Tolstoy

I. The Caucasus

Since the beginning of the ccntuiy the eyes of every young Russian who dreamed of mystery, adventure and deeds of glory had been turned to the Caucasus. Alexander I had annexed the kingdom of Georgia in 1801, but the savage tribes who lived high in the mountains were still fighting the regular army troops sent to occupy their territory. The tsar's forces had set up a cordon of military posts on the left bank of the Terek and the right bank of the Kuban from which thev could make gradual inroads into the rebels' land; the posts were held by Cossacks, and were known as stanitsas. Expeditions went out from these stanitsas to raid the aouls, or Circassian villages; they destroyed the pastureland, kidnapped the livestock, took as many prisoners as possible, and dashed back to camp. The riposte was swift and certain. Often, the Russians were ambushed before they could get back inside their lines. Or, just as the stanitsa was dropping peacefully off to sleep, warriors agile as devils would spring up out of nowhere in the midst of the camp, slit the guards' throats, bear off the screaming women and set fire to the huts. In the course of this last-ditch war, which had been going on for the past fifty years, Cossacks and mountain-dwellers had gradually- acquired a kind of bitter esteem for each other. The most dreaded of the Caucasian tribes were those of Daghcstan and Chcchcnya. Their leader, Shamil, had managed to convince his men that they were engaged in a holy war against the Christian invader; for these fanatics, death was Allah's reward.

Although he knew the Caucasian poems of Pushkin and Lermontov by heart, Tolstoy was sure a revelation lay in store for him. When would he finally sec those snowy peaks he had heard so much about? One evening the postilion waved his whip at some grayish shapes that stood out against a background of cloud. He was disappointed. But upon

awakening the following morning to the distant white architecture in the limpid sky, he felt an almost religious thrill of joy. They began to meet occasional Cossacks on horseback; high up on the other side of the Terek, thin plumes of smoke identified the enemy aouls. Tolstoy took it all in, but he was not going to be tempted by any postcard prettiness. To look closer, weigh one's words, tell the exact truth, already seemed to him, at twenty-two, to be the key to art, and perhaps to human relations as well.

When, on May 30, 1851, lie entered the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa, he was appalled: a tiny Cossack encampment at the bottom of a hollow, encircled by woods, copses and thickets, with little houses on stilts, a watchtower, an old cannon on a wooden gun-carriage, an alarm bell and a few shops where sunflower seeds, gingerbread and lengths of cloth were sold. That evening he wrote in his diary, "ITow 011 earth have I ended up here? I don't know. Why? I know even less!"¹ And a little later, he wrote to Aunt Toinette (in French): "I was expecting the country to be very beautiful, but it isn't at all. The stanitsa is on low ground, so there is no view, and the quarters are inadequate, along with every other amenity of life. As for the officers: they are, as you can imagine, an ignorant lot, but very decent fellows otherwise and, above all, devoted to Nicholas."

He had no time for further complaint. A week after he arrived Nicholas was sent with a detachment to Fort Stary Yurt, to protect the patients being treated at the hot springs in the nearby village of Goryachevodsk, and thither Leo Tolstoy followed his brother. This time, he met the real Caucasus, the one he had dreamed about and begun to doubt the existence of, down in the hollow at Starogladkovskaya. Sheer rock, dizzying paths, steam-draped boiling waterfalls. Three mills, one 011 top of the other, stood over the main stream, whose water was so hot that it would cook an egg in three minutes. The Tatar women did their laundry there, and squeezed the water out by jumping up and down. Seated 011 the bank with his pipe in his mouth, Tolstoy delighted in the scene. He could not resist describing it to Aunt Toinette, but lie emphasized the purely artistic quality of his admiration: "It is like an anthill in perpetual movement. Most of the women are handsome and well built. Despite their poverty, their oriental dress is attractive. The picturesque groups they form, coupled with the wild beauty of the place, make a truly splendid sight. I often spend hours admiring this scene."²

Even in his tent at night, the charm of this life of freedom occupicd his thoughts. His head filled with all the things he had seen, it seemed to him that his communion with nature brought him closer to God.

Nevertheless, he refused to yield to grandiloquence. How to reconcile the loftiness of his feelings with simplicity of expression? The preoccupations of the artist mingled with the preoccupations of the Christian. He wrote in his diary, "I don't know how other people think, but everything I have heard and read proves to me that they do not think as I do. They declare that the beauties of nature make them conscious of the immensity of God and the insignificance of man; lovers see the image of their beloved in the water; others say the mountains seem to speak, the leaves say this and that, the trees are calling to us. . . . How do such ideas take root in people's brains?"³ The thoughts that came into his head, when he let himself be carried away by his imagination, were, in his opinion, either trivial or untrue. But when he tried to tell what he saw and felt in plain, everyday words, it seemed to him that there was indeed a mystery in the commonplace, and greatness in what was least. Could it be that in literature as in morality, simplicity- was a paying proposition?

When everyone else in camp lay sleeping, he jotted down a few skctchy notes, which could presumably be of interest to no one. "The night is clcar. A cool brcc/.e passes through the tent and makes the candle flame waver. Far away, the aoul dogs are barking and the sentries are calling out to each other. The air is full of the fragrance of the oak- and plane-tree leaves used to thatch the tent. I sit on a drum in a little shed adjoining the tent. . . . Everything in there is dark, except for one bar of light falling across the end of my brother's bed. But just in front of mc, in full light, a pistol, sabers, a sword and a pair of underpants are hanging on a partition. Silence. A gust of wind. A gnat buzzes past my ear. Close by, a soldier coughs and sighs."⁴

He did not feel like sleeping, but the observation of sccnic details was no longer enough. Out of the silent night, sleeping men, and flickering candle flame that lighted the dome of dried, plaited leaves, a feeling of happiness and sorrow arose and spread through him. Suddenly his childhood prayers rose to his lips. "I was not praying." he wrote, "if prayer is taken to mean entreaty or a gush of gratitude. I was yearning for something higher, something perfect. But what? I could not say. And yet, I understood exactly what I wanted. I wanted to become one with the supreme Being. I begged him to forgive my errors. No; I was not begging, because I felt that if he had granted me this minute of ecstasy, that meant he had already forgiven mc. . . . All my fears vanished. Faith, Hope and Love merged into one indissoluble feeling inside mc."

As always, ebb followed flow, fust when Tolstoy thought he was at the summit of mystical bliss, a more profane vision crcpt into his mind: "I could not feel my own body. I was pure spirit. And then, the wretched carnal side took over again, and hardly an hour later I was listening to the voices of vice, ambition, vanity, life. I knew where these voices came from, I knew they were destroying my happiness; I struggled, I lost. I fell asleep dreaming of fame and women. But I am not to blame, it was stronger than I."

These bursts of religion, inspired by the beauty of the land and ending in the arms of an imaginary woman, occurred frequently. Tolstoy also thought about death, and made an effort to treat all things with philosophical detachment, which did not prevent him from eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new saddle or despairing because his mustache rose higher on the left side than on the right. I lis position in camp was highly irregular. As the only civilian in a group of officers, he passed for an idle aristocrat, an irresponsible tourist. lie did not like his brother's comrades, or his superiors. They were rough and ignorant, their only subjects of conversation were horses, women, promotions and deeds of heroism. Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev, commander of the battery, was a little fellow with reddish-blond hair, cheeks coarsened by sideburns and a piercing voice. He was a fervent Orthodox who preached temperance and invited his subordinates to dine with him "informally." There was also the young Buycmsky—almost a child, with a candid pink face—and Khilkovsky, captain of the Ural Cossacks—a typical "old soldier, simple but noble, brave and good"*—and a certain Lieutenant Knoring, a tall man with a broad, soft face and high cheekbones, looking a good deal, Tolstoy wrote, like the kind of horse that is known as "hammerhead."⁰ When he laughed, he looked "simple-minded and slightly mad." His manners were vulgar. lie pummeled Nicholas and callcd him "old snout!" Tolstoy gave him a very cold shoulder for a few days; then he became used to his laughter, his smell of bad tobacco and his fishwife's jokes.

Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev might forbid the serving of alcohol at his table, but the men made up for lost time in their tents. Sometimes Nicholas drank himself into a stupor. Leo exercised as much self- restraint as he could, and he also refrained from playing cards. "Several times, when the officers have talked of cards in front of me, I have felt like showing them that I too know how to play; but I resisted. I hope I shall go on refusing, even if they drag me bodily to the table." lie wrote these words in his diary on the morning of June 13, and that evening he owed 850 rubles* to Lieutenant Knoring. "Two hundred rubles of my own, 150 borrowed from Nicholas; leaving 500." How to

• Around $2400.

pay? lie would worry about that later—Knoring had generously taken an 10U for a date in the distant future (January 1852)—but for the moment (well-timed diversion!), the camp was busy preparing for an expedition against the mountain tribes. Eager to see some action, Tolstoy asked for and obtained permission from Prince Baryatinsky, commander of the left flank of the Caucasian Army, to take part in the operation as a volunteer.

In the second half of June the tToops began to move: an infantry battalion, all available cavalry, nineteen cannon, supply wagons and ammunition. A long, dark snake bristling with bayonets crawled along a precipitous trail. The drums rolled in the distance. The soldiers sang. Tolstoy, riding near his brother, felt his heart pound with the excitement of the morning of a great ball. At every halt the soldiers stacked their arms and rushed to the stream to drink. Lieutenant-Colonel Alcxcyev, sitting on a drum, invited his subordinates to share his meal. A few officers withdrew to the shade of a tree with vodka, glasses and cards. "I was curious to hear the conversation of the soldiers and officers," Tolstoy wrote in his autobiographical story The Raid: "I watched their faccs closcly; in none of them did I sec any trace of the vague fear I was feeling myself. Joking, laughter, gay banter, gambling and drink expressed a universal indifference to the approaching danger. It was as though it were impossible to imagine that some of these men would not be coming back by this same road—it was as though all of them had already left the world long ago." A little later, when the detachment was slithering through a deep gorge, the enemy outposts opened fire. The hillsmen howled fiercely, but their shots were harmless at that distance. After fording the stream, the Russians regrouped in the forest and the general gave the order to attack. The firing became steady. Men fell. "What a pretty sight!" said Prince Baryatinsky in French. And his aide-de-camp, anxious to please, outdid him—also in French —with: "It's a real pleasure to make war in such beautiful country!"⁷ The cannon joined in. The cavalry disappeared into the underbrush, raising a cloud of dust. Abandoned by its inhabitants, the enemy aoul was soon plundered. "A roof collapscs, an ax rings out against hard wood, a door bursts open; a heap of straw goes up in flame. ... A Cossack drags a sack of flour and a rug out of a hut; a grinning soldier carries off an iron jug and a towel; another, spreading his arms, tries to catch two hens that are cackling and struggling to get over a palisade; a third has found an enormous crock of milk, and he empties it and hurls it to the ground with a howl of laughter."⁸

On the way home, the hillsmen duly attacked the column in the forest. The Russians countered and young Tolstoy, aglow with patriotism, noted the great superiority of Russian courage—silent and dignified—over the strained and ostentatious bravery of the French, as exemplified by the heroes of Waterloo. "After that, how is one not to suffer, in his Russian heart, when he hears our young officers uttering tasteless French phrases and trying to imitate the so-called French gallantry which has become so woefully obsolete?"⁹ he wrote. At last the shooting subsided, the column resumed its march and, once back in camp, Tolstoy learned to his intense delight that Prince Barvatinsky had been pleased at the "young civilian's" composure under fire. lie himself was not altogether satisfied, however. The razing of the aoul preyed on his mind, as did the three dead and thirty-six wounded in the expedition. "It is so good to be alive," lie thought, "nature is so beautiful, and men so evil; they do not know how to appreciate what they have!"¹⁰

At Fort Stary Yurt he returned to his book about his childhood, but he thought he would never have the patience to finish it. "You have to sit down at an ink-stained table," he wrote, "take a sheet of gray paper, an inkwell, dirty your fingers, line up letters on the paper in a row; the letters make words, and the words make sentences. But is it possible to translate a feeling? To transmit one's own ideas about nature to someone else? Why are poetry and prose, joy and sorrow so closely related?"¹¹ His thoughts drifted back to Zinaida Molostvov, whom he had left in Kazan without daring to avow his love. Absurd regrets gnawed at him in his solitude. "Is it possible that I shall never see her again?" he wrote. "Is it possible that one day I shall hear she has married some Bekctov or other? Or, still more dreadful, shall I see her again, wearing a bonnet and laughing, with her same wide-open eyes, gay and full of love? I have not given up my plan of going back and marrying her; I am not quite certain that she can make me happy, but I am in love with her. . . . Otherwise, what is the meaning of the sweet memories that fill me? . . . Why not write to her? But I only know her first name and not that of her father.! And all because of that, I may be depriving myself of a great happiness!"¹²

When his ardor cooled, he forgot all about his matrimonial plans and began seriously considering joining the army. But there again, he did not want to be too hasty. At the beginning of August his detachment returned to the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa and he took advantage of this momentary lull to revise his life principles once more: "On August 28—my birthday—I shall be twenty-three years old. From that

f It was an absolutely elementary rule of courtesy in Russia that a person must be addressed by his own first name, followed by that of his father.

day forward I want to live according to the goal I have set myself. Tomorrow I shall think about all this at leisure; but, starting right now, I shall return to my diary, write down my schedule of activities, and make a table summarizing the faults 1 have to correct, according to Franklin's method. . . . Beginning at sunrise I shall do my accounts and organize my papers and books and work in progress; then I shall collect my thoughts and begin to copy the first chapter of my book.¹³ After lunch (I shall eat little), Study of the Tatar language, drawing, marksmanship, gymnastics and reading."¹⁴

As he set down these directives in his diary for the twentieth time, Tolstoy was doubtless unaware that lie had inherited his mania from his mother, whom he could not remember: when she was young she, too, had been much preoccupied by her words and deeds, and had written edifying maxims and attempted to transform her moral principles into an exact science. But she, in so doing, was thinking of the happiness of her loved ones, whereas Tolstoy, eternally concerned with himself, was aiming only at his own improvement.

Life at Starogladkovskaya was quiet, but not dull. It was the psychology of the inhabitants, rather than the relatively ordinary countryside, that fascinated Leo Iolstoy. Nothing in common with the resigned and cunning muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. The Cossacks had never been serfs, and valued freedom and bravery above all else. They hated the hillsman who killed their brother less than the simple Russian soldier who was camping on their land to help them defend their village. Their best weapons and finest horses were bought or stolen from their enemies. Out of affectation, they even aped the hillsmen's dress and willingly spoke their language. "And even so," wrote Tolstoy, "this little Christian nation buried in a remote corner of the world, surrounded by half-savage Moslem tribes and soldiers, considered itself to possess a high degree of civilization and did not acknowledge anyone as a real man who was not also a Cossack."¹* In all the stanitsas scattered along the river, the men divided their time between turns on guard duty, campaign service, fishing and hunting, thus leaving the hardest domestic chores to the women—which only increased their authority in the household. Although the Cossack men pretended to treat their women like slaves, oriental fashion, they actually respected and feared them. The women wore the Circassian costume—Tatar shirt, short stitched jacket, light, flat-heeled shoes—but they tied kerchiefs around their heads in the Russian manner. 'ITieir homes were clean. Unmarried girls were allowed much freedom in their relations with men.

Leo Tolstoy lived with an old Cossack named Epishka (Epiphany

Sekhin), who had taken an immediate liking to him. At ninety, Epishka was a hearty hulk of a man with a bulging chest, Herculean shoulders and a wide beard as white as a swan's plumage. Enchanted with this character, Tolstoy transplanted him bodily into The Cossacks, under the name of Uncle Eroshka: "He wore a ragged smock stuffed into his trousers, deerskin shoes laced over the bands wrapped around his calves, and a stiff little white fur bonnet. Slung across his back on one side were a pheasant-decoy and a bag containing a pullet and a merlin for luring hawks, and on the other, dangling from a strap, was a wildcat he had killed; from his belt hung little pouches for bullets, gunpowder and bread, a horse's tail to drive off the mosquitoes, a big dagger in a torn sheath stained with old blood, and two dead pheasants."¹⁶ Tolstoy spent long evenings with his host, who waxed loquacious in his cups. Elbows on the table, face brick-red, eyes sparkling in a network of deep wrinkles, Epishka talked on and on, and around him a complex aroma began to thicken, "strong, but not at all unpleasant, compounded of chikhir, t vodka, gunpowder and congealed blood."¹⁷ He told of his wild youth, his battles and hunts. He had never worked with his hands. Nature had always provided for him. He was a drunkard, a pillager, and an expert at catching horses in the hills, and he feared neither man nor beast: "Look at me, I'm as poor as Job, I have no wife nor garden nor children, nothing—just a gun, a sparrow hawk and three dogs, but I have never complaincd of anything and I never shall. I live in the forest, I look around me—every thing I see is mine. I come home and I sing a song."¹⁸ Sitting across from his young guest, who was asking himself so many questions about good and evil, he also said, with a roar of laughter that tore his white beard apart, "God crcated everything for the joy of man. There is no such thing as sin anywhere. Do as the animals do. They live in the Tatar's bulrushes and in ours. Their home is where they are. What God gives them, they cat!"¹⁹ From there it was only a step to claiming that it was wrong to worry about scducing girls, and Epishka took it in his stride. He even offered to procure distraction for Tolstoy. And when the young man halfheartedly objected to such practices, he cried, "Where's the sin in it? Is it a sin to look at a pretty girl? Have a good time with her? Is it a sin to love her? Is that how tilings are where you live? No, my friend, that's no sin, it's salvation! God creatcd you, and he created the girls, too. So it is no sin to look at a pretty girl. She was created to be loved and to give pleasure!"²⁰

How long did Tolstoy resist Epishka's counsel? Trying to subdue the

$ A primitive red wine.

demands of the flesh, he went out hunting with the old pander. Game was abundant—pheasant, bustard, snipe, teal, gray hare, fox, and even buffalo, deer and wolf. All went well as long as he was out in the blind, but once back in the stanitsa the young man's heart raced at the mere smell of the smoke from the fires of the village huts. He stared at the fair-skinned, black-eyed girls, imagined the outline of a panting breast beneath a blouse. Some of them came prowling around the soldiers' huts in the evening and sold themselves for a few coins; others wanted a little persuasion before they would let themselves be pushed down onto a bed of leaves, mouth open and eyes closed. In his diary, Tolstoy recorded the fluctuating temperature of his lust: "I.ast night a Cossack girl came to sec me. I hardly slept all night. . . "That drunkard Epishka told me Salomonida looked like an easy mark. I would want to

take her awav and scrub her first. . . "I absolutclv must have a

/ /

woman. Lechery gives me 110 peace. . . "^2S "I have no perseverance or stability in anything. If I persevered in my passions for women I would have conquests and memories to look back 011; if I persevered in my abstinence I could be proud of my self-control. Eschew wine and women. The pleasure one gets from them is so slight and uncertain and the remorse so great! . . "No, that's all wrong! My desires are natural. I only find fault with them because I am in an unnatural position: unmarried at twenty-three! Nothing can help me, except will-power and my prayers to God to save me from temptation."^

After a few days of heroic self-denial, he again asked Epishka to arrange a rendezvous for him. But these venal affairs, soon begun and sooner ended, could not satisfy him. He was longing for a real passion, exotic, romantic, with some native woman. And he found it, with the haughty Maryanka—who became the Maryanka of The Cossacks. "She was not pretty, she was beautiful. Her features might have seemed almost masculine and coarse, had it not been for her tall, well- proportioned figure, her powerful chest and shoulders, and above all the expression, tender and severe at once, of her wide black eyes, ringed by dark shadows, beneath black brows. She radiated virginal strength and health."-⁶ When he watched her at work, shovel in hand, shivers of desire ran through him. Hoping to approach her, he made friends with her father. He even contemplated marriage. After all, would it not be wiser to forsake the artificial allures of civilization and discover the true meaning of life with a woman whose mind had not been contaminated by the West? "Perhaps it is nature I love in her, the expression of even-thing beautiful in nature," said his alter ego Olenin in The Cossaclis. "Loving her, I feci myself an indivisible part of the good

Lord's whole happy universe." And, "The instant I imagine those drawing rooms, those women with their pommaded hair held up by artificial curls, those unnatural mouths, weak, camouflaged, deformed limbs, and that sophisticated babble that is mistakenly thought to be conversation, in the place of my little hut, my woods and my love, I am overcome with revulsion." How far did Tolstoy go in his intimacy with the young Cossack girl? His diary docs not tell. It is likely, after a few nocturnal walks, a few bashful kisses, a few vows exchanged, half in Russian and half in Tatar, that he realized it was all an invention on his part. "Ah, if only I could become a Cossack," sighed Olenin- alias-Tolstoy, "steal horses, get drunk on chikhir, sing songs, kill people and, dead drunk, go climbing in at her window and spend the night without asking myself who or why I am—then it would be different, then she and I could understand each other, then I could be happy."²⁷ In any event, he had got hold of a first-class subject for a novel! The mad passions of his characters would console him for his own exemplary conduct; there was nothing to equal therapy-by-writing. But he would think about the Cossacks later; first, he had to get on with his Childhood, a mixture of fiction and fact. To put himself in the mood, Tolstoy talked to his brother about their early years at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow. Although Nicholas had become an inveterate drinker, he was still an authority to his younger brother, even on literature. With Nicholas' help, he was sure of success. But he lacked paticncc. lie was continually torn from his worktablc by some welcome distraction. After Stary Yurt, he returned to cards with a vengeance. He had not finished paying Lieutenant Knoring when he suffered fresh losses; he was borrowing from his right hand to pay back his left, and he began waking up in the middle of the night to go over his accounts. Each time, he sat down to play in the hope that a lucky run would put him back on his feet. During one of these heartbreaking evenings, he befriended a young Chcchcnian, Sado, who lived in the Russian-controlled neighboring aoul and often came to the camp to play with the officers.

"His father," Tolstoy wrote to Aunt Toinette, "is quite a rich man, but he has buried all his money and won't give his son a cent. To get money, the son goes over to steal horses and cattle from the enemy; sometimes he risks his life twenty times to steal something that isn't worth ten rubles; but he does it for glory, not because he covets the things he steals. The biggest thief is respected here, and called a dzhigit, or brave. Some days Sado has a thousand silver rubles on him, others not a kopeck."²⁸

As Sado did not know how to count, his opponents at cards fleeced him unmercifully. Tolstoy rebuked them heatedly and took the young man under his wing, in return for which Sado, wild with gratitude, offered to be his kunak, that is, his lifc-and-death friend. According to Caucasian tradition, if your kutiak asks you for your money, your horse, your weapon or your wife, you cannot refuse him, just as he must give you anything you fancy in his house. The two young men exchanged gifts to seal this precious bond of companionship. Sado gave Tolstoy a purse, a silver bridle, an oriental saber worth a hundred rubles and, a little later, a horse. Tolstoy, less liberal, responded with an old gun, bought for eight rubles long before, and a watch. The fact was that his circumstances were at their most straitened during this period. The five hundred-ruble IOU he had given Lieutenant Knoring fell due in January 1852: the fateful day was drawing near and he saw no possibility of meeting his obligation. As a last resort, he tried to interest God in his case. "When 1 said my prayers this evening," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "I prayed to God very fervently to get me out of this unpleasant situation. 'But how can I get out of it?' I thought as I went to bed. 'Nothing can happen that will enable me to pay this debt.' I was already imagining all the unpleasantness I would have to suffer 011 account of it: he [Knoring] would lodge a complaint, my superiors would demand an explanation, why don't I pay up, etc. 'Help me, Lord!' I said as I fell asleep."²⁰

And the miracle occurred. While Tolstoy was fretting, alone and insolvent by the light of his candle, Sado was playing cards with some officers at Stary Yurt and winning back from Knoring the IOU signed by his kunak. The next day he brought it to Nicholas Tolstoy, who was also at Stary Yurt on a mission, and said to him, "What do you think of that? Will your brother be pleased that I did it?" When he received Nicholas' letter announcing the good news, Tolstoy was struck dumb with gratitude. He looked at the torn IOU in the envelope and did not know whether to thank God or Sado for this last-minute reprieve. "Isn't it astonishing to sec one's wish granted the very next day?" he wrote to Aunt Toinette. " J hat is, the only astonishing thing is the existence of divine mercy for a being who has deserved it as little as I. And isn't Sado's devotion wonderful?"³⁰

He instmcted Aunt Toinette to buy a pistol, six bullets and a little music box for Sado in Tula, "if it doesn't cost too much." Singular concern for economy in a man just rescued from a truly serious predicament! When he received the presents, he found them so much to his liking that he could hardly bear to part with them. The music box in particular charmed him with its melancholy ritornello: "I am sorry to send it to Sado. Nonsense. Off it goes!"³¹

It was making Tolstoy increasingly uncomfortable to be a civilian among soldiers—a little as though he were refusing to help his hosts with their housework. He did not fancy himself in the role of a parasite. Still less that of a cad. "Prince Baryatinsky thinks very highly of you," said his brother. "I think you have made a good impression on him and he would like to have you as a recruit." 'lhe promise of such lofty backing removed Tolstoy's last doubts. He wrote to Tula for the necessary papers to enlist and set off with his brother for Tiflis, where he could take the induction examination. He became ecstatic as they traveled along the Georgian military road through the Caucasus. Rock cliffs hung out over the roadway, the strangled Terek roared below at the bottom of the gorge, eagles sheared through the narrow strip of sky above their heads, there were glimpses of snowy peaks and clinging villages, the stone was coo], the native arbas creaked, everything spoke of freedom, endless space and wildness.

He arrived in Tiflis only to be told by General Brimmer that the papers from Tula were insufficient; to complete his file, he needed a certificate from the governor of the province stating that he was no longer a civil servant. Disappointed, he decided to wait for the document there and, letting his brother return to Starogladkovskaya alone, lie rented a room in a modest house in the suburbs—the favorite haunt of the German colony,³² among the vineyards and gardens on the left bank of the Kura.

South of the German settlement, on the same side of the river, the native quarter spread along the mountainside: steep narrow streets, houses with overhanging balconies, a languid sibilant throng in which veiled Moslem women brushed against Persians with scarlet-painted fingernails and high hairdresses, Tatar mollahs in loose gowns and green or white turbans, hillsmen from the conquered trilics wearing Cherkesska belted at the waist. The hieratic camels' heads swayed above the crowd. It was hot, even in November. The air smelled of dirt, honey, incense and leather. On the right bank of the Kura lay the Russian town, clean, neat and administrative, exhaling the tedium of a provincial capital beneath the sun. Occasionally Tolstoy would go to the theater or the Italian opera, but he immediately regretted the few rubles he had spent on his ticket. His disposition was sour for two reasons: he was short of money and he was ill—which of the Cossack girls at the stanitsa had left him this searing remembrance of a night of love? Furious, he began a three-week coursc of treatment. "My illness has cost me dear enough," he wrote to his brother Nicholas. "Druggist: twenty rubles; twenty visits to the doctor; and now cotton wadding and the cab every day are costing me another one hundred and twenty. I am telling you all these details so you will send me as much money as you can in a hurry. . . . The venereal infection has been cured, but the after-effects of the mercury are painful beyond belief.³³ 'llie inside of my mouth and tongue arc covered with sores. Without exaggerating, I am now in my second week without eating or sleeping for a single full hour." Five days later he also dcscril)cd his condition to Aunt Toinette; but this time, out of consideration for the old spinster, his pen transformed the venereal disease into "a kind of high fever that has kept me in bed for three weeks."³⁴

This period of forccd inactivity was bcneficial. Far from his world of the present, he plunged voluptuously back into the story of his childhood. "Do you remember, dear Aunt," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "a piece of advice you gave me long ago: to write novels? Well, I am taking your advice and literature has now become my occupation. I do not know whether what I write will ever appear publicly but it is something I very much enjoy doing, and have kept at it too long now to abandon it."*⁵

As his health improved, he began going out more often, met a few friends, played billiards—losing more than a thousand games to a master marksman³⁶—and hunted with fervor: "The hunting here is magnificent," he wrote to his brother Sergey on December 23, 1851. "Open country, little swamps full of gray hare, islets covered with bulrushes instead of trees, where the foxes are hiding. I have gone out nine times in all, at a distance of eight to ten miles from the Cossack village, with two dogs, one first-rate and the other worthless; I have bagged two foxes and sixty or so hares. When I come back here I shall have a go at deer-hunting 011 horseback." And he added casually, "If you want to impress everyone with the latest news from the Caucasus, you can tell them that the most important person around after Shamil, one Hadji Murad—has just surrendered to the Russian government.³⁷ The boldest (a dzhigit) and bravest man in all Chechenya has committed an act of cowardice."

'I"he official papers were long in coming and Tolstoy chafed at being forccd to continue wearing civilian clothes—an overcoat from Sharmer and a ten-ruble top hat—when every fiber of his body had already been militarized. It was all he could do to keep from saluting when he saw a general pass. To humor his impatience, the commanding officer at the recruitment center agreed to give him a provisional assignment that would become final upon receipt of the exeat from the governor of Tula. Tolstoy was attached to the 20th Artillery Brigade, 4th battery (his brother's). A mock examination, held on January 3, 1852, entitled him to the rank of cadet or junker. Donning his uniform, he felt curiously happy "not to be free any more." Ilis erratic behavior and unstable nature may at last have been beginning to alarm even himself. The only salvation he could see lay in discipline, imposed by superior officers, and in the gift of his person to the army, to help annihilate "the cunning pillagers and rebel Asiatics."³⁸ On the way to Starogladkovskaya he stopped at the Mozdok post station, where he was suddenly seized by doubt. Ilad he been right to choose the military carccr? From the posthousc he wrote to Aunt Toinette:

"A year ago I thought that entertainment and gadding about were my only sources of happiness; now, on the contrary, serenity, both physical and mental, is what I long for."³⁹ To be sure, he admitted that his unmotivated jaunt to the Caucasus had probably been inspired by God and that everything that happened to him there would accordingly be for the good of his soul, but he still believed he would return to Yasnava Polyana one day to satisfy his true destiny, as a peace-loving man with a full quota of family, learning and virtue. Curious cadet, this, who longs to resign from his post the moment he receives it, and immediately begins expounding the joys of carpet- slippered retirement to his aunt, in the following terms:

"After an indefinite number of years, neither old nor young, I am at Yasnava—my affairs are in order, I have no worries or problems; you arc living at Yasnava too. You have grown a little older but you are still active and well. We live the life we lived before, I work in the morning but we sec cach other almost all day long: wc have dinner, I read something amusing to you in the evening, and then we talk. I tell you about my life in the Caucasus and you tell me your memories—of my father and mother—you tell me the 'terrible tales' we used to listen to with frightened eyes and mouth agape. . . . We will have no social life—nobody will come to bother us or gossip to us. A beautiful dream; but I let my dreams go farther than that. I am married— my wife is a gentle, good, loving person, she loves you as I do. We have children who call you 'Grandmaman.' You live in the big house. The whole house is the way it was when Papa was alive, and we begin the same life over again, only the parts are changed; you play Crand- mothcr's part, but you arc even better than she; I play Papa's part, although I despair of ever being worthy of it; my wife plays the part of Ma man and the children ours. Marya plays the two aunts, without their miseries. Even Gasha will take the part of Prascovya Isayevna. But one person will be missing, to play the part you did in our family. There will never be another soul as fine and loving as yours. You will have no successor. There will be three new characters who will make an occasional appearance on the scene—the brothers; and one in particular will often be with us: Nicholas. An elderly bachelor, bald_t retired from the army, still as fine and noble as ever. I picture to myself how he will tell the children stories lie will make up as he used to do, how the children will kiss his filthy hands (which deserve to be covered with kisses), how he will play with them, how my wife will cook his favorite dishes for him, how we will all talk over our memories together, how you will sit in your usual place and he happy listening to us, how you will call us, the old ones, Lyovochka and Nikolcnka,⁰ as always, and how you will scold us—I because I eat with my hands and he because he hasn't washed his. . . . All of this could happen, and hope is so sweet a thing. Here I am crying again. Why do I cry when I think of yon? These arc tears of happiness. I am happy to know how to love vou."⁴⁰

The person writing these lines in the posthousc at Mozdok, with moist eyes and a heart aching with tenderness, was the same little boy who, when punished by Prosper de St. Thomas, invented a heroic future to console himself for being locked up in the dark closet; the virgin student of Kazan, too timid to talk to the girls, living on prodigious fairytales of love with HER, the ideal woman; the Moscow playboy going off to the Caucasus to massacre the hillsmen, seduce a Circassian slave and teach her to read French in Notre-Dame de Paris:⁴¹ the same eternally galloping imagination, the serpentine embroidery of every thought, the need to embellish the future in order to compensate for the present. The fact that he was in the process of writing his childhood memories made him doubly vulnerable to nostalgia for the past. The more he thought of the scenery and people that had witnessed his first years, the more sorely he needed to see them.

On January 14, 1852, however, what he saw was not Yasnaya Polyana, but the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa with its white houses on stilts, watchtower, shops, laughing girls and easy-going Cossacks. . . . Alas! his brother Nicholas was already on the march. He set off to join him at once, and spent the entire month of February 1S52 in marches, countermarches and skirmishes. "I am indifferent to life: it has given me too little joy for me to love it; therefore I am not afraid of death," lie wrote in his diary on February 5, 1S52. "Nor am I afraid of pain. What I am afraid of is not being able to bear pain and death with dignity." Nearly every day they traded fire with sharpshooters perched in the rocks or buried in the depths of the forest. On February 17, in the capture of the Kozmy, Lyachi and Indy aouls, and 011 February 18 in the attack 011 the Chcchenian positions on the banks of the Michik River, cadet

• Diminutives of Leo and Nicholas.

Tolstoy bore himself with composure. An enemy ball tore of! one wheel of the cannon he was serving; another killed a horse two feet away from him. As the enemy's aim was becoming increasingly accurate, Nicholas, who commanded the battery, ordered it to retreat and continue firing. The exhausted soldiers had to thread their way between detachments of hillsmen who picked them off as they went. "The fear I experienced at that moment was the greatest I have ever known," Tolstoy said years later, in 1900. "At last wc came to the Cossack camp. For supper, in the open, there was a roasted kid, the most succulent I have ever eaten. We all slept in the same cabin, eight men side by side. But the air was delicious . . . like the kid!"⁴² The next morning, thinking back over his behavior, Tolstoy's judgment was severe. "Danger opened my eyes," he wrote in his diary on February 28, 1852. "I wanted to believe that 1 was perfectly calm and in command of myself. But the engagements of the seventeenth and eighteenth did not confirm this." Dissatisfied with himself, he was nevertheless furious to learn that his superiors, who wanted to nominate him for the St. George Cross, had been forced to remove his name from the list for the idiotic reason that he was still not officially in the ariny. That confoundcd exeat that wouldn't comc! What were they doing in their offices back home? lie would complain to Aunt Toinette: "1 frankly confess that this one little cross is the only one of all the military honors I was vain enough to desire and this incident has infuriated mc beyond words, especially as there is only one opportunity to receive it and now I've lost my chance."'³

Back at Starogladkovskaya, he began to neglcct the army more and more. "Marching and all this cannon practice are not much fun, especially because they upset the regularity of my life."⁴⁴ His comradcs found him haughty and distant. Often, instead of joining in their discussions, he ostentatiously read a book or stared off into space. He confided to his aunt that "The education, feelings and attitudes of those I meet here are too different from mine for me to enjoy their company. Nicholas alone has the gift, despite the enormous differences between him and all these men, of amusing himself with them and being loved by all. I envy him this gift, but I know I cannot do the same."⁴³ More than anything, Tolstoy suffered from having to follow the orders of the red-haired Alcxcyev, whom he judged to be a pretentious, loudmouthed fool. The lieutenant-colonel set great store by his prerogatives, and vowed to bring the new cadet to heel. It was a tradition that the officers dined at their commanding officer's table. During meals, Tolstoy displayed a disrespectful degree of boredom, did not laugh at his host's jokes and left as soon as dessert was over.

Alcxeycv finally stopped inviting him. "I no longer dine or have supper at Alexeyev's." (Diary, March 30, 1852.) "Alexeyev is such a bore that I shall never set foot in his place again." (April 5, 1852.) "Received a rude and stupid note from Alexeyev in reference to my absence from drill. He is absolutely determined to prove that he can make trouble for me." (April 8, 1852.) "Saw Alexeyev's conceited face at drill and was unable to keep back a smile." (April 11, 1852.) One day, however, dropping in at Alexeyev's, he was overcome with humiliation to sec his brother sprawled out, dead drunk, by the tabic. "It is a shame he does not realize how it pains me to see him drunk. . . . The worst part of it for me is that people who are inferior to him judge him and pity him." (March 31, 1852.)

Once sobered up, however, this scrawny, balding brother with the teasing eye and dirty hands was the most delightful of companions. Leo read him everything he wrote. Childhood, his novel, was giving him trouble. He crossed out, wrote over, started again, and meditated on the difficult profession of author. "My brother came," he wrote in his diary on March 27, 1852. "1 read him what 1 had written at Tiflis. He thinks it is not as good as the rest and I think it is no good at all. . . ." "Definitely, I am convinced it is worthless. The style is too loose and there are too few ideas to make up for the shallowness of the rest." (April 7.) "It is an odd thing, but reading bad books helps me to dctcct my own faults more than good ones. Cood books reduce me to despair." (April 1, 1852.)

The creative trials and tribulations of the beginner were intensified by the state of his health, which was far from good. Rheumatism, sore throat, toothache, enteritis, mysterious spells of weakness . . . After consulting a physician at Kizlvar and taking a cruise around the Caspian, he returned to Starogladkovskaya and applied for leave to undergo treatment in a neighboring spa, preferably Pyatigorsk. Alexeyev, who did not bear grudges, gave him permission to go and even advanced him some money for the trip.

On May 16, Tolstoy arrived, worn out, at Pyatigorsk, found lodgings outside the town in a house with a view of the snowy peak of Elbrus, and began treatment immediately. Rising at dawn, he took long sulphur baths, drank thermal water until it nauseated him, ate Turkish delight, slept in the afternoon and observed no improvement in his condition. The distractions offered by the little city, which was famous for its pure air, tidy little houses and magnificent setting, did not tempt him: walks along the boulevards to the music of the orchestra, elegant chit-chat in the pastry shops, theatrical performances, fashion competitions between officers on furlough and wealthy civilians, the coquetry of ladies with too much time on their hands, intrigues, weddings, duels, picnics and cavalcades—to him it all seemed a ridiculous parody of "la vie parisienne."** Even the advances of his pretty landlady left him unruffled. "She plays the flirt with me," he wrote, "she tends her flowers under my window and hums songs, and all these thoughtful little attentions interfere with my peace of mind. I thank God for making me bashful; it saves me from sin."" Had his health been better, he would probably not have resisted temptation. What an oddly made fellow he was: average height (5*9"), a stocky, solid body, sinews of steel, and the nerves of a fainting female. When the least little thing went wrong, he had a flush of fever or stomach cramps. Even the escapades of his dog Bulka, who was a roving type, threw him into exaggerated states of anxiety. One day when he was afraid the animal had been shot by the police, his nose began to bleed. He was so vexed because he could not find a good copyist in Pyatigorsk that he developed a migraine. In the end, he turned over his rough drafts to his serf Vanyushka, who copied them out as best he could. But Vanyushka fell ill. New source of exasperation for the young gentleman. No doubt about it: the whole world was conspiring against him. Manfully making the best of it, he cleaned his room himself, did the cooking and nursed his servant devotedly. Hie only trouble was that by lolling in bed and being served by his master the fellow was acquiring a taste for laziness and saucy retorts. Oncc he was back on his feet, he had to be threatened with the knout. But as Tolstoy had had Alyoshka, another of his servants,⁴⁸ flogged a few weeks before, the warning bore fruit, and Vanyushka went back to work. Thus, at the same time as he was congratulating himself on his growing love for the human race, the young count was unable to forget either the distance that separated him from his serfs or the best way of making them behave. On June 29, 1852 he enthusiastically noted in his diary, "The man whose only goal is his own happiness is bad; he whose goal is the good opinion of others is weak; he whose goal is the happiness of others is good; he whose goal is God, is great! . . ."

For the moment, he was not very sure which was his goal. One thing was sure: he was working furiously away at his novel. On May 27, 1852 he completed the third draft. And immediately started over again. "Perhaps it will be like the labor of Penelope," he wrote to Aunt Toinette on May 30 (in French), "but that doesn't discourage me. I am not writing out of ambition, but because I like to; work gives me pleasure and a sense of purpose, and I am working." The same day, he wrote in his diary, "Do I have talent, in comparison with the new Russian writers? Assuredly not." But, three days later (June 2), he qualified this categorical statement: "I am not yet certain that I have no talent. I think what I lack is patience, skill, precision; nor do I have any grandeur of style, feeling or thought. On that last point, however, I will reserve my opinion." While wearily and crossly revising the fourth draft of Childhood—"in which there are sure to be spelling mistakes!"⁴⁹—he began a story based on his military experience: The Raid.

He was putting the finishing touches to the last chaptcr of his novel when, on July i, he received a letter from his steward at Yasnaya Polyana, notifying him that Kopylev, the lumberman, was threatening to sue him in Moscow for defaulting in his payments. If this happened, the court might order the seizure of his property. "I could lose Yasnaya Polyana," lie wrote in his diary that night, "and in spite of all the philosophies in the world, that would lie a dreadful blow for mc. . . . I ate dinner, wrote a little, baclly, and did nothing useful at all. Tomorrow I shall finish Childhood and decide what to do with it. To bed at eleven-thirty."

On the following day's, he alerted his brother Sergey and begged him to deal with the matter of the outstanding payments,! read his manuscript over one last time, found it neither good nor bad, and decided, without much hope, to send it to a magazine. He could choose between The Contemporary, Fatherland News and The Reading Library. He opted for The Contemporary, which had been founded by Pushkin and was foremost among the monthly publications of the time. The famous poet Nekrasov was its director. On July 3, 1S52 Leo Tolstoy wrote to him:

"Sir, the favor I am going to ask of you will demand so little of your time that I am sure you will not refuse me. Glance through this manuscript and, if it is not worth printing, send it back to me. Otherwise, tell me what you think of it, send me whatever amount you think it is worth and print it in your review. . . . Actually, this is the first part of a novel that will cover four periods. The publication of the following parts will depend on the success of the first. I am eager to know your verdict. Either it will incite me to continue in my favorite occupation or it will oblige mc to burn everything I have begun."

The manuscript was entitled Story of My Childhood and both it and the letter bore the initials L.N. The reply, a postscript added, was to be sent in care of Count Nicholas Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Second Lieutenant of Artillery, for L.N., at the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa.

Once the package had gone, Tolstoy felt both relieved and en-

t Which Sergey managed, without too much difficulty.

fccblcd, happy and unhappy at once, and was tormented by one thought: how long did it take a very famous and very busy man to read a manuscript? To distract himself, he went for treatment to another spa, Zheleznovodsk. After sulphur water, iron water. He bathed in it, he drank it: No change. His toothache, acid stomach, rheumatism continued. Would he never get well? And when it wasn't his body that was sick, it was his soul. At Zheleznovodsk he wrote more of his short story The Raid, went for walks, cursed the rain and the army, and even wondered whether the time had not come for him to resign his commission. Deeper doubts also nagged at him: "I have seen bodies die, so I suppose my body will die; but since nothing proves to me that my soul will die as well, I say it is immortal. . . . The idea of eternity is a mental disease. . . ."⁵⁰ For the first time, he included the established order in his criticism, and thought of writing an explosive novel inspired by Plato's Politics: "In my novel I shall show all the evils of the Russian government and, if I find this first experiment satisfactory, I shall devote the remainder of my life to working out a schcmc for collaboration between an elected house of representatives of the aristocracy and the present monarchical government."⁵¹

On August 7, he was at Starogladkovskaya again, where he fell back into and was carricd away by the tedium of routine: drill, cannon practice, idiotic scoldings by Alexeyev, petty drinking bouts, cards, hunting ("Shot five snipe . . . Shot three pheasants . . . Shot two partridge"), toothache, reading, women, boredom, work, writer's daydreams: "It would justify a whole lifetime to write one good book."⁵² On August 28, 1852, his birthday, he made a melancholy note in his diary: "I am twenty-four years old and I have still done nothing. I am sure it's not for nothing that I have been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past eight years. But what am I destined for? Only time will tell. Shot three snipe."

The following day, August 29, the face of the world was transfigured: "I received a letter from the editor, which has made me happy to the point of imbecility," wrote Leo Tolstoy."³ lie read Nckrasov's short, tense note ten times over: "I have read your manuscript (Childhood). Without knowing the sequel, I cannot make any final judgment, but it seems to me that the author has talent. In any case his ideas, and the simplicity and reality of his subject, form the unquestionable qualities of this work. If, as is to be expected, the sequel contains more animation and action, it will be a fine novel. Do send me the following sections. Your novel and your talent interest me. I advise you not to hide behind initials but immediately to begin publishing under your real name, unless you are to

be only a bird of passage on the literary scene. I await your reply. . . ."

When his first burst of joy had subsided, Tolstoy remarked to his annoyance that there was no mention of money among the words of praise. And his finances were in a very bad way. After considering the matter for a few days, he wrote to St. Petersburg and asked for an explanation. Ilis letter crossed a second one from Nekrasov, announcing that the novel was at the printer's. He must have written yet again, for he received a third letter from the director of the review: "I have not spoken to you about money in my previous letters for this reason: it has long been the custom of our foremost reviews not to pay a beginner who is being presented to the public for the first time. ... In the future, you will receive the same amount as we pay our top writers of fiction (of whom there are very few), that is, fifty rubles per printed page. . . . We are obliged to know the name of the author whose work we are printing, which is why you must give us positive information in this matter. If you desire, no one else need know. . . ."

It was not until October 31, 1852 that Tolstoy received the issue of The Contemporary containing his story. After the thrill of seeing his prose printed in black on white, like a real author, he flew into a rage because Nekrasov had made a few cuts and even changed the title (Childhood, instead of Story of My Childhood). He expressed his displeasure in a letter which, after reading it over, he did not dare to send. The tone of the second, which he signed and sealed, was still surprisingly peremptory for a novice: "I shall ask you to promise, Sir, with regard to my future writings—should you continue to wish to publish them in your review—that you will make absolutely 110 changes in the text."⁵⁴

When he began Childhood, Tolstoy intended to write about his playfellows—Vladimir, Michael and Konstantin Islenyev—and their father, whom he had known in Moscow, but not about himself. The personality of the father, "gallant, bold, self-confident, affable, libertine ... a connoisseur of everything that can procure comfort and pleasure," was scrupulously transcribed by the author. The mother, on the other hand, was purely fictional. It was inevitable that in his efforts to describe the life of this family, Tolstoy should be tempted to incorporate his personal reminiscences. Little by little, his own memories crept into the outline he had drawn. 'The result," he later wrote, "was a deformed mixture of events drawn from the childhood of the Islcnyevs and my own."⁵⁵ To portray Volodya, the narrator's brother, he borrowed the features of his brother Sergey; the Lyubochka of the novel was copied from his sister Marya; Grandmother was taken over bodily into the book; Karl Ivanovich, the tutor, was none other than Fyodor

Ivanovich Rossel, and St. J&rdme was Prosper dc St. Thomas; Natalya Savishna's flcsh-and-blood counterpart lived at Yasnaya Poly-ana under the name of Prascovya Isayevna; Prince Ivan Ivanovich was strongly reminiscent of Prince Gorchakov; Sonya Valakhin was a faitliful image of Sonya Koloshin—the author's childhood sweetheart; the Ivin brothers had more than one point in common with the Musin-Pushkin brothers; as to the narrator himself, Nikolenka Irtenyev—his feelings about those close to him, about nature, animals and servants, were exactly those of Leo Tolstoy at the age of his first discoveries. Thus this first work, which he wanted to be as detached from himself as possible, was unconsciously nourished with all his affection for the warm years of his childhood. Fifty years later he wrote that the book, which he no longer liked, had been written under the influence of Sterne (Sentimental Journey) and 'lopffer (La Bibliotlieque de mon oncle). lie might as well have added Rousseau, Dickens, Gogol and— why not?—Stendhal.

In fact, Tolstoy's originality was apparent in those very first pages. He instinctively refused to see people and things in terms of others before him. lie looked at the world with the eyes of a man who has read nothing and learned nothing, who is discovering everything for himself. "When I wrote Childhood" he later told Bulgakov, "I had the impression that nobody before me had ever felt or expressed the wonderful poetry of that age." He applied this constant concern for sincerity and probity to technique as well as to thought. He was not writing to please, but to translate the different aspects of life as faithfully as he could. By divesting his language of threadbare metaphor, he sought the shortest road from the object to the heart. The grandiloquent comparisons of a Lamartinc drove him wild with anger. What a heap of rubbish, all those tears that resembled pearls and eyes sparkling like diamonds! "I never saw lips of coral," he wrote in one draft of Childhood, "but I have seen them the color of brick; nor turquoise eyes, but I have seen them the color of laundry blueing." "The French," he also said, "have a strange propensity for translating their impressions into tableaux. A face? 'It is like the statue of . . .' Nature? 'It reminds one of such-and-such a painting.' A comely group? 'One might say a setting from an opera or ballet.' But a handsome facc, or a scene in nature or a group of live people will always be more beautiful than any statue, panorama, painting or stage setting."

Armed with these principles, Tolstoy vowed from the outset to use the right word every time, even if it was crudc, trivial or inaesthetic; to put it down on the paper without fear of being repetitious, and never to sacrifice the truth for clegance or poetry. He had the same mistrust of traditional forms of construction. In his opinion one should not begin by describing the characters, and then setting the scene, and then opening the action; instead, one should familiarize the reader with the characters by little touches scattered about as the action progressed. In short, he intended to write simply and be read by simple people.

In his campaign of demystifi cation, he was aided by a Dionysiac sensuousncss. He strode through the world with his eyes wide open, ears pricked and nostrils flaring. The shuddering of the leaves, smell of plowed earth, chill of a pane of glass under the hand, taste of a fruit melting 011 his tongue, barking of a dog in the country—all his perceptions coursed through his body in sharp waves, collided together and muddled his brain deliciously. He was perfectly attuned to the rhythm of nature, and it was no effort for him to imagine what beings very different from himself might feci. With equal truthfulness he could be lord, muzhik, woman, child, girl, horse and bird in turn. And he showed as much concern for the truth in his psychological notations as in his descriptions of the world: "In the course of my life," he wrote in one draft of Childhood, "I have never met a man who was all bad, all pride, all good or all intelligence. In modesty I can always find a repressed urge toward pride, I see stupidity in the most intelligent book, intelligent things in the conversation of the greatest fool alive, ctc." At the age of twenty-three, lie had already rejected one-sided characters, figures that were all shadow or all light. He decomposed the individual into an infinity of tiny spots, in the manner of the Impressionists. And out of the juxtaposition of this multitude of apparently disconnected lines, a unique character was born. After a dance, little Nikolenka looks at himself in a mirror—ugly, perspiring, his hair mussed, "but the overall expression on my facc was so gay, so good and healthy that I was pleased with myself."⁵⁶ At his mother's death he was sad, to be sure, but a curious feeling of self-importance mingled with his sorrow: "Sometimes it was the desire to show that I was more deeply afflicted than the others, sometimes concern for the effect I was producing. . . Seeing his father in a black redingotc, pale, pensive and handsome during the funeral, he was angry with him "for looking so dashing at such a moment." It even seemed to him (in an early draft of Childhood) that his grief-stricken father was not insensitive to the bare white arm of a neighbor who had come to nurse Maman.

Even in Childhood, his art of suggesting a character's psychology in a few casually sketched physical traits was abundantly displayed. Tolstoy had only to describe a gesture or underline a detail of dress, and the hidden recesses of a soul were lighted up in some mysterious manner. His characters were surrounded by an aura that distinguished each from all the others, and yet its components remained indefinable. "Who has not sensed these mysterious, tacit relationships caught in an imperceptible smile, a gesture, a look, between people who live constantly together: brothers, friends, husband and wife, master and servant, especially when they are not completely truthful with each other? How many desires, half-expressed thoughts and fears of being understood are revealed in a single chance glance, when their eyes meet, timid, unsure!"⁰⁸

With its digressions, flashes of poetry, heavy load of memories, Childhood is at once a naive and cynical book, quite singularly new by its very refusal of innovation, a triumph of heart over mind, sincerity over artifice, raw instinct over the literary culture of the "connoisseurs." Nckrasov had not been mistaken. On October 21, 1852 he wrote to Ivan Turgencv expressing his admiration; and the latter replied, after reading Childhood in The Contemporary (October 28), "You're right. 'Iliis is a sure gift. Write him and encourage him to continue. Tell him, in case he may be interested, that I welcome, hail and applaud him."

In his first flush of enthusiasm Ivan Turgcnev also showed the book by this unknown author, who modestly signed himself L.N., to Tolstoy's sister Marya, who lived near him in the country. "Imagine our surprise," Marya told Leo later, "as we gradually began to recognize ourselves in the characters of the story, and the description of our whole family. Who had written these lines? Who could be so familiar with the most intimate details of our lives? We were so far from thinking that our Leo could be the author of a book that we decided it had been written by Nicholas!"

The story made an instantaneous hit with the public, underscored by the praise of the critics. With the exception of Pantheon, which said that Childhood was an "amusing and uninspired little tale," the press unanimously hailed a genius. "It has been a long time sincc we have had occasion to read so inspired a story, one so nobly written, so profoundly steeped in love for the reality the author has sought to depict," wrote Dudyshkin in Fatherland Notes. "If this is L.N.'s first effort, Russian literature may congratulate itself upon the appearance of an admirable new talent." In The Muscovite, Almazov asked, "What is happening to Russian literature? One might almost believe it is beginning to revive at last."

Tolstoy was out hunting, in November 1852, when he received the first reviews. He read them in a cabin by candlelight, and was staggered by a violent burst of joy. "I am lying down in an isba on a plank bed," he later said,⁵⁹ "and my brother and Ogolin are beside me. I read and wallow in all this praise. I say to myself, 'Nobody, not even they, knows that all these compliments arc for me.'" And he wrote in his diary on November 25, "I read a review of my book with unbelievable joy!" On the following day, November 26, he added, "I want to begin more stories about the Caucasus right away. I started today. I have too much self-respect to write anything bad, but I don't know whether I have it in me to write something good." lie was working on The Raid, the Novel of a Russian Lord (the basis for A Landlord's Morning), Boyhood (sequel to Childhood), and taking notes for other short stories. His need to tell stories was so great that he doubted whether he would be able to use up the ideas whirling about in his head in a lifetime.

However, a short while later, in the depths of Siberia, another young writer, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (seven years older than Tolstoy), recently released from prison and drafted by force into the infantry, read Childhood and told his friend Maikov, "I like Leo Tolstoy enormously, but in my opinion he won't write much of anything else (after all, I can be wrong!)."⁶⁰

Tolstoy had been in the Caucasus for two years and the "wild, free life" had lost all its appeal for him. He was bored by his kunak Sado and the old drunkard Epishka, he 110 longer even looked at Maryanka, whose beauty had stirred him so deeply before, and the pointless banter of his cornpanions-at-arms only increased his desire for solitude.

In January 1853 another expedition went out against ShamiTs Chcchenians. The operation no longer had the spice of novelty for Tolstoy, so he saw only its futile and depressing sides: "War," he wrote in his diary on January 6, 1853, "is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves." At Fort Groznaya, where the men were resting briefly before going into battle, there was heavy drinking and gambling: "'Iliey all drink, especially my brother. How I hate it/¹¹ This evening Knoring came in drunk with Hesket. lie brought along some port. I got drunk too. Some officers from Tenginsk happened along with some prostitutes. . . ."⁶² Altercation, insults, a barely avoided duel. ... At last the 20th Brigade went into action. Artillery fire was heavy near Kurinsk. The eight cannons of the 4th battery, under Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev, overpowered the enemy battery of Shamil. The hillsmen fell back. Only ten casualties were recorded on the Russian side. On February 16 and 17 there were fresh engagements, and a few aouls were destroyed. On those two days, in his own opinion, Leo Tolstoy bore himself "well." Praised by his superiors, he again hoped he might be given the St. George Cross.

But on March 7, the day before the decorations were distributed, he was placed under arrest because he had been playing chess with an officcr and had forgotten his turn at guard duty. The next day, when the regiment fell in for parade to the roll of the snare drum, he was left behind, alone and furious, locked in a cabin. He hated Captain Olifcr, who had reported him, and General Levin, who had struck him off the honors list, 'lhe only reason he wanted that St. George Cross was "to impress the people in Tula" when he came home from the war. On March 10, 1853 he wrote in his diary, "It made me dreadfully Sad not to receive the Cross."

Sulking, he waited to return to Starogladkovskaya, where he tendered his resignation to General Brimmer, commander of the artillery brigade. It was refused. Another source of disappointment: his short story, The Raid, which he had sent to The Contemporary, had just been printed, but was heavily cut by the censor. "I ask you," wrote Nckrasov on April 6, 1853, "^not t° be discouraged by these annoyances, from which all our great authors suffer. Sincerely, your story is very vivid and fine, even in its present form." His sister Marya and brother Sergey also wrote, congratulating him on what they considered a success. And Aunt Toinette exulted, in the tones of a requited sibyl: "Didn't I urge you to take a serious interest in literature? Didn't I predict that you would be successful at this type of work, because you have in you everything necessary to be a good writer: intelligence, imagination and noble feelings?"®³

Although these words of praise did not quite take the placc of the St. George Cross, they did incite Tolstoy to settle down to work again. "I am writing Boyhood with as much pleasure as I did Childhood" he wrote on May 22. "I hope it will be as good!" And he was already working on the outline for the third part, Youth. These studious activities did not save him from an occasional resurgence of "carnal desires." He treated these attacks as symptoms of a disease. An alarming force would begin to stir in his belly. He would go sniffing and prowling around a woman, waiting for a sign to speak to her. "Because of the girls I have not had and the Cross they refused to give me, here I sit wasting the best years of my life."¹¹⁴ Salornonida remained the most receptive of the Cossack women: "I still like her, even though she has grown ugly." With her, at least, he could relax. But with new girls, shyness fuddled his brain. In his presence, one of his companions told pretty Oxana that he loved her, and he could not bear this public declaration. "I fled, in a state of utter confusion!"⁶⁵

Another flight nearly cost him his life. On June 13 he left with his kunak Sado to ride with a convoy going to Fort Groznaya. The convoy was inching along, and the two young men were foolhardy enough to set off ahead of the escort at a gallop. A few vcrsts from Groznaya, they were attacked by a score of Chcchcnian horsemen, seven of whom set out in pursuit of them. They had traded horses a short time before: 'Tolstoy's Kabardian was an excellent trotter, but heavy at the gallop. Sado, who had given him his own swift mount, was thus at a handicap. However, at the risk of lxjing caught, Tolstoy held back level with his friend rather than outdistance him. He knew he would be killed if he were captured; but the thought of escaping alone was incompatible with his code of honor. He waved his saber aloft; Sado brandished his gun—which was not loaded—and behind them the pounding hoofs and bloodthirsty howls and whistles were drawing dangerously near. The alarm was given, some Cossacks rode out of Fort Groznaya, and the Chechenians turned tail and rode away.t

This heroic deed might conceivably have reconciled Tolstoy with himself. Far from it. The moment he was back at Starogladkovskaya, after succumbing to his habitual temptations of women and cards, he took up his pen to scourge himself: "All week long my behavior has been so dissolute that 1 feel leaden and bleak, as always when I am not pleased with myself."⁶⁶ And, in his own words, he undertook a "soul cleansing." He liked to clean house this way, at intervals, throwing open the windows and giving all his evil thoughts a good sweep with a broom. Afterward he could stroll contentedly through his renovated domain and contemplate the future with emboldened confidence. "This cursed regiment has turned me completely aside from the path of goodness I had begun to follow and want to return to at all costs, for it is the best. . . . The goal of my life, it is plain, is the good . . . the good I owe my serfs and fellow countrymen; the former because I am their master and the latter because I have brains and talent."⁶⁷

He had just sold another thirty of those serfs he so cherished, "of masculine sex," along with 365 acres of land bordering the village of Yagodnaya. This transaction had brought him 5700 rubles—enough to keep him afloat for a few months. But shortly thereafter, in a surge of liberality, he had freed one of his peasants, Alexander Mikhailov, twenty-three years old, who wanted to become a monk in the monastery of Trinity St. Sergey. One deed canceled out the other, he trusted, in the eyes of divine justice.⁰

When summer came he obtained permission to return to Pyatigorsk, where his sister Marya and brother-in-law Valerian were also taking

t Three officers in the escort were gravely wounded that day in an engagement with the main body of the Chechens.

" The sale of the village of Yagodnaya was concluded by Valerian Tolstoy 011 April 10, 1853; Alexander Mikhailov, the serf, was freed on June 6 of the same year.

the waters. At first Marya amused him, then she disappointed him: "She plays the coquette too much." His brother-in-law Valerian was "an honest, sober fellow, but devoid of that delicate sense of honor I deem essential in all to whom I give my friendship." Thereupon Nicholas Tolstoy arrived; more fortunate than his younger brother, his resignation had just been accepted. This much-beloved and admired brother, in spite of his dirtiness, laziness and his fondness for wine, suddenly appeared to Tolstoy in a new light. He found him empty, and remote. As remote as his brother-in-law and sister. Strangers. "My family's indifference torments mc," he wrote on July 17, 1853. And, "Why is it nobody loves mc? I am neither stupid, nor ugly, nor perverse, nor a cad. I don't understand it!" Two days later he wrote to his brother Sergey, "I must confess I was expecting more pleasure from seeing Masha and Valerian again than I actually felt. Poor Masha goes to all the parties here and finds them very insignificant affairs indeed. In the first placc, it is a sad thing that she should enjoy herself in such trivial company, and sadder still that all her time is taken up with such distractions, which she prefers to the company of the brother she has not seen for two years. ... I may be oversensitive, as usual, but during the two weeks I have spent with them (Marya, Valerian and Nicholas), I have not heard a single word from any of them that was—I will not say affectionate (for I had all of that I wanted)—but from the heart, and proved to me that thev love me and that I have a place in their lives."

All the while he was fulminating against this idle existence, he tagged along with his brother's and sister's "bunch," down the boulevard, around the hot springs, on picnics. A certain 'llieodorina caught his eye for a few days: "July 25. Talked to Thcodorina. . . ." "July 27. The pretty women 011 the boulevard have too great an effcct on me. . . . Yesterday, Thcodorina, utterly delightful, told me about her life at boarding school." "August 1-4. Thcodorina is in love with me. I am not bored. I take baths." "August 6. Thcodorina is very infatuated with mc. I shall have to make up my mind one way or another. I confess it is some consolation." "August 7. Brushed against Thcodorina several times during the evening: she excites me very much." "September 3. Theodorina is a silly goose; I am sorry for her." "September 14. Thcodorina is snubbing me and I won't sec her again."

Merc trifles. Tolstoy's true source of worry lay elsewhere. The approach of the New Year incited him to meditate upon himself. With beetling brows, he re-entered his sententious phase. Once again, his diary filled up with trenchant formulas: "Keep away from wine and women" "The pleasure is so negligible and the regret so profound!" "Abandon yourself entirely to everything you undertake." "When under the sway of a powerful emotion, hold back; but after reflection, act with determination even if you're wrong." "Overcome depression by work, not by distractions." And, as before in Moscow, he kept his "Franklin" notebooks, recording all his misbehavior. A ruthless inquisitor, he smacked himself across the fingers with a shiver of delight: "Broke my oath not to frequent drinkers . . ." "Cot up too late . . "Lied . . ." "Made a foolish purchase . . ." "Wandered aimlessly . . ." "Could not make up my mind . . ." "Went to sleep after lunch . . ." "Offended Epishka . . ." "Struck a cat . . ." "Insulted Alyoshka . . ." "Lost my temper and beat Alyoshka . . ."^,>>R

Hie publication of Childhood and The Raid having made him, in his own eyes, a genuine man of letters, he soon added no less peremptory "Rules of Writing" to his "Rules of Life": "When you criticize your work, always put yourself in the position of the most limited reader, who is looking only for entertainment in a book." "The most interesting books are those in which the author pretends to hide his own opinion and yet remains faithful to it." "When rereading and revising, do not think about what should be added (no matter how admirable the thoughts that come to mind) . . . but about how much can be taken away without distorting the overall meaning." In his excitement he even criticized Pushkin, whose prose he found poor and thin, and concluded with a flourish, "I know perfectly well that I have genius."

This was the very reason why, no doubt, he felt so lonely! "I must get used to the idea, once and for all, that I am an exceptional being," he wrote on November 3, 1853, "a person ahead of his time, or else I have an impossible, unsociable nature, always dissatisfied. . . . For a long time I lied to myself, imagining I had friends, people who understood me. I low wrong I was! I have not met one man who is morally as good as I am, who is attracted to the good on every occasion, as I am, or ready to sacrifice everything for his ideal, as I am. That is why I can find no company in which I am at ease."

How was it, when writing those lines, that he was not tempted to skim through the pages of his diary? He might have observed that he had previously dragged himself through the mire with the same relish he was now deploying to exalt his virtues. But, accustomed as he was to switching from angel to beast, he would not have been surprised by this inconsistency: after all, it is necessary to touch bottom before one can spring back up to the surface. Now up, now down, Tolstoy was constitutionally incapable of following a middle course.

In any event, lie had had all he could take of the Caucasus; and as though in response to his desire for action, Nicholas I declared war on Turkey (October 20 [November 1], 1853). Russian troops, led by Paskevich, had entered the Danube Principalities four months before. France and England were up in arms, blustering and protesting in Support of the sultan. Since Tolstoy's resignation had been refused, he decided to ask for a transfer to Moldavia. But he had to be commissioned first. Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, alerted in Kazan, pulled her most influential strings; Tolstoy himself wrote to Prince Sergey Gorchakov, asking for a recommendation to Sergey's brother, Princc Michacl Gorchakov, general in the Danube army under the supreme command of Field Marshal Paskevich. But the mail was slow, the clerks in the offices swamped by paper. On November 26, 1853, with his fate still undecided, Tolstoy complained to his brother Sergey:

"I am counting on a change in my way of life next year. The life I am leading here has become intolerable. Stupid officers, stupid conversations, stupid officers, stupid conversations, nothing else. . . . Even though Nicholas, God knows why, took the hounds with him (Epishka and I call him an s.o.b. for doing it), I still go out hunting day after clay, all alone from morning to night, with one pointer. It's my only pleasure—not even a pleasure, but a way of wearing myself out. You're exhausted, you're hungry, you reach the house, you fall asleep like a lump of lead, and there's one more day gone."

A month later he confided in Aunt Toinette: "No friends, no occupation, no interest in anything around me. I am watching the best years of my life go by, bringing nothing to me or anyone else, and l>ccause of my sensitivity this position, which might be tolerable to someone else, is becoming increasingly trying. The price 1 am paying for my wayward youth is a high one."⁸⁹

Tolstoy had not really wasted his time in the Caucasus, although he liked to say so. His suitcases were bulging with sheafs of manuscripts. In Boyhood, written in the first person like Childhood, he studied the awakening of a personality at grips with its first challenges. The Novel of a Russian Lord recounted the adventures of a young nobleman who, after trying to achieve his ideal of justice and brotherhood in the country, was discouraged by the apathy of his muzhiks, turned to the joys of family life and realized in the end that true happiness lay in sacrificing one's individual interests to the general interest.⁷⁰ The Raid, A Wood-Felling, The Fugitive were short stories inspired by his military experiences. In Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker he described his despairing state on the eve of his departure for the Caucasus, when he

was fed up with himself and did not know where to seek salvation: "I am enmeshed in slimy nets and I can neither free myself nor learn to bear them." In A Holy Night, it was Moscow under the snow, a ball, young love.

Even these minor or unfinished works revealed the author's exceptional talent, his gift for true sight and true speech, the pitiless candor of his approach to the world. However, at this stage of his travels, he needed a change of scenery to provide him with a new source of inspiration; the writer, as much as the man, was looking forward to the Army of the Danube as a fund of fresh experience. On January 12, 1854 he learned that he would be allowed to take the officer's examination for the rank of ensignt (a mere formality) and was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade, in Moldavia. Overjoyed, he decided to set off as soon as possible, making a little detour (nearly seven hundred miles) to say hello to his aunt and brothers at Yasnaya Polyana. Lieutenant- Colonel Alexeyev approved his application for a furlough and advanced him one hundred and twenty-five rubles for the trip.

For a week, Tolstoy celebrated his promotion drinking dzhonka.t On the day of his departure he had a Te Deum sung, "out of vanity," handed some small change to the poor, "out of ostentation," and, just as he was about to climb into the carriage, suddenly felt a sorrow beyond words instead of the relief he had been expecting. His companions-at- arms were all standing at the side of the road, and his ktmak Sado, and Uncle Fpishka, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev, the "pretentious imbecile." Looking at them he realized that he had unconsciously come to love the people he was about to leave, as well as the country. "I explained this change in my attitude by the fact that in military servicc in the Caucasus, as in other intimate surroundings, a man docs not learn how to choose the best people, but how to find the good qualities in uninteresting ones,"⁷¹ he later wrote. As the horses moved forward, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev swept the back of his hand roughly across his tears. Tolstoy turned his head away. Was he to lose them all forever? No; already lie dimly sensed that the Cossacks and the Chechens, Maryanka and Sado and Epishka and all the others would soon come back to life in a book.

Two days later he wrote, with customary self-assurance: "There is one fact I must remind myself of as often as possible: at thirty, Thack-

t In the Russian army, an ensign (praporshik) is the lowest-ranking commissioned officer, coming before second lieutenant.

I A rum drink into which flaming lumps of sugar are plunged.

eray was just preparing to write his first book® and Alexandre Dumas writes two a week. Show nothing to anyone before publication. One hears more unfounded criticism than useful advice/' And, yielding to his penchant for observation he added without any transition: "Inhere is a particular type of young soldier who has backward-bending legs."

• Thackcray actually began to write around the age of twenty, and was thirty-six when Vanity Fair, his first novel, was published.

2. Sevastopol

Russia lay buried deep in snow. The relays followed each other, identical, with myopic windows peering out beneath big white roofs, stacks of frozen straw in the courtyards, shivering grooms scurrying around the horses, hulking, silent coachmen. On the sixth day of the trip, one hundred vcrsts from Novocherkassk, Tolstoy's sledge was caught in a blizzard. Whirling funnels of snow sped across the bare fields, sky and earth bccamc indistinguishable and the eardrums ached from the screaming wind. No more road, no more horizon; in a cloud of vapor, the horse's head swayed back and forth under the wooden arch, the runners sank deep into cottony nothingness and the cold became so intense that not even the vodka he downed could keep the passenger warm. After heading his team blindly in every direction, the driver admitted that he was lost. Night was coming on. What to do? Stop and wait? Freeze to death, in other words. '1 he tormented horse stumbled on through the squalls until dawn. Tolstoy vowed to base a story on this adventure if he came out of it alive.¹ For a writer, even fear can be grist to the mill. Dawn paled in the sky at last, the wind dropped and the smoke of a village appeared in the distance. Back among men once again, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "To Succeed in life one must be brave, resolute and keep a cool head."

Nine more days on the road and, on February 2, 1854, ^{in a} landscape of steam, frost and lace, the two towers marking the entrance to Yasnaya Polyana rose up at the end of a white-rutted drive. There was the house, with its neo-classical pediment, its columns, snow-powdered on the side facing the wind, its large, limpid windows; there, 011 the threshold, was the odor of childhood (tart apples and beeswax); there was Aunt Toinette, tiny and wrinkled, her eyes full of tears and light, coming forward, holding out her arms, falling on to the chest of her

"Lyova Ryova."" They wept, kissed, exclaiming how well the other was looking.

That very evening Tolstoy told Aunt Toinette all about his adventures in the Caucasus. He may have bragged a bit, omitted to mention the size of his debts and inflated that of his expectations, but he did so less from conceit than from a desire to give some happiness to the woman who, for so many years, had lived only for her nephews. He felt that his youth and his literary success were a present he was giving her. He scolded her because she kept saying in her letters that she was too lonely and wanted to die. He said she had 110 right to complain, because there he stood before her, bubbling over with optimism and good health. This princely selfishness made her smile. Hand in hand they looked at each other and sighed with love. A well-matched couple, one all youth and fire, the other all weariness and resignation.

Yasnaya Polyana was magnificent in the snow: the frozen Voronka, white ice where the pond used to be, crystal-tined trees. Tolstoy made his landlord's rounds, visited the village elder, ordered a Te Deum sung at the church, checked over the new manager's accounts—he looked honest—went on to the farm at Grumond and concluded from his inspection that everything was in order but that he himself had aged. After spending a few days with his sister Marya at Pokrovskoye, playing the piano and tumbling about with his nephews, he wrote out a will in view of his impending departure for the army, and returned to Aunt Toinette. In the meantime, his three brothers, Nicholas, Sergey and Dmitry, had also arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. It was strange to sec Nicholas in civilian clothes, a shapeless jackct and hands of doubtful cleanliness. Sergey, the family eccentric, was becoming more elegant, ironic and independent than ever. Dmitry was unrecognizable, with a beard bristling around his puff)' face, a dissatisfied expression and blear)' eyes. He had begun to drink, like Nicholas, but even more than Nicholas. Aunt Toinette whispered that he was living the life of a profligate in Moscow. The four brothers decided, either because there were not enough beds to go round or out of sheer stoicism, to sleep together on the bare floor.²

Tolstoy was so intensely happy to be with his family again in the house he was born in that no ill tidings could affect him. On February 13, he read Nekrasov's letter⁸ advising him not to publish the Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker—"content excellent, but form mediocre"—without turning a hair.

"Your previous work was too promising," Nekrasov wrote, "to follow

• "Leo Cry-Baby."

it up with something so undistinguished." He had to admit that the director of The Contemporary was right, forgot his Story and went to Moscow with his brothers. There they visited their acquaintances, caroused and reveled, and had their photograph taken together. At the right of the row sat Leo Tolstoy, stiff and intent, muttonchop whiskers framing his face, his uniform stretched tightly across his chest, epaulettes jutting out, and thumb stuck into his belt strap. He had just bought a complete outfit: "Greatcoat 135 rubles, accessories 35, boots 10 . . ." A run over to Pokrovskoye to say good-bye to Marya, Valerian, Sergey and Aunt Pelagya, a hop to Sherbatchevka, Dmitry's estate, where Aunt Toinette had hurried to kiss the traveler good-bye and give him her blessing, and it was time to go. The parting was heart-rending. Aunt Toinette cried. Looking at all those tearful faces, Tolstoy could at last tell himself that lie was loved as he wished to be. Happy in his woe, he wrote in his diary, "It was one of the brightest moments of my life."

On March 3, 1854 he set off. From Kursk he traveled to the Rumanian frontier via Poltava, Balta and Kishinev. He began the two- thousand-verst trip by sledge; then, when the snow turned to mud, he changed to a most uncomfortable sort of cart, "smaller and more ill- made than the ones wc use for carting manure at home."⁴ The drivers spoke nothing but Moldavian. Despairing of making himself understood, Tolstoy was constantly under the impression that they were cheating him. lie reached Bucharest on March 12, worn out and furious at having spent two hundred rubles without being able to account for them.

Two nephews of the commanding officer, Prince Michael Gorcliakov, welcomed the young ensign with all the courtesy lie could wish for and, four clays later, the general in person received him in his palace on his return from a tour of inspection at the front. Strapped into his new uniform, Tolstoy went expecting a formal interview. But Gorchakov treated him as one of the family. "He embraced mc, made me promise to dine with him every day and wants to put me on his staff, but this is not yet ccrtain."⁵

The ease with which an honorably-born young man could find a comfortable position was a typical feature of Russian life at the end of the last century. Every great family had some representative in good standing at court, to whom it appealed in matters of importance to intercede with the emperor. Letters of recommendation took the place of diplomas and everything worked out in the end thanks to an aide- de-camp uncle or a lady-in-waiting cousin, and, after sowing their wild oats, young men who lacked any other qualification found themselves occupying enviable posts in the army or administration. On the strength of Prince Michael Gorchakov's cordiality, Tolstoy felt that his military career, which had made a slow start in the Caucasus, would now forge swiftly ahead. Accepted by the staff officers as one of themselves he found them brilliant, noble and, in short, absolutely comme il faut.⁶

A strange thing, this return of his comme il faut obsession after a ten-year lapse. The raw artilleryman of the Caucasus was transformed overnight into a drawing-room officer. Sixty miles away on the opposite bank of the Danube, bloody battles were being fought before Silistra, which was besieged by the Russians, but in the staff city of Bucharest the social whirl was in full swing. Dinners at the prince's house, balls, evenings at the Italian opera and French theater, elegant suppers to the music of a gypsy orchestra, spooning of sherbets in tearooms—the pleasures of life became keener as the threat of death drew near. Having received a little money from his brother-in-law Valerian, Tolstoy considered his position "relatively agreeable." Indeed, he was in so little hurry to change it that he was thoroughly vexed to be sent, just for the form, to spend a few days with a campaign battery at Oltenitsa. The officers he met there seemed coarse and vulgar to him. He took a great dislike to the commander and was overjoyed at the arrival, in the heat of an altercation between them, of a courier bringing notice of his appointment to the staff of a division general. The commander had no choice but to bow and swallow his insults and Tolstoy withdrew, his vanity flattered and his sense of justice queasy. "The higher I rise in the opinion of others, the lower I sink in my own," he wrote.⁷

As ordnance officcr for General Serzhputovsky he carried orders to various parts of the military zone, after which his chief could find nothing more for him to do and sent him back behind the lines at Bucharest. lie took advantage of his free time to finish correcting the proofs of Boyhood and send the manuscript to Nekrasov. "I have not yet smelled Turkish gunpowder," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "and I am sitting peacefully here in Bucharest, strolling about, playing music and eating ice creams."³ He forgot to add that he was also playing cards and losing steadily.

Suddenly, there was a gTcat stir in the officcs. General Serzhputovsky had decided to transfer his staff to Silistra, on the right bank of the Danube. Headquarters were set up on a hilltop in the elegant gardens of Mustapha Pasha, governor of the besieged town. A vast and detailed panorama spread out below: the blue Danube, broad and sparkling, dotted with islands, the town, fortresses, the network of trenches crazing the surface of the earth; and from afar, a mass of little worms could be seen swarming about inside these furrows: the Russian soldiers. Perched on a wagon with telescope in hand, Tolstoy admired the view, which he found "poetic." The roses in Mustapha Pasha's garden perfumed the air around him. To while away the time, he exchanged a few blasЈ comments with the other young ordnance officers who, like him, were spectators at the inoffensive and charming game of war. At that distance it required a great effort of imagination to believe that those little black specks marching toward those little gray specks were men, about to kill each other.

The firing quickened during the night, because the Turks wanted to prevent the Russians from completing their earthworks. The Cannon joined in. Spasmodic flashes, dull explosions, trembling earth—one evening Tolstoy counted one hundred explosions per minute. "And yet," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "none of this, up close, is anything like as frightening as it seems. . . . With these thousands of cannon balls, thirty or so men on both sides were killed."⁸ 'Hie tranquil bookkeeping of the strategist!

Sometimes lie rode out to the trenches with an order. There the anonymous figures in the painting suddenly turned into creatures of flesh and blood, with their fatigue and fear, dirt, wounds. ... lie inhaled one gasp of this horror and rode quickly back to his balcony seat, from which the view of the battlefield was so enjoyable. A mine exploding under an enemy redoubt was a lovely display of fireworks: "T his was a sight and emotion of the kind one never forgets!"¹⁰

At last, Prince Corchakov decided to make the final assault. The entire staff went down to the trenches. Mingling with the group of ord- nancc officers and aides-de-camp, Tolstoy observed his chief. As usual, he saw in him a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous—his eternal holy hatred of statues. Gorchakov seemed grotesque to him, "with his tall figure, his hands behind his back, his cap shoved back and his spectacles and way of talking like a turkey-gobbler."¹¹ But "he is so taken up with the progress of operations as a whole that balls and bullets do not exist for him. lie exposes himself to danger so simply that one would think he had no notion of it and is involuntarily more afraid for him than for oneself. ... He is a great man, that is, an able and honest man."¹²

On the eve of the day set for the attack, five hundred Russian cannon bombarded the fortifications. The firing went on without pause all through the night of June 8-9. The attack was set for three in the morning. "There we all were," Tolstoy later wrote, "and, as always 011 the eve of a battle, we were all pretending not to think of the coming day more than any other day, and all of us, I am certain, felt something clutch at our hearts (and not a little clutch, but a big one) at the thought of the attack. . . . The time just before an engagement is always the worst, for it is only then that one has time to be afraid. . . . The feeling (of fear) subsided as the hour approached and, around three, when we were all waiting for the cluster of rockets that was to give the signal for attack, I was in such a cheerful frame of mind that I should have been cruelly disappointed had someone comc to tell me it was not to take place."¹³

What he feared most happened. Just as dawn was beginning to break, an aide-de-camp brought General Gorchakov a message from Field Marshal Paskcvich, ordering him to raise the siege. "I can say without fear of being mistaken," Tolstoy wrote in the same letter, "that the news was received by all, soldiers, officers and generals, as a real misfortune, especially since we knew, from the spies who came over from Silistra, and with whom I very often had occasion to talk myself, that if this fort was taken—and nobody doubted it would be—Silistra could not hold out more than two or three days longer."

What Tolstoy did not know, or refused to take into account, was that part of the Army of the East sent by England and France had already disembarked at Varna, and Austria was calling up a reserve of ninety-five thousand men at the Russians' backs and massing troops along the frontier. While he fretted and chafed, he admired Prince Gorchakov's equanimity in such trying circumstances. To have laid such careful plans for an engagement only to be deprived of their fruition at the last moment was, in his eyes, a kind of injustice. Only a very superior person could bear the blow without reeling. "He [Gorchakov], who is always so moody, did not display one instant of ill humor; on the contrary, he was glad to be able to avoid the slaughter for which he would have had to accept responsibility," he wrote.¹⁴

His esteem for his commanding officer increased during the retreat, which Gorchakov directed in person, "refusing to leave before the last of the soldiers had gone." Austria, with Prussia's support, had ordered Russia to evacuate the Danubian Principalities, and Tsar Nicholas I grudgingly complied, in order to avoid additional international complications. What looked like a simple operation on paper became in reality a chaotic and painful exodus. 'Hiousands of Bulgarian peasants, who were afraid of being massacred by the Turks once the Russians had gone, came down from their villages with their wives, children and livestock and herded themselves into plaintive crowds around the few remaining bridges over the Danube. Traffic bccame so badly blocked that Prince Gorchakov, moved to tears, was forced to refuse a passage to the late arrivals. With his aides-de-camp around him, he received deputations of harassed and bewildered refugees who did not understand Russian, explained as best he could why the army must have priority use of the road, invited them to follow the troops on foot, without wagons, and offered money from his own pay to the neediest. Inflamed by his example, Tolstoy wrote in his diary on June 15, "The siege of Silistra has been lifted. I have not yet been under fire but my position among my fellow officers and superiors is assured. My health is good and, as to the moral side, I am firmly resolved to devote my life to serving my fellow men. For the last time I tell myself, 'If I have not done something for someone else within three days, I shall kill myself.'"

Eight days later he was still alive, but his deeds of selflessness had been confined to playing cards and borrowing money: "A humiliating position for anyone, but especially for me," he wrote on June 23, 1854, in his diary. The following day he recorded this rather curious thought, for a lover of mankind, "I spent the whole evening talking to Shubinf about our Russian slavery. It is true that slavery is an evil, but an extremely nicc evil."

Once again, he was in Bucharest with very little to do, reading, meditating, writing. His teeth were troubling him more and more, so he consented to an operation: on June 30 a fistula was removed, after he had been anesthetized with chloroform. "I behaved like a coward," he sternly observed when he recovered consciousness. And on July 7 he sketched a mocking picture of himself in his diary:

"What am I? One of the four sons of a retired licutcnant-colonel, orphaned at the age of seven and brought up by women and foreigners, who, having acquired neither social nor academic education, became independent at the age of seventeen; without any great fortune or any solid position in socicty, and above all, without principles; a man who has mismanaged his affairs to the last degree, wasted the best years of his life in futile and joyless agitation and finally expatriated himself to the Caucasus to escape from his creditors and, even more, from his habits; whence, on the strength of his father's former friendship with the commander, he contrived to get himself transferred to the Danube army; an ensign, twenty-six years old, practically penniless except for his pay (for the money he has from other sources must go to pay off his debts), without influential connections, without social poise, without any knowledge of any trade, without innate talent, but possessed of boundless pride. Yes, that is my social position. Now let us look at my personality.

t A lieutenant, one of his friends.

⁴⁴1 am ugly, awkward, untidy and socially uncouth. I am irritable and tiresome to others, immodest, intolerant and shy as a child. In other words, a boor. Whatever I know I have learned by myself—half-learned, in bits and snatches, without any structure or order—and it is precious little withal. I am excessive, vacillating, unstable, stupidly vain and aggressive, like all weaklings. I am not courageous. 1 am so lazy that idleness has become an ineradicable habit with me. ... I am honorable, that is, I love the path of virtue . . . and when I depart from it I am unhappy and am glad to return to it. Yet there is one thing I love more than virtue: fame. I am so ambitious, and this craving in me has had so little satisfaction, that if I had to choose between fame and virtue, I am afraid 1 would very often opt for the former. . . . Today I have to reproach myself for three violations of my rules of life: (i) forgot the piano; (2) did nothing about the report concerning my transfer; (3) ate borscht, in spite of my diarrhea which keeps getting worse."

A week later he was no better satisfied with his deportment: "I am very displeased with myself, primo because I spent the whole day removing the pimples all over my face and body, which are beginning to annoy me; secundo, because of my pointless outburst against Alyoshka at dinner."

The war was still on, however, and at the end of the evacuation begun the previous month, the staff left Bucharest 011 July 19, 1854, en route for the Russian frontier. Throughout this dreary tramp, which was to last more than a month, Tolstoy unflaggingly pursued his self- interrogation. On bivouac, in his tent, in barns, he continued his written indictment of his errors with the same morbid delight he had felt in squeezing the pimples on his face. On August 16 he inaugurated a new moral therapy. Henceforth each daily note in his private journal would conclude with the same statement: 'The most important thing in life for me is to correct the following three Wees: laziness, lack of character and bad temper." He kept his word. Between August 16 and October 21, 1854 the sentence recurred more than twenty-five times. But the exorcism was without effect.

On September 9, after traversing Foegani, Barlad, Jassy and Skulyany, the staff finally set up headquarters at Kishinev. As soon as Tolstoy had set foot 011 Russian soil, he tried to interest some friends in founding a periodical with him—The Military Gazette—intended to bolster the soldiers' morale. 'The Gazette," he wrote to his brother Sergey, "will publish less cut-and-dried and more accurate accounts of the bat- tics than the other papers; reports of heroic deeds, biographies and obituaries of the bravest men, chosen chiefly from among the humble and unknown; war stories, soldiers' songs, simplified articles 011 artillery and military engineering."¹⁵

Money was needed for this undertaking. What is money? The previous year, when he had been afraid he would not be able to cover his gambling debts, Tolstoy had instructed his brother-in-law Valerian, in Pyatigorsk at the time, to sell the big family house at Yasnaya Polyana, without the land. Ilis ancestors would just have to do without the respect he owed to them. After all, a good many of them had been gamblers, too. They must be feeling sorry for him up there, maybe even approving him. In September 1854 the house was dismantled, board by board, loaded onto telegas and transported to the estate of the buyer, a neighbor named Gorokhov, to be reassembled there. All that remained at Yasnaya Polyana were the two pavilions which formerly flanked the mansion house. Nicholas wrote to his brother in November 1854, "You already know, no doubt, that the house at Yasnaya Polyana has been sold, dismantled and carried away. I went there recently. Its absence surprised me less than I had expected. The overall appearance of Yasnaya Polyana has not suffered."¹⁶ In any event, Gorokhov had paid up—five thousand rubles. \ To finance The Military Gazette, he need only dip into the till. Valerian received an order to remit fifteen hundred rubles to editor-in-chief Leo.

As for copy, there was no shortage of that. Tolstoy was confident that he could fill the paper single-handed. Without further ado he began writing short stories: How Russian Soldiers Die and Uncle Zhdanov and the Horseman Chernov. In the latter he told how the non-commissioned officers flogged the young recruits, to instill a respcct for discipline in them: "Zhdanov was not beaten to punish him for his faults, but because he was a soldier and soldiers must be beaten," he wrote with passion. Then, remembering that the story was intended for an official military paper, it occurred to him that the censor would never let it pass and he abandoned it. He wrote an article to replacc it, and the specimen issue was sent to the minister of war by Prince Gorchakov. But, Tolstoy himself confessed, even the article was "not very orthodox."^- In fact, his knowledge of the tsar should have discouraged him from the attempt altogether. I low could Nicholas 1, for whom discipline reigned supreme, tolerate the presence in his army of a periodical with humanitarian pretensions? Too much solicitude softens the men in the ranks; what they gain in learning, they lose in obedience! Once again, Tolstoy had mistaken his fancics for fact: sud-

{About $14,100.

⁰ The specimen copy of The Military Gazette has never been found, and nothing is known of the "not very orthodox" article by Leo Tolstoy.

denly bitten by the teaching bug, he saw himself educating the soldiers and—why not?—their leaders, too.

The truth of the matter was that the latter did not seem quite equal to their task. News from the front was increasingly alarming. On a mission from Kishinev to Letichev Tolstoy learned that the French and English forces had disembarked near Sevastopol and the Russians had been defeated at the Alma. He was staggered. So long as the fighting remained on foreign soil, his interest in the war had been that of a dilettante, an artist. But now that the enemy had a foothold on the Russian earth, he felt directly concerned by his aggression. And yet at Kishinev the intrigues and entertainment and dancing went on as before, and Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michaelt came to the ball and charmed the ladies. Tolstoy could not bear it. "Now that I have every comfort, good accommodations, a piano, good food, regular occupations and a fine circle of friends, I have begun to dream of camp life again and envy the men out there," he wrote to Aunt Toinette.¹⁷ On a furlough, he visited Odessa and Nikolayev, where the port was blockaded by the English fleet. He saw some English and French prisoners and was surprised by their robust appearance. "The air and manner of these men gives me, why I don't know, a sinking certainty that they arc far superior to our soldiers," he wrote in his diary.¹⁸

Back at Kishinev, he abruptly applied for a transfer to the Crimea. He had now been promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. This time he did not ask to be attached to a general staff, but left his fate in the hands of his superiors. He set out the reasons for his decision in a letter to his brother Sergey: "I have requested a transfer to the Crimea, partly to see this war at first hand and partly to get away from Serzhputovsky's staff, who do not exactly thrill me; but mostly out of patriotism, a sentiment which, I confess, is gaining an increasingly strong hold on me.""

There was a fourth, more personal reason: his comrade Komstadius, with whom he had planned to edit the gazette, had been killed at the battle of Inkerman. Tolstov's reaction to this news was to conccivc a

4

sudden loathing for his behind-the-lines safety and comfort. "More than anything else, it was his death that drove me to ask for a transfer to Sevastopol," he wrote in his diary. "In a sense, I felt ashamed to face him."-⁰

On November 1 his transfer came through and he set out. Upon reaching Odessa the following day, he learned the details of the stupid defeat at Inkerman, due entirely to General Dannenberg's lack of fore-

f Sons of Nicholas I.

thought. "I saw old men shedding bitter tears and young ones who had vowed to kill Dannenberg," he wrote the same day. "The moral strength of the Russian people is great indeed!"

It was rumored at Odessa that an assault on Sevastopol would begin on November 9 at dawn. Tolstoy was afraid he would arrive too late to display his bravery; he reached the city on the seventh—but the attack did not take place. Assigned to the 3rd light battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade, he found to his annoyance that he was quartered in the city itself, far from the fortifications and outworks.

To defend Sevastopol against attack by sea, part of the Russian fleet had been sunk in the roads. The entire city had been encircled by bastions. 'ITie offensive had come from the south, and reinforcements and supplies from the interior were still arriving by the north. The fortified Malakov Hill defended passing convoys. '"I"here is 110 way to take Sevastopol," Leo Tolstoy wrote on November 11. "And the enemy seems convinccd of this as well."

Inside the city reigned a strange mixture of "camp life" and "town life." The streets were one huge bivouac. The quay was thronged with infantry in gray, sailors in black, women in multicolored garb, shiten- vendors! with their samovars. A general sitting stiffly in his caldche passed a convoy of hay-carts. Bloodstained soldiers lay on stretchers on the peristyle of a stately mansion. The shifting breeze alternately brought the smell of the sea or the stench of overcrowded hospitals. Now and then disdainful camels passed, hauling corpse-piled flat wagons. Cannon boomed in the distance. Suddenly a military march was heard. The crowd bared their heads and crossed themselves: an officer's funeral. Pink coffin, flags unfurled. For church, tsar and fatherland. In a nearby restaurant, other officers, still hale and hearty, commented on their comrade's death as they devoured "cutlets and green peas" and drank "the sour Crimean wine baptized Bordeaux."

Closer to the fortifications, the town assumed a more tragic aspect. Houses in ruins, roadways transformed into pitted dumps, bombs half- buried in the mud, the smell of carrion and cannon powder. Stooping over, soldiers crept along the maze of trenches. At the back of a ease- mate non-commissioned officers played cards by candlelight; sailors picked lice off each other 011 an esplanade surrounded by gabions; near a cannon a lieutenant rolled a cigarette in yellow paper. Balls whistled. Bombs crashed. The sentinels called out, "Ca-a-non!" or "Mortar!" to give warning. "When the shell has gone past," Tolstoy wrote, "you revive, and an inexpressible thrill of joy and relief surges through you."²¹

t Sbiten is a beverage made of honey.

On November 15 he left Sevastopol for a week-long trip through the forward defense lines. What he saw in the trenches and bastions there heightened his love of the Russian people. "The heroism of the troops beggars description/' he wrote to his brother Sergey. "There was far less in the time of the ancient Greeks! When passing the troops in review, Kornilov said not, 'Hello there, my lads!' but 'If it has to be death, my lads, arc you willing to die?' And the soldiers cried out, 'We'll die, Your Excellency! Hurrah!' And there was no play-acting, you could see on every face that it was true, and twenty-two thousand have already been as good as their word. One wounded soldier, nearly dead, told me how they took a French battery on the twenty-fourth of last month, without reinforcements! lie was sobbing. A company of sailors nearly mutinied when relief was sent to the battery they had been serving for thirty days under fire. The soldiers tear the fuses out of the shells. The women bring water to the men in the bastions, and many have been killed or wounded. The priests go from one fort to another brandishing their crucifixes and reciting prayers under fire. In one brigade there were one hundred and sixty wounded who refused to leave the ranks. These are noble days! ... I have not had the good fortune to see action yet myself, but I thank God for allowing me to be with these people and live through this glorious time!"²²

After paying this enthusiastic tribute to the brave defenders of Sevastopol, Tolstoy soon discovered a dreadful truth beneath the patriotic imagery. The Russian soldiers were armed with muskets, the French had rifles. As a result of the parade-ground training advocated by Nicholas I, the new recruits knew how to march in step, but not how to fight. The sorry condition of the roads in the south slowed down troop transport. Supply methods had not changcd since 1812. "During this trip," Tolstoy wrote in his diary on November 23, 1854, "I became convinced that Russia must either fall or be transformed. Nothing works the way it should, we do not prevent the enemy from consolidating his position, although it could easily be done. And we ourselves stand there facing him with inferior forces, without retrenching, with no hope of reinforcements, commanded by generals like Gorchakov,⁰ who have taken leave of their senses, their common sense and their initiative, and are relying on St. Nicholas to send storms and foul weather to drive away the intruder. The Cossacks are ready to plunder, but not to fight; the hussars and uhlans prove their military prowess in drunken carouses and debauchery; the infantry is conspicuous only for its thievery and money-grubbing. A sorry state of affairs

• Prince Peter Gorchakov, brother of the commandcr of the army of the Danube.

for the army and the country. I spent a couple of hours talking to some English and French casualties. Every soldier among them is proud of his position and has a sense of his value, he feels he is a positive asset to his army. He has good weapons and knows how to use them, he is young, he has ideas about politics and art and this gives him a feeling of dignity. On our side: senseless training, useless weapons, ill treatment, delay everywhere, ignorance and shocking hygiene and food stifle the last spark of pride in a man and even give him, by comparison, too high an opinion of the enemy."

Why couldn't he state his views—in milder terms, of course—in one of the early numbers of his gazette? 'l'olstoy scarcely had time to ask the question: at the beginning of December, he was informed that the tsar had refused permission to publish it, on the ground that there already was a periodical, The Army and Navy Gazette, specializing in military literature. It was plain to see that intellectual officers were not trusted by those on high.

Furious, Tolstoy wrote to Nckrasov on December 19, offering the texts he had originally intended for his gazette to The Contemporary. Nekrasov replied by return post: "Send your soldiers' tales to us. Why bury them in some old veteran's review?" This proposal both delighted and embarrassed Tolstoy, for he now felt obliged to write the stories, after being so vociferously unhappy when their publication was refused. But he was not in the mood for work. A short time before he and his battery had been sent to the rear—to Esky-Ord, near Simferopol. The year was ending quietly for him. Quartered in a comfortable villa, he was reading, "playing various pianos and hunting red deer and roe."²-¹ His comrades were pleasant for the most part, but he was afraid that because of his standoffish manners, "they like me less than before."²⁴ As for women: he was missing them keenly. He was seeing all the young ladies, of course, but these little provincial idyls never led to anything more substantial. "In these conditions, I am afraid I shall become a boor, incapable of living the family life I love so dearly!"²⁵ lie sighed.

In January 1855 he was transferred to the 3rd light battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, stationed on high ground on the banks of the Belbek, seven miles from Sevastopol. His spirits sank the moment he arrived. Into what hole had he fallen? And among what animals? "Philimonov, the commander of my battery, is the dirtiest creature imaginable," he wrote in his diary on January 23, 1855. "Odakhovsky, the senior officcr, is a revolting yellow-livered Pole. The other officers have no personality and let themselves be influenced by their superiors."

In his Reminiscences,however, Odakhovsky was to write, "The slightest remonstrance by a superior automatically provoked an insolent retort or sarcastic comment from Tolstoy." Once again, Tolstoy's haughty demeanor set him apart from his fellows. The shortage of books, absence of people to talk to, the cold, discomfort, remoteness of danger—all of them helped to sour his temper. Now and then, to astound his companions, he would perform some physical feat such as lying on the ground on his back and holding a 175-pound man at arm's length. "He left behind him in the brigade the memory of a good horseman, a high liver and a Hercules,"²⁷ wrote the young officer Krylov. As usual, his favorite pastime was cards. It so happened that the fifteen hundred rubles intended to finance The Military Gazette had just arrived. As the publication had been forbidden, the money was going begging. Tolstoy played stos non-stop for two days and two nights. At dawn on the third day lie had lost his last kopeck: "The result is plain," he wrote in his diary 011 January 28, "I've lost the house at Yasnaya Polyana for good. ... I am so sick of myself that I would like to forget I even exist." And by way of penitence he wrote to Nicholas, who was, of all his brothers, the one able to judge him most harshly: "I have lost all the money—fifteen hundred rubles—that was sent to me. I beg you not to blame me or reproach me for it, either in your letters or behind my back: I am continually blaming myself for this enormous piece of stupidity, and shall not stop until I have made up for it by my work."

Three days later he yielded to temptation again. "February 2. Playing with Mcshcrskv on credit, I lost one hundred fiftv rubles I didn't have."

* * 0

"February 6. Played again and lost two hundred silver rubles. I cannot promise to stop playing. I hope to win it back and am in danger of going in over my head. . . . Will propose to play again with Odakhovsky tomorrow, for the last time." "February 12. Lost eighty more rubles. ... I want to try my luck at cards once more." "February 17. Lost another twenty rubles. I shall not play again."

After adding up his losses and throwing in a little nest-egg for good measure, Tolstoy sent another appeal for help to Valerian:

"As you must know from my letter to Nicholas, I have lost the fifteen hundred rubles you sent 111c. Worse yet, I have lost another 575 rubles on credit. I must have the money right away. Be kind enough to sell enough wheat to make up the amount I am lacking and send the money to 111c at Sevastopol. ... I am ashamed and it hurts me to write to you. I ask you not to show this letter to everyone. I have stopped playing."²* To give himself the illusion that he was serving his country even though he was far from the fighting, he began to write a Plan for the Reform of the Army. The moment was well-chosen, for Russia had just learned, to its secret relief, of the death of Nicholas I, on February 18, 1855. With the disappearance of this violent and narrow-minded potentate, the causc of so many police-state exactions, unjust exiles and unsuccessful wars, all who aspired to a little more freedom in the empire began to raise their heads. Ilis successor, Alexander II, was said to favor more humane policies and, 011 the strength of this rumor, 'l'olstoy opened his study with a courageous declaration of principle:

"My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country's honor. . . . We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowcd by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland—words that have been so much misused!—nor valor, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, 011 one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption." He went on to denounce the corporal punishment inflicted upon the soldiers, calling attention to "the large number of Russian officers killed by Russian bullets, or slightly wounded and abandoned to the enemy," and complaining that the generals leading the army had been chosen "not because they had any ability, but because the tsar liked them." It remained to expound the remedies. But it is easier to destroy than to construct. After exhausting his bile in his critique, the author grew bored and abandoned the positive part of his treatise. After all, nobody would listen to him anyway.

Still, the desire to repair, to improve things, would not leave him. Despite his gambling losses, his "fits of lust" and his "criminal sloth," lie felt the soul of an innovator stirring in his breast. Having failed to reform the army, he turned to religion. One evening, between two hands of whist and stos, lie had an illumination that left him breathless, flooded with ineffable happiness. On March 4 he wrote in his diary that he had just had a "grandiose, stupendous" idea. "I feel capable of devoting my life to it. It is the founding of a new religion, suited to the present state of mankind: the religion of Christ, but divested of faith and mysteries, a practical religion, not promising eternal bliss but providing bliss here on earth. I realize that this idea can only become a reality after several generations have worked consciously toward it. One generation will pass on the idea to the next, and one day, through fanaticism or reason, it will prevail."

The whole of Tolstoy's future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral perfection. Unfortunately, on the next line of the same diary: "March 6. Odakhovsky won another two hundred rubles from me, and so my situation has become critical." The prophet awoke from his trance, cards in hand.

The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate. He had a fleeting desire to give Yasnaya Polyana to his brother-in-law outright, in order to free himself from domestic cares and liquidate his debts, and devote the rest of his life to literature—one more castle in the air, like so many others, which he promptly forgot the next day. However, in the state of perpetual mental upheaval in which he lived, one idea remained constant: write. This was the pickct he always came back to, after running about in every direction like a maddened goat at the end of its tether. "The military career is not for me," he wrote on March 11: "the sooner I leave it to devote myself wholly to literature, the better it will be."

Nekrasov was crying for Youth (sequel to Childhood and Boyhood) and the promised accounts of the siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy worked on both of these very dissimilar works at once. First he was the rich man's son, the spoiled student, happy and naive, facing the anguish of his first examinations, first loves and first metaphysical doubts, and then the anonymous soldier in the inferno of Sevastopol. He received all the encouragement he could wish from behind the lines. His sister wrote that Ivan Turgenev was full of admiration for him, Nekrasov filled every letter with high praise, and the Memoirs of a Billiard- Marker, which The Contemporary had finally brought out after a year of hesitation, was warmly received by all the critics.

"What gave me most pleasure," Tolstoy wrote on March 27, "was to read the critics' notices: they speak of the Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker in very flattering terms. 'iTiis sensation is both pleasant and useful, for by feeding my pride it drives me to action. . . . Alas; for the last five days I have not written a single word of Youth, although I did begin Sevastopol by Day and by Night." The more deeply he became involved in his work, the harder it was for him to bear the hardships of camp life. Obviously, he would be more comfortable writing in an office. Prince Gorchakov had replaced Admiral Prince Menshikov as commandcr of the army of the Danube, so he applied for a transfer back to the staff. Aunt Pelagya Yushkov was pressed into service, to speak to the general—who was a relative of hers—in support of his request. On March 30, refusal: "I did not get the transfer because, I am told, I am only a second lieutenant. Pity!"

His annoyance increased when, instead of appointing him aide-de- camp and settling him in some more comfortable quarters, his superiors ordered him and his battery to the 4th (or Flagstaff) Bastion, south of Sevastopol, in the most dangerous sector of all. An artist needs distance; it is impossible to write about war in the thick of the battle! He who had been complaining of "inactivity" a few weeks before suddenly balked at the thought of being exposed to fire like some common little officer up from the ranks. He had caught a cold in the casemate, his nose was running, he was coughing, he had a fever, and it was all the fault of the command, who did not know how to use its resources. In a rage, he wrote on April 11, 1855, "Fourth Bastion ... It makes me furious, especially now that I am ill, to think that nobody has imagined I might be good for something other than cannon fodder of the mast useless kind."

When his cold abated his spirits rose, and in fact he displayed great courage. The 4th Bastion was closest to the French lines—a hundred yards or less. "Not a day went by," wrote Captain Reimers, who commanded the bastion, "without heavy bombardment—on holidays the French sent in the Turks to relieve them. There were periods during which we received an average of two thousand shells from a hundred cannon within a twenty-four-hour period." Tolstoy was on quartermaster duty four days out of eight. Off duty, he rested in Sevastopol in a humble but clean dwelling overlooking the boulevard where the military band was playing. When he was 011 duty he slept in an armored casemate. A fir post in the center held up the ceiling. Tarpaulins were hung halfway up to catch falling nibble. It was furnished with a bed, a table littered with papers, a clock and an icon with its vigil light. Inside this clammy den, the thunder of the cannonade was incessant. A flickering glare came through the narrow window. The ground shook, the walls cracked, the bitter, peppery smell of powder hung in the air.

At first he was terrified, then he mastered his quaking limbs and, from extreme fright, passed to extreme bravery; he did not know that the sccret of his genius lay in just this rare capacity to shift from cowardice to heroism, or that it was his very flaws and inconsistencies that would later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters in turn with equal sincerity, or that his diversity as a man would be the foundation for his universality as a writer.

Twenty-four hours after grumbling at being treated as "cannon fodder," he wrote in his diary, "My little soldiers are very nice, I feel quite gay with them." (April 12.) And then: "The continual allure of danger, and the interest with which I observe the soldiers around me, and the sailors, and the war itself, are so rewarding that I would be sorry to leave this place, especially as I should be glad to see the attack, if there is one." (April 13.) The firing grew more intense; a mine exploded, hurling chunks of stone and human debris into the air; deafened and tormented by the cries of the wounded, Tolstoy prayed to God: "Lord, I thank you for your unwavering protection. How worthless I should be if you abandoned me. . . . Help me, not to gratify my own futile ambition, but to attain the great eternal aim of life, which I do not know but am aware of."

In this atmosphere of fever, upheaval and death, writing was a tall order. But Tolstoy had never felt so inspired. He wrote down his impressions on the wing and drafted his accounts for The Contemporary inside the lxastion. He must have been the first real "war correspondent." He did not disown Stendhal's influence: "I am in his debt more than any other's," he told Paul Bovcr in 1901. "I owe my knowledge of war to him. Reread his account of the battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma. Who, until then, had described war in such terms, that is, the way it really is?" But in The Charterhouse of Parma the battle of Waterloo is seen through the eyes of Fabrizio alone, whereas in the Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy enlarged upon the method and entered into the minds of all his protagonists in turn, giving their dissimilar versions of the same engagement. There was no artistic premeditation in this concept of "coverage," moreover; as always, the author was obeying his instinct, saying what he had seen and not caring whether he pleased or offended. He showed the reeking operating-room, the wounded soldiers slavering with pain, the surgeon's assistant tossing an amputated leg into the corncr, the death of a mud- covered sailor with clenched jaws ("Farewell, brothers!"), the military bands playing in town for the ladies who were languishing for a flirtation and the officers back from the front, the bastion under enemy fire, the shell—approaching like a fiery pinpoint, growing larger, whistling over their heads—the mountains of corpscs, the smoke, ruins, wasted blood, the grandeur and misery of the anonymous soldier. "Hundreds of bodies who, two hours before, were bursting with hopes and desires, great and small, now lay with fresh bloodstains on their rigid limbs in the dew-eovercd flowering valley dividing the bastion from the trenches and on the smooth slabs of the mortuary chapel at Sevastopol. Hundreds more, with curses and prayers on their cracking lips, crawled, writhed and groaned among the corpses in the flowering fields, or on stretchers, camp cots and the blood-soaked boards of the ambulance station; but, as on the previous days, the heat-lightning flickered about

Mount Zapun; the trembling stars dimmed; a whitish mist rose on the dark, tossing sea; the pink dawn lit up the east; long purple clouds wafted away to the horizon, which turned a luminous blue again; and, as on the previous days, the powerful, glowing star emerged, promising joy, love and happiness to all the awakening world."

One man has a sinister foreboding: "I shall surely be killed today, especially since it wasn't my turn to go and I volunteered"; another heaves a cowardly groan of relief when his replacement arrives; a third thinks greedily, as lie sees a comrade in danger of death and remembers his ten-ruble debt to him, that it may cancel itself in a moment. Tolstoy himself, who had more than one creditor in the batter)^-, might have experienced the same sensation in similar circumstances. At the pitch of nervous tension a man is brought to by the continual threat of annihilation, his mind is no longer the master of the images that visit it. At the end of Sevastopol in May, Tolstoy could proudly declare, "The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, the hero I have tried to reproduce in all his beauty, who always has been, is and always will be admirable, is the truth."

In the night of May 10-11 Tolstoy witnessed a scries of attacks and counterattacks under heavy fire. Over a thousand dead and wounded on the Russian side, and as many among the French. The following night, second attack: in all, five hundred men out of commission. During the day of the twelfth, hostilities were suspended to pick up the dead. "The morale is falling lower every day," Tolstoy wrote, "and there is more than one sign that people arc beginning to feel the possibility of Sevastopol being taken."²⁸ In the meantime he had received Aunt Pelagya Yushkov's letter of recommendation and forwarded it to the general. But another two weeks and more went by without news of his transfer. He imagined himself staying in the 4th Bastion until the end of the war. "No doubt it is better sol" he wrote in melancholy.⁸⁰ On May 15 he learned that he had been transferred and put in command of a two- cannon mountain battery 011 the Belbek River, fourteen miles behind Sevastopol. According to a legend as attractive as it is unlikely, the new tsar, Alexander II, was so deeply moved by Sevastopol in December, of which he read the galleys, that he gave orders to remove its author from danger. Unfortunately, it is difficult to believe that between April 30, when the manuscript was sent to Nckrasov, and May 15, when Tolstoy's transfer came through, the text could have rcachcd St. Petersburg and been read, set up and submitted to the sovereign, and that his decision could have traveled from St. Petersburg back to the Crimea. Hie truth was that Aunt Pclagya's letter, added to Tolstoy's application, had persuaded Prince Gorchakov to humor his young relative, whose literary renown was growing.

In his new quarters, far from the clamor of battle, Tolstoy made an earnest attempt, at first, to carry out his duties. He officiated in person at drill, supervised his unit's supplies and was outraged by the fraud he saw on every side. Most detachmcnt leaders spent the mess money exactly as they pleased, appropriated the remainder for themselves and falsified their accounts. When, out of honesty, Tolstoy tried to show a credit balance in his books, he compromised all his fellow officers and earned a reprimand from General Krizhanovsky, commander of artillery: "What on earth have you done, Count?" said the general. "The State has organized things this way in your own interest. You have to have something to fall back on in case the battery accounts show a deficit! That is why every battery commander must have some funds on hand. You are making trouble for everyone."

"I do not see why I must keep those funds with me," Tolstoy replied. "The money belongs to the State, not to me."³¹

In the end, however, he abandoned this uncompromising position. "It is easy to steal—so easy that it is impossible to avoid it!" he fumed.⁸² He had sworn to be good to his "dear little soldiers," but sometimes their stupidity drove him to distraction. Then he became Count Leo Tolstoy, who saw red and hit hard: "Beat the men I was drilling. It's amazing how revolting and wretched I can be, how I can disgust myself!" And later, "Laziness, lack of character, vanity . . . ; bragged to my officers . . . ; showed off to the battery leaders ... It is really absurd that, after beginning to draw up rules at fifteen, I should still be doing so at thirty,t without having adopted or applied a single one." The most serious fault he had to hold against himself was still his love of gambling. In the tedium of his life in camp he became obsessed by the cards once again: to be sure of winning, he spent whole days practicing, playing against himself, noting infallible combinations for stos: "(1) The ante will be one-sixteenth of the amount to be lost; (2) Raise or lower the ante on the thirteenth card; erase score of first series up to chosen card . . . etc."

Unfortunately, every win on paper corresponded to a loss in the field. And the old familiar words erupted between the columns of figures in the diary: "Laziness . . . Stupidity . . . Despair . . . Lust . . ."

However, he kept on writing. The insults he fired at himself were answered by the compliments his readers addressed to him. The censor had passed Sevastopol in December without any major cuts and, as a

t In fact, he was only twenty-seven and a half at the time.

result, the entire literate public had been placcd in contact with the awful reality of war for the first time in Russian history. "All of us who love Russian literature," Panayev wrote to Tolstoy, "are praying God to spare you!"⁸³ "Tolstoy's article on Sevastopol is a wonder!" Turgenev wrote to Panayev. "I cried when I read it, I shouted 'hurrah!' "³* And Pisemsky, the author, growled, "This little officer will outstrip us all!" From the critics, response was the same as from the writers. The success of Childhood and Boyhood was surpassed. "Nowhere docs the author express his admiration, and yet we arc compelled to admire; there is not one exclamation point in all his descriptions, and we are astonished at every turn" (Fatherland Notes). "Sevastopol is the work of a master, rigorously pondered, rigorously executed, with vigor and concision . . ." (The Muscovite).

The emperor, profoundly impressed, ordered the account to be translated into French and published in the newspaper Le Nord,\ and the young empress wept over this frank narrative of her people's tribulations. Her tears did much to enhance the fame of the person who was still signing himself L.N.T. On June 30, 1855 he wrote in his diary, "It seems I really am beginning to be known in Petersburg!"

The second installment, Swastopol in May, awoke the censor's suspicions. After an initial pruning, when the text had already been set up, the chairman of the Censor Committee demanded to see it himself. Shocked at the author's audacity, he deleted all the passages that seemed "anti-patriotic" to him, and the editors of The Contemporary? printed the mutilated version. Nekrasov wrote to the author, storming against the crimes of the ccnsor, but adding, "Your work will not be lost, of course. . . . The truth, in the form in which you are introducing it into our literature, is something totally new. I know no author today who can compel the reader to love and sympathize as deeply with him as you can. . . . Your debut is so auspicious that even the most conservative souls are forced to hold out very high hopes."³⁶ And Tolstoy commented in his diary, "It seems the blues* have grown suspicious of me on account of my articles. I only wish Russia always had writers as moral as I; nothing in the world could force me to turn meek and mild, or write for the mere pleasure of it, without any idea or purpose." In the meantime he had been awarded the St. Anne Cross, fourth degree, for courage under fire and, together with a few of his comrades, had written a satiric ditty called the "Song of Sevastopol":

t French-language Russian newspaper printed in Brussels.

• The military police.

The toppest brass Sat down to meet And pondered long; Topographers Lined paper black; But all forgot The deep ravine They had to cross!

The song was inspired by the disastrous engagement of August 4, 1855!—the battle of Chernaya—in which the Russians lost eight thousand men, three generals and sixty-nine officers. Tolstoy, who had not been directly involved in the conflict, wrote to Aunt Toinette that day: "I am safe and sane; but my morale has never been lower."³®

A few days later, on August 27,$ a heavy bombardment began in preparation for the French assault on Malakov Hill. Tolstoy was in Sevastopol when the Zouaves and MacMahon's voltigeurs charged. The sun was blinding. A cool breeze shook the leaves in the trees along the boulevard and swept up the dust of the ruined houses. Necklaces in puffs of white smoke appeared all along the line of fortifications. The explosions shook the ground with dull violence. Then the cannon-fire subsided, and the dry rattle of rifle-fire was heard. Soldiers came pouring back into the streets helter-skelter. A white-faced officer cried out, "The attack!" And suddenly Tolstoy saw a red, white and blue flag floating over Malakov. "It made me cry to see the town in flames and the French flags over our bastions," he wrote to Aunt Toinette. "These last few days I have become increasingly obsessed by my desire to leave the army."³⁷

In the night of August 27-28, the Russian troops began evacuating the southern part of town. The glow of fires rose above the bastions. An occasional explosion tore open the sky and illuminated swarms of flying stones. The makeshift bridge across which the soldiers were filing swayed and sagged at breaking point. At two in the afternoon of August 28, Fort Paul was blown up, with five hundred seriously injured men inside. The French, stopped on the summits, did not press their advantage. Tossed about in the flood of retreating regiments, the soldiers, their faces exhausted and clothes tattered, were observed by Tolstoy and his throat tightened with compassion. "When they stepped off the other end of the bridge," he wrote, "all the soldiers took off their caps and crossed themselves. But underneath this feeling there was an-

t August 16, by the Gregorian calendar.

t September 8, by the Gregorian calendar.

other—a deep aching, compounded of remorse, shame and anger. Almost everyone, looking back from the north at Sevastopol abandoned, heaved a sigh of unspeakable bitterness and muttered threats at the enemy."³*

After the fall of the city, Tolstoy was instructed by General Kryzhan- ovsky to write an account of the final engagements based on the reports of the bastion commanders. For an author whose aim was to be honest at all times, such a task, performed on command in the style of an official dispatch, was a refined form of torture. lie later said, "It was a peerless example of the naive and inevitable military duplicity employed in composing descriptions of this type."³⁰

With the defenses of Sevastopol overrun, Tolstoy's batten' moved to Krcmenchug (September 19), then to Foti-Sala (September 26), where the Russians exchanged a few shots with the French vanguard, and then withdrew to the north. "Did not wash or undress and behaved like an ass," he wrote on October 1. In the ensuing days, his desire to leave the army sharpened. "My career is Literature! Write! Write! Beginning tomorrow I shall work at it all my life, or abandon everything, rules, religion, proprieties and all!" (October 10.) And later, "Insurmountable laziness. It is absolutely essential that 1 get out of this rut of army life, which is bad for me." (October 27.)

A letter from Ivan Turgenev—the first—gave a powerful boost to his inclination. One of Tolstoy's stories—A Wood-Felling—which had been published in The Contemporary (still under the initials L.N.T.), was dedicated to Turgenev.

"Nothing in my literary carccr has ever flattered me as much," Turgenev wrote. "But I dislike to think of you where you are now. Although in a way I am glad you are having these new impressions and experiences, there is a limit to everything; we must not tempt fate, which is only too happy to thwart us at every turn. It would be wonderful if you could get yourself out of the Crimea. You have shown sufficient proof of your bravery, but the military life is not for you. . . . Your weapon is the pen, not the sword. . . ." Inviting his young colleague to call on him when he was on furlough, he added, "It seems to me that we should get along well together, we could talk frankly, and our acquaintance would be profitable to both of us."

At last, early in November, Tolstoy, who had requested a mission, was detached from his battery and sent to St. Petersburg as a courier. On the eve of his departure he lost another 2800 rubles at cards.*

• About $7qco.

3. Introduction to Civilian Life

Tolstoy reached St. Petersburg on the morning of November 19, 1855. He left his bags at the hotel, changed his shirt, put on a dress uniform in place of his traveling uniform and rushed off to see Turgenev, who lived on Fontanka Quay near the Anichkov Bridge. All he knew of the man he was about to meet, ten years his senior, was that he was a great nobleman and a great writer. A Sportsman's Sketches had conquered the intellectual elite and given serf-owners a bad conscience. After rereading the book, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "It is difficult to write, after him."¹

In 1850, Ivan Scrgcycvich Turgenev—who lived most of his life abroad in the wake of Pauline Viardot, the singer," with whom he was in love—had returned to Russia to be with his mother at her death and collcct his share of the inheritance. Two years later Nicholas I condemned him to live on his estate (after a month in prison) on account of his obituary article 011 Gogol, in which the censor had detected liberal tendencies. He had recently been permitted to live in St. Petersburg but could not leave the country, and was suffering from this long separation from the object of his passion in France. Worse yet, his illegitimate child "Paulinctte" (alias Pelagya), whom he had thirteen years before by a seamstress-serf of his mother's, had been adopted by the Viardots and was living with them, in Paris and on their country- estate of Courtavenel, at Rozay-en-Brie.

A friend of George Sand, MЈrim6e, Musset, Chopin and Gounod, Ivan Turgenev had a mind which exuded the same European clcgance as his person. When Tolstoy crossed the threshold of his library, he saw- before him a giant, with a massive, mild and gentle face, candid blue

• Pauline Viardot's husband, who was twenty one years older than she, was director of the Italian Opera in Paris.

eyes, neat side-whiskers, large soft hands and a certain lassitude in the droop of the shoulders. A Hercules with doe's eyes. The two men embraced enthusiastically. They were equally eager to bccomc friends, and the honeymoon began immediately. Turgenev insisted that his young colleague come to stay with him, and Tolstoy accepted with alacrity. A bed was assigned to him. That evening, introduction to Nekrasov. They dined, played chess, talked literature. After his rough life in the army camp, these intellectual conversations went to Tolstoy's head like wine after a long fast. He was submerged by the flood of compliments, and realized that he was an object of exceptional interest to his fellow- writers. And, feeling loved and admired, he wanted to admire and love in return. "Turgenev is a wonderful man . . ." "Nekrasov is interesting, he has many good qualities . . . he wrote.

His circle of acquaintances widened in the ensuing days. Everyone who worked 011 The Contemporary wanted to meet the glorious young writer and hero of Sevastopol. He met Druzhnin, Tyutchev, Goncharov, Maykov, Ostrovsky, Grigorovich, Sologub, Pisemsky, Korch, Dudysh- kin, Panayev, Polonsky, Ogaryov, Zhemchuzhnikov, Annenkov, etc.f The civilians were instantly charmed by the soldier. His name cropped up often in their correspondence and private diaries. "You cannot imagine what a delightful and exceptional man [Tolstoy] is, even though I have baptized him the Troglodyte because of his barbaric ardor and bull-headedness," Turgenev wrote to Annenkov. "My affection for him is curious, one might almost say paternal."³ "Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy has arrived," Nekrasov wrote to Botkin. "What a delightful person, what intelligence! A likable, energetic, unselfish young man, a real falcon! Perhaps an eagle! I liked him better than his writing, and God knows that's good enough! He is not handsome, but he has an extremely attractive face, at once forceful and gentle. His look is a carcss. I liked him very much."⁴ "He's a first-class chap," wrote Druzhnin to Liventsev, "and a true Russian officer, full of wonderful tales; but he hates empty words and his attitude toward events is sound, if not rose-colored."'"' And he wrote in his own diary, "Tolstoy behaved like a troglodyte and a bashi-bazouk. He did not know, for example, what the Censor Committee was and what ministry it was attached to. Tie then informed us that he did not regard himself as a man of letters . . ."

His colleagues found the neophyte's candor utterly enchanting. I low was it possible to be so gifted and so little a man of letters? The first thing they had to do was to acquaint him with the ideological quarrel

f All writers, poets, journalists. The biographical notes at the end of this book give the essential facts about them and some of the other people who played a part in Tolstoy's life.

that was tearing the capital's elite asunder. In one C3mp were the "Westerners," who considered Russia a backward country in comparison with the West and thought she should seek regeneration by following the example of Europe. In the other were the Slavophils, who denied all alleged intellectual superiority of Europe and held that the Russians were too unique and exceptional a people to find their salvation from any foreign sourcc. The former drifted readily from a passion for European painting into an appreciation of the merits of democracy, and the latter from a reverence for the old Slavic traditions into adoration of the tsar, "blessed of God." Each side had its militants; wild-eyed informants told Tolstoy all their names. Between the two camps hung the bulk of the undecided moderates—liberal Slavophils or monarchist Westerners. On The Contemporary, staunch Westerners formed the majority. A few contributors, however, were already eying other less distinguished but more literary reviews. Rival editors were outbidding each other for the best writers. This whole little menagerie was seething with emulation, vanity and jealousy. In the middle of the aviary, with the preening and pecking going on all around him, stood Tolstoy, solidly planted on his two legs; he felt that he belonged to a different species. After the horrors of war, he wanted only one thing: a good time. Juggling ideas was all very well for the impotent or the satiated; what he needed was reality, succulent and immediate. His appetite for pleasure shockcd Turgcncv, who was highly refined and inclined to resignation in matters of the heart. Once or twicc he accompanied his guest on his revels and returned home aghast. He could not understand how the author of Sevastopol could sink so low, drinking himself into a stupor, singing with the gypsies, frequenting brothels. To be sure, Tolstoy subsequently repented of his nights on the town, but the reproofs he heaped upon his own head always covered a disgusted and angry desire to begin again. "Went to Pavlovsk," he wrote in his diary4 "Disgusting. Girls, silly music, girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls! Everybody tries to look as though he is having a good time and likes the girls, but in vain." And, proud of his uniform, it annoyed him to see "drunken, nasty" civilians trying to carry on like "true officers." For, although he claimed to loathe the military profession, he felt nothing but contcmpt for the townsmen in their dress suits who had never spent a night on sentry duty or seen a comrade shot down at their side. An inferior race, with stuffed paunches and sensitive bchinds, pen pushers, intriguers, clods. Those without money were as contemptible

t Pavlovsk, a pleasure spot seventeen miles outside St. Petersburg. The entry in the diary is dated May 14, 1856.

as those who had "what it takes." Turgenev belonged to the latter category. After being charmed by him, Tolstoy turned on him and criticized him with vindictive severity. What futility in this overripe man. His handsome clothes, his perfume, his honeyed ways with women, his anxiousncss to please, his faith in the future of science, his refined dinners. lie had paid a thousand rubles for his serf cook and was eternally bragging about his talents. To show that he was different from all these high-minded, weak-muscled gentlemen, Tolstoy brushed his hair back from his forehead and wore his mustache in a droop, which, he fancied, gave his mouth a determined and forbidding expression. And thus lie appears, in a photograph taken 011 February 15, 1856, standing stiffly, his arms folded across his chest, in a group of amiable colleagues striking languid poses: Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Druzhnin, Grigorovich and Goncharov.

One morning the young poet Fet, a fervent admirer of Ivan Turgenev, camc to call on him and was surprised to sec a sword decorated with the ribbon of the Order of St. Anne hanging in the hall.

"Whose sword is that?" he asked Zakhar, the servant.

The latter motioned the young man to lower his voice, pointed to a door down the hallway on the left and whispered:

"It belongs to Count Tolstoy. He is staying with us."

Fet went into the study, where Turgenev was drinking tea "Petersburg-fashion." I lis movements were relaxed, his features calm and his expression affable, but he kept glancing toward the door. "During the hour I spent with him," wrote Fet, "we talked in undertones in order not to awake the count, who was sleeping in the next room. 'It is like this all the time,' said Turgenev with a smile. 'He came here straight from his battery at Sevastopol, moved in with me and plunged into a headlong spree. Orgies, gypsies, cards all night long, and then he sleeps like a dead man until two in the afternoon. At first, I tried to restrain him, but now I've given up.'"

As Turgenev was rather sweet on Marya Tolstoy, whom he had met the year before in the country, he hid his annoyance at his guest's crude behavior for some time. But the more lie restrained himself, the more Tolstoy delighted in provoking him. Their quarrels, amusing at first, rapidly turned venomous. The moment other people were present, they could not abide each other, and Tolstoy's need to contradict everyone else was becoming sccond nature to him. It was as though, by systematic opposition, he might prove his own existence to himself. He seemed to say, "I think—the opposite of everyone else—therefore I ain!" On more than one occasion Fet, in consternation, witnessed grotesque sccncs between the two men. Stung by Tolstoy's remark on the lack of convictions among writers, Turgenev began sputtering with rage and gesticulating wildly, while Tolstoy, deadly calm, pinned him with the fire of his gray eyes and dryly proceeded:

"I refuse to believe that your words express a true conviction. Here I stand, with a dagger in my hand or a sword, and I say, 'So long as I live no one shall enter this room!' That is a conviction. But you all try to hide your real thoughts from each other, and you call that a conviction!"

"Then why do you come here among us?" cried Turgenev in a voice that squeaked with rage. "This is not the place for you! Go to Princess "

"I don't need to ask you where to go!" retorted Tolstoy. "And it isn't my presence here or anywhere else that is going to change your empty chattcr into real convictions."⁰

Grigorovich, another contributor to The Contemporary, gives an account of a scenc in Nckrasov's apartment: "Turgenev shrieks and clutches at his throat and whispers with his dying-gazelle eyes, 'I can't take any morel I've got bronchitis!' and begins striding up and down all three rooms. 'Bronchitis!' growls Tolstoy. 'Bronchitis is an imaginary disease! Bronchitis is a metal!' Nekrasov, the master of the house, stands there with his heart in his throat. He is just as frightened of losing Turgenev as he is of losing Tolstoy, because both are a precious boon to The Contemporary, and he tries to arbitrate. We are all at our wit's end and don't know what to say. Tolstoy is lying full-length on the sofa in the middle room, sulking. Turgenev, the tails of his short coat spread wide, keeps marching back and forth with his hands in his pockets. Trying to ward off catastrophe, I come up to the sofa and say, Tolstoy, dear fellow, don't work yourself up so. You know Turgenev loves and respects you!' 'I shall not permit him/ says Tolstoy with flaring nostrils, 'to go on eternally doing every thing he can to provoke me. Look at him now, pacing up and down on purpose, wiggling his democratic thighs in front of mc!' "⁷

Knowing that Turgenev admired George Sand, Tolstoy once declared, during a dinner at Nckrasov's, that if her heroines had actually existed it would have been necessary, to set an example, "to lash them to the hangman's cart and drag them through the streets of St. Petersburg." Turgenev began to protest and received a volley of such scathing sarcasm that he had not recovered three days later. "I nearly quarreled with Tolstoy," he wrote to his friend Botkin. "A lack of education will always show in some form or other. ... At a dinner at Nckrasov's he said such nasty and insulting things about G. Sand that I cannot repeat them. The argument grew very heated. In a word, he disgusted us all and showed himself in his worst light."⁸ Nor was George Sand the young officer's only pet aversion. lie was not above attacking Iler- zen, the exiled revolutionary, whose review, The Bell, was smuggled over the frontier. And Shakespeare and Homer, whom lie called "phrase-makers." But storm and sneer as he might, his friends on The Contemporary forgave all. And their very indulgence exasperated him.

Disenchanted with the Westerners, he dccided to join the Slavophils: he went to see Milyutin and Kavelin, became friendly with Aksakov, Gorbunov and Kireycvsky, listened to them professing their faith in the superiority of the good old Russian traditions over the veneer of European culture, and quickly perceived that they were no better than their opponents. "Their views are too narrow and unrealistic," he wrote. "By dint of arguing and preaching their aims have become considerably distorted, as always happens in a group of intellectuals." He also disliked them for their attachment to the Orthodox religion, which he condemned for its "monstrous perversion of the truth and historical inconsistency." And lastly, he could not respect them because they were protected by the government, whilst the censor "smothered" the Westerners.⁹ Decidedly, he could not make up his mind which side to join. He agreed with nobody. Why was that? Very simple: both Westerners and Slavophils had one fault in common—they were bourgeois, the priests of a godless religion.

"These men, my literary brothers, saw life in the following way," lie wrote, years later, in Confession. "Life in general, they said, was moving forward; this progress was due chiefly to the thinkers and, foremost among them, the artists and poets, in other words, to us. Our vocation is to edify mankind. This principle granted, these men should then have asked themselves one fundamental question: what are we, and what arc we to teach? Instead of which, their method was to avoid the issue by- affirming that one need not know anything in order to teach, since artists and poets teach unconsciously."