Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  One might ask how a disciple of Rousseau could have accepted the despotic notions of Catherine the Great, a lady whom in later life Tolstoy castigated as a ‘stupid illiterate and lewd wench’. The answer must be that at nineteen, Tolstoy was unformed. More than the generality of nineteen year olds, he was many things: both a Romantic revolutionary, and a man who wanted a career in Government service; a free-thinking nature-worshipper and, on occasion, a guilt-ridden Orthodox.

  The guilt was sexual. It is typical of Tolstoy, who loved to keep things in the family, that the introduction to whoring came from his brothers. It would seem that he was about fourteen years old when he was first taken to a brothel by his elder brother Sergey. He tells us that after he had ‘accomplished this act’ he stood by the bed and wept.18

  There is no way of knowing whether or not this was true. Historians have also been baffled by Tolstoy’s memory that this momentous event in his personal history took place in a room set apart for the purpose in one of the monasteries in Kazan.

  Tolstoy was to have plenty of subsequent experiences which could complement the first disillusioning moment with the Kazan tart: parlour maids, gipsies, peasants, eventually a wife were all to share his bed and witness the violent contradictions between his animal appetites and his sense of spiritual revulsion against the sexual act. There is a sort of Manichean appropriateness about it, if he really lost his virginity in a monastery. Whether or not they are true, the images which old age supplied him – of his uncontrollable desires, of a brother egging him on, of the lure of the woman followed by the lachrymose shame of it all – these tell their own ineradicable story. He wept but he took. Few artists have had a more exaggerated sense of sexual guilt; few have been more clumsy of their handling of it in private life, nor more creative in their literary use of it.

  Some of the reasons for his tormented feelings about sex are probably buried in the Freudian irrecoverable past – perhaps even before the death of his unremembered mother. But others are more superficially obvious, none more so than the fact that three years of sleeping with prostitutes left Tolstoy infected with gonorrhoea. A V.D. clinic is a better place than most to form feelings of hatred for one’s own body. Just at the moment when his studies seemed to be going well for him, Tolstoy developed the dreaded symptoms of discharge and stinging, and was taken off to the University clinic for treatment.

  The fact that there was a University V.D. clinic in a little place such as Kazan is indicative of the prevalence of the problem. Nineteenth-century Russia, no less than the countries of the West, was plagued by venereal diseases. Indeed, when you consider the medical history of the last century, with its dazzling array of distinguished syphilitics from Abraham Lincoln to Baudelaire, you might think that celibacy was the only prophylactic. Tolstoy’s father may well have had syphilis – his own sudden death and the hyperactivity of his children have been advanced as possibly syphilitic symptoms – but there is no evidence here to go on. Tolstoy himself was lucky, comparatively speaking, to have the highly unpleasant, but much less dangerous, clap.

  The mercury treatment which sufferers from gonorrhoea underwent was no joke. One of the dangers attaching to the disease is urethral stricture – an inability to pass urine and a subsequent poisoning of the body. It was this that killed James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, and a lifelong sufferer from gonorrhoea. Mercury was supposed to cleanse and open up the passages. But liquid metal does not easily get into those bodily regions on its own. It has to be injected through the male member. It is surely a reassuring tribute to the power of nature that the famous lechers of history like Boswell and Tolstoy lost none of their appetite for the chase in spite of the fact that one bit of bad luck could land them once more in the clinic with its primitive syringes and scarcely competent medics.

  We have remarked on Tolstoy’s isolation in the world. History had made him a minority member of a minority class while withholding from him many of the privileges of that class. Thus, he was a member of one of the senior aristocratic families, but an impoverished branch of that family. Parentless, he was growing up neither in the old-fashioned, solid world of Moscow society nor in the exciting metropolitan atmosphere of St. Petersburg.

  Now, at the age of nineteen, he was physically isolated in the clinic. It was the first time in his life when he had been completely alone. Even at lectures, or going for walks, Tolstoy, like most well-born youths, was accompanied by a servant. (Herzen was the same – he had a lackey to carry his books all the time he was at Moscow University.) Tolstoy had made a friend of his lackey, who was called Vanyusha. Now even he was removed. There were no brothers, no cousins or aunts, no noisy friends. Just the pain, and the shame, and the blank walls of the clinic looking down on him. It was in this enforced solitude that Tolstoy first began to keep a diary. Its first words are, ‘It is six days since I entered the clinic. . . . I have had gonorrhoea, from the source where you usually get it.’

  It is on the day that he wrote those words that the true history of Tolstoy may be said to have begun. After all, the reason we value him and find his story of interest is as an imagination. Tolstoy was to have some adventures – he saw a man’s head being chopped off in Paris, he took part in the Crimean War. But, for the most part, the outward circumstances of his life were no more interesting than any other Russian nobleman of the nineteenth century. What singles him out is what happened when he began to keep a diary, a record which was to develop, eventually, into the practice of fiction.

  With many gaps, he was to remain a compulsive diarist until his last days of life. The diary was a confessional, a notebook, a catalogue of moral laws. It was never to be the chatty, observant sort of diary kept by a Boswell or a Pepys. It was not a diary which focused much attention on other people. Centre stage, always, and for the rest of his life, was Tolstoy himself.

  Because of this, the diary is a vehicle less of self-record than of self-projection. He is not giving an account of what he is actually like, so much as projecting a version of what he would like to be like: it is in this process of projection and transformation that the origins of Tolstoy’s fiction are found.

  On April 17, he was asking his diary ‘what is the purpose of a man’s life?’ and deciding that it was ‘development’ – whatever that was supposed to mean – ‘the development of everything that exists’. It appears to mean that Tolstoy felt that he must realise all his potential and talents, for he adds, ‘I would be the unhappiest of men if I could not find a purpose for my life – a purpose both general and useful – useful because my immortal soul when fully mature will pass naturally into a higher existence and one that is appropriate to it. So my whole life will be a constant and active striving to achieve this one purpose. . . .’19

  Nothing about his examinations, which were forthcoming; nothing about leaving the University either. Yet two days later, on April 19, 1847, he petitioned the University authorities to be allowed to go home ‘on the grounds of ill health and domestic circumstances’. On the date of this petition to go down from Kazan, he merely notes in his diary. ‘Got up extremely late and only made up my mind at two o’clock what to do during the day.’20 Read out of context, this would sound like a day of idle lounging. Because it coincides with the date of his petition to the governing body of Kazan University to be allowed to go down, we must assume that the ‘resolution’ formed at two o’clock was in fact the decision to go home, that is, to go to Yasnaya Polyana. No explanation.21

  By this date, Tolstoy had left the clinic, and was living once more with his brothers Sergey and Dmitry. Some time before, they had moved out of the Yushkov house, and were living with their servants in a separate apartment. Whether Colonel Yushkov had had enough of their rowdy ways, or whether they had got bored with his, is not recorded. Perhaps there was not enough room for them. The Yushkov house is not particularly large.

  So, between April 17, when Tolstoy was expressing his urgent desire to ‘study the whole course of law necessary for my final e
xamination at the University’ and his petition of leave on April 19, what had happened?

  Two facts have to be borne in mind. In the previous year’s examinations, Tolstoy had done disastrously badly. Having mastered Arabic and the rudiments of some other Oriental languages, he had then ‘flunked’ on some simple geographical questions which were put to him in the viva voce parts of the examination. What were the chief ports of France? He had not the faintest idea, and showed an equal ignorance of the simplest facts of Russian history. It may well have been that when it came to the point, he did not wish to go through that humiliation again. After all, in those days it was perfectly usual to attend a university without taking a degree.

  The second fact is much more crucial; and that is, that on April 11, 1847, Tolstoy had come into his inheritance. The first experience of solitude in the clinic had been both desolating and exciting, a time when, perhaps as never before, he realised that his life was his own. The revealing thing about his childhood fondness for the story of Joseph and his brethren is the extreme ambivalence of that story, in which the second youngest member of a great family, after a period of separation from them all, achieves such eminence that he becomes their lord and master, holding in his hands their life and destiny. But this achievement only comes after a period of separation, when Joseph is away from his brethren, proving himself in Egypt.

  Nikolay had already gone into the army. Sergey was coming to the end of his course at Kazan, which would have left Tolstoy with his brother Dmitry, the ‘holy idiot’. And although he idolised Dmitry in his memory, it is significant that he hardly ever saw him between the time when he left Kazan in 1847 and Dmitry’s death.

  The complicated business of sharing out their parents’ inheritance had been under discussion since the previous summer with the trustee of their father’s will. In particular, they were anxious that Marya should not be impoverished. The executor wrote to Nikolay, posted in the Caucasus, ‘I know your brotherly love towards Marya Nikolayevna, who loves you like a father.’

  The final agreement left Marya with Pirogev, an estate of some one hundred and fifty serfs, and nine hundred and fifty-eight desyatinas of land. (A desyatina is about 2.7 acres.) The other estates and serfs were divided up among the brothers. It is remarkable how equitably they divided it. For example, Nikolay got a larger estate, Plotits’na, with rather more than a thousand desyatinas, and three hundred and seventeen serfs; Sergey, who loved riding, got the stud farm, and the prize estate of the inheritance, Pirogovo, with about two thousand and seventy-five desyatinas. But these brothers paid their younger brothers compensation in ‘roubles silver’. Nikolay paid Lev two thousand five hundred silver roubles; Sergey paid him one thousand five hundred silver roubles. Dmitry got seven thousand silver roubles from Sergey, while inheriting three hundred and thirty-one serfs of his own and an estate of a thousand desyatinas.

  In addition to his roubles, Lev inherited various estates in the Tula province: Yasenky, Yagodnoya and Mostovoya Pushotsh, as well as one called Malaya Vorotinsk. It was a convention that the youngest son inherited the estate where the family had grown up, and so Lev also inherited the Volkonsky estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Altogether he came into about one thousand four hundred and eighty-five desyatinas of land and the ownership of three hundred and thirty peasants – ‘souls’, as they were always called.

  It is quite hard to translate these statistics into tangible or imaginable realities. That is, how rich was Tolstoy? A lot poorer than his extravagant old Tolstoy grandfather had been, the governor of Kazan. The richer families in Russia, such as the Sheremetyevs, had incomes in the region of seven hundred thousand roubles a year, and owned two hundred thousand ‘souls’.22 In general the upper ranks of the nobility, to which both Tolstoy’s parents belonged, the grand seigneurial class, might have been expected to own over a thousand souls, whereas the ‘gentry’ would own in the region of five hundred. If you owned less than a hundred ‘souls’ you were considered to belong to the ‘impoverished’ dvoryane.23 Tolstoy’s family had most distinctly come down in the world in the last twenty years. On the other hand, to inherit at the age of nineteen four thousand roubles, three thousand acres and three hundred and thirty slaves was not exactly poverty.

  The inheritance was made formal on April 11, 1847, shortly after Tolstoy left the clinic. The exams still loomed up, and he had resolved to work hard for them. But his resolution lasted precisely a week. On the 19th, he asked for permission to withdraw from the University and, leaving Dmitry and Sergey still studying there, he left Kazan for Yasnaya Polyana.

  To speak of Tolstoy ‘deciding’ to abandon his University studies or ‘making up his mind’ to leave Kazan implies both a finality and a rationality which were not present. The only rational explanation for his departure is that there was no explanation. On impulse, he decided to go back to ‘Auntie’. Not for the last time in his tempestuous existence, inner crisis was resolved by flight.

  Chapter Three

  The History of Yesterday

  1847 – 1850

  We feel our vocation only after we have once mistaken it. . . .

  A Landlord’s Morning

  Spring was just beginning to burst when Tolstoy came home in April 1847.1 Around, nestling in pleasant, rolling country, was the estate, its villages, farms and outbuildings. Dodging ruts and pot-holes in the mudtrack which nineteenth-century Russians might have recognised as a road, the coach would pass between those two turrets constructed by old Prince Volkonsky in Napoleonic times. The whitewash on them was flaky now and after only thirty years their brickwork looked seedy. The turrets passed, the coach drove down the avenue of silver birches, almost a cliché of patriotism and nostalgia in Russian literature; and at the end of the birch avenue stood the two-storeyed, white-painted house, initially reminiscent of New England colonial architecture. Nearby stood the no less elegant one-storey servants’ quarters, built by Grandfather Volkonsky and equipped with accommodation for the house serfs, as well as with workshops, looms for weaving and carpet-making, sewing rooms and lace-making rooms.

  The peasants who came to peer at the arrival of their new landlord were indescribably filthy and poverty-stricken. Even the big house itself, when you got closer, showed all the signs of dilapidation and decay. The English garden, planted long since by old Volkonsky, had gone to seed. The paths were unswept, unweeded. The roof looked in a bad state. The woodwork of the verandah, with pretty carved fretwork, was rotting and splintered. But waiting for him on the verandah would have been Aunt Tatyana. After nineteen years of emotional and geographical upheaval, this was a home-coming.

  For some, the actual place of their birth is of almost no significance. For Tolstoy, however, the Volkonsky inheritance was infinitely more than a collection of wooden buildings and muddy avenues. The house, too, was much more than just a place. To date, it had been the one constant thing in his life. His family fortunes had changed with appalling violence and rapidity since he was two years old, taking him now to Moscow, now to Kazan, now to this aunt, now to that. Yasnaya, like Aunt Tatyana, remained a constant, and to Yasnaya, for summer holidays, they had always tried to return. Its significance for him was found less in the memories it contained than in those events and personages which were beyond memory’s grasp. The recovery of the Volkonskys and their world was no merely whimsical interest in family history; it was an urgent, emotional necessity. The fact that the search always eluded him is an essential ingredient in his art. Even in old age, when he had lived continuously at Yasnaya for many years, his diary finds him walking in the garden and thinking of his mother. ‘Yes, my dear mother whom I never called by that name, since I couldn’t talk. Yes, she is my highest conception of pure love – not a cold, or divine, but a warm, earthly, maternal love. This is what attracts my bitter, weary soul. Mummy dear, caress me.’2

  Inside the house was the green leather sofa where Tolstoy himself was born and where (often at great pain and inconvenience to his wife) he insisted that so many of
his children should be brought to birth. The fetish has such obvious importance that it does not need to be stressed. It tells its own tale. Wandering about the cold, dusty rooms, the nineteen-year-old possessor of his inheritance would have seen the portraits of Tolstoys and Volkonskys looking down upon him; uncles, cousins, grandparents, but no mother. (‘By some strange chance no portrait of her has been preserved, so that as a real physical being I cannot picture her to myself. I am in a way glad of this, for in my conception of her there is only her spiritual figure, and all that I know about her is beautiful.’)3 The uniformed men who stared from the walls of landings and dining room, however, had all too physical a presence, and they looked upon the young Tolstoy with gloomy disdain. Yasnaya Polyana had known better days. Russia had known better days. The family – this branch of it at least – had known better days. In the time of Catherine the Great they had been generals, diplomats, ministers of the Crown. There were still Volkonskys and Tolstoys at Court, but they were cousins of some distance, and their existence only made Tolstoy’s poverty and lack of direction a further cause for self-doubt and reproach.

  We need feel no surprise that Tolstoy felt the urgent need to do something about Yasnaya Polyana; something to improve the estates and the physical well-being of his serfs. Nicholas I himself, no dangerous liberal, had addressed the Council of State in 1842 and admitted that ‘there is no doubt that serfdom in its present situation in our country is an evil, palpable and obvious for all’. But Nicholas argued that to give them their freedom and to introduce reforms all at once would in fact cause hardship and social disorder. Like later governments in history, he pleaded for a ‘gradual transition to a different order’ and blamed a lot of the trouble on those foolish landowners who tried to educate their serfs beyond their station. To this noble band, Tolstoy soon aspired to belong. He felt an instinct to tidy things up, to improve their living conditions, to give them more say in how their affairs were run. But the gulf between the serfs and their new young landlord was enormous; and Tolstoy soon began to reflect, in his own small area, on this nineteenth-century Russian malaise. Those who were equipped, by breeding or education, to govern the country were not given the power to do so by the autocracy. But even if they could not hope to take part in the processes of government, they tended to drift to the towns. The reward for their status, however, was the possession of land and serfs. Russia was therefore scarred by a multitude of neglected estates whose owners were either incompetent or unwilling to take the responsibility for them. Sometimes the estates were left in the hands of an agent; sometimes, they were just left, while the ‘souls’ owned by these absentee or negligent landlords could go to the devil. Tolstoy, at the age of nineteen, was forced into the dilemma himself by the fact of his inheritance; and the fact that his estate was a place charged with so much important emotional significance did not make it easier for him. As well as schemes for the estate, he was full of schemes for what to do with himself. He was a wild mixture of extreme indolence and wistful ambition. Life, so far, had been a mess. For the next two years he planned: