by A. N. Wilson
It was almost exactly at this date that he began to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau,7 a writer who – if this title belongs to anyone – was the greatest single influence on the development of Tolstoy’s thought. He used to say later that, as a young teenager, he so idolised Rousseau that he wished he could have worn his portrait round his neck in a locket, like a holy icon.8 In other conversations, he would imply that this actually had been his practice. If so, neither the locket, nor anyone else’s memory of it, survives. Also, as an old man, he liked to say that he had read the whole of Rousseau many times, even his Dictionary of Music. But it is hard to establish how much of the Genevan philosophe Tolstoy had managed to get hold of in Kazan.
Family legend had it that his mother’s favourite reading was Emile, which would have made it into a sacred text so far as Tolstoy was concerned, regardless of content. Almost certainly, he did read Emile in his teens, and absorbed the simple piety of the Savoyard priest’s creed (in Book IV). This priest, born a peasant, and ordained before he has given himself the chance to question the doctrines of the Catholic Church, becomes preoccupied with a quest for truth at about the same time as getting into trouble for his inability to keep his vows of celibacy. ‘My perplexity was increased by the fact that I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith, I was forced to reject the rest; as I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived of those which were not absurd.’9
The Savoyard priest does not reject God, but finding all manifestations of the supernatural, and all ideas of the future life, quite unknowable, he prefers to concentrate on those elements in religion which do immediately concern him: that is, matters of morality and conscience as they impinge on his own soul: ‘I am aware of my soul; it is known to me in feeling and thought: I know what it is without knowing its essence. . . . Our first duty is towards ourself. . . . Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. . . . Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free.’10
At various crucial moments of his life, Tolstoy found himself rediscovering the faith of the Savoyard priest; the oftener he discovered it, the more certain he became that it was his own inner vision: hence the confusion he sometimes felt about whether he or Rousseau had written the works of Rousseau. Rousseau’s appeal to him need not be laboured: the acceptance of the near ungovernability of sexual passions; the idea that though the dogmas of the old religion be false, the kernel of moral truth contained within them can be rediscovered and made new; the love of simplicity, rural life, and the idea that virtue is best practised in retirement from society: how exciting all this must have seemed when read in an upstairs room in the Yushkov household. Rousseau, early associated in Tolstoy’s mind with his mother, was the exact opposite of everything Aunt Pelageya stood for. Her household and her way of life emphasised social distinctions in the crudest possible manner: Rousseau taught the equality of all men. Her soirées, where you could hardly hear yourself speak above the silly chatter, were full of loud, noisy, happy people; the gloomy adolescent Lev Nikolayevich read in Rousseau that wisdom was best learnt in solitude. Pelageya believed that religion consisted in obedience to the Church and a love of her rituals; Rousseau, that true religion consisted in a rejection of Church dogmas, and a contemplation of one’s own inner soul and conscience.
Meanwhile, though, with the inconsistency which marks almost any adolescent character, he continued to attach extreme importance to wearing smart clothes and uniforms, getting drunk, riding an expensive horse, and asserting his social superiority whenever he came across children of the lesser nobility or of yet lowlier rank. All memories of him at this date, his own and other people’s, call back a young blade of fairly insufferable arrogance and conceit, who, for all his moral posturings, devoted most of his waking hours to various sorts of upper-class horseplay.11
But this would be a misleading impression. Nineteenth-century Russians, just as much as modern ones, were expected to ‘serve’. The poor anti-hero of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman ‘serves’ somewhere or another in an office in the gleaming metropolis erected by the great tyrant Peter, his demented attempts to run away from Peter’s statue being suggestive, as all readers of the poem so terrifyingly feel, of the complete impotence of ordinary, private individuals in the presence of an overwhelmingly strong autocracy. The higher ranks of the aristocracy, no less than the dreary, nameless little Yevgenys of Pushkin’s imagination, were expected to ‘serve’ and it was with this in mind that the Tolstoys’ education was planned and organised. The oldest, Nikolay, was bound for a military career. The Tolstoys were in a position to ‘serve’ in important and high-ranking capacities. This, for Lev, was what gave such delightful poignancy to the innocent Dmitry’s feeble attempts to get into Government service. Presenting himself at the Secretary of State’s office at the Second Department of the Civil Service in St. Petersburg, Dmitry did not try to pull any kind of strings. His brothers imagined that he must be the only man in Russia who took the word ‘serve’ quite literally. Humble and patriotic, he was not wanting to use his name, or the fact that both his mother’s and his father’s family had played an important part in the history of Russia in the last three centuries. He merely told the Secretary his rank, and explained that he had decided to offer his services in the field of legislation.
‘Your name?’
‘Count Tolstoy.’
‘You have not served anywhere?’
‘I have only just finished my course and I simply wish to be useful.’
‘What post do you want?’
‘It is all the same to me – one in which I can be useful.’
Poor Dmitry was too good for this world. No wonder his attempts to ‘serve’ ended so calamitously! (Having wasted his short life, he was to die in a sordid hotel bedroom in the arms of a prostitute.) Lev Nikolayevich was to become a diplomat, like generations of Tolstoys before him, a decision which must have had something to do with the fact that he had a great capacity for languages. With the tutor brought with them to Kazan, the younger Tolstoy boys perfected their French and German. Once arrived in the place, Lev studied Arabic and Turko-Tartar in the local Gymnasium or grammar school, before entering the University at the age of sixteen. Kazan, both geographically and historically, was well-placed for the study of such Oriental languages, and his first year as a student was spent thus engaged. In Tolstoy’s second year he changed to Law, and gave up the idea of becoming a career diplomat.
These sentences convey almost nothing, if by ‘University’ we imagine something like the institution which now flourishes in Kazan, with its large well-stocked libraries, its hideous physics block and badly dressed students – things largely indistinguishable from anything which might be found in Harvard, Paris or Oxford.12 As Tolstoy first went up the hill towards Kazan University in May 1844, he would have seen a beautiful white building with a green roof and a golden cupola. But he soon lost any illusions about the beauty of the life there. A modern western historian13 has likened the University of Kazan at this date to Dotheboys Hall, and the educational principles of the Director to those of Mr. Squeers. State scholars, for example, were obliged to do tough manual labour. The University grounds were divided into allotments, exactly divided up according to the number of students. In Aksakov’s memory, the buildings seemed ‘like terrible enchanted castles such as I read of, or a prison where I was to be shut up as a convict. The great door between the columns at the top of the high flight of steps, when it was opened by an old pensioner, I felt had swallowed me up – the two broad, high staircases, lit from the cupola and leading from the hall to the first and second floors – the shouting and confused noise of many voices which came from all the classrooms. . . . all this I saw and heard and understood for the first time.’14
At the Gymnasium, and even more at the University, Tolstoy would have first becom
e aware of the actual structure of life in Russia, life outside his own family, life as directly affected by the policies and character of Imperial autocracy.
Kazan had only been a university since 1804 when a decree of Alexander I elevated the grammar school there to University status. The lecturers in early years were nearly all ushers or hacks from the old school and, of the seven professors in the original University, most were German because there simply were no Russians capable of teaching to the required standard. Where Russians did display intellectual prowess, they could be sure of vigorous persecution from the Government. The outstanding Russian mathematician of the early nineteenth century, for example, was N. I. Lobachevsky, whose pioneering work on non-Euclidian geometry was acclaimed by scientists all over the world. But not in Russia. Almost all Lobachevsky’s energies, as Professor of Mathematics at Kazan from 1827–46, had to be devoted to defending himself and his colleagues from the assaults of the University Curator, M. L. Magnitsky. This figure had hoped for the chair of Mathematics himself, and when he failed to get it, he managed to get the Government post of University Curator. He was based in St. Petersburg, and was persistently unsympathetic to Kazan. Indeed, his first report to the Minister of Education about the University was that it should be abolished. Having failed in that resolve, he kept up a series of attacks on all the teachers there, reporting back on them to the Minister of Education, Count S. S. Uvarov, himself no model of progressive liberalism. This took such underhand forms as examining students’ lecture notes for evidence of sedition on the part of the lecturers. And sedition, as defined by Uvarov’s Ministry, was almost impossible to avoid.
Tolstoy, as we have seen, decided to specialise in his first year at Kazan in Oriental languages. But it was considered highly damaging if students read anything which exposed their minds to the fact that not everyone shared the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church. Lecturers in the Oriental Faculty were forbidden to ‘enter into the details of the religious beliefs and customs of the Mohammedan peoples’. Influence, if there was to be influence, was to be all the other way around. Uvarov defined the Oriental Faculty at Kazan in these terms: ‘the half-savage sons of the steppes of Mongolia eagerly accept the fruitful seeds of enlightenment.’15
Fair’s fair. There was at least one Buryat Mongol student in the faculty in Tolstoy’s time: and though they expected students of Arabic not to read anything with a Moslem reference there were Moslems at Kazan University. At this period in Oxford, you could not even enter the University, let alone take a degree, unless you belonged to the Church of England. Uvarov’s remarks about the half-savage sons of the steppes are no sillier than Samuel Johnson’s about driving cows out of the garden, as a justification for expelling Methodists from Oxford.
Some explanation should perhaps be offered for what the Minister of Education meant by the ‘seeds of enlightenment’, lest by ‘enlightenment’ the modern reader supposes that the University lecturers were encouraging their students to read Kant, Rousseau, Diderot or Voltaire. If you read philosophy at Kazan in Tolstoy’s time, the set books were St. Paul’s epistles to the Colossians and to Timothy. This was at the insistence of Magnitsky, famous in private conversations for his cynical expressions of atheism, but who, in his public role, was determined to stamp out from the universities ‘the fine poison of unbelief and of hatred for the lawful authorities’.16
Philosophical inquiry, in such an atmosphere, was therefore almost inevitably bound not only to be anti-Church, but also anti-Government. Since the Government of Nicholas I chose to view itself as the very embodiment of Orthodoxy – and Orthodoxy of a stridently oppressive, ignorant and superstitious kind – it was hard to depart from those superstitions without declaring yourself against the Government.
Tolstoy was to become one of the most notable of nineteenth-century Russian dissidents, one whom both the Government and, subsequently, Lenin recognised as more than half-doing the revolutionaries’ work for them while always remaining an anomaly in the political spectrum. Much of this must be explained in terms of Tolstoy’s own personality, and in terms of who he was and who his family were. But much stems, too, from the accident of his having gone to university at Kazan, rather than St. Petersburg or Moscow, both at this period hotbeds of liberalism, anarchism and general discontent with the Government.
Kazan in Tolstoy’s day knew none of the ‘student unrest’ which was beginning to trouble it when Lenin’s father studied there a decade later. By the time Lenin was himself a student at Kazan in the 1880s, there were even public demonstrations against the University Inspector: it was for his part in such a riotous assembly that Lenin was sent down in 1887. In Tolstoy’s day, the discipline was unchallenged, as is shown by the shock which his own arrogant behaviour caused his fellow students. When he and an undergraduate were late for a history lesson, they were locked up together for the night in the lecture room, and the other young man was amazed at the cool way in which Tolstoy inveighed against the absurdity both of the University system and of its syllabus. In Moscow, no such amazement would have been felt, and it would have been the norm from an enlightened and rebellious young nobleman. Kazan completely lacked, in the 1840s, the atmosphere of political discontent which could have produced, say, an Alexander Herzen. All Herzen’s radicalism was learnt, in embryo, while he was an undergraduate at Moscow in the 1830s. After he had left his beloved University, he fostered his radical ideas with a small group of like-minded college friends. It was only when this kruzhok began to diminish under the persecutions of the autocracy, and after he had himself suffered prison and Siberian ‘internal exile’, that Herzen finally left Russia for ever in January 1847. While Tolstoy was lying in the University clinic at Kazan, the father of Russian socialism was making his way across a Europe which was on the brink of revolutions; and though he never saw many of the kruzhok again, they remained with Herzen, in his memories and his writings, throughout the period of his exile. Although a passionate individualist in his convictions, Herzen, like all those radicals and revolutionaries in Russia who looked to him as to a king over the water, was sustained by the thought of a little gang. Tolstoy, whose way of being a rebel was to be analogous but, in the end, totally different, had no such reassuring sense of belonging, in his youth, to an intellectual circle.
He is frank in his declaration that he chose his University friends because of their looks. He would rather ride in a sleigh wrapped up in a rug with some handsome young blade than discuss how to set the world to rights. Late nights were devoted to drinking and wenching, not to the niceties of political argument. Political engagements, as opposed to unspecified discontent, a sense that the world was out of joint, could hardly have dawned on Tolstoy in such a place as Kazan unless there had been a considerable politicised student movement. There was none.
When we consider the statistical facts, his isolation seems almost more exaggerated than he could feel it, or make it, himself. While he was a student at Kazan, the population of the Empire was in the region of sixty million. A census taken five years earlier (and there is no reason to suppose that there was a dramatic increase in University numbers in the years 1842–47) showed that there were three thousand four hundred and eighty-eight students in the whole Empire attending universities. Of that number, in 1842, only seven hundred and forty-two took degrees.
Higher education which, in the Soviet Union, as in the modern West, is an ideal held out to all who can attain it, was something which affected only the tiniest proportion of the population of Russia in Tolstoy’s day. And, after a year of reading Oriental languages, Tolstoy switched to Law. This put him in an even smaller elect, for only higher-ranking members of the aristocracy were allowed to study Jurisprudence in Russian universities of the ancien régime.
Tolstoy’s professor at this date was a man called D. I. Meyer who, curiously enough, in 1849, before Tolstoy had become famous, noted down his impression of the boy. ‘I gave him an exam today and noticed that he had no desire to study at all. He ha
s such expressive facial features and such intelligent eyes, that I am convinced that with good will and independence he can develop into a remarkable person.’17
Inspired by Professor Meyer, Tolstoy decided that he wanted to study very much indeed. Just as Dmitry’s piety momentarily persuaded him that he wanted to be a devout Orthodox and Sergey’s debauchery made him want to act the part of a rake, Tolstoy’s admiration for the Professor of Law (the first and only person teaching at Kazan to inspire such devotion) made him want to pass his exams. ‘For me the chief sign of love is the fear of offending or not pleasing the object of one’s love: simply, fear.’
Meyer had asked Tolstoy to prepare a dissertation comparing Catherine the Great’s Instructions to the Commission for the Composition of a Plan for a New Code of Laws with Montesquieu’s Spirit of Law. His diaries at this time show that Tolstoy considered this an extremely profitable exercise. There is nothing in his notes to suggest the later positions he was to adopt, the advocacy of anarchy and so on. There is no whiff of criticism of the notion of a purely autocratic system of government. As we have already indicated, it would have been inconceivable for an undergraduate of this period to have voiced criticisms of the Government in a formal piece of work without getting himself and his tutor into trouble. But to judge from the private jottings he made, there is nothing to suggest that Tolstoy felt such hostility. The only hint of the man he was to become is seen in his condemnation of capital punishment; but nothing could be less ‘Tolstoyan’ than his belief that good laws should be interchangeable or synonymous with morals.
