosophical discoveries; I often imagined myself as a great man discovering new truths for the benefit of mankind, and I contemplated other mortals with a proud awareness of my own merit. But the strange thing was that the moment I came into contact with those same mortals I lost all my confidence before the lowliest among them; and the higher I held myself in my own esteem the less capable I was, in their presence, not only of imposing my sense of my dignity upon them, but even of teaching myself not to be embarrassed by my simplest remark or most ordinary action."¹⁵

In the thick of his philosophical interrogations, he would be visited by dreams of earthly success. If lie passed a general in the street, he imagined him being struck by Leo's air of intelligence and boldness, taking him under his wing, guiding him in his military carccr, decorating him for bravery. Or he would see himself a poet, adulated and worshipped like that Pushkin who had been killed in a duel by a Frenchman three years before. When lie returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the rest of the family, lie wrote a poem in five stanzas, expressing his affection for Aunt Toinette, copied it onto a sheet of fine paper and gave it to her on her name-day, January 12, 1840. These unpolished verses delighted the grownups. After reading them in Moscow, Prosper de St. Thomas himself deigned to write a letter of congratulation to their author: "I read them to Princess Gorchakov; the whole family wanted to read them too, and all were enchanted with them. Do not imagine, however, that their praise was intended for the skill with which they were written, for they contain imperfections due to your ignorance of the canons of versification; they praised you, as I did myself, for the thought, which was admirable, and all hope you will not stop there; that would be a great shame."¹⁶

With such encouragement, Leo launched into more ambitious literary projects. No event was too mighty for his pen; Napoleonic wars, the battle of Kulikovo, the exploits of Marfa Pozadnitsa leading the people of Novgorod; he wrote his own versions of them all in a ruled notebook. His brain was boiling over with patriotic zeal when he wrote, "The walls of Moscow witnessed the shame and defeat of the invincible armies of Napoleon." The fate of Pompeii, on the other hand, he evoked with melancholy: "How fickle and unstable are all the things of this world: Pompeii, the second city of Italy at the height of its glory and splendor, is today nothing but a heap of ruins and ash. . . . Thus, when God wishes to punish, he can change the rich man into a pauper in an hour."

In those days he read a great deal. I lis preferences ranged from the Bible (he wept with compassion at the tale of Joseph and his brothers) to the Thousand and One Nights, the legends of the Russian people and Pushkin's poems. His brothers, too, were reading and writing. In 1841, they spent the summer together at Yasnaya Polyana. But Aunt Aline was not well. She was haunted by thoughts of death, and finally took refuge in the convent of Optina-Pustyn, where she quietly passed away 011 August 30 of that year. She was buried in the nuns' cemetery; Leo wrote an epitaph in verse which was engraved upon her tomb:

How sweet and enviable in our dream

Thy rest in the celestial haven does seem!

Once again there were the mourning suits and tears and family complications. With Aunt Aline gone, a new guardian had to be appointed. Legally, this honor fell to Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, sister of the deceased. Nicholas, the eldest Tolstoy child, wrote to her on behalf of them all: "Do not abandon us, dear Aunt, you are all we have left in the world."

Aunt Pelagya arrived in Moscow forthwith, called the little tribe together and decided to "sacrifice herself ," as she put it.

In reality this "sacrifice" gave her considerable satisfaction: if she had declined, the guardianship would have passed to Aunt Toinette as next of kin, and she hated Aunt Toinette with all her soul, and had hated her for years—Pelagya could never forget that her husband, retired colonel of the hussars Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov, had married her as a last resort after being turned down by Toinette, with whom he had been in love. lie might still be cherishing some impure feelings toward that outwardly unexciting and faded creature. One had to be so careful with men! In any event, Pelagya had been too humiliated at the time of her engagement to pass up any opportunity for revenge. In her ex-rival's presence she feigned effusive and artificial affcction, but she had laid her plans. She could have accepted the guardianship and let Toinette continue to have actual custody of the children; instead, she abruptly decidcd to take them back to Kazan with her and send them to school there. Of course, should she so desire, Aunt Toinette would be welcome to live in her house, as a guest. Pained and dignified, the old spinster refused this humiliating proposal: "It is a cruel and barbaric thing to separate me from the children whom I have cared for so tenderly for nearly twelve years!" she wrote, in French, to Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov.

Hers was a strange fate: she had rejected Yushkov because she was in love with Nicholas Tolstoy, and here the children of that same Nicholas Tolstoy were being ravished from her by the woman Yushkov had married to console himself for losing her. She must have spent many an evening ruefully recalling the marriage proposal her dear cousin Nicholas had made so long ago. Had she listened to him then, no one would be able to take the orphans away from her today. As usual, she resigned herself and yielded. It was agreed that she would go to live at Pokrovskoye with her sister Elizabeth Alcxandrovna Ergol- skaya, widow of another Tolstoy.t The separation was heart-rending. The children wept. Little Masha wanted to run away with Auntie. At last, one misty November morning, the family left Yasnaya Polyana for Kazan, traveling by short stages. The furniture and heavy baggage had been loaded onto barges that were to go down the Oka to the Volga. The numerous household staff piled onto other barges; carpenters, tailors, harness makers, cobblcrs, cooks, scrubwomcn, grooms, men- servants and chambermaids. The young gentlefolk traveled by road, in a closed coach. Now and then they stopped at the edge of a forest,

t Peter Ivanovich Tolstoy, cousin of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy.

bathed in a stream or gathered mushrooms, and the gay activity and constantly changing scenery helped Leo to bear the thought that Aunt Toinette was far away and he would not sec her again until the summer holiday.

At the end of two weeks in the carriage, the churches and minarets of Kazan appeared on the horizon.

4. Kazan

The city was built on a range of hills above a boggy plain that was flooded every spring by the Volga and its tributary the Kazanka, and the only exotic thing about it was its legend. The mind dreamed of past glories and scenes of violence inside the crumbling Kremlin walls and under the pointed tower of Suyumbeka; the Tatar district was a quaint site with its bric-a-brac of ramshackle minarets and dusty booths; there was a certain stateliness in the neo-classical pediments of the official buildings; but a veil of boredom and lassitude floated over all. To enliven the monotony of provincial life, the people of high socicty entertained each other incessantly. "At Kazan," a contemporary wrote,¹ "it was possible for a bachelor not to keep a table of his own, for there were at least twenty or thirty houses where people gathered for dinner without being invited. . . . After the meal and after coffee and chat of this and that, they all went their separate ways home for a little nap. . . . In the evening off we went again, to a reception or a ball, that always ended in a Lucullan feast. . .

This fluttering, superficial life was that of the Yushkov family. They received the children with well-meaning effusions, lodged them and dressed them, introduced them to their acquaintances and took no further notice of them. Aunt Pelagya was very different from Aunt Aline and Aunt Toinette. A social butterfly of limited intellectual capacity, she had a kind heart, the brains of a sparrow, she harbored deep-seated resentments dating from her youth, and her aim was to enjoy herself and be popular. Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy wrote of her, "She doted on archbishops, monasteries, and cloth-of-gold embroideries which she made and gave to churches and convents; she also loved good food, and liked to decorate her room tastefully, giving long thought to the position of a divan, for example." She had a strong sense of tradition, and wanted each of the Tolstoy boys to have his own personal serf, a boy of his own age—she thought this a charming custom. Her husband, Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov, was a likable man, unsubstantial, witty and a woman chaser, who shone in the salons, dabbled at the piano, squeezed the servant girls' waists and feared nothing so much as to be left alone with his wife, whose looks distressed him and whose prattling drove him wild. Although he was sincerely fond of his nephews, he had no more time or inclination to guide their steps than his wife had. Little Marya was boarded out and the four brothers continued their studies in their chosen subjects. Nicholas, now seventeen years old, enrolled at the University of Kazan, where Sergey and Dmitry joined him in 1843, entering the Department of Mathematics. Leo, having suddenly decided to become a diplomat, was preparing to enter the Department of Oriental Languages. From the first, the task appeared a formidable one: the requirements for the entrance examination included—in addition to history, geography, statistics, mathematics, Russian literature, logic, Latin, French, German and English—an elementary knowledge of Arabic and Turko-Tatar. While slogging reluctantly away at these unappetizing subjects, lie endeavored to improve his external appearance and cultivate a distinguished bearing. Awed by his elder brother Nicholas, who, by virtue of his age and learning, was almost an adult, he nevertheless felt much closer to Sergey, whose good looks, high spirits and elegance had always impressed him. In order to become more like Sergey, and also to acquire the proper Yushkov tone, he endeavored to observe the proprieties in all things. Unfortunately, when he looked at himself in a mirror, he found himself still more ugly and common than when he had been a child: "The most vulgar, coarse and ugly features," he confessed, "little gray eyes that looked more stupid than clever. . . My face was that of a common muzhik, and so were my big hands and feet."² But it ought to be possible to counterbalance them with a cultivated mind and distinguished manners. With this as his point of departure, he resolved that his goal in life would be to become, 110 longer a general, scholar or poet, but a man of distinction—cottime il faut.⁹ Society thereafter ceased to be divided into rich and poor, good and bad, clever and stupid, civilian and military, healthy and sick: there were only people "commc il faut" and people not "commc il faut." "My way of being comme il faut," he wrote, "consisted first of all in the perfect mastery of the

* Comme il faut was the French term Tolstoy used; its chief meaning is a combination of "proper, respectable, gentlemanly"; for him, of course, it meant something more than "what was done" or "tire thing," as opposed to "not quite the thing." (Tr. note).

Frcnch language and, in particular, the proper accent. A man who pronounced French badly aroused in me a feeling of contempt. . . . The second requirement for being comme il faut was to have fingernails that were long, well-shaped and clean; the third was to be able to bow, dance and converse; the fourth (very important) was to appear indifferent, to wear a certain air of distinguished and disdainful boredom at all times."³

The code of behavior which Leo invented proved more difficult to apply than he would have supposed. He was straining to become a fashion plate; yet, whatever he tried, all he achieved was a caricature of Sergey. On the other hand, he deemed himself far more advanced than his other brother Dmitry, a sober, pensive, determined boy who paid scant attention to his appearance, did not go out into society, did not dance and, winter and summer alike, wore a student's coat and a cravat that was too tight for him, obliging him to stick out his ncck from time to time to disengage it. Even his friends were peculiar. His brothers had made friends among the aristocracy, but Dmitry went round with Poluboyarinov, a poor student, who was so dirty and threadbare that the servants were embarrassed when he came to the door. And what was one to think of his attachment to Lyubov Sergeyevna, a girl the family had taken in out of charity? She was timid, mild and vague, and her face was swollen as though by bee-stings. Her eyes were scarcely visible between two folds of fat, and her pale scalp showed through thin black hair in patches. When the flies settled on her face in the summer, she did not even feel them. She never opened the windows or the transom in her room and the smell was suffocating. Dmitry, literally fascinated by such ugliness, developed a great affection for Lyubov Sergeyevna, regularly went to sec her in her lair, read to her and listened to her talcs of woe. Aunt Pelagya was afraid he might marry the wretched creature. But he paid no heed to teasing or chiding. Imperturbable and placid, he continued to behave as though the world outside did not exist and the soul were the only thing that counted. Occasionally, he mistreated Vanyusha, the little serf Aunt Pelagya had given him, but he repented the next moment and begged pardon of the boy, who gaped at such kindness. For Leo and Sergey, going to church was a custom to be respected but not taken seriously, but Dmitry went to every service and prayed with a fervor that could scarcely have been less comme il faut. On Orthodox holy days, he dragged the whole family to the prison church where the service was very long and very beautiful. In the nave, a glass partition with a door in it separated the faithful free from the faithful unfree. Once, one of the latter wanted to give some money to the sacristan to buy a candle. As none of the good people around would carry out his request, Dmitry pushed his way up to the partition and did what the convict had asked. He was reprimanded because it was forbidden to have any contact with the prisoners. He said nothing, but, feeling he had done no more than his duty, he repeated his gesture on the following days. This obstinacy irritated Leo, who saw it as a lack of savoir vivre. He made fun of Dmitry, said he was crazy, callcd him Noah in public and chokcd with delight when a trustee of the University of Kazan tried to persuade the young man to dance by explaining, in deadly earnest, that David had done no less before the Ark. And yet, in his heart, he envied his impossible brother for having found his way and refusing to relinquish it in the face of scoffs and taunts. Perhaps, to merit the respect of others, and especially of oneself, it was not enough to be comme il faut. As the date for his university entrance examinations drew near, Leo became increasingly convinced of the need for moral improvement.

During Holy Week he was hurrying to finish reviewing his lessons, for the examinations took place immediately after Easter. He was sixteen, and Lenten fasting and rapid growth had overtaxed his strength. His eyes continually strayed from his book to stare out the window at the blue sky and trees covered with shiny buds and the new grass coming up between the paving stones. A servant in shirtsleeves rolled up, wearing an apron, came to remove the putty and bend back the nails in the double casements. When the window was opened, the fresli-scented air flooded the room and Leo, dizzy with joy, could scarcely keep from crying out in wonder. "Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, virtue! . . . Everything told me that beauty and happiness and virtue were all one!"⁴

'Ilien and there he resolved to change his life. He would go to mass every Sunday, read the Gospels one hour every day, give two and one- half rubles a month to the poor—without telling anyone—clcan his room himself, oblige no one to wait on him, always go to the University on foot—and if his family gave him a coach of his own he would sell it without a twinge and offer the money to some needy family. As for his studies: he would confound his professors by his application, win two gold medals, become a lecturer, a doctor of philosophy, one of the greatest scholars in Russia. This would not prevent him from keeping in top physical condition, so that he could exccl the famous athlete Rappo in strength and skill. When he had reached the height of his powers, She would enter his life. She: the ideal woman—who was, Tolstoy later wrote, "a little like Sonya, a little like Basil's wife, Masha, used to be when she was washing our linen in a tub, and a little like the woman with a white throat and pearl necklace I saw once at the theater in a box next to us." And if some upstart should take it into his head to offend this adorable creature, he would pluck him off the ground like a feather, just to frighten him, and then magnanimously let him go. Everybody would admire and love him. At the sound of his name hundreds of strangers would commune in ecstasy. He would be rich, honored, respected. . . . From these dizzy heights he plummeted back to earth with a jolt that restored him to his senses in a flash, showing him all his old shortcomings, and he fell to loathing himself, body and soul, with morbid delight. A few days before his examinations he decided to write down in a notebook the "Rules of Life" he would follow in the future. lie divided them into three categories: duties to oneself, duties to one's neighbor, duties to God. He began to list them, lost count, gave up and went back to the first page to set down the title: "Rules of Life." But his pen would not move smoothly across the page, the letters kept running together, the whole thing was illegible. "Why is everything so beautiful and clear inside," he asked, "and so formless on paper and in my life in general?"⁵ A servant interrupted him to announce that the priest had come to confess the family before Faster communion. He quickly hid his notebook, took a glance in the mirror (that hideous nose, lumpish, red!), brushed his hair upward—he fancied this gave him "a pensive air"—and went down to the sitting room where an icon and lighted tapers had been placed on a cloth-covered table. The confessor, an old monk with white hair and a severe countenance, did not appear at all shattered by Leo's revelations and concluded with the words, "the blessing of the Heavenly Father be upon thee, my son, and may He ever preserve thee in faith, meekness, and humility. Amen." Purified and relieved, Leo no longer doubted that God looked upon him with special favor and would, in any event, help him through his exams.

The truth is that in his state of unpreparedness, aid from such a source would not have been unwclcomc; and during the first question periods, he might well have believed that Providence had indeed singled him out: in religious instruction he got four out of five, five in German, Arabic, Turko-Tatar; five-plus in French, four in algebra, arithmetic, English and Russian literature; but he answered very badly in history and geography, statistics, Latin . . . ones and twos rained down upon the examiners' cards. Hoping to rescue the candidate, the trustee of the University of Kazan who was a friend of the Tolstoy family asked him an easy question: "Name the French seaports." Leo's mind went blank. From the North Sea to the Mediterranean he saw nothing but barren coastline. With a premonitory shudder, he realized that France would be his downfall: one out of five. He flunked.

Swallowing his humiliation, he decided to take the exams over again in September. His holidays were ruined by academic anxiety. No trip to Yasnaya Polyana. Instead of his favorite authors Pushkin, Dickens, Schiller, Dumas—he had to dig his way back into the dim, gray mist of his textbooks. At last he passed, and could don the student's uniform he had been coveting for months. Dark-blue tunic with brass buttons, three-cornered cocked hat, patent-leather boots and a sword at his side— the first time he went out on the street in this garb, he was conscious that he was no longer little Leo: he was Count Leo Tolstoy. "I felt," he wrote, "against my will, an oozing, radiant, idiotically self-satisfied smile spreading across my face and I noticcd that this smile communicated itself even to the people I was talking to."⁰

His first contacts with the academic world increased his feeling of his own singularity. Dozens of boisterous students shoved into him without noticing him, exchanged rough handshakes, evil-sounding comments and unintelligible jokes. At first it seemed out of the question for him to join any of his fellow students' groups. Some he found poor and vulgar, not at all comme il faut; the others, the aristocratic clan, displayed a shocking degree of doltish pretentiousness; and the professors rattled off their lectures without conviction. An outpouring of empty words, a Niagara of platitudes! . . . Gradually, however, he grew so used to this fraternal community that he could no longer live without it. He even came to love the atmosphere of the lecture halls, with the speaker's monotonous voicc droning on and on, the jostling in the corridors, the glasses of vodka tossed off on the sly in some nearby tavern, the easy-going, interchangeable companions, who distracted him from his work. He could, of course, have made up for lost time at home, after classes were over. But then there were the temptations of society. As grandson of a former governor of the town, nephew of the Yushkovs who had such a wide circle of friends, and the bearer in his own right of a considerable name, Leo Tolstoy was much sought-after in the salons, despite his youth. Kazan was one long series of parties, winter and summer. The marshal of nobility, governor of the province, trustee of the University of Kazan, principal of the Rodyonov School for Young Ladies, notables, wealthy merchants, senior civil servants, all took turns arranging balls, suppers, masquerades, tableaux-vivants. These gatherings of the "gilded youth" amused Leo Tolstoy, he would have been grief-stricken to miss a single one; and yet, as soon as he found himself among other people, he became paralyzed by a morbid shyness. Deafened by the blare of the music, blinded by the chandeliers and the young ladies' glances, agitated by a thousand subtle scents given off by the waltzing gowns, he lost every semblance of poise, did not dare open his mouth, and wished himself invisible. While his fellow students were flirting with the ladies, he took refuge in a comer, brows beetling, hands hidden behind his back, and mutely admired the inaccessible beauties beyond. On the rare occasions when he invited one of them to dance, he was so distraught that he got his feet mixed up, blushed, apologized and speedily led her back to her place. "My dear Leo, you are nothing but a sack of flour!" exclaimed (in French) the principal of the Rodyo- nov School for Young Ladies, not at all pleased with his deportment. The young ladies whispered among themselves that he was "a boring partner."⁷

In spite of his dread of appearing ridiculous, he agreed to act in two amateur theatricals being given in February 1845. "To which of the actors shall we give the palm?" wrote a local chronicler of mellifluous pen. "We are hard put to say, for each played his part so excellently that in many placcs the audience forgot it was a stage play they were observing and not nature itself."⁸ One member of the company was a young man named Dmitry Dyakov (Mitya), to whom Leo was immediately attracted. He was also struck by Dmitry's sister, Alexandra. But she was so pretty that, whenever he looked at her, he was overcome by his own ugliness. Mitya, who had a gentle face, a fine small mouth and wavy blond hair, was less intimidating. In their long conversations together, the two friends agreed that man's destiny was to progress toward moral perfection and that it was for each person, in his small sphere of influence, to discourage vice by setting an example of virtue. "Our souls," Tolstoy later related, "were so well attuned that any chord struck in one, no matter how lightly, echoed in the other."⁹ Sometimes they descended from the clouds to talk of their future, military service, art, marriage, how to bring up children. They both considered it absurd to look for beauty in a woman; any self-respecting man should marry a person who was "able, above all else, to help him improve himself."¹⁰ Metaphysical problems intoxicated them like fumes of opium. "I used to love," Tolstoy wrote, "the moment when ideas, flowing faster and faster, growing more and more abstract, finally became so nebulous that one could no longer find any words to express them and, believing one was saying what one meant, said something quite different. I loved the instant when, after rising higher and higher into the realms of thought, one suddenly sensed the immensity beyond and recognized the impossibility of going any further."¹¹ Tolstoy was unmistakably intimidated by Mitya Dyakov, who was five years his senior. He wished to hide nothing from this incomparable, irreplaceable friend. "I always say exactly what I am most ashamed to admit, but only to people I am sure of!" he proudly declared one day.¹²

Other friends, the two Zybin brothers, temporarily communicated to him their passion for music. With his customary single-minded zcal- ousness, Tolstoy practiced scales on the piano, tried to loosen up his "big fingers" by keeping them constantly in motion, on his knees at the dinner table, or on his pillow in bed, and in the end, he even wrote a waltz.f While engaged in these artistic pursuits, he was not above joining his fellow students in one of their shabby "carouses" in an atmosphere of smoke, sweat and pommaded hair. He banged his glass against theirs, laughed, sang and felt his mounting fatigue and disgust, and was convinced that the others were having no more fun than he, but that a rule of honor required them all to pretend they were wildly gay. He came home with a heavy conscience and a woolly mouth. In those days he stared at women and talked about them with a lack of restraint that made a poor cover for his inexperience. His passion suddenly settled upon a ladies' maid at the Yushkovs', big Matryona, who was twenty-five years old, had a pretty round face, a quantity of white skin and provocative manners. He had noticcd one of the footmen in the house pursuing her assiduously; then he surprised his own brother Sergey scuffling with her on the stairs. She pushed the young gentleman away with a laugh and whispered, "Really, watch where you're putting your hands, you should be ashamed of yourself."¹³ At first he was terrified by Sergey's boldness; then Leo dreamed of usurping his place in the girl's favors. A hundred times he crouched in the corridor listening to the flutter in the women-servants' room and erecting foolproof schemes for conqucst, but he never had the courage to push open the door. "What would I say, with my cabbage nose and my tufts of hair sticking up in the air, if she asked me what I wanted?""

It was not long afterward, no doubt, that he lost his virginity, in the most commonplace and tawdry way; barely sixteen years old, a liquor- sodden girl, a brothel bedroom. Later, he told his secretary, N. N. Gusev: "The first time my brothers dragged me to a brothel and I performed that act, I sat down afterward at the foot of the woman's bed and cried."¹⁵ The hero of his short story, Memoirs of a Billiard-marker, also weeps and rages at his friends after they have forced him to sleep with a prostitute. "You think it's funny, but I am sad," he says. "Why did I do it? I won't forgive you for it and I won't forgive myself as long as I live."! The memory of this distasteful body-to-body skirmish with a

\ He never forgot it, and played it at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906. lie himself admitted that he had only sketched out the melody, arid one of the Zybin brothers did the arrangement.

J The hero of the talc A Holy Night (1853) ^al^{so cries a ba}V ^{in the same} circumstances.

total stranger long prevented Leo Tolstoy from taking another woman in his arms. He preferred poetic elucubrations and solitary relief to tire sordid pleasures of possession.

The end-of-term examinations found him unprepared. His marks were so poor that the board of examiners would not allow him to sit for the year-end examinations. Their decision, dated April 26, 1845, was accompanied by the following commentary: "Insufficient attendance in class and total failure in history." Mortified by this censure, Tolstoy blamed it on the hatred of Ivanov, his history professor, who had quarreled with his family a short time before. He shut himself up in his room and indulged in a three-day bout of tears, rage and curses. He envied his brother Nicholas, who was going to enlist in the army the following month. He dreamed of going with him, fighting in the Caucasus, dying a hero, or possibly committing suicide. Then, picking up the notebook in which he had first written his "Rules of Life," he opened it and felt a momentary rush of remorse and nostalgia. "When I recovered, I decided to revise my rules of life," he wrote, "convinced that this time I would never do anything wrong again, would never spend one sccond in idleness and would never violate the principles I had laid down for myself."¹⁶

Filled with these noble resolutions, he set off out for Yasnaya Polyana with his brothers. Aunt Toinette was there, with her warm eyes and little blue-veined hands. The moment he entered the drawing room he felt "the gentle caress of the old house." "How," he wondered, "have the house and I managed to live so long without each other?"¹⁷ The windowpanes rcflcctcd memories of his childhood, he ran to bathe in the swift, merry water of the Voronka, stretched out in the shade of a birch grove, opened a book, read a few lines, drank in the shimmering, layered transparence of the leaves and felt coursing through him "the same force of life, fresh and young, that filled Nature around me."¹⁸ Then, closing his book, he went to pick apples in the orchard or plunged into the dark, moist forest, filled with the smell of rotting fruit, moss and raspberries. In the evening, after supper, he settled himself to sleep on the terrace, heedless of the clouds of mosquitoes that vibrated in the shadows. One by one the last lamps emigrated from the ground floor to the rooms above, voiccs were lowered, the lights went out, the whole house sank into sleep and the night watchman began his rounds, stumping down the avenue striking his iron plate.

Then everything took on a different meaning for Leo Tolstoy: the silver-frosted sprays of poplar, the soft creaking of two birches against each other, the leaping frogs "which sometimes climbed up the steps of die terrace, their backs gleaming greenish in the moonlight . .

Surrounded by shadows and the eerie phosphorescence, he dreamed of the ideal woman, with one black braid lying over her shoulder and provocative breasts. "But," he wrote, "something told me that SHE, with her bare arms and scaring embrace, was by no means all the happiness in the world and that even my love for HER was by no means the only good. The longer I stared up at the moon, high in the sky, the more it seemed to me that true beauty and true happiness Were still higher, more pure, closer to Him, the source of all that is good and beautiful, and tears of joy, an unfulfilled, straining sort of joy, came to my eyes. . . . It seemed to me then that Nature, the moon and I were one and the same."²⁰

These nocturnal meditations were supplemented during the day by the study of the philosophers. He was not satisfied by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" and proposed, in its stead, "I want, therefore I am." Dazzled by this discovery, he even outlined a theory, beginning with the words: "If man did not desire, there would be no man."¹'¹ And, after finding fault with Descartes, he came in due course to Rousseau. The Confessions thundered through his brain like an earthquake. He learned that he was not alone to harbor a writhing mass of sordid instincts, that all men were probably equally cowardly, covetous, lying, envious and cruel, but that it required great strength of character to own up to it. As for the theory of the benefits of a primitive life as opposed to the evils of civilization: he might have invented it himself. "I thought I was reading my own mind and simply added a few details here and there," he said in Youth.

These reflections inspired him to withdraw into himself and flee his fellows; and Aunt Toinette, watching him wander through the grounds —gazing at nothing, slack-jawed, conversing with some imaginary partner—began to worry. When addressed, he came back from another world, assuming an expression at once dazed and condescending. He, who formerly took such pains with his dress in order to appear comme il faut at all times, now prcachcd simplicity of attire and began to neglect his appcarance. With his own hands, he sewed a dressing gown of coarse linen, which he wore in the day as he meditated and, by means of an ingenious system of flaps which could be unbuttoned and folded back, used at night as bed and blanket. No more shirt, no cravat, no hose: slippers, over bare feet. He did not even change for company. When Aunt Toinette rebuked him for this getup, he angrily retorted that he was above such "vain contingencies." However, the new Diogenes of Yasnaya Polyana was hard-put to overcome the emotions women aroused in him. "I always watched most attentively as the ladies' gowns —especially pink ones—came and went around the pond, across the meadow or in front of the house/'²- lie wrote. And he alternated his philosophical investigations with romanesque readings which were disturbing in quite another way: Eug&ne Sue, Alexandre Dumas and Paul de Kock were his revenge upon reality. "Not only did I not dare suspect the author of lying," he wrote, "but the author himself did not exist for me, and the characters, real and living events, sprang up before my eyes, straight off the printed page. ... I discovered in myself all the passions they described, and I resembled all the characters, both heroes and villains, in every novel, just as a hypochondriac discovers every symptom of ever}' conceivable disease in himself when he reads a treatise on medicine." When his imagination had become white-hot, he closed his book and confronted a void. Not one woman in his life. How long could he be contcnt with the solitary pleasures so dear to Rousseau?

In mid-August, he left Yasnaya Polyana with his brothers, returned to Kazan and, rather than repeat his first year in the Department of Oriental Languages, asked to be transferred to the Law Department. "I do not know whether this will please you or not," he wrote to Aunt Toinette on August 25, 1845, "but I have changed departments and become a student of law. I personally find this science more easy and natural to apply to our private lives than any other and I am consequently very pleased with the change. Now I am going to tell you my plans and the kind of life I want to live. I won't go out in society at all. I will divide my time equally between music, drawing, languages and my courses at the University. May God grant me the determination to carry out my intentions."

On his way through Moscow he had seen his brother Nicholas, attached as a cadet, or "junker,"® to the 14th Artillery Brigade which was stationed not far from the city.

"Poor fellow, he's having a miserable time in the camp, especially as he hasn't a cent, one must find it extremely hard," he exclaimed in the same letter. "And the others! Good God, what yokels, if ever there were any! You need only one glimpse of camp life at first hand to lose all desire for a career in the army."

His decision was already taken: he would be neither officer nor diplomat, but jurist! However, his first law courscs did not provide the intellectual stimulus he had expected from them. lie continued to receive poor marks, and was even put into confinement oncc, for unexplained absence from Professor Ivanov's history lectures. (Him

• A young man from the upper classes serving a sort of military apprenticeship before receiving his officer's commission. N. Tr.

again!) In the vaulted cell with its barred window, he found a fellow law student and undertook to explain to him, with passion, that history was nothing but a "heap of myths and useless, trivial details, sprinkled with dates and names!"

The future author of War and Peace railed on until nightfall against official historians and the "temple of the false science," lighted from below by a tallow candle, gesticulating, his cap in his eyes and his coat unbuttoned, across from his companion who was dropping with sleep.

Despite his relative diligence at his studies, he miraculously scraped through the year-end examinations and departed, elated, for Yasnaya Polyana, determined to turn his hand to estate management during the summer months. Soon after his arrival, he wrote to his brother Nicholas, who had meanwhile been transferred to the Caucasus: "I have been at Yasnaya with the whole family,f which is just as it should be, for two weeks now, and yet I shall not begin to live according to my rules until tomorrow. This 'tomorrow' will make you laugh, yet I still have hope! I must tell you that I am up to my neck in estate management: primo, it keeps me busy and secundo, it amuses me—I am inventing all sorts of machines and improvements. I don't know whether I have told you about the three books I am writing: one is called Miscellany, another What Is Needed for the Welfare of Russia? and Studies of Russian Customs, and the third is Observations on Property Management. . . . My Miscellany will be filled with poetry, philosophy and in general things that are not pretty but are amusing to write." Thus, even before he knew he was going to be a writer, Tolstoy was preoccupied by the three areas he spent the rest of his life exploring: storytelling, educating his fellow men and organizing life on a country estate.

At the level of mental maturity he had now reached, it seemed absurd that he should still be required to live in the home of his guardian, Aunt Pelagva. His brothers Dmitry and Sergey agreed, and so, when they returned to Kazan, they took their leave of the Yushkov household and moved together into a six-room cottagc, rented for seven hundred rubles a year. During his second year in the Law Department Leo Tolstoy, as flighty, unstable and unconcentrated as ever, nevertheless expressed some interest in Professor Vogel's discussions on the death penalty and deigned to attend a few of Professor Meyer's lectures on the history of civil law. His private studies waxed as his class attendance waned. Every minute he stole from the Department was spent in reading and exalting discourse: "Gogol, Rousseau, Pushkin, Goethe's Faust, Hegel . . ." Since January 1847 he had been keeping

f That is, Auut Toinette, Dmitty, Sergey and Marya Tolstoy.

a diary of his thoughts and actions, and cspccially of his resolutions. His idee fixe was to pcrfcct his famous "Rules of Life." It seemed to him that the more clearly he defined perfection, the more chance he had of attaining it. His recipes for virtue covered whole pages. "Get up early (five o'clock), go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock) . . . Eat little and avoid sweets . . . Try to do everything by yourself. . . Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for ever)' week, a goal for ever)' day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater . . ." "Keep away from women . . "Kill desire by work . . ." "Be good, but try to let no one know it . . ." "Always live less expensively than you might . . ." "Change nothing in your style of living even if you bccome ten times richer . . Setting down these aphorisms with the glowing conviction of his eighteen years, Leo Tolstoy believed he would remain true- to them until death. But, at his present degree of intellectual ebullition, the notes in his diary were no longer enough. He drafted a commentary on Rousseau's philosophy, formulated in passing a few caustic remarks about history, "the most backward science of all," outlined an essay on the immortality of the soul, and another in French on the second chapter of BruyЈrc's Characters: and, counseled by Professor Meyer, began a comparative study of the Directives of Catherine II and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. He became enthused by this at-first-glancc forbidding task. But then lie fell ill; was he going to have to give up all literary activity, perhaps for days? Fortunately, it was nothing serious, and at eighteen his vitality was such that the fever itself was fuel for his meditations. Admitted to the university clinic on March 11, 1847, he looked forward happily to a period of uninterrupted study far from acadcmic obligations and worldly temptation. In the calm of the big white hall, he seriously applied his mind, for the first time, to the problem of the lawfulness of power. He accepted the imperial government as a necessity, but he had doubts as to the fate of freedom and justice for the individual under such a system; and he was opposed to capital punishment but advocated the assimilation of enacted law to natural law. "The Directives brought more glory to Catherine than benefit to Russia," he wrote.

At the same time, he continued his diary with impassioned solemnity. "It has bccomc plain to me," he wrote, "that the irregular behavior which most people of fashion take to be a consequence of youth is nothing more than an expression of premature spiritual depravity. . . . If a man but leave society and withdraw into himself, a little thought will cause the glasses he has been wearing, through which he saw everything in a false light, to drop from his eyes. . . And further on, "I am beginning to feel a passion for study growing within me. . . . I should be the unhappicst man alive if I did not have a purpose in life. . . ."

lie had a sudden revelation that he could not go on taking courses in the Law Department. He had been too happy working by himself to go back to the tedious discipline of the University. "Strange as it may seem," he wrote later, "my work on the Directives and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws opened up a new field of intellectual activity to mc, whereas the University, with all its rules and regulations, not only did not help mc to study but actually prevented me from doing so."²⁴ He also said, "Men of genius are incapable of studying when they are young, because they unconsciously feel that they must learn everything differently from the mass."²⁵

When he left the clinic he already knew that his true professors were not Ivanov, Meyer and Vogcl, but Montesquieu and Rousseau.

On April 12, 1847, without waiting to take his examinations, he asked the rector for permission to withdraw from the University, for reasons of health—any excuse would do. His request was granted. On April 23, leaving his brothers Sergey and Dmitry to carry on docilely with their studies, he collected his books and papers together and packcd his trunks. According to his habit, he outlined his life for the next two years at Yasnaya Polyana: "Study the entire law course, practical medicine and part of medical theory; also French, Russian, German, English, Italian and Latin, and agriculture, both theory and practice; also history, geography, statistics; and mathematics—(high-school course); write a thesis; reach an average degree of perfection in music and painting; write rules of life."²⁰ His friends from the University accompanied him as far as the ford in the Kazanka River, which was rising. Handshakes, kisses, thumps on the shoulders . . . the coachman was growing restive. The young man climbed up again, looked across to the opposite bank and smiled confidently at the future.

At the University, an inscription scratched with a knife in an iron desk—"Count Leo Tolstoy"—was the only trace of the five and a half years he had spent in Kazan.

5. Wild Oats

The first thing Leo did upon arriving at Yasnaya Polyana was to invite Aunt Toinette back under his roof. At nineteen he was no longer subject to any guardian's dictates and might choose whom he liked to manage his household. The old spinster saw that her moment of revenge upon the intriguer, Pelagya Ivanovna Yushkov, was at hand. She gratefully resumed possession of her two ground-floor rooms, hung up her icons in a corner and stood out her tins of dates, candies, cookics and raisins on her dresser. Soon afterward Sergey and Dmitry also came back to the old house, after passing their university examinations, and Nicholas joined them, having obtained a special furlough for "family affairs." All the Tolstoy sons were now their own masters and the inheritance could be divided up. According to the Russian law of that time, daughters were entitled to only one-fourteenth of the movable goods and one-eighth of the real property of their parents' estate, the remainder being divided equally among the sons. The boys considered these provisions unjust and decided that their sister Marya should receive a fifth of the whole, like themselves. They had discussed the allocation of the land the previous year. Nicholas, the eldest son, had chosen Nikolskove; Sergey, who was a great horse-fancier, took the estate and stud farm of Pirogovo; Marya was given 2440 acres of land and 150 peasants on the same estate; Dmitry received Sherbatchevka in the government of Kursk; and Leo inherited Yasnaya Polyana and a few neighboring hamlets—a total of approximately 4000 acres of land and 330 peasants. When Sergey Tolstoy was asked why his brother Leo had preferred Yasnaya Polyana to all the other lots, he answered, "It was considered the least profitable share of the entire estate." The deed of settlement was signed on July 11, 1847 and the brothers separated immediately afterward, each going off to prospect his claim.

Marya did not stay long, either: in November of that year she married her cousin Valerian Pctrovich Tolstoy and settled on the Pokrovskoye estate with him.

Now sole and absolute master of Yasnaya Polyana and its inhabitants, Leo Tolstoy began to plumb the extent of his responsibilities a little more ever)' day. First, lie decided to modernize the farming methods, and ordered a mechanical threshing machine built to his own specifications. At its inaugural demonstration for the peasants, the contraption throbbed, whistled, wheezed and threshed nothing. Deflated, Tolstoy moved on from technology to welfare. From afar, the thought of the reformation he would carry out on his land had positively intoxicated him. Close up, he was less sure of his theories. The stewards heard him out with obsequious smiles as he expounded his projects for social reform, and when he had finished talking they presented him with accounts which were so entangled that he no longer knew whether they were all crooks or himself a hopeless fool. He was too unsure of himself to argue, shout and throw the riff-raff out of his office, and so in the end, battle-weary, he grudgingly endorsed what he would rather have damned. Similarly, when he tried to give the muzhiks a vision of a more elevated and prosperous way of life, he felt he was infringing upon their time-worn ways. They met his exhortations and his benevolent concern with a staggering force of inertia. Centuries of serfdom had atrophied their brains. Cringing and blinking, their faces baked by sun and dirt, they refused to abandon their status as beasts of burden for a better life. "Master, our young master!" they respectfully murmured. And when his back was turned they called him a madman.

Ivan Churis' isba was on the very verge of collapse, but when the master, appalled at such destitution, offered to build him a new one, the fellow pleaded to be allowed to stay on in his old hovel, with his filth and his eccentricities. Yukhvanka wanted to sell his horse, claiming it was too old to work; but when Leo went to buy the animal, just to do the man a favor, lie saw that there was nothing the matter with it: the muzhik only wanted to get rid of it bccause he was too lazy to farm his field. Karp, the coachmaker, and his sons whined that their trade brought them next to nothing in comparison with the farmers, but when Tolstoy offered to rent them eighty acres of his own land to work, on very favorable terms, they refused, suspecting their young master of trying to make a profit at their expense. There was no school in the village, and besides, nobody in it knew how to read. Negligence, ignorance, disease, sloth and cunning prevailed. They muddled along from day to day and harvest to harvest, and nothing was done to better the condition of anyone. Could one lone man budge this mountain of wretchedness? And yet, how was one to avoid getting involved with it? The serfs overran their lord's existence—he was as much theirs as they were his. If he did not go to see them in their village, they came to him in his handsome house. "Assembled before the steps," Tolstoy wrote, "were a woman in bloodstained rags, screaming that her father- in-law had tried to kill her; two brothers who had been quarreling over the division of their property for two years, glaring at each other with loathing; a grizzled, unshaven old house-servant with the shaking hands of a drunkard, whom his son, the gardener, had brought to the master to be scolded; a muzhik who had run his wife out of his house because she had not done a stroke of work all spring; and the wife in question, sick and sobbing, not uttering a word, sitting there on the grass in front of the steps, holding out her swollen leg wrapped in dirty rags."¹ The young master swallowed his distaste, swelled out his chest and, calling upon the vast stores of his inexperience, scolded some and consoled others; then, with a feeling compounded of weariness, shame, helplessness and remorse, he went back to his room.²

However, although he deplored the wretched lives of his serfs, Tolstoy did not condemn serfdom itself. "The idea that the serfs should be liberated was quite unheard-of in our circle in the forties," he wrote in his Reminiscences. "The hereditary ownership of serfs seemed an indispensable fact of life." After losing his illusions as to the opportuneness of the reforms he had dreamed of carrying out, lie came to think it was better for the muzhiks to go on vegetating and the stewards fleecing them, and the estate to slumber on. "My peasants are no better off, and it grows harder for me to bear every day," said his hero Nekhlyudov in A Landlord's Morning. "Ah, if only I had seen my projects crowned with success, or gratefully accepted . . . But no: I sec nothing but pointless routine, vice, mistrust, impotence. I am wasting the best years of my life." And also, "It is easier to find happiness for oneself than to give it to others."

In the country, as in town, Tolstoy went on reading everything that came into his hands, and took notes on a wide variety of subjects. Ever precise, he drew up a list of his literary discoveries over the years, marking opposite each the degree of admiration it had aroused in him:

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (immense influence).

Sterne's Sentimental Voyage (very great influence).

Rousseau's Confessions (immense influence). Emile (immense influence).

La Nouvelle blelo'ise (very great influence).

Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (very great influence).

Schiller's The Robbers (very great influence).

Gogol's The Overcoat, Ivan Ivanovich, The Nevsky Prospect (great influence).

Vii (immense influence). Dead Souls (very great influence).

Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (very great influence).

Druzhnin's Pauline Saks (very great influence).

Grigorovich's Anton Goremyka (very great influence).

Dickens' David Copperfield (immense influence).

Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times (very great influence).

Prcscott's Conquest of Mexico (great influence).

At least two works in this motley collection dealt with the muzhiks: Anton Goremyka and A Sportsman's Sketches. Tolstoy marveled to see that in Grigorovich's latest book the muzhik was no longer regarded as "a part of the landscape/' but as a "teacher of life," and that the writer spoke of this humble hero "with love, respect and even a sort of trembling compassion."³ As for Turgenev's tales: Tolstoy was equally enchanted by the charm of their style and the liberality of their equali- tarian ideas. He later said that A Sportsman's Sketches, Anton Goremyka and Uncle Tom's Cabin had been instrumental in abolishing slavery from the world.⁴

At the moment, however, a different form of slavery' was bothering Tolstoy: that of the flesh. He raged against himself for being so susceptible to the diabolical allure of women. "How difficult it is for a man," he wrote in his diary on June 14, 1847, "to cultivate the good in him when he is surrounded by nothing but evil influences." While he was striving to get the upper hand of his spring fever—treacherously abetted by the warm weather, the twittering birds and the sight of the peasant girls working in the fields—little Dunyasha arrived at Yasnaya Polyana with her husband at her side.* For him, she had always been like a sister; the thought that she might also be a woman had never entered his head. And here she was, a young bride, back to spend a few nights under his roof. A room was prepared for the couple. Tolstoy could not refrain from imagining scenes of lascivious intimacy lictwecn her and her husband. "Yesterday I was in an excellent frame of mind," he wrote on June 15, "and would no doubt have remained so until evening, if the arrival of Dunyasha and her husband had not affected mc so strongly that I had to forego the satisfaction of being pleased with myself."

•Dunyasha Temyashov (Dunycchka), ward of Leo Tolstoy's father, had gone with the family to Kazan and married there.

The expressions "I am pleased with myself" and "I am not pleased with myself" reeur often in his writing, and arc probably code-words to cover up reprehensible practices. His splendid health and prodigious appetite for life demanded, or so he thought, these solitary "purges." Otherwise he would have succumbed to temptations yet more base. But no sooner had he divested himself in this manner of his obsession with women than the creatures reappeared, more shameless than ever, in his imagination, revenging themselves upon him for trying to do without them. He indignantly undertook to confound them with dialectics, posing as the champion of a sacred cause. The next day, June 16, he was still unable to forget Dunyasha: "Will a day ever come when I shall no longer be dependent upon external contingencies? In my opinion this would be a huge stride toward perfection. . . . Now I shall set myself the following rule: regard the company of women as a nccessary social evil and avoid them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who causes us to lose our natural qualities of courage, resoluteness, reason and justice, etc., if not women?"

He felt better after writing down this peremptory excommunication. But then, a strange feeling of disenchantment stole over him, he no longer saw any point in continuing to record his daily impressions: without a sigh, he put the notebook away in a drawer along with some other papers, and was not to resume his diary until three years later.

Leo Tolstoy had planned to spend at least two years at Yasnaya Polyana with his dear Aunt Toinette, but after eighteen months, having lost faith in the muzhiks, he conceived a loathing for the country. He read, yawned, dreamed of the city, women, lights. Toward mid- October 1848, when the peasants had dug themselves into their isbas and a sleet-storm was lashing at the trees, the anchorite of Yasnaya Polyana decided to go to Moscow.

He stayed only a few weeks—long enough to cultivate a few connections and suffer heavy losses at cards—and then, at the end of January 1849, he abruptly left for St. Petersburg, where two of his friends, Ozerov and Fersen, were also going. At first he felt out of place in the foggy, damp European capital, divided by broad rectilinear avenues, where fake Greek palaces stood perishing of boredom beneath a polar sky. The passers-by in the street all seemed to be traveling along a wire that drew them unwillingly toward their work. Not one familiar facc. Hardly any trees. Granite, marble, bronze. Surrounded by so much austerity, his love of study returned. He was even glad to be in a city in which everything spoke to him of order, labor, career. Always eager to give himself good reasons for his optimism, he wrote to his brother

Sergey on February 13, 1849, saying that he intended to sit his remaining law examinations in Petersburg and then go into the government, as a fourteenth-class civil servant if need be: "I know you won't believe I have changed, and you'll say, 'That makes at least the twentieth time; no good will ever come of him, he's a dead loss.' No; this time, the change is completely different; before, I said, '1 shall change.' This time I see 1 have changed and I say, '1 have changed.'"

He immediately confirmed these resolutions in a letter to Aunt Toinette.⁵

"I like life in Petersburg. Here everyone has his job, everyone works and minds his own business and pays no attention to anybody else; even though the atmosphere is cold and selfish, it is essential for young people like us, who arc inexperienced and lack savoir faire; it will teach me to be orderly and keep myself occupied, the two indispensable qualities in life, of which I am totally devoid. ... As for my plans, here they are: before I do anything else, I want to sit my examinations at the University of Petersburg and then enter some administrative department, here or somewhere else, however circumstances decide. . . . Don't be surprised, dear Aunt, I have truly changed, I am not in one of those philosophical ecstasies you so often used to reproach me for at Yasnaya. . . ."

Between "rules of life" and life itself, what a chasm! To be sure, Tolstoy began to study, prepared his law examinations and even muddled through one or two, but then gave up the rest overnight.t Once more his passion for the legal science palled. Too many pleasures and too many worries were crowding his mind—the latter resulting, as is only proper, from the former. And at the head of the list, there were his gambling debts. He turned automatically to his brother Sergey, to whom he had declared two months previously that he was a changed man. On May 1, 1849 he confessed his relapse in a missive bearing at the top the terse commcnt: "Read this letter alone." He was probably afraid its receiver would alert Aunt Toinette. "Sergey, you must be saying—I can hear you—that I am a good-for-nothing, and you are right," he wrote. "My God, what have 1 done? I came to Petersburg for no good reason, I've done nothing worthwhile here except spend masses of money, and I've gone into debt. It's so stupid, so unbearably stupid. You can't imagine how it infuriates me. First of all, there are the debts I must pay and without a moment's delay, for if I don't pay them soon I shall lose not only the money but my reputation to boot.

t Afterward he wrote, in Education and Instruction: "I passed an examination at the University of St. Petersburg without knowing a single thing, having begun to study for it, at most, one week in advance."

For the love of heaven, do this: say nothing to the aunts, or to Audrey,! and sell Vorotinka." . . . While I'm waiting for the money to come through, I must absolutely have 3500 rubles right away.t ... I know you will moan and groan, but what else can I do? You only make this kind of mistake once in a lifetime. My freedom and my philosophy are expensive and now I am having to pay! . . . There was nobody to give me a beating, that's what's the matter!"

Not for one moment did the would-be savior of the muzhiks falter at the thought that in order to pay his gambling debts he had to sell a scorc of men, women and children along with his wood, land and livestock. He was merely acting according to the customs of the times. Anything, rather than be declared insolvent by his creditors, who had taken his word. Besides, he had not lost hope. No one scrambled back into the saddle more quickly than he, after a tumble. Yesterday he fancied himself a law graduate, senior civil servant, diplomat. . . Errors all! He would be a soldier, or more precisely a non-commissioned officer in the Ilorse Guards. The moment seemed propitious: Nicholas I, his nerves already on edge after the Revolution of 1848 in France, had decided to send an anny to Hungary to put down Kossuth's proletarian uprising and seat the young emperor Franz-Josef more firmly on his throne. A fine opportunity to gain glory serving his country. Of course, he would be fighting people who claimed allegiance to republican doctrines—but those were foreign notions, French ideas, which need not trouble a Russian mind. Tolstoy admired Montesquieu and Rousseau, abominated oppression and desired the good of the poor, but the events of the Revolution of 1848 left him cold, whereas the promise held out by the campaign of 1849 tickled his warrior's bump. Indeed, it was not among his gambling-cronies that he would have been likely to find a professor of political science. His great friend of the moment was Konstantin Islcnycv, a homeless rake who refused work of any kind, took life as it came and subsisted from day to day on money extorted from his father. 'Hie presence of this jolly debauchee prevented Tolstoy from making friends with people of higher moral cast. He was not overamazed to learn that in the night of April 22, 1849 a group of young men suspected of conspiring against the government under the leadership of Petrashevsky, an official in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, had been arrested and thrown into prison.! He was

t Andiey Ilich Soholcv, administrator of Leo Tolstoy's property at Yasnava Polyana.

• A picce of Tolstoy's property- comprising twenty-two peasants.

t In the neighborhood of $9900.

t The prisoners were convicted and led out to a mock execution, after which they were sent to Siberia.

vaguely acquainted with two of the conspirators, Milyutin and Beklemi- shev. Also said to be among them was a certain Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, whose first novel, Poor Folk, had caused something of a stir in 1846. Tolstoy had never met the author, and could not have cared less whether he had any talent or was guilty or not. He was a long way, in those days, from art, literature or the principles of non-violence.

"1 have high hopes for my military service," he wrote to Sergey. "It will accustom me to the practical side of life and I shall be forced to stay in until I receive a commission, whether 1 like it or not. If I am lucky, that is, if the Guards see any action, I could be promoted within two years."

A few day's later, a new about-face. Tolstoy had told his brother he would enter the Horse Guards, "provided the war were in earnest."" But the war must not have been earnest enough, for he suddenly decided not to enlist. He no longer saw his salvation in Hungary and in uniform, but at Yasnaya Polyana, in work, thrift and thought. Besides, Sergey, alarmed at his brother's spending, agreed to help him only on condition that he go back to live on his estate. On May 26, 1849 Leo Tolstoy wrote to Aunt Toinette, once again in French:

"Forgive me, dear Aunt, I am a good-for-nothing wretch to make you unhappy on my account. I know I am the cause of your grief, and I have made up my mind to come back to you as soon as I can and never to leave you any more, except now and then for a few weeks."

It was a somewhat crestfallen Tolstoy who left Petersburg early in June, after paying a few of his creditors and leaving sizable debts behind him with Dussot's Restaurant, Sharmer the tailor and three or four overtrusting friends.

Aunt Toinette welcomed him with open arms. She knew all, forgave all. Gambling debts were traditional in great families. It would have been as abnormal for a young gentleman not to lose at cards as for him not to have a mistress. Since Leo had 110 mistress, honor required him to lose at cards. Even so, she gave a start when he began to quote figures. Extreme in everything, her dear Leo! She frowned, while her heart melted.

Unfortunately, Leo was not alone. He had brought back from Petersburg a German pianist named Rudolf, a man he had picked up in a cabaret, who was, he said, a genius. Under this virtuoso's tutelage, he imagined that he, too, could become a composer. In his enthusiasm he seriously considered writing a treatise entitled Foundations of Music and Rules for Its Study. In the meantime, he learned Rudolf's works by heart: Hexengalop and Cavalry Trots. The two melomaniacs were carried away by their harmonics far into the night. But Rudolf was also earned away by vodka. And as his fingers often left the keyboard to stray among the conservatory of servant girls, he had to be sent packing. Thereupon, Aunt Toinette remembered that she had once been a good musician herself. To please her nephew she took up the piano again, and, four-handed, they played his favorite Etudes and sonatas. Delicious moments. A male presence at her side. A smell of tobacco in the house. She transferred to the son her old mute worship of the father. He bccamc the second man in her life. Sometimes, in conversation, she would call him Nicholas, on purpose, and with guilty pleasure. "I was especially touched by this," Tolstoy wrote, "for it showed me that my father's image and my own had merged into one in her love for us." She was fiftv-seven, her body had thickened and her

j ^r 4

hair was turning gray, but her eyes still gave off the light, keen glimmer of agate. Her nephew came to her room almost every evening, sat down in a tapestried armchair, nibbled a piece of candy or a date and helped her to lay out her solitaire, watched over by a tall silver-sheathed savior. "Every time I sec Aunt Toinette," he wrote to his brother Nicholas, "I find more excellent qualities in her. The only fault one can find with her is that she is too romantic; but that is because she has such a good heart and such a good mind, and she had to occupy her mind with something, so for want of anything better, she chose to build the whole world into one great romance."⁷

And Aunt Toinette confessed, in her private diary and the drafts of her letters, that her nephew's affection made her forget the "cruel torment" that gnawed at her heart; he was the "light of her life," she could not live without him. "When you sat beside me on the divan," she wrote, "I looked at you with all my soul and all my senses, I was transformed into that look, I could not utter a word; my soul was so full of you that I forgot everything else."⁸ This love, more or less repressed, more or less disguised, did not prevent the old spinster from judging "her Lyovochka" with clear eyes. She said he was "a man for challenges" and that in order to use up his excess energy he should be "writing novels." Attached to him so intensely by the complex feelings of pseudo-mother and pseudo-mistress, she might well have dreaded the thought that another woman could come and take him away from her. But she was above such petty jealousy; on the contrary, it pained her to see her attractive nephew living so sedately. She yearned for an amoral, brilliant future for him in keeping with the fashion of the time. " The good aunt with whom I lived, the purest creature alive," Tolstoy wrote in Confession, "was always telling me there was nothing she wanted so much as for me to have an affair with a married woman. There is no better education for a young man than an affair with a woman of good breeding!' There was another blessing she desired for me: to be an aide-de-camp, preferably to the emperor; but the very summit of bliss would have been for me to marry a very rich girl, so that I might acquire many serfs."

None of these projects appeared outrageous to the young man at the time, but neither did any of them tempt him. To be sure, he had given up his solitary pleasures, but when he sought the company of women now, he wanted them easy to take and easy to leave. His roving eye first fell upon one of Aunt Toinette's servants, Gash a," who was a virgin, guileless and clean. She had eyes that were "black as wet currants," a candid smile on velvet lips, a white apron over a round belly— her very walk disturbed him, the mere sound of her voice. He pursued her down the corridors, stole a few kisses from her and, one night, entreated her to open her door to him. 1'he latch dropped back, he slipped through the crack and clasped in his arms a quaking body huddled inside a coarse linen nightshirt. Ilis desire quenched, what disgust, what lassitude! "What does all that mean?" he asked himself. "Is what has happened to me wonderful or horrible?" And he concluded, "Bah! it's the way of the world; everybody does itf't Aunt Toinette soon discovered the liaison, duly flew into a rage against her maid—not her nephew—and dismissed the poor girl. "I seduced her, she was sent away, and she perished," Leo Tolstoy later told Biryukov, his biographer. And when, in Resurrection, he told the story of the young servant-girl who was deflowered by her benefactress' nephew, turned out of the house pregnant, and driven to prostitution, penury and theft, it was Gasha who was haunting his memory. Contrary to Tolstoy's assertions, however, Gasha's fate had nothing in common with that of the Katyusha Mazlova of the novel. After her "fault," Gasha became a chambermaid to Marya Nikolaycvna, Leo Tolstoy's sister, gained her confidence and raised her children.

Another house-servant next attracted the young master's attention and received the honor of his favors. Her name was Dunyasha and she was later to marry a steward of the Tolstoy family named Orekhov. After riding by their trysting-place at the age of sixty-nine, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "1 remembered the nights I spent there, Dunvasha's beauty and youth (I did not have a real affair with her), her strong womanly body. Where is it? Long since, nothing but bones."⁹ lie was also to confess to a relationship with a serf-woman from the village. Did he, like Irtenyev in his short story The Devil, meet his mistress in the gamekeeper's collage? Irtenyev behaved as he did because it was

•Her full name was Agatha Mikhailovna Trubctskaya.

f Remrrection, Book I, Chapter XVII.

"essential to his health and peace of mind." The woman the gamekeeper had provided for him "wore a white blouse and an embroidered skirt, had a red scarf on her head and was barefoot—fresh, sturdy, comely, smiling." Thanks to her, he was able, the author states, to overcome "the major drawback of country life: voluntary chastity." But what Irtenyev believed to be only a passing fancy developed into an abiding passion. This was not the ease with Leo Tolstoy who, while having a whirl with the girls in his house and village, kept enough of a cool head to work.

Every time he took up some new activity, he wanted to write a treatise on it. The treatise on music, Foundations of Music and Rules for Its Study, was followed by one in French, On Gymnastics—because he had resumed his morning limbering-up exercises—and another, On Cards—because he had lost so much money playing them. He might also have written a treatise on the habits and customs of the Bohemians, for he had been haunting the singers of the gypsy chorus at Tula for some time. The distance between Yasnaya Polyana and Tula was small and the road was paved. Officially, Tolstoy went to town now and then on business (he had signed up to work part-time for the Chancellery of the Assembly of Representatives of the Nobility, at Tula). But in fact, once he got there, he sped from elegant reception to low dive, from the young ladies to the girls. His passion for the gypsies was shared by his brother Sergey, who had fallen in love with a little singer, Marya Shishkin, a wasp-waisted lass of seventeen with intense black eyes and a throaty voice. She became his mistress. After paying a steep price for her to the leader of the chorus, he intended to take her to his estate at Pirogovo and break off all relations with any neighbors who dared to raise their eyebrows.

Leo Tolstoy was not in love with any particular gypsy; he mixed them all up together in one impersonal desire and admiration. Their husky singing so moved him that the tears spilled out of his eyes every time he listened. "Suddenly the chorus is still," he wrote in A Holy Night. "Then there is a chord, and then the same melody, over and over, in a gentle, tender, sonorous voice with extraordinary inflections and astonishing flourishes, and the voice grows steadily stronger and more vigorous until the melody is imperceptibly transmitted to the chorus, which takes it up in a group." And the hero of The Living Corpse said about the gypsy songs, "They're the steppe, they're the tenth century, not freedom, but independence. . . . How is it man can attain that ecstasy and then can't make it last inside him? Ah, Masha, Masha, how you made my guts heave!"

On his way home from these nocturnal sprees his head whirled with the thrum of guitars, the smell of smoke, the silhouettes of the girls in their many-colored dresses, the metallic taste of champagne, a bottomless melancholy, a desire to walk to the ends of the earth, to love- anybody, to die, to be born again, to have a drink of cold water and go back to the place he had just left. He wrote in his diary, "No one who has known the gypsies can ever cease humming their songs over and over, in or out of tune, but always with pleasure, because they remain so sharp in his memory."¹⁰

Back home, he sank gratefully into his quiet, peaceful humdrum existence and the gentle face of Aunt Toinette, waiting for him. "After the wicked life in Tula, with the neighbors, cards, gypsies, the hunting and idiotic futility, I returned home and went to her. . . . According to the old custom, we kissed each other's hands: I, her pretty, lively hand; she, my dirty, sinful hand; we greeted each other in French, again according to the old custom; I would tease Natalya Petrovna [her servant] for a moment, and sit in my armchair. She knows everything I have done and is miserable because of it but will not say one word to me about it; always the same good-will, the same love. I sit in the armchair, I read, 1 think, I listen to her conversation with Natalya Petrovna. Sometimes they talk of the past, sometimes they play solitaire, sometimes they discuss omens, sometimes some remark amuses them, and then the two little old ladies begin to laugh, especially my aunt, the way children do—a charming laugh I can still hear today."¹¹

But all the time she was pretending to chat with Natalya Petrovna, Aunt Toinette was watching her nephew out of the corner of her eye. She was clever enough to guess that he would soon be leaving her again. And one clay, after losing four thousand rubiest to his neighbor, the young landowner Ogarev, he suddenly became panic-stricken. Luckily, he won the money back, down to the last kopeck, which enabled him to observe that lie had a rare degree of self-control, except when he was with the gypsies, or drunk. "But I have sworn not to get drunk any more," he wrote. In any case, he would be better off away from Tula and the gypsy singers. . . . Moscow was the place where he could live a life of virtue. He packed his bags on the spot. Left gasping by the suddenness of this decision, Aunt Toinette swallowed her tears, made the sign of the cross over the traveler's head, ordered supplies for the trip and went out on the steps to watch the carriage roll away down the broad drive, its trees stripped by the autumn wind.

In Moscow, Tolstoy rented a small furnished apartment in the Arbat district. His lodgings consisted of a drawing room, with armchairs and

J Or $11,300.

sofa upholstered in red rep, a dining room with a piano—a rented "royalino"—in solitary state, a study with the leather couch indispensable to all Russian reveries, a bedroom, a dressing room and an antechamber. For forty rubles a month, he hired a pochevny, a sort of sledge in fashion that year. He even bought an expensive harness; his turnout was, in his own opinion, flawlessly elegant. All this was necessary for the new project he had adopted. For, as always, he intended to forge ahead. Only he had changed his tack. As soon as he was settled, on December 8, 1850, he sat down to take stock in his diary: "1 have stopped building castles in the air and making plans beyond all human power to carry out. ... In the past, everything that existed in the ordinary sense seemed unworthy of me. Now, on the contrary, I will not acknowledge as good or true any conviction I cannot test in action and apply in practice. . . With this as his point of departure, he drew up the following program: "(1) Join a group of card players, to try my luck when I am in funds. (2) Get into the best society and, under certain conditions, marry. (3) Find a good position."¹² And, to fill in the details of the role he meant to play, he set down some "rules of society" for his personal use: "Try to control the conversation at all times, S]>cak in a loud voice, slowly and distinctly; always contrive to begin and end the discussion. Seek out the society of people more highly placed than I. In a conversation, do not shift from French to Russian or Russian to French. At dances, invite the most important ladies and do not be discouraged by a refusal. Be as cold as possible and let no feeling show. . . . Do not stand for an impertinent remark but redeem it immediately by one twice as impertinent." Thus the apostle of Yasnaya Polyana became a social climber. He was seen in every salon: calls on Governor General Zakrcvsky, on the Corchakovs, the Volkonskys, the Lvovs, the Stolypins, the Konivalskys, the Perfilyevs; workouts at the riding academy, exchange of bows along the paths in Sokolniki Park, concerts, theater, balls, dinners, gymnastics, and fencing in Poire, the Frenchman's famous fencing school. All the while Tolstoy was writing in his diary that this existence was vain and futile, he made no attempt to elude it. And, as at Tula, he returned to the gypsies. For variety, he would leave some stiff evening party full of marriageable young ladies, with cold buffet, rubber plants and musicians in tailcoats, to descend, with his habitual drinking companions—Islavin in the lead—upon the surburban cabarets where the beautiful Bohemians with gleaming teeth were performing—the terror of fiancees, wives and mothers. There they sang, drank champagne, broke glasses and spent money with the delicious feeling that they were committing a fatal folly, poetic and irreparable. After solemnly noting in his diary, on December 24, 1850 —Christmas Eve—"in accordance with the laws of religion, stay away from women," lie confessed two days later: "A bad day, went to the gypsies." Again, on December 28, "to the gypsies." And on December 29, "I am living like a beast. ... In the evening, drew up precepts, then went to the gypsies."

Seated on Leo Tolstoy's knees, Katya the gypsy hummed his favorite song, "Tell Me Why," and vowed between verses that she had never loved another man. "That evening I believed her sly gypsy chattcr with all my heart, I was in a good mood and no 'guest' came to disturb me," he admitted a few months later. I lis acquaintance with the gypsies gave him a desire to write a story about them. What fun it must be to tell a story, let your pen flow across the paper. . . . After blackening a few pages, he changed his mind; he was toying with an idea for a novel: Aunt Toinette's love life—her sacrificcs, defeat, resignation. . . . But did one have the right to divulge the innermost secrets of the heart, just for the pleasure of composing a work of art? He sorrowfully observed, "Aunt Toinette's life would make a good book," and abandoned the idea. The best thing of all, he said to himself, was to seek material from his own life. And by good fortune, he thought he had just fallen in love with Princess Shcrbatov. What a godsend for a writer! All he had to do was tell the truth. The title would be Story of Yesterday. But his social commitments prevented him from setting to work at once. More gypsies, supper parties, balls—at one costume ball, he turned up dressed as a cockchafer!¹⁸ ... At last, he made up his mind. Progress was fitful, the charactcrs would not come to life, the style was heavy, cluttcrcd with metaphor. But the author already knew how to suggest a mood by a gesture or a look, and made skillful use of monologue. "I told myself," he noted, "I shall just go ahead and describe what I sec. What is the best way to describe? Letters make up words and words make sentences, but how to transcribe feelings? Description is not enough." Dissatisfied, it occurred to him that he would feci more at case relating the circumstances that had made him what he was, rather than those of his present life. His childhood was still within reach; in the process of recounting it he would be stimulated by- it, his writing would improve. He set to work with a will. Strict timetable. Iron discipline. Gymnastics and creation. Once again, the torrent drained away into the sand, and the manuscript of Childhood was abandoned after a few pages.

Never lacking an excuse, Tolstoy declared that it was the irregularity of his life alone that prevented him from writing. And, indeed, his gambling debts had mounted at an alarming rate since his arrival in Moscow. Naturally, he was sure he could win it all back in two or three lucky plays, provided he played systematically; he invented extravagant martingales, none of which, alas, worked; and he wrote down com- minatory precepts in his diary: "Play only with people richer than myself." Or, "Never play for less than twenty-five silver kopecks."

While waiting to recoup his fortune at cards lie spent every cent that came to him from the estate, pawned his watch, ordered extra fellings of timber, mortgaged a few acres and humbly inclined before Aunt Toinette's lamentations.

"Dear Aunt," he wrote in French, "everything you tell me of my passion for cards is perfectly true, and I often think the same. That is why I believe 1 shall play no more. I say 'I believe,' but I hope I can soon tell you 'I know'; you see, it is very hard to let go of an idea one has had for a long time."¹⁴

At one point, in urgent need of money, he, the Muscovite dandy, conceived the idea of becoming a postmaster. He would expand the postal service between Moscow and Tula. The application for a government license was processed in record time. But a few weeks later he backed out of the undertaking, fearing he might lose his last shirt: oats were too expensive and his partner untrustworthy. Ashamed of his idleness, his "nullity," he decided to begin a special column in his diary, to which he would consign his weaknesses, "in the manner of Benjamin Franklin." For one month, without missing a day, he set down, page after page, the most torrid self-accusations: "vanity," "boasting," "conceit," "sloth," "apathy," "affectedness," "deceitfulncss," "instability," "indecisiveness," "waiting for miracles," "tendency to copy others," "cowardice," "contrariness," "excessive self-confidence," "inclination to voluptuousness," "passion for gambling" . . . How he reveled in reviling himself! Driven by the demon of analysis he split himself in two and became teacher and pupil at once. The teacher set a program for the pupil (" Tomorrow, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., write; from 10 to noon, look for money and fence; from 6 p.m. until nightfall, write and receive no one . . .") and scolded the pupil when he did not adhere to it. The pupil confessed his sins to the teacher ("I am not pleased with myself ... I behaved neither well nor badly . . . Lack of perseverance . . .") and promised to "do better" next time. In fact, nothing fascinated Tolstoy as much as himself. He peered at his diary as though it were a mirror, experimenting with new faccs and then grading himself on them. Other people interested him only in terms of his effect upon them. When he thought of the exalting struggle that lay ahead, before he would become morally irreproachable, he was almost happy to be nothing but an amalgam of vices, a kneaded lump of straw and mud.

As spring drew near, something like a breeze blew through his soul, lie wrote to Aunt Toinette: "With the rebirth of nature, one would like to feel reborn oneself; one regrets the past, the wasted time, one repents of one's weakness, and the future lies ahead like a shining light."¹⁵ He was eager to leave behind his haggard companions in pleasure, the green baize, the smoke, the gypsies and empty bottles, and plunge back into the calm countryside of Yasnaya Polyana, where the trees were budding. Easter with the family. This time, in addition to Aunt Toinette, he would see his brother Nicholas, artillery lieutenant in the Army of the Caucasus, who had been given a six- months furlough.

Nicholas had arrived home on December 22, 1850, and Leo had gone to Pokrovskoyc to see him at the home of their sister Marya, who was expecting a baby.* After four years, his meeting with his eldest brother had made such an impact upon him that he still thought of it with alternating affection and uneasiness. Nicholas, now twenty-seven, appeared to him in his officer's uniform as a man of experience, self- assured, poised, upright, modest and dignified. Oh, he still liked to laugh and drink, and he told stories as well as ever, but his whole being gave off an air of worldly wisdom and lassitude which commanded respect. He never argued, never condemned, he merely smiled to express his doubt or disapproval. Leo had expected to dazzle him with his elegant outfit from Sharmer's, his fine linen and tales of nights spent at the gaming tables, in aristocratic drawing rooms and with the gypsies; but Nicholas had pursed his lips into a faintly mournful grimace and changed the subject. "Either he is completely blind or else he doesn't like me," Leo noted in his diary after their first meeting. "Or else he is simply pretending not to notice and not to like me."¹⁶ This uncomfortable feeling had worn off during Nicholas' short trips to Moscow. But Leo needed to see him back at Yasnaya Polyana, in the atmosphere of their childhood, in order to regain his confidence in their friendship. Unconsciously, he was looking for advice, for a revelation, from his brother, as in the far-off days when they had played at being Ant Brothers together.

Borne up by this unacknowledged hope, he set off, on April 2, 1851, for his domain. Alas! Once the joy of greeting Aunt Toinette and his brothers and sister had worn off, he relapsed into boredom and self- disgust. "April 5. Went to sec Sergey (at Pirogovo). Lied, boasted and acted like a coward." "April 6. Did nothing. I lied and boasted a great deal. Fasted, but without thinking about it, absent-mindedly . . ."

• A son, Nicholas, was bom to Marya Tolstoy on January 1.

"April 7. Lazy and soft. Tomorrow, Easter Sunday . . ." "April 8. Easter. Wrote a sermon; half-hearted, punv, afraid to speak out."

Since he had been at Yasnaya Polyana, his continence had begun to prey upon him. There were so many serf-girls in the house and village. Even when lie avoided them he felt attracted to them: the sway of a skirt, glow of a bare arm, sweat-stain on a shirt clinging to a body. . . . Ilis periods of concupiscence and asceticism always alternated in rapid succession. He was two men—a sybarite and a saint—sewed up inside one skin, each loathing the other. After struggling to remain pure for three days, he gave in: "April 18. Could not hold out. I motioned to something pink which looked very nice from a distance. I opened the back door. She came in. Now I can't stand to see her any more; everything is vile and ugly; I hate her, because she drove me to break my resolution. ... I bitterly repent of it. I have never felt it so strongly as now."

The day after his "relapse," his brother Nicholas, sister Marya and brother-in-law Valerian Tolstoy arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. It was a momentous occasion for Leo. Nicholas had already tried several times to explain to his younger brother that the dissolute life he was leading in Moscow was a mistake and that none of the alternatives he proposed for getting himself out of his troubles was worthy of him. This time he repeated his arguments, more emphatically. According to him, of the three solutions advocated by Leo the first (gambling) was simply ridiculous, the second (a position in the administration) would be necessary—sincc he did not have a university degree—to complete a tedious two-year period of preparation in the provinces, and the thhd (a rich marriage) was distasteful in the present and perilous for the future. Since Lyovochka didn't seem to know what to do with his excess energy, why didn't he come to the Caucasus? The country was magnificent: hunting, long horse rides, fraternity of the bivouacs, skirmishes with the rebel mountain dwellers. ... As this captivating sccnc unfolded, Leo felt his enthusiasm rise. Why hadn't he thought of it before? To triumph over his bad habits, there was only one remedy: the Caucasus!

Aunt Toinette bravely accepted this new whim, hoping that Lyovochka would mend his ways under the influence of Nicholas. A small family council was held to discuss the best way of managing the young man's affairs during his absence. His brother-in-law Valerian volunteered to take care of the estate, applying the incomc, by priority, to the repayment of his debts. The traveler would simply have to tighten his belt a notch or two. He was already determined to do so. The harder it was, the better lie would like it.

Until the last minute, Aunt Toinette kept expecting another about- face. Once before, he had taken it into his head to follow Valerian when he was leaving for Siberia on business, and instantly had gone racing after the tarantas like a madman; then, noticing that he had come off without his hat, he turned back to the house and, suddenly deflated, began thinking of something else. . . . What if he forgot his hat again this time? But he forgot nothing. On April 29, 1851 the two brothers, one in civilian dress and the other in uniform, said their good-byes to the old lady, who tried not to cry as she blessed them, and jumped into the coach. Tragic barking resounded through the house until the horses moved off: Leo had locked up his dog Bulka to prevent him from following them. At the first relay, as he was climbing back into the tarantas, he saw a black ball rolling down the road—it was Bulka, without his brass collar. "lie came running like the wind and threw himself upon me, licked my hands, and then went to lie down in the shadow of the coach," Tolstoy wrote. "Afterward I learned he had pushed out the windowpancs, jumped out and, following my scent, covered the twelve miles at a dead nm in the suffocating heat."¹⁷ lie could not bring himself to send the dog back, so he settled him on his knees and they pursued their journey with an additional passenger, who had heaving flanks, a lolling tongue and blissful eyes.

As Nicholas had a month in which to rejoin his regiment, the two brothers made a detour by way of Moscow, where they spent two days visiting friends, going to restaurants, looking in on the gypsies in Sokolniki Park and playing in the gamblinghouses. The late-period Leo felt nothing but contempt for this debased world in which early-period Leo had experienced such potent joys. The singing girls with their medallions on their foreheads might flash their black eyes at him, glittering from the candle flames, to their hearts' content: he was made of stone. Immensely pleased with himself, he wrote to Aunt Toinette: "I went among the common people, in the gypsies' tents. You can easily imagine the struggle that I waged there with myself, for and against; but I emerged victorious—that is, having given nothing more than my blessing to the joyous descendants of the illustrious pharaohs."¹⁸

He confessed, however, that he had not been able to keep away from cards; and a good thing it was, too, for he won four hundred rubles. "I am afraid this may alarm you. You will think I am playing and am going to play again. Do not worry, this was just one exception I allowed myself."

Before they left, the two brothers had their photograph taken together in Mascr's studio. In the daguerreotype, which has been preserved, we see Leo Tolstoy seated, his hands crossed on the pommel of his stick, his neck shortened by a badly knotted tie, with stiff hair, Staring eyes, a rough, peasant face, and the shadow of a mustache above his upper lip; Nicholas has a sickly, triangular face with a mild expression, a lock of hair across his forehead, his shoulders artificially broadened by epaulettes, and seven brass buttons down his hollow chest. In spite of his uniform, he is the less martial looking of the two.

The departure from Moscow probably took place at dawn after a farewell "stag" supper, noisy and hearty, like the one Tolstoy described in The Cossacks. The coach awaiting him was a common tarantas, made at Yasnaya Polyana. The box of this chariot rested on eight long, flexible wooden poles, intended to serve as shock-absorbers. The front and rear wheels were set far enough apart to allow some play in the poles. The volume of piled-up baggage determined the amount of space left to the passengers. The whole badly-balanced contraption creaked at the slightest bump. Tn case of breakdown, vehicles of this type were repaired with an ax: there was always wood to cut along the side of the road. They went through a poor, dingy part of the city which Tolstoy had never seen. "It seemed to him that only people setting out on journeys ever went down these streets," he wrote of his hero Olcnin. And, further on, "Olcnin was a young man who had never completed his studies anywhere, had no job ... had run through half his fortune and, at twenty-four, had not yet chosen a career and had never done a thing. He was what was known as a 'young gentleman' in the high society of Moscow. . . . Now his imagination was turned to the future, to the Caucasus. His dreams were colored by visions of Amalat- Beks, Circassian women, mountains and gorges, terrifying torrents, and danger."¹⁹

On their way, the two brothers stopped to spend a week in Kazan with their aunt Pelagya Yushkov. Leo Tolstoy found a childhood friend in town, Zinaida Molostvov, whom he had thought he was in love with in his university days. Seeing her again, he was not disappointed. She was not pretty, but she was lively, mischievous, witty. Iler shining eyes overwhelmed him. He danced with her, went walking with her shoulder-to-shoulder, but never spoke of love; he wanted to carry this tender, pure memory away with him on his trip, to muse over nostalgically, lulled by the lurching coach and jingling bells. A few days later he wrote in his diary, "Do you remember, Zina, the little sidepath in the Archbishop's Garden? I nearly said it then, and so did you! It was for me to speak first. But do you know why, I think, I didn't? I was so happy that I wanted nothing more. I was afraid to spoil my happiness, or rather ours. . . . Those delicious moments will remain among the finest memories of my life."

From Kazan the Tolstoy brothers went, still by tarantas, to Saratov, where they loaded the coach onto a flatboat, hired a pilot and two oarsmen and abandoned themselves and their baggage to the current. The trip from Saratov to Astrakhan took three weeks, during which Tolstoy was deeply affected by the horizontal placidity of the banks, the silence of floating, the changing intensity of the sky reflected in the water. The Volga was swollen by the spring thaws and had overflowed her banks. The mornings were chilly, the sun swam slowly up out of the fog. Now and then they passed a heavy barge towed by ragged, singing boatmen; or a steamboat, churning the water with its flashing paddle wheel and blowing gray smoke, soon dissipated by the wind, up to the sky. Here and there white sails glided by with seraphic ease, and then along came a forester's raft with a wooden cabin built on a platform of rough-hewn tree trunks. At twilight the nightingales all began to sing at once, and did not stop, even when men came near. The boat was tied up and they spent the night ashore, and at dawn the crew returned to their oars. Leo strolled back and forth on the deck, read, argued with his brother and grew to like him better. "Nicholas finds me a very pleasant traveling companion, except for my cleanliness; it makes him angry, as he says, to see mc change my shirt a dozen times a day," he wrote to Aunt Toinette. "I find him, too, a very pleasant traveling companion, if only he weren't so dirty."²⁰