'I have read all of Rousseau, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I did more than admire him - I worshipped him. When I was fifteen, I wore next to my skin a medallion with his portrait rather than a cross. Many of his pages are so close to me that it feels like I wrote them myself.'
Tolstoy in conversation with Paul Boyer, 19011
THE MOVE TO KAZAN spelled the end ofTolstoy's innocence. When he was fourteen, he lost his virginity, and he would later define the subsequent twenty years as a period of 'crude dissolute living in the service of ambition, vanity, and, above all, lust'.2 The five and half years Tolstoy spent in Kazan were certainly not the happiest in his life, and few of his memories of this time were fond ones. Nevertheless, it was during his adolescence that he embarked on the intense self-analysis which culminated in the writing of his first fictional masterpieces. From the outset, Tolstoy conducted his self-analysis on the page. At the age of eighteen, shortly before he left Kazan to return home to Yasnaya Polyana, he began to keep a diary. It was with his first diary entries in March 1847 that his turbulent creative journey began, rather than with the completion of his first piece of fiction in 1851, or the publication of his first work a year later. This diary, which was to become the engine-room of his writing and which he kept on and off for the rest of his life, became increasingly voluminous in his last decade and fills fourteen volumes of his collected works.
As with the move to Moscow in 1837, the Tolstoys' relocation to Kazan in November 1841 was a major undertaking, even without accompanying adults. The smallest and most remote of the Tolstoy properties was sold to pay outstanding debts, and then the family's belongings were loaded on to a number of barges to make their slow way down to Kazan via the Oka and Volga rivers. The family's belongings, of course, included numerous serfs, including tailors, decorators, carpenters and cooks, on whom they would depend for their well-being in their new home. The four brothers and their sister set off later, and travelled overland by sleigh, via Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and the Chuvash capital of Cheboksary, one of the ports on the Volga. They settled upon arrival in Kazan into the ground and mezzanine floors of a centrally located house; their landlords occupied the top floor. It was not far from the river and one of the city's monasteries, but its windows looked out on to the prison. The Tolstoys' servants had separate lodgings.3
Kazan was not like other Russian cities, as would have been immediately apparent to the new arrivals, for there were minarets alongside the domes of its many churches. Until 1552 Kazan had been the centre of a powerful Tatar khanate which had gradually adopted Islam as its state religion. After Kazan was conquered by Ivan the Terrible (who celebrated his first great victory over former Mongol lands by building the oriental-looking St Basil's in Moscow's Red Square), the city was populated by Russians, and its small remaining Tatar population would henceforth become a persecuted minority. The miraculous survival, after one of the city's many fires, of the venerated icon of Our Lady of Kazan in 1579 is testament to the vigour with which the new Russianisation policy was pursued in this former Islamic kingdom. And the fact that it was to Our Lady of Kazan that the Russian army's commander-in-chief Mikhail Suvorov appealed for help after Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, meanwhile, is testament to the esteem in which this icon came to be held. In 1813 Suvorov was for this reason buried in the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg; it was here that a precious copy of the original icon was kept, and it now became the chief memorial to Russia's victory over Napoleon in the city.
Kazan never lost its Tatar character entirely. Catherine the Great had permitted mosques to be built again in Kazan towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the university founded in the city in 1804 rapidly became a major centre for oriental studies. The very foundation of Kazan University, where all the Tolstoy boys became students, speaks volumes about the city's importance nationally. Until Alexander I's famous 1804 statute, the only universities in the Russian Empire were located in Moscow, Dorpat and Vilna, the last two of which provided an education delivered in German and primarily for the benefit of their elite Baltic German populations. In 1804, these three were joined by two new universities in European Russia (St Petersburg and the Ukrainian city of Kharkov), and a third in the distinctly Asian setting of Kazan, some 750 miles south-east of St Petersburg. It was also in Kazan that the first state lycée was founded outside Moscow and St Petersburg, but as the Russian nobility preferred to educate their offspring at home, the younger male Tolstoys continued to be privately taught after moving to Kazan.
Kazan was a provincial city, but by the standards of provincial Russian cities at the time it was exceptional, and its university was a major reason behind the Tolstoys' relocation there. Soon after they arrived in November 1841, Nikolay became a second-year mathematics student, having failed the exam to transfer to the third year at Moscow University.4 He graduated in 1844, then joined the army, and was soon transferred to the Caucasus. His younger brothers, meanwhile, started to prepare for their entrance examinations with tutors. Sergey and Dmitry both entered Kazan University in August 1843 to study mathematics like Nikolay, and Lev followed in 1844. Their sister Maria had a German governess, then was educated at the newly founded Rodionov Institute for girls in Kazan.5
By all accounts Aunt Polina had very little impact on the upbringing of the young Tolstoys, nor was she in any serious way involved with it. Radically different from her reclusive and abstemious late sister Aline, she was a social butterfly for whom good taste was everything. According to her nephew Lev's subsequent reminiscences, she was a kind and pious woman, but rather frivolous. She was also vain, and clearly flattered by the chance now given to her to step into the role of saviour to the orphaned Tolstoys, but she was too busy socialising to exert any moral authority over her young charges, who now had the chance to go wild. Polina's marriage was unhappy, and her husband was frequently unfaithful, so she seems to have drowned her sorrows in parties: the Yushkovs had a reputation for entertaining in style, and boasted one of the best chefs in town. Polina's main contribution to the Tolstoy boys' upbringing was to give each of her nephews their own personal serf, in the hope that each of them would become in time a faithful and devoted servant.6 Dmitry was given Vanyusha, whom he mistreated, according to his younger brother. Tolstoy could not remember Dmitry actually hitting Vanyusha, but he did have clear memories of him begging contritely for forgiveness.7 Dmitry soon radically changed his ways and became a fervent Christian, although he never lost his irascible temperament.
Dmitry is a shady figure in Tolstoy's life - he was the first of the brothers to die, at the age of twenty-nine, and does not appear ever to have been close to his siblings - but he looms large in Tolstoy's memoirs of their life in Kazan. It was really only in Kazan, in fact, that Tolstoy's real memories of Dmitry began. Unlike his brother Lev, just one year younger than him, who confessed to preening and being conscious of his appearance even before they moved to Kazan, Dmitry never had any aspirations to beingcomme il faut. With rare exceptions he was serious and quiet, particularly after he started to attend church regularly and observe all the fasts, like Aunt Aline before him. As the youngest, Lev had a tendency to envy all his elder brothers, and what he envied in 'Mitenka' was his indifference to other people's opinions about him, which he believed was a trait inherited from their mother.8 Indeed it was only because of Mitenka's unkempt appearance that he came to the attention of his far more image-conscious siblings, who were embarrassed by him. Dmitry had no interest in dancing or attending social events, nor did he spend much time with his family, and he stuck rigidly to his student's uniform. Tolstoy retained a strong memory of Dmitry's tall, thin frame, his sad, large, brown, almond-shaped eyes, and the nervous tic he developed during his first serious bout of fasting, when he would jerk his head, as if his tie was too tight. Tolstoy would draw heavily on this and other aspects of Dmitry's life when he came to create the character of Levin's brother Nikolay in Anna Karenina.
As the grandchildren of the former governor of Kazan, the Tolstoys were invited to all the best households in town, and they thoroughly enjoyed becoming acquainted with the local aristocracy - all except Dmitry, who only ever befriended one poor, bedraggled student who went by the unfortunate name of Poluboyarinov (apart from simply sounding clumsy, the name implies someone who is only 'half-noble'). Otherwise Dmitry preferred to spend his time in church. Rather than go to the fashionable university church, he went to the one attached to the prison opposite their house, and at Easter probably spent more time there than at home. It is the custom for excerpts from the four Gospels concerning Christ's Passion to be read out on Good Friday, but this church's very strict priest unusually insisted on all four Gospels being read out in their entirety. Since the Orthodox Church requires its parishioners to stand for services, the congregation would have been on its feet for a very long time indeed, but this was probably welcomed by Dmitry, who had a tendency to apply himself with almost masochistic zeal to anything he cared passionately about.9
When casting his mind back to his years in Kazan, Tolstoy readily acknowledged that he and his siblings were far too 'obtuse' to appreciate the unusual moral purity of their brother as adolescents. Like their fashionable friends in Kazan, they instead 'continually subjected him to ridicule', as Tolstoy recounts in Confession, even nicknaming him Noah.10 Dmitry's remarkable altruism was perhaps best observed in his relationship with Lyubov Sergeyevna, the illegitimate child taken in at some point by the Tolstoy family out of pity. In Kazan, Lyubov Sergeyevna was taken in by Aunt Polina, and Tolstoy's memories of her date from this time. They were not very affectionate memories. Lyubov Sergeyevna was a 'strange and pathetic creature', he later recorded, who suffered from some ailment which made her face puff up as if stung by bees. During the summer months she was insensitive to the numerous flies that settled on her face, which made her even more unpleasant to look at. In Tolstoy's recollection she had only a few strands of black hair and no eyebrows, and found it physically difficult to speak, probably as a result of a tumour. He also recalled that she also always smelled bad, and lived in a suffocating and equally malodorous room whose windows were never opened. When Tolstoy became aware of Lyubov Sergeyevna she was 'not only pitiful but repellent', and most of the family did little to conceal their feelings of revulsion. Dmitry, however, went out of his way to listen and talk to her, and become her friend, not giving the slightest sign that he regarded what he was doing as philanthropy. Impervious to his family's opinion of him, he just did what he thought right. Nor was his selfless behaviour a fad. He remained close to Lyubov Sergeyevna until her death in August 1844, when he completed his first year at university.11
Like their father, Dmitry was artistically gifted. When playing games many years earlier, Nikolay had promised his younger brothers that their wishes would be fulfilled if they carried out all the conditions he imposed on them. It was characteristic that Sergey declared his desire to mould horses and chickens out of wax, while Dmitry wanted to draw big pictures like an artist: the Tolstoy museum in Moscow stores in its archive many pencil drawings he executed of rural landscapes which are impressive for a ten-year-old.12 (Lev, meanwhile, could think of nothing he wanted back then except the ability to draw small pictures.)
There are no biographical events at all listed for 1842 and 1843 in the official chronicle of Tolstoy's life and works. Careful sleuthing, however, has established that after Tolstoy turned fourteen in August 1842 his brothers Nikolay and Sergey took him for the first time to a brothel. Many, many years later, his wife castigated him for writing a seduction scene in his last novel Resurrection, believing that as an old man (he was then seventy) he ought to be ashamed of writing such 'filth'. This unpleasant altercation induced Tolstoy to confess to a friend that after committing the 'act' for the first time that fateful day in Kazan, he had stood by the woman's bed and wept. And he was deeply shaken when an acquaintance later told him that he had once been a novice at the Monastery of the Cyzicus Martyrs, located on the outskirts of Kazan. Tolstoy responded quietly that it had been in that part of town that he had had his 'first fall'.13 Perhaps his feeling of guilt was heightened by his awareness that his grandfather was buried in the monastery's cemetery along with other dignitaries (the only grave from that period that has survived to the present day).
Tolstoy later regretted the absence of moral guidance in his early teenage years in Kazan. On 1 January 1900 he confided to his diary that he had done a lot of bad things when he was young out of a desire to copy his elders, who drank, smoked and led debauched lives.14 Dmitry, of course, whom their brother Nikolay characterised as an extreme 'eccentric', was not included in their number: he practised complete abstention until the age of twenty-five, which in those days, according to Tolstoy, was a great rarity, particularly as far as relations with women were concerned.15 This was certainly not true of Sergey, however, who was Dmitry's polar opposite, and a major influence on their youngest brother Lev's waywardness. Of all the brothers, Sergey was the most talented and good-looking, and if Tolstoy loved and 'respected' Nikolay, and was on 'comradely' terms with Dmitry, he 'admired and copied' Sergey. Indeed, as he famously puts it at one point in his memoirs, he actually wanted to be him.16 Sergey had a reputation for being gregarious and good-humoured, and for singing continually. Where Tolstoy was painfully shy and acutely self-conscious, which interfered with his enjoyment of life, Sergey was an extrovert whose egotism made him supremely oblivious of whether his behaviour and appearance aroused approval or disapproval. For this reason he was all the more attractive to his younger brother, for whom he was a mysterious and unfathomable exotic species. Tolstoy started copying Sergey in early childhood, first by rearing different kinds of speckled and tufted hens and painting pictures of them.17 During his adolescence in Kazan, it was Sergey who led Tolstoy into debauchery.18
In May 1844, when he was sixteen, Tolstoy formally applied to the rector of Kazan University, Nikolay Lobachevsky (a mathematician famous for developing non-Euclidean geometry) for permission to take the various entrance exams. Tolstoy's letter of application launches the twenty-five volumes of his letters in his Collected Works. As ever, Tolstoy wanted to be different, and instead of applying to study mathematics like his brothers, he elected to join the Faculty of Oriental Languages, whose scholarly achievements were already renowned. It was a smart move. By 1828, the year of Tolstoy's birth, the faculty had professorships in Persian, Arabic and Turkish, and by the time he became a student, chairs in Mongolian, Mandarin Chinese, Armenian and Sanskrit had been added. Thanks to Lobachevsky's active support, the teaching of oriental languages at Kazan University was of a quality unsurpassed anywhere in Europe.19 Tolstoy was thinking of his future career in making this choice: his plan at this stage was to join the diplomatic service (although when one bears in mind the direction his life took, a less suitable spokesman for Russian imperial policy is hard to imagine).20 First, however, he had to pass several exams. Tolstoy excelled in his French exam, and did well in German, English, Arabic and Turkish (though he later claimed to have no memory of the last three). He also received good results for mathematics, logic, Russian literature and religious studies, which, like most people of his background, he did not take seriously at all. Much later, in an early draft of Confession, he wrote that the whole edifice of theology collapsed for him as soon as he took an interest in philosophy when he was sixteen, and began to see that the catechism was a 'lie'.21 Tolstoy did poorly in his Latin exam, having been unable to translate even two lines of an ode by Horace, and even worse in statistics and geography, his superlative command of the French language clearly not accompanied by even a basic familiarity with the country where it was the mother tongue. His performance in history was also execrable, and he later added the comment in the manuscript of Pavel Biryukov's biography: 'I knew nothing.'22 As a result, he was forced to resit these last two exams, and had to spend the summer in Kazan rather than Yasnaya Polyana, where he would much rather have been. In September 1844, however, just after his brother Nikolay graduated, he was admitted as a student.
Tolstoy's university career was not distinguished. He had never before attended an educational institution, so mingling with other students in lecture halls was a novelty at first. It clearly soon wore off, though, despite Tolstoy having the chance to study with the distinguished orientalist Professor Mirza Kazem-Bek, whose scholarship was world-renowned. He ended up failing his first-year exams, which meant having to repeat the year. Rather than face this indignity, he decided to transfer to the less distinguished Law Faculty, but of course had to start from scratch again as a first-year student. He justified this change of direction in a letter he wrote to Aunt Toinette in August 1845, just before the start of the academic year, by maintaining that law was a more practical choice in view of its application in daily life ('je trouve que l'application de cette science est plus facile et plus naturelle que toute autre à notre vie privée').23
If Tolstoy did not respond well to the demands placed on him by his tutors at Kazan University, it was because he wanted to be in control of his own educational curriculum. He had already began to read seriously on his own. Occasionally there are references to novels he enjoyed in the scant literature documenting his Kazan years, such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, two contemporary 'best-sellers' by Alexandre Dumas which had just been published in France for the first time, and were also popular in Russia.24 Dumas's earlier novel The Fencing Teacher, meanwhile, had been banned in Russia by Nicholas I for describing the events of the Decembrist Uprising, and the subsequent exile to Siberia of its leaders, as was its author (Dumas was unable to visit Russia until 1858, during the reign of Alexander II). The Russian novel was still in its infancy at this time, but when Tolstoy stumbled upon Pushkin's Eugene Onegin at a friend's house during these years, he was so entranced that he sat up all night reading it, and started immediately reading it a second time when he got to the end.25
Tolstoy later drew up a list of the books which had the greatest influence on him between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The most influential Russian works included Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Gogol's Dead Souls and Turgenev's A Hunter's Notes. Amongst the foreign volumes we find Schiller's The Robbers and Sterne's Sentimental Journey. Others that made a 'huge' impression on him were Dickens's David Copperfield, the 'Sermon on the Mount' in the Gospel according to St Matthew, and Rousseau's Confessions and Emile.26 Tolstoy was sometimes inaccurate about dates, and certainly in this case, as David Copperfield was first published in 1850, but it is nevertheless interesting to see the early appearance of Rousseau on his literary horizon.
It was philosophy which most excited the young Tolstoy during his student years, and it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who probably exercised more influence on Tolstoy than any other thinker over the course of his lifetime. This influence can be seen in Tolstoy's later condemnation of human civilisation for its corruption of human behaviour and distortion of man's true nature (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750, and Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, 1755), in his promotion of a radical child-centred education in a natural environment and his rejection of organised religion in favour of belief based on personal conscience (Émile, ou de l'éducation, 1762), in his fictional exploration of marital relations and family life (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse,1761) and in his advocacy of greater social equality (Du contrat social, 1762). Tolstoy also took a page out of Rousseau's posthumously published Les Confessions (1781-1788) when writing his own autobiographical works, emulating the candour and rigour of the French-Swiss thinker's unsparing self-analysis, not to mention the egocentric belief that the truth he discovered about himself had universal application. It is no wonder that Tolstoy saw himself in Rousseau, who also lost his mother at a young age, and followed a number of different paths in his life before finding his metier. Both figures are united by soaring genius, overweening vanity, a dogged, noble but often misguided sincerity, and a lamentable lack of a sense of humour, the latter being the single thing which sometimes makes the study of Tolstoy's life and works slightly hard-going.
Both Tolstoy and Rousseau were thin-skinned and highly emotional people which led to frequently turbulent relations with their contemporaries. They shared a huge energy and ambition which led them into diverse areas of intellectual and artistic endeavour, and a complete lack of fear in the face of controversy. Their most incisive works were deemed so subversive they were banned by the authorities, and yet neither Rousseau nor Tolstoy, despite their devotion to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, sought revolution, retaining little faith in the efficacy of political activity. Rousseau died shortly before the French Revolution and Tolstoy shortly before the Russian Revolution, events they both inspired and were blamed for. As Robert Wokler writes, Rousseau had a greater impact on his age than almost anyone else in the eighteeenth century:
No other eighteeenth-century thinker contributed more major writings in so wide a range of subjects and forms, nor wrote with such sustained passion and eloquence. No one else managed through both his works and his life to excite or disturb public imagination so deeply. Almost alone among the seminal figures of the Enlightenment, he subjected the main currents of the world he inhabited to censure, even while channelling their direction...27
One could say that Tolstoy almost picked up where Rousseau left off, for the above achievements are also associated with his prodigious legacy.
After his rather dismal first year at university, Tolstoy spent the summer of 1845 at Yasnaya Polyana, during which time he did a lot of reading and thinking. He became interested in the ethical ideas of the pre-Christian Cynics - Greek philosophers who preached, amongst other things, the virtues of a life without material possessions.28 For Aunt Toinette, her nephew Lev now became an 'incomprehensible creature' obsessed with plumbing the depths of human existence, and only happy when he met someone prepared to listen to him hold forth passionately about his ideas.29 Tolstoy's inborn eccentricity had certainly begun to exhibit itself in various ways. Under the influence of Rousseau and the philosophical ideas of Diogenes, one of the chief Cynics, he tried to simplify his life. In the fourth century BC Diogenes chose to live an ascetic and self-sufficient life, jettisoning the idea of marriage and family and rejecting laws and conventional social institutions as corrupt and hypocritical. He was famous for sleeping in a tub on the street. Tolstoy made a start by trying to simplify his own life. Apart from giving up wearing socks, he invented a utilitarian one-piece garment which was buttoned up from the inside, serving him as both daytime clothing and bed-linen-cum-blanket. A party of lady visitors to Yasnaya Polyana were slightly nonplussed when they encountered him in this strange garb. Nor was Aunt Toinette entirely convinced by this Russian Diogenes, though had she been alive during the last decades of his life she might well have thought otherwise.
While he was walking incognito in this garment one day, Tolstoy was able to listen in on unguarded conversations amongst his peasants. This was how he first discovered how hated the nobility were by the peasants, and how little respect the peasants accorded their owners.30 It came as a shock for him to hear such sentiments from his own serfs. More shocking to him, though, was the contempt generally shown by the Russian ruling class for the well-being of their serfs, particularly since it was the peasants who habitually had to bail their masters out - literally, in Tolstoy's case. One warm day during a visit to the Yushkovs' country estate on the banks of the Volga, Tolstoy took it into his head to impress the young ladies amongst the guests by throwing himself head-first into the large pond near the house, fully dressed, intending to swim to the island in the middle. He had to be rescued from drowning by peasant women who had been gathering hay nearby: they hauled him out of the water with their rakes.31 Tolstoy's social conscience was beginning to awaken, but it would be a long time yet before he would renounce his aristocratic birthright and become a fully fledged 'repentant nobleman'.
Tolstoy went to great lengths to try to make a good impression on his contemporaries during his student years, and he also tried enhancing his physical appearance. He was never happy with his looks, but his attempts to improve them did not always meet with very successful results. He once conceived the idea of shaving his eyebrows to make them grow back more bushy, and ended up almost shaving them off completely.32 Shy and lacking in self-confidence, he never quite cut the dashing figure on the dance floor who lived in his imagination, and he was too absent-minded and ungainly to succeed in emulating his suave and debonair brother Sergey. But he nevertheless enjoyed being part of the uppermost echelon of Kazan society, made a few good friends, and even wrote a waltz with one of them.33
Tolstoy had promised Aunt Toinette in the summer of 1845 that he would work hard in his second year at university, and in his leisure time study music, art and languages. 'I won't go into society at all,' he vowed in a letter ('Je n'irai pas en société du tout').34That autumn, however, he went to all the most prestigious social events, including a grand ball held in October 1845 in honour of the visit of Nicholas I's son-in-law Maximilian, the Duke of Leuchtenberg. And in January 1846 he had to spend a few days in the university jail for persistently failing to attend lectures.35 This oscillation between the setting of unrealistic, puritanical goals for a future life of purity and self-denial and the self-mortification which followed his actual pursuit and enjoyment in the present of a hedonistic social life, is the leitmotif of Tolstoy's first diary entry, which he famously began in the university's venereal diseases clinic in March 1847. In fact, one could say that the battle between these two opposing sides of Tolstoy's personality was the main theme of his entire life as an adult, and certainly fundamental to his creative processes. Simultaneous possession of these two warring impulses was not unique to Tolstoy, but may be seen as the mark of a quintessential^ Russian nature. The early-twentieth-century philosophical thinker Nikolay Berdyaev certainly thought along these lines. As he wrote in his book The Origin of Russian Communism, 'In the typical Russian two elements are always in opposition - the primitive natural paganism of boundless Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, a reaching out towards the other world.'36
In January 1847, when he was eighteen, Tolstoy started compiling a 'Journal of Daily Activities', listing on the left-hand side of the page a strict timetable for each day under the heading 'The Future'. Here he set out exactly which hours he would devote to his coursework, when he would have lunch, when he would study English, go for a walk or play chess. On the right-hand side, marked 'The Past', he entered comments on his performance. Thus on good days, when he maintained his self-discipline, he could write that he had kept to his regime, while on others he was forced to admit that he did 'nothing', 'almost nothing', did things 'badly', 'read Gogol' or 'overslept'.37 This journal was maintained until June. At the same time Tolstoy started compiling rules for developing his willpower. These included getting up at five and going to bed no later than ten, with two hours permissible for sleeping during the day. He resolved to eat moderately, and nothing sweet, to walk for an hour every day, to carry out everything he prescribed for himself and visit a brothel only twice a month. In the second tier of his rules he vowed to disregard luxuries and all public opinion not based on reason, and to love those to whom he could be of service. The rules in the third and last tier called on him to do only one thing at a time, and not allow flights of imagination unless necessary.38
In February 1847 Tolstoy had felt a compulsion to compile some new rules, this time more general ones, concerning his relationship to God, other people and himself, but broke off before setting out exactly what they were.39 In March he started again, delineating forty-seven different rules under twenty headings. He told himself, for example, to never show his emotions, to stop caring about other people's opinion of himself, and to do good inconspicuously. He ordered himself to keep away from women, suppress his feelings of lust by working hard and help those more unfortunate than him.40 At times Tolstoy's rules remind one in spirit of the Domostroi, the notoriously cheerless and minutely detailed 'housekeeping' rules produced in the pious times of Ivan the Terrible, where we read, for example:
A man cannot be healed if he is insolent and disorderly; does not fear God or comply with His will; does not keep Christian law and the tradition of the Fathers on the Church and on Church singing, on reading from the holy books before communion, on prayer; if he is not concerned with praising God; if he eats and drinks to excess and fills himself with food and wine when it is not fitting to do so; does not honour Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, the holy days, the great Lent, the Lent of the Mother of God; if he fornicates with no restraint, at improper times...41
It has to be said, Tolstoy does not come across as a particularly attractive person at this point, his self-absorption and sanctimoniousness detracting somewhat from his worthy aspirations and self-deprecation.
On 17 March, six days after entering the university clinic, where he was being treated for gonorrhoea, Tolstoy began writing a proper diary. He welcomed this period of complete solitude, with no servant nearby, since it enabled him to perceive that the dissolute life led by the majority of his class during their youth was the consequence of 'an early corruption of the soul'. He was talking about himself, of course. In condemning his way of life, however, he was already cognisant that it was easier to read ten tomes of philosophy than to put one principle into practice.42 The following day, in the absence of anything better to do (he spent almost a month in the clinic), Tolstoy started to tackle an assignment given to second-year law students, in which they were asked to compare Catherine the Great's Nakaz (or Instruction), first drafted in 1765, with Montesquieu's 1749 De l'esprit des lois. Although he failed to complete the assignment, rather to his surprise he became engrossed in Catherine's proposals for a new code of laws, and ended up spending over a week dissecting them at great length on the pages of his diary.43 Tolstoy criticises autocratic rule as despotic, since laws provide no protection in a state where they are applied at whim by the sovereign. And he challenges Catherine's insistence that the autocrat's limitless powers are, in fact, limited by the sovereign's conscience, by pointing out that the assertion of limitless powers is predicated on an absence of conscience.44 There was also a limit to Tolstoy's republican tendencies, however. As Count Tolstoy, the scion of a distinguished noble family, he argues that the aristocracy, guided by honour, are the essential ballast needed to limit a monarch's powers. The views he puts forward here about the moral duties of the Russian aristocracy were to reach their fullest expression, of course, in War and Peace. Since he was preoccupied with the moral relationship between landowners and peasants, there is little in Tolstoy's analysis of the Nakaz which relates to the fundamental injustice of serfdom. He comments that serfdom impedes the development of trade, but never raises the idea that it should be abolished, since, as he would later record in his memoirs, that simply never occurred to anyone from his milieu in the 1840s.45
Meanwhile, on 11 April 1847, the legal document setting out the division of the Tolstoy family property was drawn up, having been the subject of negotiations for many months. The very next day Tolstoy requested permission to leave Kazan University for 'health' and 'domestic' reasons. The study of the Nakaz had fired him with a desire to continue his studies independently, and he felt his university curriculum would actually now hinder them. Also, both Dmitry and Sergey were about to graduate, while Masha had already left Kazan, and was living at Yasnaya Polyana. Unwilling to remain in Kazan on his own, and fulfil university requirements he found tedious, Tolstoy left without taking a degree, having completed only the first two years of his law course.
Under Russian law in the 1840s, daughters were entitled to inherit one-eighth of their late parents' property and a fourteenth share of everything else, but the Tolstoy brothers voted to share their inheritance equally with their sister. Nikolay was assigned the Nikolskoye estate in Tula province, together with 317 male serfs (the only ones considered worth counting), and a large piece of land. As a great horse-lover, Sergey inherited the Pirogovo estate, also in Tula province, together with its stud farm and 316 male serfs. Maria received land in the same village, a flour mill, and a large sum of money. Dmitry received Shcherbachevka, the family estate in Kursk province, and over 300 serfs, while Lev inherited Yasnaya Polyana and its neighbouring villages, and also some 300 serfs. There were also sums of money given and received to even everything out.46 The legal document was signed by all parties on 11 July 1847 in Tula, after which they departed for their new properties. That November Masha, who throughout the previous few years had lived rather apart from her brothers, married their distant cousin Valerian Petrovich, who was a nephew of Fyodor Tolstoy, the famous 'American' (and indeed of Aunt Toinette). She was seventeen; he was thirty-four. In August 1847 Tolstoy turned nineteen, and now had the freedom to do as he wanted.