Tolstoy

The relatively comfortable circumstances of these "professional" writers, their cosmopolitan culture, their love of the pleasures of the table and their refined manners offended him as an insult to the majesty of the Idea. Forgetting that he himself was a hard drinker and inmate of certain houses of ill repute, he accused them of being "amoral men, most of them wicked, with petty natures." He who had never sacrificed a hair to defend a conviction attacked Turgenev, who had braved and borne exile for his obituary on Gogol. Applauded from his first word by every writer of his time, he denounced their "literary conniving."¹⁰ For him, the only things worthy of respect in Russia were the aristocracy and the people; he was a member of the former, and was attracted to the latter. Through the veins of a noble coursed the entire history of the country, and through those of a muzhik, all the wisdom of the earth. Between these two true beings, a third had insinuated itself, a new and entirely artificial, useless and untrustworthy creature: the intellectual. The intellectual was not nourished on experience but on books. He claimed the right to instruct his fellows and he had never fought or plowed a field. Most of the time, his pen produced nothing but falsehood.

"Lies!" The word was recurring increasingly often in Tolstoy's conversation and in his diary. He soon moved out of Turgenev's apartment: his host's feminine sensitivity, elegant dress, love of order and gourmet's pretensions gave Tolstoy an imperious desire to live in a shambles and feast on sour cabbage. But after moving into a dark ground-floor apartment in Officer's Street, he continued to harry his friend every time they met. Suddenly, in the midst of the most trivial conversation, Turgcnev would feci himself transfixed by a gaze as keen as a scalpel, the look of a man determined that nobody was going to put anything over on him, and knew that Tolstoy was on the warpath again. A word, the flicker of an eyelid or quiver of a nostril had convinccd him that his partner was not being sincere. "Ivan Sergeyevich Turgencv told me," wrote Garshin, "that he had never experienced anything so disagreeable as that piercing look which, coupled with two or three venomous remarks, was enough to drive a man mad unless he had considerable self- control." After scenes of this type, Turgcnev, shattered and tearful, would complain to his friends. "There is not one natural word or gesture in him," he moaned faintly. "He is forever posing, and I cannot understand this ridiculous affection for a wretched title of nobility in a man as intelligent as he is. . . . You can boil a Russian officer in laundry soap for three days without dissolving that way they have of coming all lordling and cadet over you; no matter what varnish of education you try to paint onto an individual like that, the brute in him always shows through. . . . And to think that all that vulgarity is aimed solely at gaining attention!"¹¹

One clay he was talking to Panayev in this vein and the latter remarked, "You know, Turgenev, to listen to you ranting away like this, I would think you were jealous of him if I didn't know you so well."

"Why should I be jealous of him? Why? Give me one reason!" cricd Turgcnev.

And he suddenly burst out laughing.

And Tolstoy, while furiously condemning the faults of this literary pontiff, could not bear to be out of his sight. If Turgenev went home in a huff, his young collcaguc would racc after him, dogging his heels like a "woman in love."¹² The reconciliation was as necessary as the quarrel. Without a victim, what executioner would not die of boredom? The ups and downs of this friendship are recorded with meticulous detail in his diary. "February 7, 1856. Quarreled with Turgenev." "February 13. Dinner at Turgenev's; we made up." "March 12. Quarreled with Turgenev, this time for good, I think." "April 20. Went to see Turgenev and had a most amusing talk with him." "April 25. Pleasant visit to Turgenev. Must book him tomorrow for dinner." "May 5. Insulted everyone; Turgenev went home. ... I am depressed." And when Turgenev, at the end of his rope, retreated to his country home at Spasskoyc, the repentant troglodyte wrote to Aunt Toinette, "Now he is gone, and 1 feel that I was beginning to care for him a great deal, even though we did nothing but argue. Without him, I am perishing of boredom."¹³

He did not like St. Petersburg, he did not feci at ease among his fellow writers, whatever their persuasion, and he was going out more from habit than desire. His evcr-indulgcnt superiors had transferred him to the School of Pyrotechnics, where he did not even need to put in an appearance. All that remained of his military' carccr was his uniform. He devoted every minute of his free time to literature. On January 12, 1856 the third Sevastopol sketch (Sevastopol in August) was published in The Contemporary. For the first time, the initials L.N.T. were replaced by the author's name in full, "Count Leo Tolstoy." An editor's note stated that Childhood, Boyhood, Sevastopol in December and other stories previously printed under the initials LJsf.T. were by the same author. While working on Youth, he dashed off a few shorter tales: Two Hussars, The Snow Storm, A Landlord's Morning. And just to prove to himself that he belonged to no school or part)', he gave some of his manuscripts to the Westerners at The Contemporary and some to Katkov's Russian Herald, a reactionary Slavophil periodical. Since he was not dependent on his writing for a livelihood, he did not have to cater to public, critics or colleagues; he could do as he pleased, break down doors, bang his fist 011 the table, speak out loud and true. Diplomacy was not his cup of tea, and flattery still less. They would have to take him as he was. And, true enough, the very people who were exasperated by his conduct were subjugated by his art. There was never a false note in the praise that hailed each new work. He despaired of finding an enemy worthy of him.

At the beginning of January 1856 he was callcd to Orel, where his brother Dmitry, who had been suffering from tuberculosis for some time, lay dying. Leo Tolstoy had not seen him for two years. In the sordid bedroom he found, in place of the jolly Mitenka of his childhood, a white, bloodless being, so gaunt that he was frightened by him. "I lis enormous wrist was as though soldered to the bones of his forearm. His face had been devoured by his eyes; they were as beautiful, as serious as ever, but now their expression was inquisitorial. He coughed and spat incessantly, and he did not want to die, did not want to believe he was about to die."¹⁴ At his bedside were his sister Marya, brother-in- law Valerian, Aunt Toinette and a girl with a pockmarked face and red eyes, a kerchief tied around her head. This was Masha, a prostitute, whom Dmitry had bought from a brothel a few years before—the only woman he had ever known.

In this brother, ravaged by suffering and debauchery, Tolstoy saw a distorted reflection of himself. There seemed to be a propensity in the Tolstoy blood for swinging from good to evil, humility to pride, lechery to virtue, with unusual facility; they were all more or less creatures of extremes, lost in a world of happy-medium. Only, in Leo reason moderated instinct, whereas Dmitry followed his impulses to the end, however absurd their consequences. There was something magnificent in this blind impulsion, something noble in this defeat. Of old, his brothers had laughed at him and callcd him "Noah" because of his exaggerated piety. For years, in Kazan, he had continued his studies, caring for the sick, visiting the prisons and fasting to the point of inanition. Shabbily dressed, unwashed, stooped-shouldered and diffident, his only pleasure was abstinence. After receiving his law degree, he had gone to St. Petersburg and appeared, looking like a tramp, before Tanayev, secretary of state of the Second Division, requesting employment: "Anything at all, so long as I can be useful." Such an aspiration coming from a person of such unlikely appearance could only arouse the official's misgivings. Disappointed with the results of this overture, Dmitry had gone back to Sherbachevka and tried simultaneously to make a living hrom his estate and treat his serfs decently. His friends were pilgrims and monks and an ugly old hermit, short, bandy-legged and dark, who spoke in tones of deepest mystery and was known as Father Luke. No alcohol, no tobacco, total chastity*. One day, however, the youngest Islenyev son had prevailed upon the ascetic to accompany him to Moscow. At twenty-six, the life of sin came to Dmitry as a revelation. He began to drink, smoke, play cards and frequent brothels. But, pure even in his depravity, he resolved to keep the prostitute who had initiated him into the pleasures of the flesh. Scandal and consternation in the family! Brothers, sister, aunts, all opposed him. On his way back from the Caucasus, Leo himself had gone to Sherbachevka and tried to persuade Dmitry to get rid of the girl; for, despite his shining theories of redemption through love, the future author of Resurrection really could not condonc such a misalliance. After I-co's lecture, Dmitry sent Masha away; but his conscience compelled him to fetch her back again before long. Perhaps he was afraid to die alone; the couple roamed from place to place until the day, at Orel, when Dmitry could no longer get up. Masha was there beside him, plumping his pillows, brewing tisanes, holding the basin. He asked to see a miraculous icon, and she brought it. Hands clasped, he prayed to the holy image. Tolstoy readily persuaded himself that his brother was in good hands and he could depart with a clear conscience. "I was particularly loathsome at that time," he later wrote. "I had come from St. Petersburg, where I was very active in society, and I was bursting with conceit! I felt sorry for Mitya [Dmitry], but not very. I simply put in an appearance at Orel and left immediately."¹⁵ Three weeks later he was informed that his brother was dead; he was expecting it. One dry note in his diary: "February 2, my brother is dead." And, in a letter written the same day to Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, these few words: "He died a good Christian. That is a great comfort to us all."

He did not bother to go to the funeral. As before, when his father and grandmother had died, his grief was mixed with a feeling of selfish annoyance. Dmitry's death created problems for him. That very evening he had been invited to a reception in the home of a relative of his, a lady of whom he was very fond. He wrote to excuse himself, saying there had been a death in the family. Then, unable to stand it, he dressed and went to her home. She was surprised to see him and asked why he had come. "What I wrote you this morning wasn't true," he said. "If I am here, that means there is no reason why I should not be here." A few days later he told his Aunt Alexandra Tolstoy" that he had also gone to the theater. "I trust you enjoyed yourself!" was her icy comment. "Not at all," he answered. "I came home in agony." "And so that is how you twist the truth, in spite of all your claims to sincerity!" she cricd. He looked at her hard and said, weighing every word, "I must test myself in everything, down to the last detail."¹⁶ Later, writing of Dmitry's sorry end, he said, "I honestly believe that what bothered me most about his death was that it prevented me from attending a performance at Court to which I had been invited."¹⁷ But no event in his life was lost to literature. The furnished room at Orel, its walls covered with evil-looking stains; Masha, the prostitute with the heart of gold; Dmitry, reduced to skin and bones, dying in a garret; the smell of medicine and sweat, the rattling, coughing, spitting, change of nightshirt, doctor's

• Alexandra Tolstoy's father was Count Andrey Andrcycvich Tolstoy, brother of Leo Tolstoy's paternal grandfather.

visit—he found a place for them all in his description of the death of Levin's brother in Anna Karenina.¹⁸

The Crimean War, from which Leo Tolstoy now felt so far removed, ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and Russia heaved a sigh of relief. On March 19, 1856 Alexander II published a manifesto promising the country that a great effort would be made to improve the legal rights of all his subjects. That day, a memorable occasion for the nation, was also noteworthy for Leo Tolstoy, but for a different reason. Having chanced to read an unflattering opinion of himself in a letter which Longinov, a contributor to The Contemporary, had written to Nckrasov, he issued a formal challenge to his detractor. "God knows what will come of it," he wrote two days later, on March 21, "but I shall be firm and bold. O11 the whole, this incident has had a beneficial effect on me. I have made up my mind to go back to the village, get married as soon as possible and not write under my own name any more." The last two of these three resolutions were promptly forgotten, and he meant to wait until after his duel before carrying out the first. But Longinov did not answer the challenge, friends interceded and Tolstoy subsided, with the thought that the puny pen pusher did not even deserve to be grazed by his bullet. A few days later he received a piece of news that was very flattering to his self-esteem and effaced the last traces of the bad feeling left by his abortive duel: on March 26, 1856 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, "for bravery and resolute conduct displayed on August 4 at the battle of the Chernaya." He immediately requested an eleven-month furlough, for "treatment" abroad. But he had nothing that needed treating and so, instead of going abroad, he packcd his bags for Yasnaya Polyana. The spring must be magnificent just now! And, on the way, he could make a little side trip to pass the time of day with Ivan Turgenev on his estate at Spasskoye. Something had been missing from his life ever since the soft, gentle giant—like a dummy to stick pins into—had been out of reach. He was still thinking about him as he read one of his short stories on the train that carricd him to Moscow: Diary of a Superfluous Man. And he fiercely recorded his reactions on May 17: "Appallingly syrupy, cute, clever and playful." The very image of its author. Really, he could hardly wait to see him!

Yet once he got to Moscow, he was so pleased to be there that he prolonged his stay. As he had sworn before he left never to set foot inside a cabaret or brothel again,he had to fall back on trips to the parks and monuments. In the gardens of the Hermitage, where he was loitering one bored afternoon, he ran into Longinov, erstwhile refuser of his challenge. His anger boiled up again, he could not decide whether to speak to the coward or pretend not to notice him, and strolled ostentatiously along in front of him with murder in his eye. Longinov did not turn a hair, however, and Tolstoy went away disconcerted. Another day he went as far as the Troitsa Monastery, where Aunt Pelagya Yushkov was making her retreat. "She's still the same," he wrote in his diary on May 19. "Vain, full of petty and amiable sensitivity, kind- hearted." The next day he went to the sacristy: "You would think you were watching a Punch-and-Judy show: numbers of people kissing icons, and one prostrate old woman braying with joy." But mockery, in him, quickly gave way to compassion. Upon analyzing his state of mind, he found himself divided into four compartments: "Love, the pangs of repentance (pleasant, however), the desire to marry, and a feeling for nature."

It was in this poetic mood that he met Dyakov's sister Alexandra once again, at her brother's home. lie had been in love with licr long before and had not seen her for years; she was now married to Prince Andrey Obolensky. "Yes," he wrote, "even today it pains me to think of the happiness that might have been mine and has fallen to the lot of a distinguished man, A. Obolensky." (May 22, 1856.) "She listened to me twice, very attentively. No, I am not mistaken when I say she is the most charming woman I have ever met. The most highly refined artistic nature and at the same time the most moral." (May 24.) To subdue his passion, which he knew to be hopeless, he went out to the Sparrow Hills one evening to drink milk, bathe by the Moskva and sleep in the garden, "while the monks were getting drunk with the girls and dancing polkas in the orchard."²⁰ The following day at the Dyakow', he had a conversation with the fair Alexandra that troubled him considerably. "She suddenly gave me her hand. Her eyes filled with tears. ... I was beside myself with joy. . . . Even though the feeling is hopeless, I very much like inspiring it. . . ." But after an exchange of reminiscences, some transparent allusions and a few soft squeezes of the hand, Alexandra announced that she would shortly have to follow her husband to St. Petersburg, whereupon Tolstoy decided that there was nothing further to detain him in Moscow.

He was famished for the green country-side. On the eve of his departure for Yasnaya Polyana, he dined at Pokrovskoyc-Streshnevo,f eight miles outside Moscow, at the home of his childhood friend Lyubov Behrs (nee Islenyev), the very woman he had once pushed off the balcony. She received him en famille: as she had let her servants off to go to church, the meal was served by her three daughters, Lisa

f Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, the Bchrs' property, should not be confused with Pokrovskoye, Valerian Tolstoy's estate in the government of Orel.

(twelve), Sonya (eleven) and Tatyana (ten). A playful spirit of rivalry animated the pink-cheeked girls, with their sparkling eyes and skirts belling out over starched petticoats. Their eyes devoured the famous author whose Childhood and Boyhood they had read, the hero telling Papa about the war, his lips scarcely moving beneath his thick mustache. After the meal they asked him to sing the "Song of Sevastopol"; he willingly complied. Then they went for a walk. They even played leapfrog. "What sweet, gay little girls!" Tolstoy wrote in his diary, on May 26, 1856. Me did not dream that six years later one of them—Sonya, the second daughter—would become his wife.

The desire to revisit the scenes of his childhood was not the only thing that brought Tolstoy back to Yasnaya Polyana. For some time he had been thinking about the emancipation of the serfs. The idea was in the air. In March of that year, at the assembly of marshals of the nobility in Moscow, Tsar Alexander II had said it was better to "abolish serfdom from above, rather than wait for it to abolish itself from below." Then he convened a Committee for Peasant Affairs and instnictcd it to prepare a draft reform. The committee, determined to stall for time, had referred the question to a commission of which General Rostovtsev was chairman. Westerners and Slavophils alike united in condemning the delay. On April 22, 1856 Tolstoy noted in his diary, "My relations with the serfs arc beginning to prey upon my mind." Hearing talk of the impending reform, he flung caution to the winds. Why couldn't he do, alone and at once, what it would take the government years to accomplish, because of the slowness of administrative machinery? This desire assuredly showed great good-will on his part toward the peasants, but once again, there was a large share of pride mingled with the master's generosity. Rather than submit, like any other landowner, to a decision from the tsar, he wanted to lead the field, take the initiative, be the first to put social justice into practice. He began his campaign forthwith. He went to see Kavelin the historian, and Milyutin, a member of the imperial commission, and drew up his own draft reform, which he submitted to Their Excellencies Levshin and Bludov for approval. Ilie replies were evasive. Tolstoy was inccnscd: "Wherever one turns in Russia, one sees that everything is beginning to changc—but the men in charge of the changes are old and therefore incompetent."-¹ In the end, although he was not officially authorized to act, he was not exactly forbidden to do so either. That was enough for him.

It was not really his intention to cast away all his worldly goods for nothing, especially as there was a two-thousand-ruble mortgage on his property which had to be repaid before anything else. Hence, no rash donations, no evangelical abdication; rather, an equitable arrangement respecting the interests of both master and serfs. The wisest course would be to free the peasants and lease the land they had hitherto farmed for their master's sole profit; in exchange, the peasants would pay rent for thirty years, after which the land would belong to them outright.

His pockets stuffed with papers, Tolstoy hurried back to Yasnaya Polyana, feeling himself the bearer of a priceless gift. Before leaving he had written out the speech lie would make to the peasants: "Cod has planted in my soul the idea of setting you all free." After this preamble, lie would propose to discuss the plan "with the old men, the wise." "If anything about it seems unfair or illegal to you," he would say, "tell me, and I shall make it right and change it." In advance, he savored the surprise and gratitude of the crowd, and in his heart a kind thought stirred for himself.

When he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana on May 28,1856, he hardly took time to kiss Aunt Toinette, and immediately gave orders to assemble the muzhiks. While he was waiting to speak to them, he jotted hastily down in his diary, "At Yasnaya, life is sad, pleasant, not at all in harmony with my state of mind. Besides, when I compare myself as I now am with my old memories of Yasnaya, I see how far I have progressed toward a literal approach ... in a little while I shall hold a meeting and make a speech. What will come of it?"

He went to the village square with a bad case of actor's stage-fright, and instead of reading out the text he had prepared in St. Petersburg, greeted the serfs massed in front of him with a resounding "Hello!" Then, very simply, he explained his idea to them. A few hours later he came back to his diary, full of optimism: "Everything is all right. The peasants arc delighted to understand me; they see me as a bold, for- ward-looking man and they have confidence in me." The next day, second meeting and first hitch. Living in St. Petersburg, far from the serfs, Tolstoy had gradually forgotten their faults. Now he saw them again, just as they were before—suspicious, obstinate, crafty and stupid. Instead of snatching at a proposal that was so advantageous to them, they hung back, smiled, scratched their heads and said "Thank you" as though it was not their place to say it, asked for time to consider and went away dragging their feet. Hardly containing his anger, Tolstoy talked to them individually, explaining every clause in the contract, and then called them together again to subject tlicin en masse to the fire of his eloquence. There were five of these conferences, during which the project became even more liberal, the purchase-period being reduced from thirty to twenty-four years, The peasants were still unconvinced.

From the house-servants Tolstoy soon learned the reason for their reticence: it was rumored in the villages that at the coronation festivities next August, the tsar was going to free all the serfs and give them the land for nothing. So by offering to lease them the land they already farmed, their master was trying to cheat them, to "stuff them in the sack" as their own saying went. He was a fine fellow, their master, but canny. He knew the laws. He was just trying to take poor innocent folk for a ride. Outraged, Tolstoy determined to have one last heart-to-heart talk with the muzhiks. On June 7, after the meeting, he wrote, "Their obstinacy put mc in such a rage that I could hardly control myself." Three days later, another talk, another failure. Tin's time, there could be no doubt: "They don't want their freedom." 'llieir lord was just as much their slave as they were his. "Two strong men are chained together; each is hurt when the other moves, and there is not enough room for them both to work together."²² The master put his plans back in his pockets: "We shall return to the question in the autumn,"²⁸ he said, without much conviction. And he vented his spleen on that portion of the Russian intellectuals for whom the muzhik was the repository of all ancestral wisdom. Let no one say another word to him about the innate goodness and profound intelligence of the people!

"Ill tell those Slavophils what I think of the grandeur and sacrcdncss of the Mir assemblies,"t he wrote to Nckrasov on June 12, 1856. "What nonsensel I shall show you the minutes of the meetings, I've taken notes." It was no longer the peasants he was pitying now, but the landowners. For if someone did not put a stop to the outrageous pipe- dreams that were sweeping the villages, the serfs would rise up in arms against their masters one day and simply demand the land the tsar had supposedly promised to give them along with their freedom. It would be the beginning of a fearful peasant insurrection. The worst was to be expected from a people as bigoted and cruel as the Russians, and the innovators who were trying to give them what they wanted would be swept under by the wave. Tolstoy personally was not at all tempted by martyrdom. One evening, in a panic, he wrote to Bludov, a minister, warning him against the stupidity of the masses:

"There are two extremely grave and dangerous matters I must bring to your attention: (1) the conviction that a general emancipation is going to take place during the coronation period is firmly rooted among the people, even in the most remote villages; (2) the question of who owns the land populated by the peasants is being decided in most cases in favor of the peasants, who would like to appropriate all of their

t Russian rural community.

lord's property. 'We belong to you, but the land belongs to us.' When, at one of my meetings, they told me to give them all the land and I answered that I would then have to go barefoot, they simply laughed at me. . . . The government is responsible for this state of affairs, because it has evaded the chief question of the day. ... I confess I have never understood why it could not be established that the land belongs to the landlords, and the peasants be freed without giving them the land. . . . Freeing them with the land is not, in my opinion, a solution. Who is to answer these questions that are essential to a solution of the overall problem, namely: how much land shall go to each, or what share of the estate; how is the landlord to receive compensation; over what period of time; who is to pay the compensation? . . . Time is short. ... If the serfs are not free in six months, we are in for a holocaust. Everything is ripe for it. Only one criminal hand is needed to fan the flame of rebellion, and we will all be consumed in the blaze."²⁴

Having foretold the catastrophe, Tolstoy felt doubly relieved: his conscience was at peace because he had offered his people their freedom, and he had squared himself with the authorities by reporting the dangerous mood of the populace. What did still annoy him was the silent triumph of Aunt Toinette. She had opposed his project from the start —as narrow-minded as the peasants, she was, but in a different way; clinging, like them, to the tradition of a paternal relationship between lord and subjects; believing that God had given them to the master like big children to be brought up, protected and occasionally punished. "One hundred years of explaining would not make her see the injustice of serfdom,"²⁵ he wrote on his arrival. And a few days later, on June 12, "I am beginning to develop a silent hatred of my aunt, in spite of all her affection."

He did not like Yasnaya Polyana as much as before. After being sold to pay his gambling debts, the old wooden house in which he was born had been dismantled by the buyer, his neighbor Gorokhov, and put up again twelve miles away, in the hamlet of Dolgoye.* Contrary to Nicholas, he found that its removal had disfigured the estate. A riot of tall weeds and bushes grew in place of the old foundations. Tolstoy now lived with his aunt in one of the two small stone buildings that used to stand on either side of the main house. Within their walls, devoid of memories, he felt out of place, as in the home of strangers. His brothers

• Gorokhov's land was later bought by the neighboring commune and the peasants demolished the house, already badly run-down, for firewood. On December 6, 1807 Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Went to Dolgoyc on the fourth. Was moved by the ruins of the house. A host of memories." and sister were far away. To pass the time, he wrote The Cossacks, corrected Youth, read Pushkin and Gogol, swam in the Voronka, surreptitiously overpowered a peasant girl in the bushes ("Awful lust, amounting to physical illness,"²⁶) and, in the evenings, played solitaire and yawned.

Shortly after his arrival he went to see his sister at Pokrovskoye. Alas; he found her so unattractive that he wrote in his diary, "Masha has bad breath, a serious drawback!"²⁷ At five o'clock the next morning he called for his horse and set off for Spasskoyc, Turgcncv's estate, some fourteen miles away. When he arrived two hours later, his heart pulsing with friendship, Turgenev was not at home. He explored the house while he waited: "There, I could see the roots of the man; it enabled me to understand many things, and reconciled me with him."²* At last, Turgenev returned. Embracings, tears of joy. The grievances of both had been left behind in St. Petersburg. "Lunched, walked, had a very pleasant talk with him, took a nap. . . ."

The next day Masha and Valerian joined the two writers. Turgenev was full of attentions for the young woman; he must not have noticed her bad breath! He thought her pretty, with her childish face and frank, open expression and her unaffected manner. He had even dedicated a short story to her: Faust. After all, that fool of a Valerian deserved no better than he got, since he had been ncgleeting his wife for some time. "I like the relationship between Masha and Turgenev," Tolstoy wrote. And he went back to Yasnava Polyana, convinced that he had renewed a friendship with his colleague that would stand the strain of time.

When he saw him again a month later, he changed his mind. His animosity flared up without apparent reason, like a brushfirc after long smoldering. "He is a man of no consequence, cold and unpleasant. I feel sorry for him, but I shall never be able to be his friend." (July 5, 1856.) "His whole life is an attempt to ape simplicity. I am decidcdly repelled by him." (July 8, 1856.) "He refuses to do anything, 011 the pretext that an artist is powerless. But 110 man can avoid the material side of life—the muzhik for us, like the bank for the English." (Notebooks, July 31, 1856.)

In August of 1S56 Turgenev left for France. The moment he was out of sight Tolstoy began to miss him. There was a mysterious bond between these two that strengthened with absence, for Turgenev, settled into the Viardots' home at Rozay-cn-Brie, was also haunted by the thought of his loving tormentor. With melancholy benevolence he analyzed the other man, whose superiority seemed still more patent from afar. To be sure, he did not underestimate his own talent: he knew (he had heard it so often!) that his style was the most elegant in all

Russia; but since reading Childhood, Boyhood and the Sevastopol Sketches, he felt that everything he wrote himself was artificial and false. Ilis books turned out to be works of art, those of the other man were chunks of life. Was this the beginning of his decline? Was that young boor with the glittering eyes going to relegate him to oblivion? He felt it coming, it made him sad, but he did not protest against the judgment of posterity. Out of intellectual integrity, he felt he must confess himself to Tolstoy.

"You are the only man in the world with whom I have had misunderstandings," he wrote from Francc, "and they arose precisely bccausc, with you, I did not want to remain within the limits of a simple friendship. I wanted to go further and deeper. But I plunged ahead recklessly, collided with you and upset you and then, seeing my error, drew back, too suddenly, perhaps. And that is why a 'breach' grew up between us. Then, too, I am much older than you. I have followed a different path. . . . Your whole life is facing forward, mine is built on the past.f . . . You are too solidly planted on your own feet to become a disciplc of anything! I can assure you that I never thought you were malicious or dreamed you were capable of literary jealousy. I saw in you (forgive the expression!) a considerable amount of confusion, but never anything evil. And you are far too perceptive not to know that if either of us has anything to envy the other, you are surely not the one. In a word, we will never be friends in Rousseau's sense, but we will love each other and rejoice in each other's success and, after you have settled down and all that is surging around inside you has subsided a little, then, I am certain of it, we shall meet again as joyfully and openly as on the day I met you for the first time, in St. Petersburg."²⁹

He hoped his words would mollify his correspondent—but they only- irritated him. By what right, thought Tolstoy, was this "European" preaching to him? He might criticize and revile himself in front of a mirror, but he would not allow anyone else to make reflections on any aspect of his character. "Received a letter from Turgenev yesterday, and it did not please me," he wrote in his diary.³⁰

A few days later, further explanations from Turgenev arrived in reply to a letter from Tolstoy:³¹

"I know I care for the man in you (for the author, it goes without saying), but there are many things in you that rub me the wrong way and, in the end, I have found it more convenient to remain at a distance. . . . From afar my heart is full of fraternal sympathy for you, even tenderness. . . . Once you liked my work, and it might even have

t Ivan Turgenev was thirty eight at the time, Tolstoy was twenty-eight.

had some influence upon you before you found yourself. Now it is pointless for you to study me, all you will see is the difference in the way we work, the mistakes and hesitations. What you must study is mankind in general, and your own heart, and the truly great writers. As for mc, I am only the exponent of a period of transition, meaningful only for individuals who are themselves in a state of transition."³²

And, as though to warn Tolstoy against the temptation of dogmatism which was already threatening him, he wrote on another occasion:

"Would to God your horizon may broaden every day! The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard: it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away, knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling."³³

After hanging back, Tolstoy finally let himself be swayed by Turgenev's solicitude. He also recovered his former fondness for Aunt Toinette, whom he had been hating for her retrograde attitude toward serfdom. "Aunt Toinette is an amazing woman! Now there's a case of love that endureth all!" (Diary, July 1, 1856.) Even Yasnaya Polyana seemed pleasant to him, now that he had temporarily given up the idea of freeing the muzhiks and no longer needed to try to argue with them. He read, wrote, hunted, savored the beauties nature spread before him. What was missing from this idyllic tableau? A woman, to be sure! Solemnly and persistently, Tolstoy began to wonder whether the time had not come for him to marry.

Early in the summer, when his friend Dyakov came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy poured out his matrimonial projects to him. Since, at last hearing, Dyakov's own sister was the woman he claimed to be in love with, his friend was greatly surprised to learn that the object of his passion was 110 longer Alexandra Obolensky, but a certain Valcrya Arscn- yev. This young person, an orphan, lived with her sisters Olga and Gcnia on the estate of Sudakovo, five miles from Yasnaya Polyana. An aged aunt and a companion, Mile. Vergani—French, according to the rule- mounted guard over the three maidens. As a neighbor, Tolstoy had known them for years. But he had recently come down from Moscow in the company of Mile. Vergani, who had succeeded in quickening his interest in little Valcrya. He had gone to Sudakovo several times, vaguely paid court to the twenty-year-old maiden whom everyone was desperate to marry off, and now could not decide whether to propose or bow out. When consulted on this point, Dyakov, whose chief aim was probably to divert Tolstoy's attention from his sister, said he must lose no time: "He advised me to marry Valerya. When I listen to him, I, too, believe it would be the best thing for me to do. Can it be money that is stopping me? No; simply lack of opportunity. Then he took mc back to the turning for Sudakovo." And Tolstoy, with a shove from "the best friend in the world," set off down the path that led straight to matrimony, certain that he was striding toward happiness. But when he actually came face to face with the girl, his ardor cooled. He had never really looked at her before. She was chubby, colorless, she had porcclain eyes. "A pity she has no bone, no fire," he wrote that evening. "A wet noodle. Sweet, though—her smile is sickly and submissive."³⁴

From that day forward, he saw Valcrya more and more often, testing her as much as himself. Marriage was such an important matter, he thought, that you mustn't commit yourself until you were sure, and had added up the good and bad points of your chosen one. Two columns: debit, credit. Under the suitor's probing eye, the total changed after every encounter. A detail of dress or hair style was enough to bring the whole project to a halt. If she talked clothes to him, he fretted: "She is frivolous! In her it would appear to be a lasting passion, rather than a passing fancy."³⁸ If she wore a white gown, he went soft all over, as though her dress were a promise of angelic innocence: "Valerya had on a white dress. Very nice. Spent one of the most pleasant day's in my whole life. Do I love her seriously? Can she be steadfast in love?"⁸⁰ If she used a bad word, his esteem turned to resentment: "Valerya is impossibly uncducatcd, ignorant, not to say stupid. The verb 'to prostitute,' which she used, pained me, God knows why, and coming on top of my toothache, plunged me into gloom."³⁷ If she chanccd to appear bare-armed, he left off criticizing her soul and turned to her body: "She was wearing a white sleeveless dress: her arms are not pretty. This upset mc. I began to tease her so bitterly that she had to smile, but her tears showed through. ... I felt fine, but she was miserable. I am conscious of that."³* If, the following day, she received him in a dressing gown, sitting at her writing desk wearing a languid expression, it was worse still: "Valerya, decked out in that revolting, supposedly alluring peignoir again, was writing in an unlighted room."³⁹ If she described the dresses she was going to wear in August for the coronation festivities, to which her family had been invited, he suspected her, oddly enough, of lacking a maternal instinct: "She is all frivolity about everything serious, and terrifyingly light-headed. I am afraid she is one of those people who do not even love children."⁴⁰ If she paid less attention to her dress and drew her hair back to let her cars show, he warmed up again: "For the first time, I found her without 'her gowns,' as Sergey says. She is ten times better like that, and above all, more natural. She has put her hair behind her ears, now that she sees I like it that way. . . . Spent a positively blissful evening."⁴¹ Three days later his beatitude turned to acute physical excitement. After beating his brains out to convince himself that Valerya was nice, he began to find her attractive instead: "Odd that Valerya should be beginning to appeal to me as a woman, whereas before it was just as a woman that she repelled mc. Well, not always. It depended on my mood. Yesterday I noticed her arms for the first time, which used to disgust me." Perhaps, it was simply the fact that she was about to leave for Moscow that made her desirable. She was looking forward so intensely to those coronation festivities, the suppers, receptions, balls and fireworks, that he was jealous a priori of every man who would come near her! Around him, the two families were conspiring to force the hook down his throat, with Vergani, the tireless companion, leading the pack; she had sworn to marry off the poor creature before the end of the year, as she had just done for Olga.t She invented a thousand opportunities for the young people to meet, whispered advice into the girl's ear, chose her gowns, urged her on or held her back according to the mood of the man she was supposed to ensnare. Sometimes it was Tolstoy who went to Sudakovo, and sometimes Valerya, chaperoned by the Frenchwoman, who camc on some pretext or other to Yasnava Polyana. There were walks in the forest, impromptu picnics at the haying camp, reveries, tЈte-a-tetes on a moonlit balcony and four-handed sessions at the piano, while the older generation gathered around the samovar and laid plans for the future. When he was alone with Aunt Toinette, Tolstoy had to submit to her remonstrances. She could not understand why he was still waiting to become engaged. In her opinion Valerya was perfect in every respect. If he waited, he might lose her. Hadn't he had enough of living like a wild animal? Ah! God had given her a heavy cross to bear with her nephews: Dmitry had died in the arms of a prostitute, and the three others stubbornly refused to marry! . . . Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, who was visiting Yasnaya Polyana just then, shared Aunt Toinette's pro-marriage attitude. Sergey, on the other hand—the eternal skeptic—warned his brother against the folly he was about to commit. "Conversation about Valerya," Leo Tolstoy wrote. "Sergey's words were like a cold shower."⁴² lie was increasingly intimidated by the idea of marriage, but he did not have the courage to break off. She was to leave for Moscow on August 12. On the tenth he ran over to Sudakovo in an extremely positive frame of mind: "Talked marriage with Valerya. She is intelligent and exceptionally svvcct-tcmpcrcd." On the eleventh, "A storm prevented mc from going over to the Arsenyevs,

t Olga Arsenyev had just announced her engagement in Moscow.

although I badly wanted to go." On the twelfth he hastened along the sodden paths toward the girl he was already thinking of as his fiancee. What a lot of luggage! Trunks full of dresses and hats. The young lady was almost pretty in her traveling suit. Touching farewells, promise of a speedy return, admonitions on either side. That evening, in his bedroom, Tolstoy wrote, "She was more simple and sweeter than ever. I wish I knew whether or not I am in love with her."

When she was present, Valerya got on his nerves; absent, she seemed incplaccable. Even the "pretty peasant girls" he met in the forest, over whom he occasionally "lost his self-control," as he put it, could not take his mind off her. "These past day's I have been thinking more and more of my little Valerya," he wrote 011 August 16. And the following day, flaunting propriety, lie turned out a half-tender, half-teasing letter: "To my great surprise, I am bored without you! ... I console myself in your absence with the thought that you will come back a little older, for being youthful to the point of childishness is a fault, albeit charming. . . . Was Mortier* pleased with you? I can see your mournful smile, I can hear you say, 'lie cannot live without moralizing.' How can I help it? I have got into a bad habit, that of teaching others what I don't know myself."

He hoped for a quick reply, but Valerya would not give him that satisfaction and, on Mile. Vergani's advice, fired off a letter to Aunt Toinette that was brilliantly calculated to make him jealous. It contained an enthusiastic account of the coronation entertainment, her success with His Majesty's aides-de-camp, a military procession during which her dress had almost been torn in the crush. After reading this bulletin of Valerya's social success, Tolstoy gave free rein to his wrath:

"I try to restrain the mild hatred your note to my aunt has aroused in me," he wrote her. "Not even mild hatred, but rather sorrow and disappointment, for 'Drive nature out the window and it comes in at the door . . .' I low cruel. Why did you write that? Don't you know how it exasperates me?" He went on to say that she must be "ghastly" in her ceremonial gown, that the "current" pattern she spoke of sounded calculated to make her look ugly, that most of the aides-decamp sniffing about her skirts were "cads or imbeciles." He concluded with these vengeful words, "I shall not come to Moscow, although I should like to, if only to lose my temper at the sight of you. Wishing you every sort of vanity-flattering joy, accompanied by its usual

⁰ Louis-Henri-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine (1816-1883), French pianist and composcr, who was living in Moscow at the time and with whom Valerya studied music.

bitter ending, I remain your most humble, but also most difficult, servant."

As soon as he sent the letter, he regretted it. Perhaps he was going too far? lie had a few erotic dreams in rapid succession—each scrupulously noted in his diaryf—and, on September 8, took up his pen once again, to apologize to Valerya:

"I am tormented by the thought that I wrote to you without your permission and in such an awkward, stupid, vulgar manner. Send me one word to tell me whether you are angry and in what way. . . . Arc you still having a good time? . . . How is your music? Are you coming back, and if so, when?"

Thereupon, he fell ill. Congestion of the lungs, he was sure of it. Aunt Toinette called in several doctors. They bled him and applied lecchcs: ten in one day. Quaking with fever, he thought of his brother Dmitry's demise and wondered whether he, too, might not be consumptive. "I feel as though I am going to die," he wrote. Which did not prevent him from revising the manuscript of Youth in bed. He was completely recovered when the Misses Arsenyev returned to the fold, on September 24. That very day Mile. Vergani came over to Yasnaya Polyana, alone, to reconnoiter—she wanted to inspect the suitor's state of mind after a month and a half of separation. To arouse the young man's jealousy, she described Valeria's life in Moscow as one long triumphal procession from drawing room to drawing room. The dose was too big, the patient rebelled.⁴³ "After what she told mc," Tolstoy wrote, "Valerya disgusts me."

Nevertheless, he saddled his horse next day and galloped over to Sudakovo. Once again, face to face with the girl, his spirits fell. "Valerya is nice," he wrote on September 25, "but, alas! just plain dumb." And the following day, "Valerya came to sec me. Nice, but narrow-minded and incrcdibly trivial." Was this the end? No! Mile. Vergani had her weather eye open: in the nick of time, Valerya began to refer to her tender sentiments for Mortier de Fontaine, her piano teacher in Moscow. Tolstoy immediately revived: "Curious, it annoyed me. I was embarrassed for her and for myself, but also, for the first time, I experienced something resembling an attachment for her."⁴⁴ This new lease on love was not long-lasting. Two days later, calm and gloomy, he confided to his diary, "I am not in love, but this relationship has had a great effect on my life. Still, I have not yet known love and, judging by what I feel now from this foretaste, I think I must be capable of experiencing it with great violence. Please God, not for Valerya. She is slial-

f Beginning on September 3, 1856.

low and cold as ice, and has no principles." A few days later, on October 8, there was a decided turn for the worse: "I cannot speak to Valerya except to criticize her. I feel absolutely nothing for her, it's only a habit. She is no more than an unpleasant memory for me."

The snow had come. An infinity of white, a desert of incomprehension, spread out between Yasnaya Polyana and Sudakovo. Tolstoy argued with Aunt Toinette, set off into the country on horseback, hunted rabbit, arrived unannounced at the Arscnycvs', where everyone nevertheless behaved as though they were expecting him. On October 19 he found Valerya particularly homely; "Looked at Valerya more calmly. She has put on a great deal of weight, I most decidedly feel nothing at all for her now." TTiis did not prevent him from returning to Sudakovo on October 23 and telling Mile. Vergani the tale, invented by him, of one Khrapovitsky and a certain Dembitskaya, from which it emerged that marriage was a serious affair and a passion for clothes was incompatible with a sound approach to connubial bliss. Of course, he was counting on the companion to repeat this fable to the young lady, which she did that same evening. In the meantime, he had agreed to spend the night at Sudakovo, in a room prepared for him. "Went to sleep in their house, almost at peace, but far from in love." Hie next morning Valerya came to breakfast in a radiant twitter. She was all innocence, docility, sobriety, tenderness in person. Subjugated, Tolstoy took her to the ball at Tula: "Valerya was delightful, I am almost in love with her," he wrote upon his return, 011 October 24. And, on the twenty-fifth: "Talked to her. Went very well. Was even on the point of sniveling." Two more days passed and, in a burst of honesty, he showed her a page of his diary ending with the words, "I love her." She tore it out and ran away. 'Ibat night he rebuked himself for his rashness. Now she would surely imagine the affair was in the bag. To find out, he rushed over to see her the next morning- catastrophe! She was wearing that triumphant, mysterious air of the young fiancee that he dreaded above all else. "Her hair arranged in a ghastly fashion, decked out with a mantle in my honor. I suffered, I was miserable, the day went by in tedium, conversation languished. I have bccomc, without making a move, a sort of fiancЈ.'^M5 The more clearly he saw the role he had been cast in by the Arscnycvs and all their neighbors and acquaintances, the more he wanted to quit the game. But could he, after all those months of arduous courtship, without dishonoring the girl to whom the entire province had unofficially united him? The devil take their wagging tongues! 'lhe time had come for trial by fire. He would go away for a few weeks, after which he- would make up his mind and be able to know what he was doing. When

Valerya heard that he was preparing to go to Moscow, she burst into tears. A final ball at Tula brought them closcr again: "She was very sweet. Plaintive voice, wanting to compromise herself, or make some sacrifice for me." But he held his ground. Against Aunt Toinette, against Mile. Vergani, against Valerya, against himself. His departure resembled flight more than anything else. Several times during the trip he asked himself, as he lurched along in an uncomfortable sledge, whether he ought not to turn around and go back.

The moment he reached Moscow he rushed to see his sister Marya and explain his behavior. But she sided with Valerya against him. Then, to atone for his remissness toward her, he wrote a long rambling and preachifying letter in which he confessed that there were two men in him: "the stupid man," who loved her only for her physical charms, and "the good man" who held her in too high esteem to be content with any commonplace form of love. There followed a dialogue between these two halves of Tolstoy—both equally long-winded. "And yet you are happy when you are with her, you look at her, listen to her, talk to her," said the stupid man. "Then why deprive yourself of this happiness? And then, is it not odious on your part to respond to her pure and devoted affection with cold rationalizations?" The good man's reply: "In the first place, you lie when you say I am happy with her; it is a pleasure for me to listen to her, of course, and look into her eyes; but that is not happiness. . . . Besides, sometimes her company weighs on me. ... I am happy because of her, even when I am not with her. . . . You love her for your happiness, and I love her for her own."

And, mixing heaven up with his affairs as usual, he proclaimed with unruffled hypocrisy, "I thank God for giving me the idea of going away. . . . I believe He has guided mc toward the best course for both of us. You may be forgiven for thinking like the stupid man. But in me, it would have been a shame and a sin. ... A great task lies before us: to understand each other and preserve our affection and respect for each other. For this, I am counting on our correspondence, we shall be able to talk things over calmly."

He began his education of the girl who might one day be his wife by giving her some advice (the eternal mania of "Rules of Life"), and urged her to follow it:

"Please go for a walk every day, no matter what the weather is like! This is recommended by every doctor. Put 011 your corset and stockings by yourself and, in general, try to make various improvements of this type. But these are trivialities. The main thing is that when you get into bed at night you should be able to tell yourself, 'Today, firstly, I have performed a good deed for someone else; secondly, I have become a little better myself.' Try, please, please, to plan your occupations a day in advance and give yourself an account of them every evening. You will sec what serene but intense joy results from being able to tell oneself, ever}' day, 'Now I am better than yesterday.' . . . Farewell, dear young ladv, the stupid man loves you, but stupidly, the good man is ready to love you with the strongest love there is, tender and eternal . . "⁴

On November 7, 1856, he was in St. Petersburg. 'ITiere, he moved into a small furnished apartment at the corner of Great Meshanskaya and Vozhncscnsky Prospect and went immediately to see General K011- stantinov, director of the School of Pyrotechnics. He had tendered his resignation from the army on September 30 and was surprised to have had no news of it for a month. I lis superior assured him that the matter was pursuing its normal course, although Grand Duke Michael Nikolayevich, having heard that Tolstoy was the author of the highly irreverent "Song of Sevastopol," was very cross with him. Indignant at this "base calumny"—in which there was a fair share of truth—Tolstoy went to staff headquarters to vindicate himself, and they pretended to believe him.

He was more deeply disturbed by another misunderstanding, also founded, no doubt, 011 gossip. Just before he left Moscow he learned from Prince Volkonsky that, according to a number of eyewitnesses, little Valerya Arsenyev really had fallen in love with Morticr de Fontaine, the pianist, and was even writing to him. So much duplicity in a young person who gave every indication of wishing to become his wife outraged him, it was an insult to his honor. He was sorry he had sent her such a friendly letter the week before. However, instead of leaping at this opportunity to break with her, he toyed with the idea of bringing her to her knees first. Did he care more for her since he suspected her of being faithless? On November 8, needled by jealousy, he wrote her a letter of savage recrimination:

"I no longer respect you as I did before, I don't believe you. ... Is it my fault? Judge for yourself. You knew me for three months, you saw what kind of friendship I felt for you, only you weren't sure whether I was going to propose, and you fell in love with Mortier. . . . Then you stopped seeing him, but you haven't stopped thinking about him or writing to him. You learned that I was about to ask for your hand in marriage, and then you fell in love with me. . . . But which was the real emotion, and is it an emotion? Did you really love Morticr? How far did your relationship go? Did he kiss your hands? . . . Yes, I am in love with you and that is why I am continually oscillating between my feelings for you: passionate love and hatred."

Having thus poured out his heart, he could not resist his desire for even more sympathy and, as a consummate man of letters, added, "I am in poor health and my books arc selling badly."J When he read it over, however, this q)istlc struck him as being too violent. He penciled "unmailed" across the first page and immediately wrote another, in milder tones.

"I am furious with you because I cannot help loving you. ... If you would please tell me about your relations with Mortier, and say definitely that your feeling for him was a beautiful one, that you miss him, even that you still love him, I would prefer it to the indifference and feigned scorn with which you speak of him. . . . 'Hie main question is whether we can live together and love each other, and it is essential for that very reason to reveal even-thing bad in ourselves. ... I should suffer, I should suffer horribly if I were to lose your affection for me; but better to lose it right away than have to reproach myself for a deception that would end in your unhappiness."

Having worked well the following day, November 9, he felt disposed to love anyone and forgive anything, and Valerya immediately reaped the benefit of this change of heart. With soul raised on high and pen dipped in honey, Tolstoy wrote:

'This extraordinary feeling I have for you, which I have not experienced for any other person, takes the following form: the instant anything disagreeable happens to me, whether important or trivial—any failure, any dent in my vanity—I think of you and say, 'All this is trivial, since a ccrtain young lady back there exists; so nothing bad can happen to me. . . .' Ah, if only you might learn, through suffering, to believe that the only possible happiness—true, eternal, elevated—is achieved through these three things: work, self-denial and love. . . . You see, I want to love you so badly that I am teaching you how to make me love you. Because my real feeling for you is not love, yet, but a passionate desire to love with all my strength. . . . One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."

Could the little goose from Sudakovo grasp the true meaning of that last sentence? Perhaps, for Tolstoy vainly awaited her reply. In the night of November 11-12 he wrote again to explain his views on marriage, using the two allegorical figures, Khrapovitsky and Dcmbitskaya. Khrapovitsky—alias Leo Tolstoy—spurned high society because worldly agitation destroys even the most beautiful, the most noble and purest of thoughts, and yearned for a "healthy and peaceful" family life.

t Refers to Childhood, Boyhood and Tales of Army Life, published in one volume in 1856.

Dembitskaya—alias Valerya Arsenyev—was the exact opposite; for her, happiness "was the ball, the bare shoulders, the carriages and diamonds, her acquaintanceship with the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and the aides-de-camp." According to Tolstoy, the solution for these two characters was to live seven months of the year in the country and five in St. Petersburg. He was already estimating the household expenses; that should be reassurance enough for the young lady! And yet four more days went by without a sign from her. Vexed, Tolstoy resumed his habits of the previous winter. He went out in society, dined at Dussot's, exercised at the gymnasium and found no pleasure at all in the company of his fellow writers. "Love and love alone can provide certain happiness,"⁴⁷ he declared. If only Valerya were a better correspondent! Did she really have nothing to say, or didn't she know how to hold a pen? At last, on November 19, he received two letters from his beloved. He should have been in transports of joy—but no: what he had longed for so keenly now left him cold. I lis fever had dropped. "Strangely enough, when I am taken up by my work, I am indifferent to Valerya," he wrote the same day. And he sat down with a sigh to grind out his answer. No more talk of love in this letter. The tone was brotherly, protective and gay. If he were still attracted to her it was only, he said, because he thought she might be "good" and he had always been subjugated by virtue. And his jealousy had so diminished that he positively entreated her to go out with other men so that she could analyze her reactions to them:⁴⁸ "Go to the ball 011 Wednesday. It would be interesting for you to test yourself. Do it, my dove, and then tell me your honest impressions."

Days passed, and Valerya's stock rose a few points as a result of the prolonged absence: "Thought a great deal about her," he wrote. "Perhaps because I have not met any women of late."⁴⁹ In the interim, he received another "very sweet" letter from her, to which he replied with patronizing affcction.

"I feel that you love mc and so you are beginning to adopt a more serious attitude toward life. ... By the grace of God, my dove, love mc, love the whole world, God's world, men, nature, poetry, all the wonderful things that exist, and cultivate your mind so that you can understand things worthy of love. ... If the overall destination of a woman is to be a wife, her particular destination is to be mother, not womb."

Not content with instructing his dove as to the best way of ornamenting her mind, he threw in for good measure a few lessons on the best way of ornamenting her body: "Alas, you are mistaken to believe you have taste. Your little blue hat with the white flowers is pretty, but it would only be right for the wife of a great aristocrat, stepping out of her coach behind an English trotter. Your little hat looks absurd enough on a person of modest means, with only a simple caldche, and even more on a person living in the country, with nothing but a tarantas to drive. There is another kind of elegance, based on modesty, that shuns everything exaggerated and loud. It may be seen in the smallest details of dress—in slippers, for example, and collars and gloves. It also requires spotless nails and neatly dressed hair." If, after this, Valerya did not turn into a model young lady, there was no hope for the future of correspondence courses. Upon coming to the end of his letter, he was seized with a sudden frenzy, he was overflowing with tenderness, his pen was quivering with it: "Farewell, my turtledove, turtledove, thousand times turtledove, whether you're angry or not, I'll say it just the same!"

After this flare-up he subsided, colder and more empty than before; two letters from Valerya could not fan the flame to life again. "She is deceiving herself, I see it plainly, and I don't like it." (November 27, 1856.) "I think little about Valerya and not very favorably." (November 29, 1856.) Nothing had happened to alter his feelings, but it was as though he were purged of a hallucination, and ashamed to have let himself be carried away. Yet he still did not have the courage to burn his bridges. He explained to Valerya that he was "terribly afraid" of meeting her, for the shock might be irreparable:

"In our letters we inflate each other with all sorts of tender declarations ... we show off our best side, we hide the bad features in ourselves. . . . When you see me again, all of a sudden, with my looks, my faded smile, my turnip nose and my temperament (gloomy, fickle, an easy prey to boredom)—all the things you have already forgotten— they will all seem new to you, and will come as a painful surprise."-'¹⁰

He prevaricated less with Aunt Toinette, a militant partisan of his marriage to the young lady:

"I should very much like to be able to tell you that I am in love, or simply that I love her, but it is not there. The only feeling I have for her is gratitude for her love for me, and the thought that, of all the girls I have known and know now, she would make the best wife for me."⁵¹

But distributing these analyses right and left was not helping him to find an honorable way out. He himself was surprised at his cowardice. There he was, quaking and limp-handed like an apprentice executioner facing a too-tender victim. He did not dare bring down the ax on the neck of this over-plump, over-silly and ridiculously over-drcsscd provincial scatterbrain. Was he afraid of hurting her, or of being hurt himself? On December 10 he received a stinging letter from her, reproaching him for "boring" her with his "preaching." She was making it easy for him! "Received an offended letter from Valerya and, to my eternal shame, was glad of it," he immediately wrote in his diary. After thinking for two days, he replied:

"We are too far apart. . . . Love and marriage would have given us nothing but misery, whereas friendship, I am certain, is good for both of us. . . . Then, too, I think I must not be made for family life, even though it is what I most admire in all the world. You know what a difficult person I am, suspicious and moody, and God only knows whether anything will ever happen to change me. ... Of all the women I have known you arc the one I loved most and still love most, but it is not enough."⁰²

This time Valerya could not fail to understand. The break had come, clean and sharp as a scalpel's edge. After posting his letter, he felt both relieved and uncertain. That night he had a nightmare so bizarre that he described it in his diary: "A brown woman lying on top of me; she was stretching forward, completely naked, whispering into my ear." Was this Valerya's last assault?

As he had expected, his break with the girl aroused general indignation in the drawing rooms of Tula. He was blamed by his aunt, his sister, all his friends in the province; the best way to avoid hearing all this nasty gossip was to flee abroad. He had been toying with the idea for some time. His resignation from the army had been accepted on November 26. He ordered civilian clothes and applied for a passport to leave Russia. He scarcely recognized himself in civilian dress! Was it possible that this inglorious garb was to be his for the rest of his life? Now he was nothing but a writer, a mere artist! lie spent New Year's Eve listening to Beethoven in the apartment of his friend Stoly- pin. On January' 1 he talked until midnight with Olga Turgenev.⁰ "I never liked her so well before." On January 3, at a costume ball, he met a young woman wearing a mask: "Sweet mouth. I pleaded with her a long time. She finally agreed, after much hesitation, to come home with me. Inside, she took off her mask. As like A.D. [Alexandra Dyakov] as two peas. But with coarser features." Two days later, another noteworthy encounter: the violinist George Kizevctter, a drunkard, a "gifted madman." Touched by Tolstoy's interest in him, the musician told him the story of his downfall. Tolstoy immediately decided to write a story about him, to be entitled A Lost Mcm.t But he soon realized that he was not in the mood for writing. Was the atmosphere of St. Petersburg bad for him, or was it remorse at having offended Valerya that nagged

• No relation to Ivan Tuigenev.

f Later called Albert.

at him? She had tried to get him back by letter; he replied, to discourage her for good. What a Iccch! Quick! lie had to get away. He went to Moscow first, and there he wrote to Aunt Toinette on January 14, 1857:

"I have received my passport and have come to Moscow to spend a few days with Marya.$ . . . You will surely understand, dear Aunt, why I do not want to—and must not—come to Yasnaya Polyana just now, or rather to Sudakovo.* I think I behaved very badly toward Valerya, but if I were to see her now I should behave still worse. As I have already written you, I feel less than indifferent toward her and cannot go on deceiving myself or her. And if I were weak enough to go back there, I should begin telling myself stories again. Do you remember, dear Aunt, how annoyed you were with me when I told you I was going to St. Petersburg as a test? Yet it is thanks to that idea that I have avoided bringing both of 11s to grief—for do not believe it is capriciousness or infidelity on my part: I have not been attracted by anyone else during these two months; I simply saw I was fooling myself, and not only never have had but never would have the least feeling of genuine love for Valerya."

As Yasnaya Polyana was only a few versts from Sudakovo, he thought it wiser not to kiss his aunt good-bye before embarking on his travels abroad. If he should happen to run into Valerya, what a scene there would be. The girl in tears, Mile. Vergani's scathing reproaches! Anything, rather than this mudbath of sentiment. His target now was Paris, where good old Turgenev was waiting for him. As though by design, two days before he was scheduled to leave he met a woman who captivated him: Baroness Elizabeth Ivanovna Mcngden, six years his senior. At the mere sight of her, he regretted that his passport was in his pocket and his scat reserved in the coach. IIow beautiful she was, pure and full of mystery, the stranger standing at the roadside while the horses whirl you off into the distance. Thinking of her, lie wrote in his diary:⁰³ "Docs the attraction lie in remaining just on the verge of love?"

On January 29, 1857 he boarded the stagecoach. Cold, snow and the monotonous jingle of the horses' bells. Packed with strangers into the coach like a sardine in a tin, he thought back over his experiences of the last few years. In human relations, nothing noteworthy: no revolutionary friendships, no revelations in love, neither progress toward virtue nor backsliding toward evil. In the field of literature, on the other hand, he couldn't complain. The Snow Storm, Two Hussars, A

t His sister.

⁰ The Arsenyev estate.

Landlord's Morning had been smashing successes; Youth, which had just come out in the first issue of The Contemporary for 1857, had already gleaned some words of praise. It seemed to Tolstoy, however, that the friends who had read the manuscript or proofs had been more reticent than on previous occasions. Druzhnin, for example, whose opinion he highly valued, had written on October 6, 1856, "None of our other writers could have grasped and portrayed the agitated and disorderly time of youth better than you." But he found some chapters too "long-drawn-out" and said the author must guard against his propensity for analysis as against the plague: "One occasionally feels that you are about to write: X's thighs showed that he wanted to take a trip to India." He also criticized Tolstoy's style, heavy, almost "ungram- matical," cncumbcrcd by never-ending sentences. Like Druzhnin, Pana- yev also begged the author to lighten his "otherwise admirable" text. On December 5, 1856 he wrote, "Your phrases arc too long and obscure, the same words keep recurring."! On this point Tolstoy conceded that Druzhnin and Panayev were right, he did not have Turgcncv's diaphanous style. But his desire to approach ever closer to the core of truth in beings and things prevented hiin from caring about the elegance of his language. He piled up his relative clauses one on top of the other, twisted his syntax, peppered his sentences with increasingly specific epithets, in order to capture some subtle nuance. Asking him to lighten his style was tantamount to asking him to change his vision of the world, to change himself. Then, too, even though he agreed with Druzhnin, lie could not curc himself of his "mania" for sketching in a charactcr by beginning with some detail of physiognomy and proceeding by induction from matter to soul, from data to idea. In this connection his notebooks for 1856 are filled with curious observations. "For mc," he wrote, "the back is an important mark of physiognomy, and especially the place where the neck joins the back; no other part of the body so clearly reveals lack of self-confidence and false sentiment." And also, "A straight back is a sign of passionate temperament." Or, "The physiology of wrinkles can be very telling and accurate."⁰⁴ In Youth he had put this theory to the test even more than in his previous work. "Dubkov," for example, "had the sort of hands that often wear rings and belong to people who like to do things with their hands and love beautiful things.""⁵ Again, "Sofya Ivanovna had that singular, florid complexion one encounters in very stout old maids who are short and wear corsets."⁵⁰

f On Dcocmber 6, 1856, Panayev wrote to Turgenev, in rcfercncc to Youih, that "Me [Tolstoy] simply docs not know how to write. His sentences are all two yards long. The thought is admirable, its expression often thoroughly obscure. . . "

In painting the third panel of his triptych he had, as in Boyhood, combined the story of his friends, the Islenyevs, with his own. In particular, the Islcnyev father's second marriage with "a young beauty," Sofya Zhdanov, had given him the idea for the episode of Nikolenka's father and "la belle Flarmande." As for Prince Nekhlyudov, he was to become one of the author's favorite aliases. Aunt Toinette, Dmitry and many others had posed for some of his characters; but however great the charm of these half-real, half-fictional figures, the real hero of Youth was its narrator. Ilis relentless digging down into his self, to eject admirable and ignoble features pell-mell and reveal the naked man, compelled even the most superficial reader to venture into his own lower depths.

Aksakov wrote, in The Russian Tatler, "Here analysis assumes the form of a confession, a pitiless exposure of all the seething activity of the human soul. And yet this self-indictment is perfectly healthy and straightforward, there is no hesitation about it, it is tainted by no involuntary desire to excuse what goes on within. . . . There is something sickly, weak, uncertain about Turgcncv's analysis, whereas that of Count Tolstoy is sound and uncompromising."

Tolstoy left before he had seen this notice, and that of Basistov in the St. Petersburg News: "To present the hero of Youth as typical of Russian youth is an insult to both society and youth." For the time being, he was planning to continue the series, but his ideas were not yet ripe.J Besides, he was unable to concentrate on anything inside the stagecoach. His mind flitted from one thing to another. He sighed for Mme. Mengdcn ("She is delightful, a relationship with her might be most enjoyable.") and was sorry he had behaved so badly to Valerya ("I should like to write to Mile. Vcrgani and tell her I am not the guilty part)', if there is one"⁵⁷). He would have been greatly surprised to learn that the girl he was berating himself for having compromised would soon be married to someone else; but it would probably have astonished him less to be told that, accustomed as he was to using the events of his own life as his raw materials, this romantic interlude would bccomc, two years later, a novel.®

On February 4 Leo Tolstoy stepped out of the stagecoach, exhausted, at Warsaw, after covering 900 miles in five days, or 180 miles a day. The sun was rising in front of him, "setting the houses alight with bright colors." He immediately sent a telegram to Ivan Turgenev, an-

t 'I'his projcct was subsequently abandoned.

• Valerya Arsenyev married A.' A. Talysin, future magistrate at Orlov; in Family Happiness Tolstoy described what would have happened had he carried out his first matrimonial plans.

nouncing his arrival in Paris. Nekrasov was there, too—double cause for rejoicing. He continued his trip by rail, went through Berlin without stopping and set foot on Frcnch soil 011 February 9, 1857,! in the crush, smoke and racket of the Gare du Nord.

f February 9, Old Style (Julian calendar), February 21, New Style (Gregorian).

PART III

Travel, Romance and Pedagogy

I. Discovery of Europe

Tolstoy first went to the Hotel Mcurice, which was then located at 149. rue de Rivoli; the following day, he rented a furnished apartment in a pension at No. 206 on the same street. 'Ilie rooms were sunny, but cold. No Russian double windows, none of those excellent tile stoves with serfs to bank up their fires; no samovar steaming around-the-clock. The pale sun of dying winter shone 011 the Tuileries. Birds chirped in the bare branches of the trees. The music of the French language was pleasing to the car. Sitting down to the table d'h6te, the traveler found himself among a score of pemionnaires who immediately engaged him in a conversation "studded with witticisms and word-play."¹ He was sorry, however, that lie had not brought a servant with him, and had so few friends in this big city. Turgenev and Nekrasov came to see him on the evening of his arrival. Both disappointed him. "Turgenev is unbelievably touchy and soft," he noted, and "Nekrasov looks gloomy."

Ivan Turgenev, who lived with his daughter Paulinette and her gov erness at No. 208, rue de Rivoli, two doors away, was very unhappy indeed, because Pauline Viardot was neglecting him for a newcomer, the painter Ary Scheffcr. Nevertheless, he wanted to make a festive occasion of his meeting with the "troglodyte" and, as the Carnival was in full swing, dragged Tolstoy, still worn out after his trip, to a costume ball at the Op6ra. On the evening of February 9 (21),* 1857 Tolstoy scratched one word in his diary: "Madness." The next day, he wrote to his sister:

"The little Frenchmen are very droll and nice when they are out for fun, which assumes monumental proportions here. An ordinary Frenchman dresses himself up as a wild Indian, daubs paint all over his face

• Dates included in parentheses are based on the Cregorian calendar. These are the dates as used by Tolstoy and others when writing from Europe.

and, bare-armed and bare-legged, alone in the middle of the room, begins to caper about and bob up and down and whinny for dear life. He is not drunk, he is a respectable married man with a family, he is simply full of joie de vivre."

On the streets, in the cafes and shops and buses, he found the same air of buoyancy, frivolity and elegance. Even the poor people here seemed glad to be alive. Bold stares sped back and forth between men and women in public. The peddlers hawked their wares so wittily that there was alway's a ring of loiterers standing around to listen. Everyone, from the livery-stable driver to the soft-drink peddler, had his own saucy line of patter, as though there were no police. Although Napoleon III claimed to be an emperor, his French despotism had nothing in common with the Russian variety. True, a lot of people were said to have been imprisoned and exiled after the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, but that did not prevent Paris from exhaling an air of devil-may-care nonchalance that would have been inconceivable in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The air was cleaner along the banks of the Seine, one felt like throwing out one's chest, making smart remarks, thumbing one's nose at the authorities and crowing like a rooster. "There is not one numbskull of an officer running after the whores or hanging around the cafds who is untouched by this sense of social freedom, which is the chief attraction of life in Paris," Tolstoy wrote to Kolbasin.² And to Botkin, the same day: "I am still in Paris . . . and cannot yet foresee the day when this city will have ceascd to intrigue me, or the life I am leading here lose its appeal. I am a flagrant ignoramus, I have never felt it so powerfully as here. If only for that, I should be thankful to have come, especially as my ignorance is not, I can feel it, irreparable. I am delighting in the arts here."³

As a dutiful tourist, he went often to the theater and, back in his pension, jotted down notes on the plays he had seen: Les precieuses ridicules and L'Avare—'"Excellent"; Les fausses confidences—"Deliriously elegant"; Le malade imaginaire—"Admirably acted"; Le Manage de Figaro—"Very good"; Racine's Plaideurs-'Foul." Moreover, "The theater of Racine and his ilk is the poetic plague of Europe. Luckily we do not and never shall have anything like it."⁴ Offcnbach, at the Bouffes-Parisiens, is "pure French! Funny! A sense of comedy so jolly and sprightly that he can get away with anything."⁵ The concerts swept him off his feet. He declared that nobody could play Beethoven as the French could.®

Determined to see everything, he set himself a schedule that would have brought a less robust man to his knees at the end of a week. He raced through the Hdtel de Cluny, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Bourse

("A horror!"), the Louvre, where he could not decide which was most admirable, the Mona Lisa or Rembrandt's portraits; Fontaincblcau, Versailles ("There I feel how little I know"), La Bibliotheque Nationale ("The place is packed full of peoplel"), the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the racetracks, the auction gallery. He saw the Comte de Falloux being admitted to the Academie, and was amazed at all those men of letters in brocadcd gowns, listening to such boring speeches. He pushed on to Dijon to see the churches and museum. Then, back in Paris, he went to the Invalides. At the sight of Napoleon's tomb, he was seized with indignation. Paying no attention to the guide, who was mumbling his commentary as though they were in church, he felt his ancient patriotic resentment rise within him against the invader of Russia and profaner of Moscow, and his historical hatred was intensified by the memory of a more recent war in which the French had again gotten the upper hand. Less than two years after Sevastopol, he could not tolerate this homage paid to the military prowess of the enemy. How could a people who claimed to be peace-loving, freedom-loving and reason- loving dedicate this haughty sarcophagus in red porphyry to a man who had drenched all Europe in blood? "This idealization of a malefactor is shameful!" he thought.⁷ He scowled furiously at the names of the victories carved in the walls of the crypt, among which he saw—O horror of horrors!—the Moskva! ITc left in a rage, and the sight of two old disabled veterans sunning themselves in the courtyard merely fanned the flames of his wrath. That evening the man who had once sung hymns to the braver)' of the Crimean troops—whatever their nationality—wrote of these cockcd-hattcd and medallioned derelicts, "They arc nothing but soldiers, animals trained to bite. They should be left to starve to death. As for their torn-off legs—serves them right!"⁸ A few days before he had written, in tones of equal surliness, "Read a speech by Napoleon with unspeakable loathing." And, enlarging upon this statement: "No one has understood better than the French that people will worship insolence—a good punch in the face. The trick is to act with conviction; then everyone will step aside and even feel he is in the wrong. That is what I realized, reading Napoleon's speech."⁹ In his address, delivered on Febniary 16, 1857 for the opening of the legislative session, Napoleon III had said that his greatest desire was to serve mankind, justice and civilization everywhere. Impossible for Tolstoy to give credence to such assertions, coming from the nephew of Napoleon I.

But with what delight, on the other hand, he listened to the lectures of the great masters of the day at the Sorbonne and College de France: Saint-Marc Girardin, Lef&vre de Laboulayc, Baudrillart! To fill in the gaps in his education, he took English and Italian lessons with a tutor. He already spoke fluent French and might have become acquainted with some French families, but he made no effort to do so. Neither the publication of Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in Baudelaire's translation nor the stir over the trial of Madame Bovary, both of which occurred early in 1857, had the least effect on him; lie had never even heard of tliese authors. The only representatives of French literature with whom he had any contact at all were the traveler Xavier Mannicr, Louis Ulbaeh the novelist, and a singer, Pierre Dupont. Turgenev could have introduced him to authors of higher rank—MЈrimЈc, Dumas . . . "Why bother?" said Tolstoy to himself. He had too little esteem for his Russian colleagues to seek out the company of their French counteqjarts. What he wanted to know about France he could learn just as well from the Russians living in Paris. They had returned en masse after the signing of the peace treat}'. Their salons were open to all comers; Tolstoy went to call on the Lvovs, the Orlovs, the Trubetskoys, the Bludovs, the Sherbatovs, the Klyustins, etc. With one or another of them he went to the theater, the circus, the caf6 chantant, dined at Durand's or at the Maison DorЈe, had supper at Musard's or went out "slumming." As he made his way home at night along the deserted streets, he was haunted by "bad thoughts." When a female silhouette sidled furtively up to him he shuddered with desire and then hurried on, fleeing, red-faced with shame, and, once back in his room, wrote by candlelight: "A lively lady. Was paralyzed with confusion . . ." "Accosted. Spoiled my evening. Had a struggle with my conscience and tortured myself . . ." "Nothing, hush! . . ." "A woman disturbed me. I followed her home, but then remained firm. Depravity is a dreadful thing. . . "¹⁰

Tawdry streetwalkers were not enough to quench his thirst for love; he required tender feelings as well. He paid court to Prince Lvov's niece. "The princess is so charming that for the last twenty-four hours I have been under a spell, and it has made my life very pleasant," he wrote 011 February 21 (March 5). A month later: "I like her very much, I think I'm a fool not to try to many her. If she marries some excellent man and they are happy together, it could drive me to despair." An empty threat, like so many others. He was stirred by the grace, sweetness and intelligence of this young lady of society, but he was equally stirred by the charms of Louise Fitz-James, a danccr at the OpЈra who lived in the same pension as he. He recorded in his diary the impression that "Mrs. Fitz-James's calvcs" had made on him, noted that on one occasion Mrs. Fitz-James, "perspiring freely," had played "la coquette" with him, and expressed amazement at her boldness when she said in public, "One is never as wicked as one would like to be!" At the time, he burst out laughing with the others, but her remark left him pensive: no doubt about it, the Parisians were all in league with the devil!

As though to add to his agitation, he received a letter from Valerya, who had swallowed her pride and was returning to the attack, wanting to know the reasons for the "change" that had driven him away from her. "There was nothing one could properly call a change," he replied. "I always told you I was not certain of my feelings for you, and it always seemed to me that something was wrong. ... In St. Petersburg, the simple fact of not seeing you any more proved to me that I had not been and never would be in love with you."¹¹ He had previously written the same thing to Aunt Toinette: "Although I admit it was wrong of me to behave in such a flighty way, and I might have acted very differently, I still believe I was perfectly honest. I have never ceased to say that I am not sure what it is I feel for the girl, but I know it is not love."¹²

The truth appeared to be that women existed solely in order to incite men to bestiality and then to frustrate them. A perfect example of the evil a woman could do to a man was unwittingly furnished by Ivan Turgenev: abandoned by Pauline Viardot, he had become a shadow of his former self. A kidney ailment, which he patiently- nursed, aggravated his feeling of physical inferiority to the dazzling and faithless soprano, and he was continually worrying over the education of his daughter Paulinctte, a difficult and quarrelsome child. "Tur genev is flailing and floundering about in his misfortunes,"¹³ noted Tolstoy. And he wrote to Aunt Toinette: "His unhappy love affair with Mme. Viardot, and his daughter, keep him in a state that is very bad for him, and he is pitiful to behold. I would never have believed he could love so deeply."¹⁴

But if he pitied Turgenev one day, he could not abide him the next. The curious inconstancy he had shown toward Valerya Arsenyev reappeared in his relations with the contemporary Russian writer he- most admired. They saw each other every day, and utterly contradictory judgments rained down on the pages of his diary: "Dinner with Turgenev ... He is quite simply vain and petty." (February 17 [March 1].) "Spent three pleasant hours at Turgenev's." (February 20 [March 4].) "Spent another pleasant evening with Turgenev and a bottle of wine by the fireside." (February 21 [March 5].) 'Turgenev doesn't believe anything, that's what's the matter with him. He does not love, he is in love with love." (February 25 [March 9].) "At dinner I told him something he had never suspected; namely, that I con- sidcr him superior to me." (February 26 [March 10].) "Turgenev is really tiresome! Alas! lie has never loved anyone." (March 1 [13].) "Dropped in on Turgenev. lie is a cold and useless man, but intelligent, and his art is inoffensive." (March 4 [16].) "Stopped by at Turgenev's. No; I really must keep away from him. I have paid enough tribute to his merits, tried every possible way of making friends with him; but it's 110 use." (March 5 [17].) "Turgenev came to sec me around five. lie looked guilty. What to do? I respect him, I value him, I can even say I love him, but I feel absolutely no warmth for him; and the same is true for him." (March 7 [19].) "Turgenev is old." (March 9 [21].) "Stopped by Turgenev's; he no longer talks, he babbles. He has lost all faith in reason and in men—believes in nothing." (March 25 [April 6].)

Turgenev, meanwhile, was confessing that he could not, despite all his admiration for Tolstoy, remain 011 good terms with him: "Tolstoy has changed considerably for the better, but the creaking and groaning of his internal upheavals have a very bad effect on a man like me, whose nerves are already overstrained." (Letter to Annenkov, February 16 [28], 1857.) "I cannot establish any lasting friendship with Tolstoy, our views are too different." (Letter to Kolbasin, March 8 [20], 1857.) "No; after all my attempts to get along with Tolstoy, I have to give up. We are put together too differently. Whatever 1 like he doesn't and vice versa. I cannot relax with him, and he is probably no more at ease with me. He lacks serenity, and yet he also lacks the turmoil of youth. As a result, I don't know how to take him. But he will develop into a remarkable man, and I shall be the first to applaud and admire him, from afar!" (Letter to Annenkov, March 9 [21], 1857.) "Tolstoy is showing signs of tolcrancc and calm. When this new wine has done fermenting, it will be a beverage fit for the gods!" (Letter to Botkin, March 23 [April 4], 1857.)

In fact, Tolstoy was still a long way from "calm" and "tolerance," when Turgenev made this indulgent assessment of his character. I lis brother Sergey had just come to Paris with Prince Obolensky. They rode horseback in the Bois de Boulogne, went to sec a few friends and soon discovered that they were bored in each other's company. Who could be more total strangers than two brothers, united only by childhood memories? Sergey left Paris at the end of a week, and I.eo wondered whether he, too, should not be thinking of moving 011. He was tempted by Switzerland, Italy, England. . . .

He was still trying to decide what to do next when he heard that on March 26 (April 6), 1857 a certain Francois Richeux, sentenced to death for robbery and homicide, would be publicly executed in Paris.

Fascination won out over revulsion, 'lliere are experiences one cannot pass up, if one's profession is to wield the pen! Feeling somehow guilty-, as though he were going to the theater, he got up long before day, dressed in his chilly room, found a cab and drove to the Place de la Roquette. A dense crowd stood silently beneath the still-dark sky: many women, a few children.! All the bars around the square were open. Here and there a lantern lighted up an islet of faces, a bottle, a hand waving a hat. Above this milling conglomeration, the sharp vertical contour of the instrument of death. A low murmur greeted the arrival of the condemned man. People shoved and pushed to get a better view. Tolstoy must have found a good vantage point, for he did not miss a single detail of the ritual. When the cleaver dropped, he felt the blow in his own flesh.

Back in his room, his mind reeling with horror, he set down his first impressions in laconic terms: "Got up feeling ill, before seven, went to see the execution. Chest and neck firm, white, healthy. Kissed the New Testament. Then, death. Senseless! Strong impression, and not useless . . . The guillotine kept me awake a long time, made me keep looking back over my shoulder." Haunted by the vision of the decapitated body, he wrote to Botkin the same day: "I witnessed many atrocities in the war and in the Caucasus, but I should have been less sickened to see a man torn to pieces ljeforc my eyes than I was by this perfected, elegant machine by means of which a strong, clean, healthy man was killed in an instant. In the first case there is no reasoning will, but a paroxysm of human passion; in the second, coolness to the point of refinement, homicide-with-comfort, nothing big. A cynical, insolent determination to do justice, obey the law of God—justice as proclaimed by lawyers, who make utterly contradictory allegations in the name of honor, religion and truth . . . And the awful crowd! A father was explaining to his daughter how this very painless and ingenious mechanism worked, etc. Human law—what a farce! The truth is that the State is a plot, designed not only to exploit but also to corrupt its citizens. For me, the laws laid down by politics are sordid lies. . . . I shall never enter the service of any government anywhere."

Twenty-five years later, in Confessionhe returned to the lugubrious events of that day: "When I saw the head part from the body and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood —not in my mind, but with my whole being—that 110 rational doctrine of progress could justify that act, and that if every man now living in the world and every man who had lived sincc the beginning of time

f Journalists on the sccnc estimated the crowd at twelve thousand.

t Confession was written in 18S2.

were to maintain, in the name of some theory or other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know that it was not indispensable, that it was wrong."

After that, Tolstoy turned against the entire French nation. "There is no poetry in this people," he wrote, "their only poetry is politics. . . . On the whole, I like the French way of life and the French people, but I have yet to meet one man of real value, either in socicty or among the people."¹⁵ This comment may seem strange coming from a traveler who had spent six weeks in the country virtually without setting foot outside the Russian colony in the capital. Nevertheless, he was now determined to leave it. Switzerland—peace-loving, clcan and virtuous —would purge him of the horrors of Francc. Was it the guillotine alone, as fervent Tolstovans would have it, that drove him to pack his bags? They are forgetting that one week before—the eternal impulsive —he had already made plans to leave Paris with his brother Sergey;¹⁸ that, on the day of the execution, he qualified his letter to Botkin as "silly"; and that on the following day, his brooding over capital punishment did not prevent him from contemplating marriage with Princess Lvov. The truth was that the guillotine gave him a dramatic cxcuse for leaving, and until then, in his usual shilly-shallying way, he had been unable to make up his mind to go.

On March 27 (April 8), he went to say good-bye to Turgenev, and once again, face to face with his abhorred colleague, he could not restrain his tears. lie loved no one as well as the person he had demolished the day before. "After I had said good-bye to him and left, I began to cry, I don't know why," he wrote that evening. "I love him very much. lie has made a different person of mc, and is still doing so."

He was bored on the train, which left from the Gare de Lyon. In those days, there was no direct line from Paris to Geneva: one had to go through Macon and Bourg to Amberieu and then continue by stagecoach. Tolstoy was glad to leave the cramped, lurching compartment. Sitting next to the driver, he inhaled the fragrance of the sleeping countryside and looked up at the sky; his heart filled with ineffable contentment and well-being: "At night, with the full moon shining on the seat, everything fainted away and bccamc transformed into love and joy. For the first time in a very long while, I thanked God for being alive, and meant it."¹⁷

The first tiling he saw in his hotel room in Geneva was the New Testament, placed on his night table by the Bible Society. After the turpitude of Paris, it was like an invitation to return to the paths of righteousness. He read a few pages with delight and looked out the window. Moonlight on the lake, and the light of Christ in the soul—

Switzerland was a wonderful place! In the throes of an extraordinary joy, he wrote to Turgenev forthwith, advising him to flee Paris, too— that capital of iniquity: "I lived for a month in Sodom; deep is the layer of mud in my soul, and the two whores, and the guillotine, and the idleness, and the mediocrity."¹⁸

The only tiling he was sorry to abandon on the banks of the Seine was Princess Lvov, whom Prince Orlov was also courting. "Tell me frankly," he added, "whether a girl such as she might love me; I only mean by that, whether she would not find it repugnant or monstrous that I should want to marry her. Such an eventuality seems so impossible to me that even writing it makes me want to laugh." To prevent Turgenev from joining him in his laughter, he did not mail this letter, the draft of which has been preserved, but sent another, more moderate version, in its place, which presumably contained no mention of marriage.⁰ After reading this second missive Turgenev wrote to Annenkov: "He's an odd fellow, I've never met his like, and I don't fully understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic and aristocrat; he reminds one of Rousseau, only more honest—sternly moral and at the same time somehow unattractive." And to Kolbasin, "Tolstoy has left, after deciding that he loathed Sodom and Gomorrah, as he puts it. He has gone to Geneva, has taken a room on the lake, and is happy, waiting ... to grow bored with the place."¹⁰

In Switzerland as in Paris, Tolstoy saw almost no one but Russians, and in particular, two relatives of his, aunts twice removed: Elizabeth and Alexandra Tolstoy. Neither had married, and they lived most of the year in St. Petersburg at the Marya Palace where, since 1846, they had been maids of honor to Grand Duchess Marya Nikolayevna, daughter of Nicholas I and wife of Prince Maximilian of Leuchten- bcrg. Tolstoy had seen them at the palace several times during the previous winters, and had a warm recollection of his conversations with Alexandra, the younger of the two—though she was not very young any more: forty! But what lovely gray eyes she had, with such a serene and intelligent expression, and what an angelic smile, what a captivating contralto voicc, what tact, what culture, what sensitivity! She had a most gentle disposition, coupled with the most discriminating judgment. Her whole life was illuminated by religion. When Paris had suddenly turned his stomach, Tolstoy thought of her at once as the person most likely to understand him.

The day after he arrived in Geneva he went to see her in her villa, "Le Bocage," on the lakefront not far from town. lie adored making

• The second letter has not been preserved.

sudden appearances like this, dropping in out of the blue. Savoring his aunt's surprise at his wild-eyed and radiant expression, he cried as he came in the door: "I have come to you straight from Paris. That city has made mc so sick that I nearly lost my mind. The things I saw there! First, in the lodginghouse I lived in there were twenty-six couples, nineteen unmarried; I was horrified beyond belief. Then, to test myself, I went to see a criminal being executed by the guillotine. After that, I could not sleep, and I could not stay there any longer. Luckily, I happened to hear that you were in Geneva and I came rushing headlong here to see you, ccrtain that you would save mc!"²⁰

She listened to his confessions and comfortcd him, and he felt that here at last he might find peace of mind. She was too young for him to call her "Aunt," so he decided to go to the opposite extreme and call her "Grandmother" (babushka), as a joke, perhaps in a more or less conscious attempt to guard against her attraction for him. As they were related, their long talks together gave him the twofold pleasure of being admired by a woman and understood by a sister. A tender friendship grew up between them, to the delight of both. "Wonderful Alexandra," he wrote in his diary. "A joy and a consolation! I have never met a woman yet who is worth her little finger."²¹ Toward the end of his life he was to say, "Just as a ray of light sometimes filters beneath a door in a dark hallway, so the memory of Alexandra, when I look back over my long and sorrowful life, remains an eternally shining light." And in her account of their relationship,²² Alexandra wrote: "Our pure and simple friendship was a triumphant disproof of the widely held but false opinion that a friendship between a man and a woman is impossible. Our relations remained on a very special plane and I can honestly say that we were chiefly concerned, each in his own way, with that which ennobles life." But all the while she was disclaiming the least particle of impurity in her feelings toward her nephew, her portrait of him betrayed deep tenderness: "He was simple, extremely modest, and so lively that his presence animated everyone around him. ... He was not handsome, but his keen eyes, kind and highly expressive, made up for the favors nature had withheld." And also: "Like a mirror broken into fragments, every facet of him reflected a little of the brilliant light he had been given from above."

Mutually entranced, aunt and nephew became inseparable: together, they took boat trips around the lake, explored the countryside, went on picnics, played the piano. Tolstoy could not decide whether it was the flower-laden springtime or the company of the serene and smiling spinster that kept him in his state of euphoria. "It's terrible, how easily I fall for people," he wrote in his diary. "Ah, if only Alexandra were ten years younger."²³ lie was forgetting that if she had been, he would probably have deserted her for fear of getting involved in sentimental complications. With his imaginative, ardent and apprehensive nature, the inaccessible women were the ones he liked best. Knowing that no physical consummation could either crown or spoil his hopes, he found in her company that rare satisfaction of safcty-in-cxcitcmcnt, fulfill- ment-in-abstinence. Alexandra's ten years too many were her most certain attribute.

After spending a few days in Geneva, where he performed his Easter devotions with his aunts in the Orthodox church, he and Alexandra went by boat to the little village of Clarcns—the place Rousseau had chosen to write La Nouvelle Helo'ise. To think that at the age of fifteen he had worn a medallion with Jean-Jacques' portrait on it around his neck, and now, today, here he was in the very place in which his idol had lived. "I simply cannot tear myself away from this lake and its shores, and I spend most of my time contemplating it in ecstasy, going for walks or staring out of my window," he wrote to Aunt Toinette 011 May 18, 1857. This wonderful spot, "all leaves and flowers," was to hold him captive for the best part of three months. Alexandra went back to "Le Bocage," her villa near Geneva, and he began a flirtatious correspondence with her. He continually needed to remind her of his existence, amuse and intrigue and worry her. Poetic letters, droll telegrams and tender billets flew back and forth across the lake. One moment he would dash off a few lines of doggerel:

Toward Bocage my thoughts race. Incessantly myself I tell With babushka I would dwell Even in the Fireplace.!

The next, complaining of a painful sty on his eye, he yearned for his aunt—his babushka—to come and nurse him, and talked baby-talk: "And baba, and nana, and kaka, and tata, and zaza, and papa, and all the other vowels . . ."

He made friends with a group of Russians at Clarcns, one of whom was Michael Pushchin, brother of the famous Decembrist friend of Pushkin's. For his part in the uprising of December 14, 1825, Michael Pushchin had been demoted and sent to the Caucasus as a simple foot- soldier. "A splendid and good man," Tolstoy said of him. Which did not prevent him from calling him a braggart, later on in his diary. Similarly, on April 10 (22) the Mesherskys were "fine people," and 011

f "The Fireplace" was Tolstoy's jocular name for the court of the Grand Duchess, to whom Alexandra Tolstoy was maid of honor.

April 12 (24), "low, embittered, thick-skulled conservatives, convinced that they are the sole possessors of every virtue," and on May 4 (16), "likable characters" whose conservatism was "engaging." Mrs. Karam- zin, another holiday acquaintance, was initially labeled "an excellent creature," before ending up as "artificial, and very tiresome."

While criticizing this little group of idle rich, Tolstoy willingly shared its distractions. With one or another of them he went driving or canoeing, drank tea in a country inn, or hiked, alpenstock in hand, on longer excursions. On May 15 (27) he set out on a trip lasting several days, with an eleven-year-old boy as his companion—Sasha, the son of his friends the Polivanovs. He took his diary and a supply of paper in liis rucksack. Sasha strode manfully alongside; but, probably overexcited by the exhilarating air, he asked too many questions. "The boy is a nuisance!" noted Tolstoy. They slept in inns and started out at dawn. Near Les Avants, they were made giddy by the perfume of the narcissus; at Chdteau-d'Oex a miller ferried them across the stream; at Interlaken they feasted on rye and milk; at Grindclwald they were caught in a torrential rainstorm ("Sasha is lagging behind") and had to undress when they reached the chalet. "Attractive waitress," he observed. The next day, after ascending the glacicr, he returned to the inn, ate his supper, was unable to get to sleep and, at midnight, went out onto the second-floor balcony to look at the black and white mountains in the moonlight. A servant went by; he teased her a little, then let her go. lie thought he saw another one, beckoning to him from below, and hurried down. But she suddenly became uncooperative, and struggled and cried out, arousing the hotel. "Everyone came running and glared at me," Tolstoy wrote after beating a retreat to his room. "I can hear them up here, the whole household is awake. They've been going on about it in loud voices for nearly half an hour."²⁴ At Thun, he dined with Sasha and eighteen pastors; at Bern he thought of marrying—but whom?—near Fribourg he was appalled at the sight of "filthy, ragged children, a huge crucifix at a crossroads outside a village, inscriptions on the house-fronts and a garish statuette of the Madonna above a well." But he was awed by the majestic view from the Jaman Pass. "I love nature," he wrote, "when it surrounds me on all sides, spreading out as far as I can see, when the same warm breeze that caresscs me goes rolling off and is lost on the horizon; when the blades of grass I flattened as I sat down accumulate into the endless green of prairies, and the leaves whose shadows flicker across my face in the sighing wind become, afterward, the far-off line of the forest; when I am not alone to rejoice, but millions of insects arc buzzing and spinning around me and the coupled beetles go creeping along and the birds arc singing everywhere."²⁵

Back in Clarens he put his papers in order, wrote up his travel notes, a few pages of a short story—Albert—and one or two chapters of The Cossacks, wrote letters, read a little Balzac, some Proudhon, Las Cases' Memorial, the New Testament, accidentally broke a mirror and "had the weakness to read my fortune, with a dictionary." The words that came out—"sole, water, satarrh, tomb"—were unedifying. The future refused to disclose its secrets ahead of time.

The following day, May 31 (June 12), 1857, he set out on another long hike; his plan was to go as far as Turin, where Druzhnin and Botkin were staying. At the end of a zigzag itinerary, his friends disappointed him—they had aged, and could not bear each other's company—but the Piedmont entranced him. A pause to cool off and take a quick shower, and he set out again—on mulcback this time, to Grcs- soney, where the servingwoman at the inn was a giant, and there was a superb view of the Val d'Aosta; then a long, jolting journey by stagecoach: he met an idiot wearing a hat like Napoleon's; visited the Hospice of St. Bernard—enormous, adrift in the fog—and was given a "honey-sweet" welcome by the monks in the great hall with the fireplace; went down through mist and snow to Martigny and Evian— "the town is suffused with something mauve-colored."

The change of scene, his fatigue and the keen air had given him an appetite for love. At almost every halting-place he noticed some woman: "A pretty tobacconist . . ." (June 8 [20].) "A plump, jolly waitress." (June 10 [22].) "It's pleasant, but incomplete: no women." (June 11 [23].) "A freckled beauty. I want a woman, terribly. And a pretty one . . ." (June 15 [27].)

He returned to Clarens unappeased, spent a few days and then, unable to hold still, strapped on his pack and set off to Geneva, and from there to Bern. A railroad car packed full of "angular Germans," "effete French," who "want to be on a spree wherever they go," "stocky, blooming Swiss," a class of schoolboys and girls with their teacher, shouting and laughing . . . When the train stopped in the middle of some fields, Tolstoy leaned out the door to breathe in the drowsing landscape: "A moist prairie, lighted by the moon, with the cries of the landrails and croaking of frogs; something I can't define draws me out there, farther, farther. And yet if I went, I should be drawn farther still. My response to the beauty of nature is not joy, but a sweet pain."²⁶

Bern, flag-bedecked for some shooting match, was a disappointment. He was particularly ill-disposed, having dreamed again that night that he had tuberculosis. The oppressive jollity of the crowd, the shooting, the carousing, the people clambering on top of the tables and, in the zoo—oh, shame!—"one wretched Russian bear," terrified by the din- no, he could take no more of that! When the shadows began to lengthen, he followed "a fat beauty" down the street, returned to his hotel exhausted and, as soon as he fell into bed, dreamed the tuberculosis nightmare once again.

When he awoke he decided to go to Lucerne, where his two "aunt- grandmothers," his beloved babushki, were staying. He went to the best hotel in town, the Schweizerhof, which stood on the edge of the Lake of Lucerne and was patronized almost exclusively by the English. In his room, he opened the window and was transfixed: "I was literally submerged by the beauty of that water, and deeply moved," he wrote to Botkin. "I suddenly needed to hold someone in my arms, someone I love deeply, to hug her with all my strength, crush her against my breast and share my great joy with her . . . The lake is greenish and mauve, striped with moirl bands, dotted with rowboats. . . "²⁷

The magnificent view was unfortunately spoiled by the Englishwomen, "shiny and scrubbed, with long red faces and Swiss straw hats" and the Englishmen, "wearing cardigans and carrying traveling-rugs over their arms." Looking at forty or fifty of them seated at two long tables in the dining room, Tolstoy felt as though he were watching a collection of automatons, masticating, drinking and thinking nothing. "As the eight courses comc and go, each applies himself to eating more fastidiously than the others, and all are completely dead," he wrote, "literally dead. ... I have listened to more than five hundred conversations between the English, I have talked to them myself, but if I have ever heard a single living word from one of them . . . may I be struck down by lightning."²⁸

One evening he met a Tyrolian in the street, who was singing and accompanying himself on his guitar with such skill and gaiety that Tolstoy invited him to play under the windows of the hotel. The Tyrolian consented. At the first notes, a crowd gathered around him: cooks in white coats and tall hats, footmen in livery, doormen and chambermaids. Ladies "in long, wide gowns" and gentlemen "in detachable white collars" appeared on the Schweizerhof balconies. After three songs the performer, a squat, deformed little man, held out his C3p, but nobody threw any coins into it. He mournfully mumbled, "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," and turned away, dragging his feet, while the flunkeys' snickers rippled at his back. "It hurt mc," wrote Tolstoy. "I felt bitterness and shame for the poor fellow, for the crowd, for myself. As though they had been laughing at me, as though I, too, were guilty. . . ."²⁹ He raced after the singer, caught up with him and invited him to drink with him in the hotel. Scandal! 'Ilie patrons cringed in horror from the unwashed mountebank that so-called Russian count was bringing into the lobby. A waiter with a poisonous smile preceded the two men, not into the main lounge, but into a room furnished with wooden tables and benches, which was reserved for the personnel. Women were washing dishes in a corner.

"Do you want vin ordinaire?" asked a maitre-d'h6tel.

"Moet champagne," snapped Tolstoy.

The bottle arrived. At first the Tyrolian thought his rich stranger was tTying to get him drunk as a joke. Then, understanding that his gesture of friendship was sincere, he began to tell the story of his life. The servants gathered around. A doorman sat down unceremoniously beside the narrator and stared at him, sneering. Tolstoy turned white with indignation.

"What are you smirking at?" he cried. "Stand upl"

The doorman got up, grumbling. But Tolstoy could no longer contain himself.

"Why have you put us here, I and this gentleman, instead of in the other room? Well? Doesn't everyone who pays have the same rights? Your dirty republic!"

"The other room is closed," answered the doorman.

"That's not true!"

Intimidated by his tone of authority, which only a true master could command, a footman led the count and his singer into the main hall, which was in fact open. There, an Englishman and his wife were eating mutton chops. The man murmured "Shocking!" and the woman stared, pinched her lips together and left the room, "flouncing her silken gown." Soon afterward the embarrassed singer also left. Tolstoy ostentatiously shook hands with him outside the door. 'Ilie doormen, valets and patrons were all staring rudely at him. They needed a little lesson in Russian charity. To cool himself off, Tolstoy went for a walk, alone, through the streets, with clenched fists and feverish brow. The cool, star-studded night made him forget human pettiness. He raised his eyes and let himself be swept away in a mystical ecstasy. Beauty always prompted him to question himself and God. "A marvelous night," he wrote in his diary. "What is it I so ardently desire? I do not know. At any rate, it is not the blessings of this world. How can one fail to believe in the immortality of the soul, feeling such incommensurable grandeur in one's own? ... It is dark, holes in the sky, light. I could die! My God! My God! What am I? Where am I going? Where am I?"³⁰

The incident of the Tyrolian singer had impressed him so unfavorably that he began to write a story about it three days later, in the

form of a travel letter: Lucerne. "Which is more civilized, which more of a barbarian: the lord who stamped away from the table in a huff at the sight of the singer's threadbare suit, who refused to pay him for his work with the millionth part of his fortune, and who now, after eating a hearty dinner, is sitting in a handsome, well-lighted room, calmly passing judgment on events in China and justifying the murders committed there; or the little singer who has been out on the road for twenty years, with two sous in his pocket, risking prison, doing no harm to anyone, roaming over hill and dale, cheering people with his songs, and has now gone off, humiliated, almost driven away, tired, hungry and ashamed, to sleep in some nameless place on a heap of rotting straw?"

After what had happened at the Schwcizerhof, Tolstoy could no longer stand the sight of his over-comfortable room, the dining hall full of the gleam of "real white lace, false white collars, real or false white teeth, white faces and white hands," the feigned courtesy of the staff and the haughty manners of the English, whom he would cheerfully have cut to bits "in the Sevastopol trenches." He moved into a modest family pension, where he rented two attic rooms above the caretaker's cottage. Outside his windows there were apple trees, high grass, the lake and the mountains. And, as an added attraction, the landlady's daughter, aged seventeen, in a white blouse, who bounded hither and yon "like a young cat."³¹ Temporarily reconciled with Switzerland, he took a few short trips—to Lake Zug, Sarnen ("Here one re-enters the region of bald women with goiters and blond, self- satisfied cretins"), Stans ('Two young ladies from Stans made advances to me, one of them with a magnificent pair of eyes; I had a wicked thought, for which I immediately punished myself by a fit of bashfulncss!"), Ricd ("A feeble-minded woman with blond hair asked mc if I had ever seen a woman like her and began to yodel and prance about"), the Rigi ("Depressing, senseless panorama"). He observed, upon his return, that the landlady's daughter was still prowling around him, but she was "too regal" to be used for impure purposes; he went to see his "aunt-grandmothers," was bored by them for a change, and made plans for a long tour, the high points of which would be the cities of the Rhine, The Hague, London, Paris, Rome, Naples, Constantinople and Odessa.

Upon reaching Zurich, however, on July 8 (20), he changed his mind and veered off toward Schaffhausen, Fricdrichshafcn and Stuttgart. One evening he looked out of his train window and saw the moon 011 his right—a good omen! This favorable impression was heightened by an acquaintance he made 011 the train: a Frenchman, M. Ogicr,

who said he was a banker, wanted to become a member of the Assemble and was on his way to Baden-Baden, which was famous for its gambling tables. Tolstoy followed him. On July 12 (24) he was hard at it. On July 13 (25) he wrote in his diary, "Roulette from morning to night. Lost, but made it up toward the end of the day. At the house, the Frenchman [OgicrJ and a girl." On July 14 (26), "Roulette until six in the evening. Lost everything." "Everything" was three thousand francs.t M. Ogicr, the banker, accompanied him to his lodgings and stayed in his room until three in the morning, talking of love, poetry and politics. "Revolting," noted Tolstoy. "I would rather be a foul stinking creature with a goiter and no nose, the lowest of the idiots or the most hideous monster alive, than a moral abortion such as he." But the next day he shamelessly confessed that the "moral abortion" had bailed him out of a tight spot: "Borrowed two hundred rubles from the Frenchman and lost them at once. He has gone." What to do? Polonsky, the poet, was also at Baden-Baden; Tolstoy put the touch on him, but all he got was two hundred francs. Botkin, quickly alerted by letter, proved more liberal. He sent money from Lucerne. Tolstoy breathed again, bathed, went to the casino and noted in his diary that evening, July 16 (28): "Lost every cent, you pig!" For forty- eight hours, his pockets empty, he fumed with frustration at being kept away from the wheel: "Surrounded by human offal. And the biggest offal of all is me." (July 18 [30].) At last, the next day, Turgenev, who had also been called to the rescue, descended upon Baden- Baden like the Savior. Bearded, tender and melancholy, he was still shuffling along in the wake of Pauline Viardot. The two friends greeted each other rapturously. Turgenev scolded his troglodyte and lent him enough to tide him over.

A fresh fit of the fever swept over Tolstoy. Not a minute to losel He ran to the casino, his heart pounding wildly, played one number after another and watchcd the croupier rake away every stake, and staggered out of the room. Turgenev's features registered dismay when he heard the news. "Vanichka³² is very kind," wrote Tolstoy. "I feel ashamed of myself in his presence."

That day events took another turn for the worse: a letter came to the hotel, from Sergey, announcing that their sister Marya, whose husband's misconduct had become open knowledge, had left him for good. "I do not intend to be the favorite sultana in his harem," she said. She had taken her offspring and gone to live on her estate at Pokrovskoyc. "I nearly choked when I heard it," said Tolstoy. He stood up for his

J Approximately $1650.

sister, but winced at the thought of the scandal, the broken home, the children's divided affections. The combination of family problems and lack of funds determined him to go back to Russia. He took the train to Frankfort, where he rejoined the inestimable Alexandra ("A wonder 1 A delight! Never met such a woman"), borrowed enough from her to continue his journey, reached Dresden ("Pleasant town"), where he cncountcrcd Raphael's Sistine Madonna, who enchanted him, and Princess Lvov, who disappointed him. In Paris he had wanted to marry her; in Dresden lie had no use for her. She was too intelligent, "in the Russian manner," and surrounded by too many "young puppies." And yet, he liked her. "I was," he wrote Alexandra, "in the right state of mind for falling in love, having lost at roulette, being dissatisfied with myself and having nothing to do. It is my theory that love answers a need to forget oneself and that is why, like sleep, it comcs upon you more readily when you are displeased with yourself or unhappy. Princess Lvov is pretty, bright, honest and good company. I tried with all my might to fall in love with her; I saw her often, and . . . nothing! Am I a monster? I am probably lacking something!"³³

On July 26 (August 7) he went from Dresden to Berlin; on July 27 (August 8), he boarded a ship at Stettin; on July 30 (August 11), after four uneventful days at sea, he reached St. Petersburg. He gambled again on the trip, and had to borrow a few rubles from Pushchin the moment he arrived. Temporarily solvent, he abandoned himself to the joy of seeing Nekrasov, Panaycv and the other writers, and finding himself once more on native soil: "Blue morning—with dew and birch trees—Russian morning. How good it is!" he wrote on July 31, 1857. But on August 6, "Russia revolts me!" And he went to Yasnaya Polyana.