by A. N. Wilson
The literary historians, anxious to hurry on to Tolstoy’s great works, have written slightingly of The History of Yesterday. But they have also written misleadingly, as though its chief interest was a freak, a false herald, promising the emergence of a Proust or a Joyce. Far from being proto-Modernist, the fragment actually suggests (with its debts and allusions to Sterne and Rousseau) a world of literary modes and models which, by the standards of Western Europe, were at least half a century out of date. But The History of Yesterday does herald a new star in the firmament; a novelist who has almost nothing in common with Proust or Joyce; the author, that is to say, of Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
Chapter Four
Kinderszenen in the Caucasus
1851 – 1854
Koгдa кacaютcя xoлoдныx pyк мoиx
C нeбpexнoй cмeлocтью кpacaвиц ropoдcкиx
Дaвно бестрепетньIе pyки –
Hapyжно лorpyжacь в иx блecк и cyeтy,
Лacкaю я в дyшe cтapиннyю мeчтy,
Пorибшиx лeт cвятыe звуки.
[When the hands of town-beauties, which have long since ceased to tremble, touch my cold hands with careless boldness, how often then – outwardly absorbed in their glitter and vanity, do I caress in my soul an old dream, and the sounds of years gone by!]
Lermontov, ‘January 1’
It was three years1 since the brothers Tolstoy had all seen one another together; all, by now, had gone very separate ways, and the effects on the immature Lev Nikolayevich had been disastrous. Since he left Kazan, he had been unable to settle to anything. Friendships had been formed, dinners eaten, maids deflowered, resolutions of good conduct written down but, time and again, broken. More disastrous than his inability to settle in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Yasnaya was Lev Nikolayevich’s growing addiction to the tables. However he might be loved by his aunt Toinette, his sister Marya or his brother Sergey, the addiction – which was the ruin of so many noble families in Russia – was a menace. The idleness, the moral inertia, the sense of futility were all sure symptoms of what the Russians call khalatnost’: literally, ‘dressing-gownness’, the tendency to loll about doing nothing, and thinking futile thoughts. It is in such moods that gambling debts, desperate philosophies and suicides are hatched.
No one recognised the dangers more than the young self-improver himself, and the resolution of the difficulty – salvation through literature – had not yet formed itself in his brain.
On December 22, 1850, Nikolay Nikolayevich had come home on long leave from the Caucasus, and the means of grace – via the Ant Brotherhood – were at least reconstituted. The noise of life began again, though for a few months the brothers did not see much of each other. Nikolay had other old contacts to renew besides that with his youngest brother. Sergey had by now installed his favourite gipsy girl from Tula, Marya Shishkina, as mistress of his household. Marya Nikolayevna and her husband Valeryan were nursing their new offspring. Lev Nikolayevich spent much of the time in Moscow buying a horse he did not need, flirting with his cousin’s wife, practising gymnastics (a new craze) and having the experiences and, at last, the resolution to pen the fragmentary The History of Yesterday. Thus was passed the holy season of Lent.
Easter was spent in Yasnaya Polyana and, conscious of his unworthiness, he confessed his sins to the village priest and received Holy Communion. In the days after Easter, he tried to talk things over with his aunt, but the mere sight of one of the house serfs ‘is making me struggle violently with passion and yield to it more and more often, just because I’ve already had her here’. On April 18, the diary sadly recalls, ‘I could not refrain.’2 On the following day, his brother Nikolay arrived with his sister and brother-in-law. They had come for a family reunion in the old home, to be sure. But there was also business to discuss. How were Lev Nikolayevich’s debts, now standing at sixteen thousand roubles, to be paid? It was eventually agreed that one of his villages, Verotynka, should be sliced off his estate and sold. Meanwhile, what was to be done with the young prodigal? Common sense, family tradition, and Lev Nikolayevich’s natural impulse to run away from difficult situations, for once, all combined. Generations of Tolstoys had served in the army and it had been on Lev’s mind for some years that he might, like Nikolay, do the same. Why should he not accompany his elder brother when his leave was up, return to the Caucasus and see how he liked it? If it seemed a plausible idea, he could join up as a cadet.
The idea had everything to be said for it. Not only would it be an ideal way of taking Lev away from the drawing rooms of Moscow, which were obviously so ‘bad’ for him. It also had positive attractions, particularly for the newly-fledged ‘literary’ man, who had just scribbled his few pages of The History of Yesterday. Where better, for a young hero of their time, to seek a period of exile than in the Caucasus where, as Lermontov observed, the wilderness listens to God, and star speaks to star? It is important, perhaps, given the fact that our responses to the Caucasus are so conditioned by what Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy had to say about the place, that we remember that, whatever the romantic charms of the landscape, the reasons for a Russian troop presence there were purely military. As Ronald Hingley has incisively reminded us, ‘Like the English lakes, the Caucasus inspired the country’s poets, but the atmosphere was less elegiac, and anything but Wordsworthian. It was neither little Lucy nor the springs of Dove that one might expect to meet round the bends of Chechnya’s mountain tracks so much as a bullet in the neck.’3
Eighteen fifty-one was an unusually exciting time for a young Russian to be embarking upon his career, and the journey to the Caucasus by a young man whose career might go either in a literary or a military direction is emblematic of the climate of things.
In intellectual circles, particularly in St. Petersburg, the march of progress was still keenly and optimistically felt, in spite of the many repressive measures of the Government of Tsar Nicholas I. Whatever the Emperor and his advisers may have wanted, Russia was by now on its way to being a fully European country, open to all the cultural and ideological conflicts which had swept through Western Europe in the previous decade. If the Decembrist generation had brought back European books and ideas as though they were some kind of guilty contraband (in the way that a modern Soviet citizen might smuggle home blue jeans after a trip to London or Paris) the present generation were less self-consciously borrowers and more surely partakers of the European inheritance.
Eighteen forty-eight had been the ‘year of revolutions’. Louis-Philippe had been driven from the throne of France; Metternich had fallen in Vienna. In Berlin Frederick William IV had conceded a constitution. At about the same time, only a few weeks before the Paris revolution, a young German exile in London had published a little work called The Communist Manifesto, whose opening words were ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’ His name was Karl Marx.
The Russians not only had intellectuals of their own to match these western developments. Their surprising literary renaissance showed every sign of continuing. Having played almost no part in the European scene at any previous stage in its history, there had been a sudden and extraordinary flowering. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) had begun to publish poems when he was fifteen which were wholly Russian in character, and yet comparable with his giant contemporaries Byron and Scott. Pushkin’s appearance in the Russian sky – comparable with the emergence of Shakespeare towards the close of the sixteenth century in England – lit up a firmament of stars: his fellow poet Lermontov; the critic Belinsky; and other names no less remarkable, both those such as Alexander Herzen who were ‘Europeanisers’ and welcomed Russia’s new contacts with the West, and those such as the Aksakov brothers who cherished the Slavic inheritance and were to be known as ‘Slavophils’. Lermontov, moreover, before his tragically early death, was to write A Hero of Our Time. The literary bombshell which was waiting to burst upon Europe – the development of the nineteenth-century Russian novel – had st
arted to fizz. The absurdities of Russian bureaucracy had been satirised in Gogol’s hilarious Dead Souls (1837) and in the writings of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin whose novel The Golovlyov Family is if anything funnier than Gogol.
Tolstoy, then, belonged to the first generation in Russia to have been born into a full, vigorous literary and intellectual inheritance; to have been born into a Russia which not only received western intellectual writings as well as novels and poems, but which also now produced such writings themselves, writings of a kind which rivalled and outshone their western equivalents.
On one level, then, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But there was a drawback. In Russia, for intellectuals, there has always been a drawback.
Tsar Nicholas I was not, to put it mildly, an intellectual and his reaction to all this imaginative renaissance in his midst was characteristically decisive. Herzen had suffered internal exile from 1834 onwards and in the year of revolutions he found himself exiled from Russia altogether. There is not much doubt that, had Belinsky not died in 1848, and had Lermontov and Pushkin not already been dead, they would all have been locked up or silenced. Gogol’s exposition of the corruption of local government officials in Dead Souls seems to us like pure comedy. It cost him his liberty. Even though he was profoundly Orthodox in religion and conservative in politics, Gogol was such a non-person in the Government’s eyes that by the time he died in 1852, Turgenev could be put under house arrest merely for writing a kind obituary of his fellow novelist.
This, then, was the climate in which Tolstoy was growing up: a renaissance such as had never been seen in Russia before and a system of censorship which vigorously suppressed any signs of independent life among poets, journalists and novelists. It is rather as though the Government of Louis XIV, instead of persecuting Huguenots, had turned its attentions on Corneille and Racine; or as though Elizabeth I, not content with making Catholic martyrs, had sent Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser to the gallows. On December 22, 1849, a young genius called Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was arrested and condemned to death for the crime of owning a printing press. The sentence was changed at the very last minute – even as he stood before the firing squad – and by the time Tolstoy was making his way down to the Caucasus, Dostoyevsky was doing hard labour in Siberia.
Nicholas I felt the classic tyrant’s need to compensate for disturbance at home by taking up a belligerent attitude to the countries on his border. And there were definite causes for Russian anxiety. Poland, for example, was a traditional area of concern. It had always regarded itself as an independent Catholic kingdom, profoundly hostile to the Orthodox Empire to its east. Now it had the full backing of Prussia against the borders and armies of Nicholas I. And as if this was not worrying enough for Nicholas, there had been, ever since 1848, a whiff of revolution in the air throughout Eastern Europe. Romania had had a revolution in 1848. Poland and Hungary were riddled with westernising, atheistical revolutionaries. Or so, to the Russian way of looking at things, it appeared.
In addition, Nicholas wanted to expand the borders of his Empire in three important directions – in the north-east Pacific, in Turkey (where an international crisis was brewing) and in the Caucasus.4
It was the Caucasian situation which, immediately, affected Tolstoy. It is somehow emblematic of what the future would hold that his literary career, which really began in the Caucasus, should have come to birth far from the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is also somehow typical that, though there were strong political reasons for his brother’s fellow soldiers to be in the Caucasian mountains, for Tolstoy it was a purely personal journey. Of all the Russian writers in the last century, he is the one who fits least easily into any intellectual circle or political category. From the beginning he is alone.
By the treaty of Turkmanchay, in February 1828, Russia had acquired Persian Armenia. During the 1830s, the Russians made inroads into the main Caucasus massif and had ambitions of pressing on towards Turkestan and Afghanistan, in spite of continual resistance from the natives. In 1844, the Tsar appointed Count Mikhail Vorontsov as viceroy of the Caucasus. In May 1845, Vorontsov had led a force of eighteen thousand men into Chechnya. The mountaineers retreated, allowing the Russians to press on as far as Grozny, penetrating deep into the heavily (beech) wooded hill country. But it was then that the resistance from the mountain snipers could begin, and there were four thousand Russian casualties, including three generals, in the summer of 1846. There had been no peace in the Caucasus ever since, in 1799, the mad Emperor Paul had annexed Georgia, which for hundreds of years had been a little buffer state between the Ottoman and the Persian Empires.
Transcaucasia required, and received, a constant supply of Russian troops, rather as the Northwest Frontier of India and Afghanistan, at the same period, and for the next hundred years, needed the perpetual vigilance of the British army. In fact, the comparison has often been made between the relative positions of the Caucasus and India in the life and imaginations of the Russian and British Empires respectively.5 It is probably a more helpful one than the comparison with the English lakes, though Tolstoy was to have his Wordsworthian moments in the year to come.
When the decision had been made that he should accompany Nikolay back to his unit, there was nothing to do but act upon it. They left Yasnaya Polyana on April 29, 1851, spent a few days in Moscow, and then made their way to spend a week in Kazan. In his diary at the time Tolstoy expressed his ‘contempt for society’, but by the simpler standards of Nikolay (founder of the Ant Brotherhood, who had spent the past five years entirely in the company of soldiers) Lev was disconcertingly, and even foolishly, sophisticated. Within a day of arrival in Kazan, Lev remarked to his elder brother of some passer-by in the street, ‘That man is a cad.’ ‘Why?’ asked the baffled Nikolay. ‘Because he isn’t wearing gloves.’ ‘Why is it caddish not to wear gloves?’ asked Nikolay. Lev did not have an answer.6
Still he was not so much of a coxcomb that he could not enjoy a return to childhood enthusiasms. One day, helpless with giggles, he climbed a tree outside his aunt Pelageya’s house and shouted at everyone through the windows. And he renewed a fairly unserious contact with a girl he had been half in love with. The girl’s name was Zinaida and, unlike the maids and gipsies about whom he could only scribble secretly in his diary, this devotion could be talked about in the family. It was ‘the pure yearning of two souls for one another’.7 He even tried getting ready to be the Lermontov de ses jours – by writing a poem about her. It was awful.
Going to Kazan gave them the chance to make duty calls on the family. But it also provided them with the chance to travel south in the most agreeable possible manner: by barge down the Volga.
The dullness of the landscape in the initial stages of their voyage down the river was relieved by the exciting sense that, as they drew closer to Astrakhan, they were entering a new and romantic world. If the boat seemed in danger of getting stuck on shallows or sandbanks, exotically clad figures would come to haul it to rescue. Tolstoy was getting his first glimpse of the Cossacks.
Cossacks, since the seventeenth century, had been a law unto themselves, while fulfilling an essential role as border guards for the Tsars. On the Polish border, they had something of the character of Orthodox crusaders, medieval knights born centuries out of time, organised into camps, and committed to resisting the Roman Catholicism, monarchism and westernisation of the Poles. In the Tartar regions whither Tolstoy was bound, their religious obedience had, strangely enough, less fervour. Cossacks here were nominally the defenders of Christianity against Islam. But though they tended to be Old Believers (an ultra-conservative sect who had broken away from the Orthodox Church rather than accept the reforms of the Patriarch Nikon in 1653) and therefore to regard even the Orthodox as beyond the pale, their general attitude to life was unfanatical. In so far as their religion affected existence, it was very much the sort of life-worship which Tolstoy describes in his Cossacks novel.
Though they had not adopted the Moh
ammedanism of their foes the Tartars, they had adopted many Tartar words, costumes and customs. Unlike the Cossacks of the Polish border, the Cossacks in the Caucasus grouped themselves together in villages. And it was to such a village, Starogladkovskaya (the name means ‘old and smooth’) that they were bound, a tiny little place on the banks of the Terek, a border village with, on the other side of the river, hostile Moslem snipers looking down upon it. All the physical descriptions of the village in Tolstoy’s later story, The Cossacks, are based closely on the place: the almost shocking beauty of the mountains, seen from the reedy, sandy banks of the Terek, the Oriental strangeness of the village, the low-lying, thatched houses, the beautiful women, kept firmly in their place.
But the final version of the story was not written up for another nine years. We should postpone until then, perhaps, a discussion of Tolstoy’s reasons for making the hero of The Cossacks both so like, and so unlike, his twenty-three-year-old self. Olenin, it will be remembered, only has to glimpse the mountains before deciding, at once, to put his past behind him. (He fails to do so in the end, but his initial reaction is to feel that ‘all his Moscow reminiscences, shame and repentance, and his trivial dreams about the Caucasus, vanished and did not return’.)
Tolstoy, who had no function in Starogladkovskaya, save as an awkward civilian hanger-on of his military elder brother, felt no such reassurances on his arrival in the Caucasus, if his diaries of the period tell us the truth. He realised that he would be thrown back, for company, on Nikolenka’s regimental colleagues, and the prospect did not please him much. Within two days of arriving in the place, he was exclaiming ‘My God, my God, what sad and melancholy days. . . . The melancholy which I feel is something which I cannot understand or imagine to myself. I have nothing to regret, almost nothing to wish for, no reason to be angry with fate. I can understand how gloriously I could live on my imagination. But no. My imagination depicts nothing for me – I have no dreams. There is a certain gloomy delight in despising people – but I am not even capable of that; I don’t give them a thought at all. . . .’ Six days later, he was deciding that he really had been in love with the girl in Kazan with whom he had flirted. No wonder. ‘I did not say a word to her about love, but I am so sure that she knew my feelings that if she did love me, I attribute it only to the fact that she understood me. All impulses of the soul are pure and elevated to begin with. Reality destroys their innocence and charm.’8 This was certainly true as far as sex was concerned, and it is crucially important to understand this if Tolstoy is to come into any kind of focus.
