by A. N. Wilson
(1) To study the whole course of law necessary for my final examination at the University. (2) To study practical medicine, and some theoretical medicine. (3) To study languages: French, Russian, German, English, Italian and Latin. (4) To study agriculture, both theoretical and practical. (5) To study history and geography. (6) To study mathematics, the grammar-school course. (7) To write a dissertation. (8) To attain a degree of perfection in music and painting. (9) To write down rules. (10) To acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences. (11) To write essays on all the subjects that I shall study.4
Quite a programme. No wonder that he did not include time for writing a novel. In fact, it never crossed his mind. The list shows (medicine, agriculture) that he did partly want to study so that he could become a responsible landlord. One of the very impressive things about Tolstoy’s life, taken as a whole, is that he carried out this demanding course of study pretty thoroughly. To the languages, he also could add competence in Turkish and Arabic and, in later life, Greek and Dutch. Perhaps he never achieved perfection in painting. But in all the other areas, he was to become competent, chiefly, no doubt, because of his acute consciousness that in his youth it had been emotionally impossible to settle down to being educated. Nor was it realistic to imagine, as a nineteen year old alone in the country with a favourite ‘Auntie’, that he would find either the necessary stimulus to begin or the external disciplines to continue such a course of study. For the first few months at Yasnaya Polyana, he was tasting freedom from Kazan, and a strong sense of homecoming: there was the rediscovery of the haunts of childhood, as well as the various experiences of poking a disgusted nose into the peasant izbas (cottages), of hunting animals and entertaining country neighbours and relations. None of the resolutions at this stage had any chance of being carried out: except, perhaps, his resolutions to write down rules. He was good at that. There were rules for controlling the emotions, rules for subordinating the will to the feeling of love (‘Keep away from women’ – small hope of that!), rules for exciting feelings of universal love, rules for developing various faculties, such as the ability to draw conclusions, poured from his pen. But no conclusions were drawn in life.
As we have said, one obvious reason why Russia was in such a mess was that the owners of estates found it too boring to live on them. The tastes and aspirations reflected by Tolstoy’s rules would obviously not be satisfied by Auntie (clever and stimulating as she was) nor by the peasants (fascinating as he found them imaginatively and sexually). Tolstoy needed companionship, drawing rooms, concert halls, libraries: in short, he needed town. Rousseau’s cult of the rural and the primitive had seized his imagination while surrounded by the bustling and noisy atmosphere of Kazan. Nor was Tolstoy ever disloyal to Rousseau’s vision in principle. In practice, though, after his first few months there, Yasnaya Polyana bored him terribly.
His cousin (and future brother-in-law) Valeryan Petrovich Tolstoy came to stay towards the end of the summer, before returning to complete a spell of Government service in Siberia. As Valeryan’s tarantas (coach) pulled away, Lev Nikolayevich impulsively jumped in to join him, perfectly prepared, on the spur of the moment, to go and pass the winter in Siberia. Why not? What else was there to do? Valeryan pointed out that though Lev Nikolayevich had brought a little hand luggage, he had no hat on his head, and that this might be uncomfortable in Siberia. Tolstoy stopped the coach and got out again.
The little story reveals the complete aimlessness and lack of direction in his life at this juncture. We know that he is Tolstoy and that one day he will write War and Peace. But no such knowledge was vouchsafed to the young man himself. When he inherited Yasnaya Polyana he was quite as genuinely at a loose end as any of the Romantic heroes of early nineteenth-century Russian literature, as indolent as Chatsky or Olenin. What a good example, incidentally, of how dangerous it can be to make uncritical use of the fiction as a source for Tolstoy’s biography. No one questions, for example, that the novel which he later planned, but never completed, to be entitled A Russian Landlord, draws heavily on this period for its memory and inspiration. ‘Yes,’ said old man Tolstoy, pausing for a walk round the estates with his German biographer Löwenfeld, ‘here we are in the very selo [village] where the young landowner experienced all his disappointments.’5
But, far from being a drifter like Tolstoy himself, the hero of the novel is seen in vividly decisive terms. On the very first page we meet a nineteen-year-old prince who has completed his course at the University (unlike Tolstoy) and who, after a summer spent on his estate, writes to his favourite aunt that he intends to devote himself to bettering the lives of his peasants.
As I wrote to you before, I found affairs here in indescribable disorder. Wishing to put them in order and understand them, I discovered that the chief evil lies in the very pitiable and impoverished condition of the peasants, and that this is an evil that can only be remedied by work and patience. If you could only see two of my peasants, David and Ivan, and the way they and their families live, I am sure that the mere sight of those two unfortunates would do more to convince you than anything I can say to explain my intention. Is it not my sacred and direct duty to care for the welfare of these seven hundred men?6
Tolstoy, one notices, has quietly doubled the size of his inheritance for the purposes of fiction. He is not only more decidedly altruistic than in real life; he is also richer.
Yevgeny Onegin, and other heroes, have similar feelings of charity about the ‘souls’ in their ownership; and there is no reason to suppose that Tolstoy was anything but earnestly sincere in his desire to better the lot of such as Ivan and David. In Gogol, Leskov and other writers, we get used to the tragi-comic figure of the liberal landlord, trying to improve the life of his peasants and being viewed with a profound suspicion which would never have been directed towards the heartless, old-style agents and landlords who maltreated or abused them. In Leskov’s tale of the emancipation, A Spiteful Fellow, the idiotic peasants take a great dislike to their liberal English steward, Mr. Denn. ‘He wouldn’t give me a flogging,’ one of them complains. They are not happy until they have burnt down the distillery which Denn had built for them, nor until some of their number have been flogged, put on a chain gang, or sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia; then they know where they are.
Tolstoy attempted no such crude ironies in the fragment A Landlord’s Morning, but it quite obviously reflects his dismay at the hopelessness of peasant conditions as he confronted them in the summer of 1847. Dismay, however, is not all that he felt when confronted by the great gulf fixed between himself and his peasants. A profound imbibing of Rousseau inclined him to a belief in the noble savage, while something deeper drew him towards the peasants in a startlingly unusual manner. The fragment ends on a typically Tolstoyan note, wishing that he was a peasant, and not just any peasant, but a particular one called Ilya. There is nothing here of Marie Antoinette. What Tolstoy envies in Ilya is his supposed ability to respond to life spontaneously and naturally. It is not Ilya’s Christian virtue so much as his pagan self-abandonment which so attracts Prince Nekhlyudov: ruddy of cheek, fair of curls, a latter-day King David, the peasant has arrived on his cart outside an inn:
Ilya broadly exchanges greetings with a fair-faced, broad-bosomed hostess, who asks ‘Have you come far? And how many of you will want supper?’ and with her bright, kindly eyes looks with pleasure at the handsome lad. Now having seen to his horses he goes into the hot, crowded house, crosses himself, sits down before a full wooden bowl, and chats merrily with the landlady and his comrades. And here, under the penthouse, is his place for the night, where, in the open, starry sky is visible and where he will lie on scented hay near the horses which, changing from foot to foot and snorting, pick out the fodder from the wooden mangers. He goes up to the hay, turns to the east, and crossing his broad, powerful chest some thirty times, and shaking back his fair curls, repeats, ‘Our Father’ and ‘Lord have Mercy’ some twenty times, covers himself, head and all, with his c
oat and falls into the healthy, careless sleep of strong, young manhood. And now he dreams of the towns: Kiev with its saints and throngs of pilgrims, Romen with its traders and merchandise, Odessa and the distant blue sea with its white sails, and Tsargrad [i.e. Constantinople] with its golden houses and white-breasted, dark-browed Turkish women – and thither he flies freely and easily further and further and sees below him golden cities bathed in bright radiance, and the blue sky with its many stars and the blue sea with its sails; and it is gladsome and gay to fly on, further and further. . . .
‘Splendid!’ Nekhlyudov whispered to himself, and the thought came to him, ‘Why am I not Ilya?’7
The crazy question was to return to Tolstoy again and again in the course of his life. Even on his deathbed (though by then the thought had become encrusted with doctrine) he was studiously wondering what it would feel like to be spontaneous, and uniting this wonder with his admiration for the muzhik (peasant).
Ilya, like a number of the noble savages in the young Tolstoy’s imagination, feels no sexual guilt. He is able to shake back his curls, and make the sign of the cross over his beautiful chest, and then dream, with no torment, of the full breasts of Turkish women. But it was not so for Lev Nikolayevich, whose attitude to sex alternated between insatiable sexual appetite and morbid self-reproach. His diary, when he could bestir himself to write in it, is a catalogue of ‘rules’ punctuated with pompously juvenile generalisations: ‘From whom do we derive sensuality, effeminacy, frivolity in everything and a multitude of other vices, if not from women? Who is to blame for the fact that we lose our innate feelings of boldness, resolution, judiciousness, justice etc. if not women? A woman is more receptive than a man; and therefore women were better than us in virtuous ages; but in the present depraved and corrupt age, they are worse than us.’
These feelings of revulsion are very marked whenever he can bring himself in the diaries to allude to the sexual act itself rather than resorting to such code-language as ‘I am not pleased with myself,’ for a lapse into unchastity. For example, in the spring of 1851, we find him writing, ‘I beckoned to something pink, which in the distance seemed to be very nice, and opened the door at the back. I couldn’t see her. It was vile and repulsive. I even hate her because I’ve broken my rules on her account.’
There was plenty of this in the years of indolence after he first left Kazan. In the first summer at Yasnaya Polyana, he was in love with a maid called Dunyasha. She had lately got married to a steward called Orekhov and the young landlord had the pair sleep in the room next to him, so that he could imagine on the other side of his bedroom wall, and perhaps, in a tormented way, even listen to the guiltless happiness of the couple. Another year, it was a maid of his Aunt Tatyana, a girl called Gasha, whom he got pregnant. The incident was one of the things which, according to his later conversations with Biryukov, got changed and dramatised into the theme of his later novel Resurrection. Gasha, however, unlike Maslova, did not have to drag her way through sin and shame, but was transferred to a perfectly happy life as a maid in the household of Tolstoy’s sister.
But in spite, or perhaps because of, the delights and moral torment provided by maids and peasant women, life in the countryside was as dull for Tolstoy as it had been for Yevgeny Onegin.
Потом увидел ясно oн,
Что и в дepeвнe cкyкa та жe,
Xоть нет ни yлиц, ни двopцoв
Hи кapт, ни бaлoв, ни cтиoв . . .
[Then he saw clearly that it could be just as boring in the country, even though there were no streets, no palaces, no cards, no balls, no verses. . . .]8
For the next two years, Tolstoy spent the summer months in Yasnaya Polyana and for the winter season, he took a flat, which he shared with a friend, in the Arbat district of Moscow.
A twentieth-century Muscovite would be surprised, were he or she to return to the Moscow of 1850, by its smallness and by its newness. In 1812, it had been a largely wooden town. At the time of Napoleon’s invasion, it had been burnt to the ground. More or less all that survived of the old town was within the walls of the medieval citadel, or Kremlin, with its stupendous churches, cathedrals and royal residences.
Domestic Moscow was a nineteenth-century creation. The town which Tolstoy knew consisted of avenues, squares and houses, not one of which was much more than forty years old. True cosmopolitans like Turgenev enjoyed looking down their noses at the Muscovites, who seemed to them provincial and conservative. But many of the ‘good’ old families had large houses there. In 1850, there was still an air of aristocratic leisure about the place. The extraordinary overcrowding and industrial expansion which dogged the old capital in the later part of the century, and which caused Tolstoy such anguish, had not yet begun.
By his own confession, the Moscow days and nights were dissipated: a lot of drinking; sorties to brothels or to ‘the gipsies’; an increasing addiction to gambling. All these punctuated his presence at the soirées and balls of his grander relations and friends. In society, shyness still tormented him unless he was drunk. It is hard to think that the rules which he formulated for social behaviour necessarily made him the most charming of companions. ‘Rules for society. Choose difficult situations, always try to control a conversation, speak loudly, calmly and distinctly, try to begin and end a conversation yourself. Seek the company of people higher in the world than yourself. . . .’9
The irresolution of these years, the inability to settle or to study, or to know where his life was leading, were perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the Ant Brotherhood was now dispersed. Nikolay was absent on military service in the Caucasus. Dmitry was out of touch. Sergey was devoting himself to horses and to fornicating with gipsies. Yet, of all the four brothers, Lev Nikolayevich was the only one who had failed to complete his University course. Obviously, the original idea (or one of them) upon leaving Kazan was that he would spend his time in the country to revise his law books. That idea came to nothing. Then, quite suddenly, towards the end of January 1849, he went to St. Petersburg.
There could have been no greater contrast between the essentially provincial atmosphere of Moscow, and the gracious beauty and cosmopolitan energy of St. Petersburg. It was not Tolstoy’s first visit to the place, but it was his first extended stay there. For the first time, his eye took in the sheer scale of the city – the streets, the buildings, the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals, the enormous eighteenth-century palaces, the avenues and boulevards down which the people glided elegantly in their sleighs. The Neva was frozen. The snow showed off the buildings to peculiar effect. This was the city which Pushkin loved and celebrated in his poetry:
I love your brutal winter, freezing
the air to so much windless space;
by broad Neva the sledges breezing;
brighter than roses each girl’s face.10
Here too was the world which later Dostoyevsky was to make his own – the teeming world of the poor, the eccentrics and grotesques who invariably congregate in a capital city. All sorts and conditions were here, from the Tsar and his courtiers (among them Tolstoy’s own relations) to the notorious bath-houses and bars of low life. Here, too, were intellectuals, fully aware that this was the city where Peter the Great had deliberately opened a window upon Europe. It was a place where you were as likely to hear French spoken as Russian, where students might congregate in cafés, and where all the latest periodicals and publications could be devoured.
On February 13, a fortnight after his arrival, Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergey that he intended to stay in the capital for ever. First, he was going to take his law examinations, then he was going to enter Government service, as all the great Tolstoys had done. ‘I know you won’t believe that I’ve changed; you’ll say “That’s the twentieth time you’ve said it, and there’s no good in you and you’re the emptiest of fellows.” But no, this time I’ve changed quite differently from the way I used to change before. Before, I’d say to myself, “I think I
shall change,” but now I see that I have changed and say, “I have changed.”’11
Strange to say, Tolstoy did buckle down and pass a couple of law examinations within a few months of coming to live at St. Petersburg; but the next letter to Sergey, in May 1849, tells its own sad tale. He was badly in need of three thousand five hundred silver roubles to cover gambling debts and living expenses. Would Sergey kindly sell a small estate to cover the costs? As for Lev Nikolayevich’s idea of joining the Civil Service, it had evidently been forgotten or abandoned. He was now going to join the Horse Guards as a cadet. Unfortunately, he could not join up, let alone get a commission, without money. ‘God willing, I’ll turn over a new leaf and become a respectable person one day. . . . Don’t show this letter to Auntie. I don’t want to upset her.’12
