Call things by their name.
Diary entry, 21 February 18511
TOLSTOY HAD GRAND PLANS for his new life as a member of Russia's landowning nobility. He wanted to use his time wisely, and for a noble and worthwhile purpose, so on 17 April 1847 he set out in his diary what he planned to do over the next two years as the owner of Yasnaya Polyana. He would study French, German, English, Italian, Russian and Latin as well as acquire a 'moderate degree of perfection' in music and painting. He would devote himself to history, geography, statistics, mathematics and natural sciences, practical and theoretical medicine, and farming in all its aspects. He would complete his course of study in law, so that he could take his final exam and graduate. He would write a dissertation. He would write essays on all the subjects he was going to study. And he would write down rules. But all those good intentions came to nothing. The very next day he admitted somewhat sheepishly to himself that he was not actually capable of meeting his own expectations, and so he scaled everything back, deciding he would stick to following just one rule at a time. The first rule he resolved to follow was to carry out whatever task he set himself - except that he failed at the first hurdle. On 19 April he admitted in his diary that he had got up very late, and only decided what he would do that day at two o'clock in the afternoon. There was an easy way out: on 20 April he stopped writing his diary. There were a further three entries in June, then it completely petered out. After the entry on 16 June, in which he lambasted women for emasculating men, and resolved to avoid them as far as possible, came a three-year silence.2
The period from June 1847 to October 1848 is almost a complete blank page in Tolstoy's biography: there are not even any letters from him which could shed light on what he did when he was not adhering to his rules. Presumably he threw himself into the farming at Yasnaya Polyana, and discovered it was very hard work. Not only had he never worked on the land, and knew nothing about agriculture, but he had no experience in managing the serfs he owned. When his brother Dmitry wrote to ask him in September 1847 whether he had grown bored of running the estate at Yasnaya Polyana yet, we can assume the answer was affirmative.3 Tolstoy seems to have been a very fickle youth at this time. Some indication of his volatility comes from the fact that in the early autumn of 1847 he apparently decided on a whim to accompany his future brother-in-law to Siberia, and jumped into his carriage as he was setting off, thinking twice about it only when he realised he did not have a hat. In the end Valerian Petrovich set off alone to tie up his business in Tobolsk, in advance of marrying Tolstoy's sister Maria.4
If Tolstoy's siblings seemed more settled than he was, it was because none of them nurtured such huge aspirations. As a female member of the provincial nobility, nothing was really expected of Maria except decorum. She and Valerian set up home at his Pokrovskoye estate in the Tula region, a day's travel by carriage from Yasnaya Polyana, and they soon launched themselves into family life. Nikolay was serving in the Caucasus, having joined the army as a volunteer after leaving university in 1844. He had received his commission eighteen months later, and was now an ensign with the 20th Artillery Brigade, but his was by no means a brilliant army career, not least because he lacked ambition.5 The gifted, dashing Sergey would also join the army a few years later, and was expected to excel, but he lasted all of a year, due to his unwillingness to submit to authority and a similar lack of drive and ambition. The Pirogovo stud farm and large kennels he inherited were enough to keep him busy. Like Tolstoy, Sergey was passionate about hunting - he had soon shot so many wolves that he had enough bones to make an original fence along one of the paths on his estate.6 Otherwise his main passion in life was a gypsy girl in Tula.
Dmitry had ensconced himself on his Shcherbachevka estate in Kursk province. Like most of his class, he did not question the institution of serfdom, but he did feel morally obliged to show concern for his serfs. He also felt it was his duty as a Russian nobleman to serve, a conviction which was perhaps a vestige of Peter the Great's rule, when lifelong service was imposed on the gentry in return for the privileges of noble status. The length of compulsory service to the state had been progressively reduced over the course of the eighteenth century until it became merely a matter of honour under Catherine the Great, but the idea of serving clearly lingered for high-minded young men like Dmitry Tolstoy. Accordingly, he set off for St Petersburg, where he naively presented himself to one of the Ministry of Justice's mandarins and declared that he wished to be useful. Since he failed to specify what exactly he wanted to do, however, he was despatched to copy Chancellery documents, and was soon living the life of Akaky Akakievich in Gogol's immortal story 'The Overcoat' (1842). In this merciless satire of the St Petersburg bureaucracy, the lowly copyist Akaky Akakievich, a man who is oblivious to his threadbare clothes, is eventually compelled to buy a new overcoat. In order to save enough money to pay his tailor, he practises extreme self-denial, and then the coat is stolen from him on the first day he wears it. Dmitry Tolstoy similarly paid no thought to his clothes, and merely dressed to cover his body, but his coat, ironically, was practically all he had. According to Tolstoy's memoirs, his brother one day decided to visit a family acquaintance in the hope that he might help him find a better job. After arriving at Dmitry Obolensky's dacha, and being invited to take off his coat and join the other guests, it turned out, to the embarrassment of all present, he was wearing nothing underneath, having decided a shirt was unnecessary.7 Apart from being actually quite well off, Dmitry differed from the hapless Akaky Akakievich in one other important respect: he became rapidly disillusioned at becoming another faceless cog in Nicholas I's vast bureaucratic machine, and he soon retreated back to his estate, sending Obolensky a valedictory letter which made Tolstoy and Sergey wince (whatever Dmitry had written, Sergey told Tolstoy that it made him break out in a sweat, go red in the face and start pacing about the room in excruciating embarrassment).8
'The Overcoat' was naturally one of the masterpieces of Russian literature which Tolstoy devoured in the 1840s, along with many other works by Gogol, including the novel Dead Souls, published in 1842. Perhaps because he did not need to tell himself to read, it was an activity he enjoyed, and it was fundamental to his intellectual and artistic development in the years immediately following his departure from Kazan. He read voraciously. Tolstoy came of age at a very bleak time in Russia's history, which was something he became aware of only gradually. Nicholas I had begun his reign in 1825 by suppressing the Decembrist Uprising, and his regime had grown more repressive and reactionary as time went on. Foreign visitors were shocked. In the book the Marquis de Custine wrote following his visit to Russia in 1839,9 he described the country as a police state ruled by a despot. De Custine's condemnation of the Russian nobility as 'regimented Tatars' who confused splendour with elegance, and luxury with refinement, touched a raw nerve. Not surprisingly, his book was banned when it was published in 1843 (as it would be by Stalin in the twentieth century, in view of its alarmingly accurate prophetic qualities).10 When the spectre of revolution raised its head again in Europe in the late 1840s, Nicholas responded by increasing censorship, yet in this suffocating atmosphere, or perhaps because of it, literature managed to flourish. Indeed, writers were now expected to provide moral leadership as well as entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.
By the end of the 1840s many works of Russian literature had made a deep impression on Tolstoy. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) were Russia's first 'proper' novels, but their form was already highly idiosyncratic: Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, A Hero of Our Time is a collation of interlinked stories and Dead Souls is sub-titled 'A Poem'. Tolstoy would later proudly uphold the Russian refusal to conform to the European model by asserting the sui generis form of War and Peace, which he adamantly insisted was not a novel. From the beginning Tolstoy was drawn to prose rather than poetry, whose 'Golden Age' had in any case given way at the end of the 1830s to an era of realist fiction. He regarded 'Taman', one of the constituent stories in A Hero of Our Time, as a paragon of artistic perfection (a view Chekhov would later share).11
Talented new writers emerged in the 1840s to assume the mantle of Pushkin and Gogol, who had dominated the literary scene in the previous decade, and chief amongst them was Turgenev, who published the first of the stories which make up his A Hunter's Notes in 1847, the year in which Tolstoy took up residence again at Yasnaya Polyana. Turgenev's stories about contemporary rural life created a furore, not so much for their form as for their content, since they were the first works of Russian literature to depict peasants as three-dimensional human beings. As a liberal-minded Westerniser who abhorred the institution of serfdom, Turgenev consciously set out in his fiction to endow the peasants with a natural dignity, and as worthy of as much respect and artistic attention as the gentlemen who owned them. His oblique criticism of serfdom was all the more powerful for its subtlety, and forced his readers, including the future Alexander II, to confront the evil which had engendered such an iniquitous system. The embarrassment, indignation and then disgust which Turgenev declared he felt with respect to his own land-owning noble class would eventually lead him to move abroad.12 Tolstoy, by contrast, did not yet subscribe to the view that serfdom should be abolished. In this he was no different from most of the landowning nobility, and he was later frank about it in his memoirs, where he points out that treating the serfs justly was already a sign of enlightened ownership. But Turgenev's A Hunter's Notes, a collection whose political importance was equal to its artistic merit, could not but make Tolstoy think as he came into his inheritance.
There were also numerous other foreign authors who stimulated Tolstoy's imagination during these formative years. He could justly be proud of acquiring a sufficient command of English to read writers like Dickens in the original (one rule he appears to have managed to abide by). David Copperfield (1850) was the Dickens novel Tolstoy most enjoyed as a young man, and he also greatly admired Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768). Both Dickens and Sterne were powerful influences on Tolstoy when he first embarked on writing fiction. He was still quite eclectic in his tastes however, enjoying William Prescott's epic History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and Schiller's play The Robbers (1781).13 It was Rousseau who still captivated him most, however. TheConfessions, Emile and The New Helo'ise were instrumental in his moral education.14 Beyond some of the books on his reading list, we know little else about Tolstoy's life in the late 1840s, but we do know that he brought his beloved Aunt Toinette back to live at Yasnaya Polyana. For a while her sister Elizaveta lived at Yasnaya Polyana too, otherwise she was based with her son Valerian Petrovich and new daughter-in-law Maria. Elizaveta's place at Yasnaya Polyana was permanently taken by Natalya Petrovna, an impoverished widow who became Toinette's companion (no Russian estate was complete without its meek and deferential prizhivaltsy, who were always acutely conscious of their status as dependants). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Aunt Toinette to Tolstoy during his early twenties. She was his rock, and the most frequent recipient of his letters when he was away. It was she who kept him on an even keel, and she was also the one to entreat him to take up writing. She believed in his talent.
In October 1848 Tolstoy suddenly upped sticks and moved to Moscow, ostensibly to prepare for his law examinations, which he had finally decided to take. He rented the annexe of a building occupied by some friends in the Arbat area, not far from where he had lived as a boy. Having not been in the city since his childhood, he was excited to be back, but he never went anywhere near his law books. Instead, he was lured by the bright lights of the city into experiencing Moscow high society. He was twenty years old and well educated, he was the owner of a handsome country estate, he had a title and an income - in short, he was an eligible bachelor, welcomed in all the best drawing rooms in the city. It was all very flattering to the ego, although Tolstoy's vanity was checked by shyness and an acute self-consciousness about his looks which caused him to feel awkward in polite society. Without the inconvenience of a job, or even any real obligation to study, Tolstoy led a completely hedonistic life that winter, during which time he developed a passion for playing cards, or rather for gambling. It was a passion which would last for well over a decade, and was an expensive habit which brought some serious personal consequences in its wake.
Tolstoy was far from the first Russian nobleman to acquire a gambling addiction - he had some illustrious forebears here, not least amongst his own family. The deeply ingrained recklessness of Russian gamblers (which led some foreign visitors to assume that betting was a national pastime) may have been attributable to the need to assert a degree of independence in Russia's repressive and rigidly hierarchical society, where even private life was subject to state surveillance. Russian writers seemed particularly susceptible to gambling, and many made it a theme of their work.15 Pushkin, author of the quintessential gambling story 'The Queen of Spades' (1834), staked money on his own poetry and ended up having to surrender precious manuscripts.16
'The Fatalist', one of the stories in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, is devoted to a game of Russian roulette, while the principal characters of Gogol's play The Gamblers (1836) are two incorrigible card sharps. Turgenev grew up with a father who gambled, and there was a room at their family estate which his mother called the 'casino'. Along with Gogol, he was a rare example of a Russian writer able to resist the lure of the betting tables in German casinos. Dostoyevsky, author of the classic novella The Gambler(1867), had an addiction to excitement which led him on one occasion to gamble everything he had, leaving him with nothing but the shirt on his back.
Gambling certainly ran in Tolstoy's family. While his none-too-bright paternal grandfather was one of the most incompetent gamblers who ever lived, stories of the outrageous stunts pulled by his notorious 'American' cousin Fyodor Ivanovich were still circulating in Moscow years after his death in 1846. Tolstoy's gambling compulsion was not helped by another deeply rooted Russian trait amongst the educated classes: an indifference to money which bordered on contempt. He soon ran up large debts and was left feeling very dissatisfied with himself. As he wrote to Aunt Toinette in December 1848, his life of excess had left him world-weary, and longing for the country air again: 'I have been completely corrupted in this social world, all that annoys me terribly at the moment, and I am dreaming again of my life in the country which I hope to resume soon' ('Je me suis tout à fait débauché dans cette vie du monde, à présent tout cela m'embête affreusement et je rêve de nouveau à ma vie de campagne que je compte reprendre bientôt.')17 Instead of returning to Yasnaya Polyana, however, Tolstoy decided on a whim to go to St Petersburg in January 1849, just because some friends were going there.
The impressionable young Tolstoy had never been to the Russian capital, which was a far more sophisticated and aristocratic city than provincial Moscow, and he straight away decided he wanted to settle there. He took a room in the Hotel Napoleon, on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Vosne-sensky Streets (it is now the Angleterre Hotel). If he was lucky, he would have been given a room facing the largest church in Russia - construction of the neoclassical St Isaac's Cathedral was then nearing completion. When he was settled, Tolstoy sat down to write a long letter to his brother Sergey, telling him St Petersburg was having a good effect on him. Everyone was always busy doing things, he wrote, and their industry was rubbing off on him: he was finally planning to take his law exams at the university. Afterwards, he continued in his letter, he planned to take up a job in the civil service. If necessary, he told Sergey, he was prepared to start at the bottom of the Table of Ranks if he failed his exams. No one in the nobility could avoid being hierarchically classified in the table of fourteen ranks that Peter the Great had originally instituted for the court, the civil service and the armed forces. It had led to an obsession with official status which was subjected to magnificent ridicule by Gogol in his story 'The Nose' (1836). Tolstoy went on to say that he was aware his brother would greet his assurances that he had changed with some scepticism, having heard the same story twenty times before. He hastened to tell him that this time he really hadchanged in quite a different way from the way he had changed on previous occasions, and it was no longer just a question of good intentions. For the first time, he declared, he had understood that he could not live on philosophy alone, and needed to undertake practical activities. He did need some money so that he could pay off his gambling debts, however - 1,200 roubles, to be precise - and he asked Sergey to sell off a birch forest at Yasnaya Polyana.18 Selling off bits of his inheritance would become a regular occurrence over the next few years.
Sergey was indeed sceptical of his brother's protestations, and rightly so. He was particularly worried that his younger brother would start gambling again in St Petersburg, where he stood to lose spectacularly large sums to unscrupulous players. Sergey repeatedly implored Tolstoy in letters he sent him that spring to start work, and on no account to play cards. He was generally concerned about Tolstoy's lack of discipline at this time, as well as that of his brother's servant Fyodor, who had stolen money from him, pawned some silver spoons and then spent all the money his master had given him to redeem them on drink.19 Actually, none of the Tolstoy brothers seemed to be coping well with suddenly coming into money: Dmitry's gardener had stolen 7,000 roubles which he had foolishly left in the estate office at Shcherbachevka, and Sergey was himself spending considerable sums in pursuit of Maria (Masha) Shishkina, a girl in the famous Tula gypsy choir, with whom he was madly in love.20 But that was small fry compared to his brother Lev's recidivism. On 1 May 1849, Tolstoy sent Sergey a letter which he instructed him to read alone:
Seryozha.
I imagine you are already saying that I am the most empty-headed fellow [Sergey's pet phrase for Tolstoy], and you will be telling the truth. God knows what I have gone and done! I set off for no reason to Petersburg, did nothing worthwhile there, just spent a heap of money and got into debt. It's stupid. It's unbelievably stupid. You won't believe how much it's tormenting me. The main thing are the debts which I have to pay, and as soon as possible, because if I don't pay them soon, I will lose my reputation on top of the money. Do this, I beg you: without telling the aunts and Andrey [Sobolev, the estate manager] why and what for, sell [the village of] Vorotinka to either Uvarov or Seleznev...21
Since he had arrived in St Petersburg, Tolstoy had taken two law exams, but then had got bored and given up. His latest half-baked scheme was to join the army as a volunteer.
As soon as the news had reached St Petersburg from France in March 1848 that King Louis Philippe had been overthrown and a republic had been proclaimed, an alarmed Nicholas I had started mobilising his troops. The 1848 French Revolution launched a wave of insurrections across Europe, and Nicholas I was particularly alarmed when revolution broke out in areas of the Habsburg Empire such as Hungary (which shared a border with Russia). The dreaded 'Gendarme of Europe' was thus only too happy to accept the invitation of the Austrian government to help restore order in Hungary by despatching four infantry regiments and an artillery brigade in May 1849, not least because there were two Poles in charge of the Hungarian troops who had been in exile since their own failed uprising against Russian rule in 1831. The solipsistic and rash Tolstoy was oblivious to all the politics, however. He was dreaming of military glory. He now set his sights on joining the Horse Guards, and perhaps even receiving his commission as an officer before completing the standard two-year period of service.22 It was another plan that was not thought through.
Just over a week later Tolstoy wrote again to Sergey to tell him he was, in fact, not going to join the army now, and had gone back to his previous plan of taking his law exams. He also asked Sergey about the possibility of his serf Alexey Petukhov working for him, offering to take care of his family and pay him ten roubles a month (a sum which puts into perspective the thousands of roubles he sometimes lost at cards).23 Sergey had been dutifully biting his lip and helping his brother out over the previous months, and he did not bother giving him any advice now, knowing in advance that it would not be heeded. But he did exhort Tolstoy to come back home and sort himself out. 'You say that stupid things only happen once in one's life, and if only that were so!' he wrote, warning him that he was in danger of squandering his entire assets.24 To Aunt Toinette, before whom he felt ashamed, Tolstoy wrote that he had dropped his earlier idea of working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was intending to come back and prepare for his exams at Yasnaya Polyana. Sometime either at the end of May or the beginning of June in 1849, just as the northern capital's famed 'white nights' were about to reach their peak, he set out to travel home, first to Moscow and then on towards Tula. He was leaving behind a number of creditors, and his unpaid debts would gnaw at his conscience over the next few years.
One person who saw nothing of the white nights that summer was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the talented but impoverished young writer who had published a story bearing the name 'White Nights' the previous year. He was languishing in a jail cell that barely let in any light at all. The week before Tolstoy sent his grovelling letter to Sergey, the tsarist secret police had descended on Dostoyevsky's flat to arrest him. In a coincidence worthy of his later masterpieces, he had been living in the building which faced the Hotel Napoleon on the other side of the street. Dostoyevsky was one of twenty-four members of the left-wing intelligentsia group called the Petrashevsky Circle who were all engaged to varying degrees in the struggle for political freedoms and civil rights. Their crime was to have met on Friday evenings to discuss such incendiary topics as socialism, the abolition of serfdom and censorship. In the suffocating, paranoid climate of Nicholas I's Russia, even discussing such topics was tantamount to conspiracy, particularly in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions. At the Circle's last meeting, on 15 April 1849, someone had read out the celebrated letter to Gogol composed by the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. This was an outspoken and fearless document, written on the eve Belinsky's untimely death, in which he castigated the writer for his seemingly spineless defence of Russian absolutism and all it stood for. Belinsky had written the letter in Germany in 1847, while dying of tuberculosis, and handwritten samizdat copies had spread like wildfire amongst the progressive intelligentsia after being smuggled into Russia.
Dostoyevsky and his comrades were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the notorious, dank prison where Peter the Great's son, Tolstoy's ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich and the Decembrists had all been held. While Tolstoy was still strutting about St Petersburg in suits made by the city's best tailor, and dining at its finest restaurants (it is no surprise who his creditors were), Dostoyevsky was communing with fleas, lice, cockroaches and rats in a damp, dark cell. At the end of 1849 he was clamped in irons and sentenced to four years of hard labour in Siberia.25 The two giants of Russian literature would spend their lives coming close to each other but never meeting, either physically or ideologically. For one thing Dostoyevsky was socially Tolstoy's inferior, and for another, he was his main rival, but they would also come to espouse radically different worldviews.
Tolstoy brought a German pianist back to Yasnaya Polyana when he returned from Petersburg in June 1849, and he spent much of the summer learning the rudiments of music from him. This was to be a good investment, as music became an important part of his life. When he was not teaching Tolstoy, Rudolf the pianist retreated to the greenhouse to compose, or engaged in inebriated music sessions with all the old servants who had played in Count Volkonsky's serf orchestra. One of those musicians was the former second violinist Foka Demidych, who had been the family's butler while Tolstoy's father was alive. That autumn, Tolstoy co-opted him to become the teacher at the first school he started for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children - twenty little boys who were given lessons in arithmetic and scripture along with being taught how to read and write.26 It seems to have been a short-lived experiment, about which there is next to no documentation, but it is one of the first signs of Tolstoy's awakening social conscience. Over the course of the next two decades popular education would become a cause very close to his heart.
Tolstoy resumed his diary for one week in June 1850, but this was otherwise another year about which we have little information beyond knowing that he stayed put at Yasnaya Polyana. He became a proud uncle and godfather in January 1850 when his sister Masha gave birth to a little girl, Varvara (Varya). This was not Masha's first child: her first son Pyotr died soon after being born in 1849, but Varya survived (as did Nikolay and Liza, born one and two years later, respectively).27 After the birth of Varya, Tolstoy immediately travelled to Pokrovskoye to attend her christening (it was about fifty miles away from Yasnaya Polyana), but this seems to have been the longest journey he undertook until the end of the year. Most of the travelling he did in 1850 was to nearby Tula. At the end of 1849 Tolstoy had taken a modest civil-service post in the Tula local government (which placed him on the bottom rung of the Table of Ranks as a collegiate registrar), but it was very undemanding, and gave him a good excuse to spend much of that winter socialising with the city's local nobility and consorting with the gypsies.
Tolstoy had his favourites amongst the gypsy girls, but he was chiefly drawn to the gypsies for their sultry, melancholic music and wild dancing. Gypsies had appeared in the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century. Some settled, while others continued to lead a semi-nomadic life, lodging with Russian peasants during the winter months and earning their living by bartering horses in the summer. From the beginning they had also given professional performances of Russian songs as a way of earning money. The first Russian gypsy choir was formed in the 1770s by Count Orlov-Chesmensky, who brought together some of his gypsy-serfs from the family of Ivan Sokolov to perform at his estate outside Moscow. They were given their freedom in 1807, but their reputation only began to soar after the war with Napoleon was over, and they began to be invited to perform late into the night at Moscow's restaurants and taverns. Soon choirs began to spring up in other Russian cities, launching great singing dynasties who performed a cappella, or to the accompaniment of violins and the Russian seven-stringed guitar. The gypsy choirs appealed to both ends of the social spectrum - the merchantry and the nobility (particularly army officers), and they filled a gap. There were no other professional musicians in Russia at that time except for foreign virtuosi, and the chief virtue of the gypsy choirs was that they performed Russian songs, tinged with elements of their own distinct and exotic traditions. Perhaps uniquely, gypsies were not discriminated against in Russia, at least by the people amongst whom they lived. The gypsy choirs reached the peak of their popularity in the 1840s, and the one in Tula was reputed to be one of the best in Russia. Sergey's inamorata Masha Shishkina (herself from one of the great gypsy musical dynasties) was its greatest songbird.28 Hearing gypsy choirs perform in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod was certainly a highlight of the Marquis de Custine's Russian tour in 1839. He was struck by their differences to other gypsies he had encountered:
Their wild and impassioned song has some distant resemblance to that of the Spanish gitanos. The melodies of the north are less lively, less voluptuous, than those of Andalusia, but they produce a more profoundly pensive impression ... it was nearly midnight, but this house was still full of people, noise, and light. The women struck me as being very handsome; their costume, although in appearance the same as that of other Russian females, takes a foreign character when worn by them: there is magic in their glances, and their features and attitudes are graceful, and at the same time imposing. In short, they resemble the sibyls of Michael Angelo.29
It was the gypsies who first spurred Tolstoy to think about writing a story, and they feature in one of his early unfinished pieces of fiction from 1853, in which the clearly autobiographical narrator laments that their art has already become debased. 'There was a time when people loved gypsy music more than any other; when the gypsies sang the good old songs,' the narrator writes, going on to maintain that gypsy music in Russia was the 'only way for us to cross from popular to serious music', unapologetic that his love for gypsy music had made him digress.30
Tolstoy combined his love of popular Russian song with a serious enthusiasm for the classical European repertoire (particularly Beethoven, such as his Piano Trios, Op. 70), with which he largely became acquainted at the keyboard. He was still hell-bent on living up to the absurd standard he kept setting himself, but to judge from his week of diary entries in June 1850, he generally failed to follow his strict daily timetable for swimming, managing his serfs, reading and writing, and playing the piano that summer. Even if he chastised himself when he did not manage to play all twenty-four scales and arpeggios in two octaves every day, however, he could not help but attain a respectable level of proficiency of musicianship. He would continue to play the piano into his old age, sometimes playing duets with his wife Sonya or his sister Masha.
Another source of Tolstoy's dissatisfaction with himself in the summer of 1850 came from his inability to suppress the physical attraction he felt towards the pretty peasant girls on his estate. Like so many Russian landowners during this period, Tolstoy abused the nobleman's 'privilege' of owning serfs and exercised his droit de seigneur with peasant girls on a regular basis when he was a young man. He confessed to his diary on 19 June 1850 that he was incapable of controlling himself, and that what made it worse was that seducing girls had become a habit.31 There was one particular innocent young girl who tempted him that summer: Toinette's servant Gasha Trubetskaya, who went on to work for his sister Masha and accompanied her abroad in 1859. Tolstoy's conscience was later sorely troubled by his exploitative behaviour, and in the 1890s he made an attempt at atonement by fictionalising and condemning his moral failings through the experiences of the central characters in his story 'The Devil' and his last novelResurrection.As he was writing the latter in 1898, he confessed to his wife Sonya that he was recycling details from his own life. She had seen Gasha as an old lady, and was disgusted both by the idea of her husband's taking advantage of a peasant girl and by him recalling lascivious details in his old age.32 (This is what prompted Tolstoy to confess to a friend about his first experience with a prostitute.) At the end of his life Tolstoy also confessed to having had amorous feelings for Avdotya (Dunyasha) Bannikova, the daughter of the servant who was his first tutor, Nikolay Dmitrievich. Dunyasha later married Tolstoy's servant Alexey Orekhov, and worked as a maid at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was adamant he had not laid a finger on her.33 Tolstoy was generally quite predatory as a young man - he also began to develop a passion for hunting with borzois at this time.
Despite all his good intentions, by autumn 1850 Tolstoy had once again succumbed to drinking, gambling and spending time with the gypsies in Tula. There were some huge losses at cards this time: 4,000 roubles on one occasion.34 Another change of routine was called for, so in December 1850 he again departed for Moscow, where he got out his diary and started compiling rules once more. Some of them were unrealistic ('play the piano for four hours every day'), some were practical ('do exercise every day', 'say as little as you can about yourself', 'speak loudly and clearly'), some were idealistic ('don't have women'), some were quite odd ('before a ball do a lot of thinking and writing'), and some were just plain silly ('don't read novels').35 Tolstoy also drew up elaborate rules for card playing - this time he intended to play cards seriously, and gamble only with people richer than him.36 He went to a lot of balls that winter (there were rules about dancing too), as he wanted to mingle with the haut monde of Moscow society and find a wife. It would in fact be a long time before he found the right person to marry, but his socialising meant he was up to date with all the latest intrigues, and so was able to send Aunt Toinette long letters telling her all the gossip doing the rounds of the Moscow salons - such as the scandal surrounding the evidence which implicated Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's aristocratic Russian mistress in the notorious murder of her French rival.37
Toinette greatly enjoyed the letters she received from her favourite nephew. On 27 January 1851 she told him in one of her replies that he wrote so engagingly, and so naturally, that it was if he was standing there before her. But she was concerned about the aimlessness of his life, and his worrying gambling habit. She reminded him reproachfully that he had come back to join his family for Christmas, but had preferred to play cards all night in Tula rather than spend time with his brother Nikolay, who was back 'in Russia', as he put it, on leave from the Caucasus for the first time in nearly four years. Aunt Toinette also despaired of Sergey ('If he had a job which occupied him seriously, he would not have given into that mad passion for the gypsy girl'), and she hoped Lev would find some purpose in his life, and not enter into a marriage of convenience just to pay off his debts.38 She beseeched Tolstoy to take himself in hand.39 He was beginning to. He was already painfully aware of the emptiness of Moscow society, and he had begun to think seriously about writing fiction. It was in December 1850 that he declared in his diary that he wanted to write a story about the gypsies.40
From the very beginning, Tolstoy's ability to hold up a mirror to his blemishes (looking in the mirror too frequently was another habit he faulted himself for at this time) would be fundamental to his powers of psychological analysis. On 8 March 1851 he began keeping a 'Franklin Journal' as a way of monitoring his moral lapses. Benjamin Franklin had described his technique of drawing up a table of virtues, and marking those he had failed to demonstrate each day, in his autobiography Mémoires de la vie privée,which was published in Paris in 1791.41 Whether he had finally found his resolve, or whether the arrival of spring simply fired him with new energy, Tolstoy now became rigorous about writing in his own diary every day, convinced that acknowledging his moral failings was half the battle to eliminating them. He was quite successful at keeping up regular gymnastics and fencing lessons, but his behaviour rarely passed muster: the words 'laziness', 'cowardice', 'gluttony', 'false modesty' and 'self-deception' punctuate his diary entries during these months as a regular admonishment of his lack of moral fibre.
As he began experimenting with fiction for the first time, Tolstoy became more reclusive, and he also started to spend even more time reading. Earlier in the year he had been working his way through Montesquieu; now he read Lamartine's newly publishedHistoire des Girondins (1847), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1787), Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1769). During the spring of 1851 he began to be more observant not only of the turbulent emotional and intellectual processes going on inside his head, but of life around him. What Tolstoy had in mind when he embarked on the first draft of Childhood, which would become his first published work, was an original kind of Bildungsroman in four parts, to be entitled Four Epochs of Development. Under the clear influence of David Copperfield,42 and also Laurence Sterne, amongst many other influences, Tolstoy's goal was to explore the psychological experiences of a young boy growing to adulthood. As with almost every work of fiction he ever published, Tolstoy drew on his own life as raw material for the evocation of particular scenes from two days in his character Nikolenka's childhood. It is important to recognise that his own life was the means and not the end, but as the Tolstoy scholar Richard Gustafson has put it, 'this distortion of personal experience conceals only to reveal',43 since sincerity and emotional truth were always Tolstoy's ultimate goal. Childhood is deceptively simple. In order for it to work, Tolstoy had to come up with a convincing narrative voice, thus one of the first problems he wrestled with was whether to have an adult narrator, and risk his story seeming like a memoir, or have the child Niko-lenka himself tell the story of his life, which posed dilemmas of a different kind.44 Tolstoy's artistic techniques were already sophisticated. The fact that he wrote to a friend in Petersburg that spring to ask if he might help negotiate the literary censor was a sign that he was taking his writing seriously.45
Nikolay came to visit him in Moscow that March. The end of his furlough was fast approaching, and he suggested that his brother accompany him back to the Caucasus. Tolstoy immediately agreed, and at the beginning of April he left Moscow and returned to Yasnaya Polyana. The Caucasus offered Tolstoy the opportunity to start from a clean slate. It was a chance to leave behind his debts and his bad habits, and embrace a life of danger and adventure on the most dangerous frontier of the Russian Empire. The famous daguerreotype taken of the two brothers that spring shows the future writer clean-shaven, sitting tensely in rather scruffy clothes, his hands resting on a cane, fixing the viewer with a penetrating stare, while the more relaxed, phlegmatic Nikolay sits beside him in his army uniform, nonchalantly resting his elbow on the back of his brother's chair. By the end of the month the brothers were on the road, deciding to take a scenic route via Kazan, to catch up with family and friends. They took along two Yasnaya Polyana serfs as their personal servants: Alexey Orekhov and Ivan Suvorov (Alyoshka and Vanyushka).
After a pleasant week in Kazan, during which time Tolstoy's head was turned by the demure and pretty Zinaida Molostvova, the brothers headed south. On 30 May, after a glorious week sailing down the Volga from Saratov to Astrakhan and a further week on horses, they finally arrived in Starogladkovskaya, in present-day Chechnya. That same evening Tolstoy got out his diary. 'How did I end up here?' he asked himself. 'I don't know. And why am I here? Also I don't know.' 46 As it turned out, Starogladkovskaya was to be Tolstoy's base for the next two and a half years, and the time he spent there was to be the making of him. By the time he left the Caucasus he would be a commissioned officer in the imperial army and a published writer. His first-hand experience of warfare in the Caucasus, furthermore, would prove to be invaluable when he later came to write the battle scenes in War and Peace.
It was Catherine the Great who had brought Russia into the Caucasus, when she graciously came to the aid of the struggling Orthodox Christians in the Kingdom of Georgia. In truth, she really wanted to keep Persia and the Ottoman Empire at bay, with the ulterior motive of moving closer to realising her 'Greek Project'. She dreamed of defeating the Turks, and placing a Russian ruler on the throne of a newly restored Christian Constantinople. Her annus mirabilis was 1783, when she not only conquered the Crimea but signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, thus making Georgia a protectorate of Russia. Aggression by a newly resurgent Persia then played into Russia's hands. In 1795, the last year of Catherine's reign, Russia offered no assistance when the Persians invaded the capital of Tiflis, and Alexander I then violated the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1801 by simply annexing Georgia and abolishing its monarchy. Subsequent wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia over the next decade resulted in the Russian Empire adding other small Caucasian nations to its territories.47
A town quickly grew up around the fortress at the foothill of the mountains which had been established in 1784 to become Russia's main military base in the area. It was optimistically named Vladikavkaz ('Ruler of the Caucasus'), but it took more than building the Georgian Military Highway between Vladikavkaz and Tiflis for the Russians to conquer the Caucasus. Although the Georgians largely surrendered peacefully to the Great White Tsar, with many of their aristocracy later distinguishing themselves in the war with Napoleon, there were many north Caucasian peoples who strongly resisted the Russian presence, chief amongst them the Chechens and Avars in the mountainous east (close to the Caspian Sea), and the Circassians in the west (near to the Black Sea). Russia soon found itself fighting a protracted war against a tenacious resistance movement. General Alexey Ermolov, the first commander-in-chief appointed to run operations in the Caucasus, was notorious for his brutal methods, but the Chechens (whom he saw as primeval savages) often outwitted him, and he was replaced in 1827 by Ivan Paskevich. Other strategies were deployed by subsequent commanders-in-chief until the war finally came to an end in the east in 1859, and in the west in 1864.
Tolstoy's experiences in the Caucasus were restricted to Chechnya in the eastern theatre of war, which had entered its last decade by the time he arrived in 1851. That was also the year in which Russia scored a minor victory. Since the 1830s, the disparate Muslim tribes of the northern Caucasus had been united by the Avar leader Imam Shamil who ruled the peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan. Shamil saw the war with Russia as a holy war, but he did not always enjoy full support from the highlanders. In 1851 he had fallen out with his commander Hadji Murat, a fellow Avar who went over to the Russian side. The following year, Hadji Murat tried to rejoin Shamil, but was murdered by Russian forces. Proof that Tolstoy's involvement in the protracted struggle with the Caucasian highlanders made a deep impression on him is provided by the fact that he decided to turn this litany of betrayals into fiction at the very end of his life. Hadji Murat was written at a time when his priorities were more religious than literary, but it is one of his greatest works of fiction.
Before Tolstoy met any Avar or Chechen rebels, he met Cossacks. Starogladkovskaya was one of five Cossack settlements which extended over a distance of about fifty miles along the northern bank of the River Terek. Named after Gladkov, one of the localatamans, the settlement was founded in the 1720s and its population contributed to the thousand or so Cossack troops who fought for the Russians in the Caucasian War. They were descendants of the original sixteenth-century Mountain or Terek Cossacks (Grebenskie or Terskie kazaki) who had settled along the Terek, some of whom had been part of autonomous military units and some of whom had originally fled central Russia to avoid enserfment.48 The Cossacks' desire to maintain their traditional lifestyle of independence and freedom ultimately brought them into (sometimes very violent) conflict with the tsarist authorities, particularly under Catherine the Great. By the end of the eighteenth century they were forced into a position of accommodation, whereby they were granted special status in return for acting as border guards along the edge of the empire, particularly its threatened southern frontier. Although they were subjects of the Russian Empire, and were usually Christian, the Terek Cossacks had their own language and looked very like their Chechen neighbours on the other side of the river, with whom they had peacefully co-existed for centuries.49 The men wore tall fur hats and the same long tunics with strings of cartridges worn across their chest.
Tolstoy was initially quite disappointed by the rather flat landscape where his brother's regiment was stationed - it was not until he started travelling in the Caucasus that he began to see the magnificent mountain scenery which had inspired visiting Russian poets to flights of rhetoric. The Cossack life-style was certainly an eye-opener for him, however. It was completely different from what he knew back home in Russia. The men had a cult of machismo, and left heavy work to their wives, but the women, far from being downtrodden, were often smarter, and usually far more attractive. They had a dignity which came from centuries of defiant independence (no Cossack had ever been a serf), and their standard of living was far higher than that of the average Russian muzhik. They also lived close to nature. Tolstoy would draw deeply on his knowledge of the Terek Cossacks for his fiction. In 1863, just before he embarked on War and Peace, he finally finished a novella called The Cossacks which he had begun when he was still living in the Caucasus. As a civilian with not much to do while his brother was out on manoeuvres, Tolstoy began to befriend the Cossacks in Starogladkovskaya, and learn their language. He became particularly close to Epifan (Epishka) Sekhin, a tall old Cossack with a big beard, then apparently in his late eighties, who became his first landlord and who was immortalised with great precision as Eroshka in The Cossacks.50 Epishka took his young Russian friend with him on hunting trips, played the balalaika and regaled him with stories of old Cossack life.
Tolstoy's first experience of Chechens came a month after his arrival in the Caucasus. In June he followed his brother's regiment to the fortress at Stary Yurt, some thirty miles away, and took part as a volunteer in a raid. By chance, General Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, who was in charge of the army's operations in the eastern Caucasus, happened to be present, and Nikolay relayed to his brother that he had been impressed by the young volunteer. Flattered by the attention of one of the most important Russian soldiers in the Caucasus (in 1856 he would be appointed commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army, and viceroy in the region), and encouraged by his brother, Tolstoy decided to join up. First, however, he had to obtain a letter from the Tula local government giving him leave to resign from the post he still nominally held.
Meanwhile, since he had a lot of time on his hands, he carried on with reading and writing: he was now working on his second draft of Childhood. He also played a lot of card games with Russian officers. On 13 June he lost 850 roubles in one sitting, which meant asking his brother-in-law to sell off another of his villages.51 Tolstoy found it very hard to renounce gambling, but it did at least give him the opportunity to teach a Chechen how to count. Not all Chechens were hostile, and he became friends with a hot-headed young man called Sado Miserbiyev who was often cheated by the Russian officers with whom he played cards. Tolstoy took him under his wing and was rewarded with undying loyalty and a Chechen sword. He was also later bailed out by his devotedkunak (a Caucasian term for friend) when he suffered another terrible gambling loss.
That first autumn Tolstoy began to travel further afield, including to the Russian fortress at Groznaya (current-day Grozny), a new outpost built in 1818 by General Alexey Ermolov. The forbiddingly named Groznaya (which means 'threatening') was one of a number of new forts he built and named with the intention of terrorising the locals, such as Vnezapnaya ('Sudden') and Burnaya ('Stormy'). It was also Ermolov who in 1817 had completed major improvements to the 126-mile-long Georgian Military Highway which served as a vital artery for Russian troops over the mountains. It was the only passable road crossing the Caucasian range, and one of the highest in the world - higher than the Simplon Pass. When Pushkin had shared his impressions of the Highway in hisJourney to Erzerum (1829) it was still extremely dangerous: travellers had to go with a convoy of 500 soldiers and a cannon, and sometimes covered only ten miles a day. By Tolstoy's time it had become both safer and faster.52 He travelled along it for the first time with his brother when they went to Tiflis in October 1851, and now he was finally rewarded with the spectacular views of the snow-capped peaks which Pushkin and Lermontov had found so exhilarating before him.
Resigning his civil-service post and joining the army proved to be a lengthy bureaucratic procedure, and Tolstoy was forced to remain in Tiflis for over two months, where he also lost all his money at billiards and fell ill. During that solitary time, when he carried on working on Childhood and tried to stop himself womanising, he wrote fond, homesick letters to Aunt Toinette, who was his only regular correspondent. He told her how glad he was to be able to play the piano again, as it was the only thing he missed in his new life at the Starogladkovskaya camp (around this time he also decided to give his grand piano at Yasnaya Polyana to his sister Masha, knowing he would not soon return home). Tolstoy was also able to hear some music at the Tiflis Opera House which had just opened. For that, and for the city's new tree-lined streets and its first Russian newspaper, Tolstoy had Prince Mikhail Vorontsov to thank. Commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army from 1844 to 1854, and the first imperial viceroy in the region, the British-educated Vorontsov was a moderniser who had previously transformed Odessa, and he had now brought his enlightened city-planning ideas to Tiflis.53
Following his formal application to join the artillery regiment in which his brother served, Tolstoy needed to sit an exam. Passing it entitled him to call himself a cadet, or, to use the Russian term, a yunker (a corruption of the German 'Jung Herr', the rank for junior under-officers from the nobility). On 3 January 1852 Tolstoy was appointed Feierverker (Bombardier), 4th class, in the 4th Battery of the Russian Army's 20th Artillery Brigade - though his appointment would not become official until his resignation from the Tula government was formalised. Two weeks later he was back in Starogladkovskaya, but left again immediately to take part in a month of raids against the Chechens for the first time as a full-time soldier, often side by side with his brother. It was relentless, intense and very dangerous, but after decades of successful guerrilla warfare from the Chechens and other mountain tribes, the Russians were beginning to gain the upper hand.
To begin with, Russian military strategy in the Caucasus was designed with a conventional European army in mind as the enemy, but this was no ordinary theatre of war. The Russians were not fighting large numbers of conventional troops with bayonets on a plateau, but small, heterogeneous bands of rebels on heavily wooded mountain slopes. Their enemies knew every inch of the land and were adept at knowing how to take cover. Eventually the Russian army changed its tactics. Under Vorontsov, who was as ruthless as Ermolov, the new strategy was to cut back forests and decimate villages so as to undermine the Chechen defence system.54 It began to produce results. Tolstoy relished the opportunity to prove his mettle in his first raids against the Chechens, and his valour should have been rewarded with the St George Cross, but since his papers had not come through from Tula, he was still technically a volunteer, and so not officially eligible. He was bitterly disappointed. His papers finally arrived at the end of March.55
Tolstoy took part in several forest-clearing expeditions that spring, and the following year he would start distilling his experiences into the story 'The Wood-Felling', but his first priority was to complete Childhood, and when he came back to Starogladkovskaya in March he began working on his third draft. It was ironicallyjust at the time that he joined the army that he began distancing himself from his rowdy fellow officers, who found his aloofness arrogant. Nikolay was happy to sit up all night drinking, but not Lev, who now began to prefer chess and fencing, and sitting with a book. His army duties were fairly light. In April he travelled a little way east to Kizlyar where he consulted a doctor about his poor health, and May found him undertaking a much longer journey, a few hundred miles west this time, to Pyatigorsk in the foothills of the north Caucasus, where he would undertake treatment. He would not return to Starogladkovskaya until August, by which time he had not only finished and submitted Childhood,but learned that it was accepted for publication.
Pyatigorsk ('Five Mountains'), so-called because it is overlooked by the five peaks of Mount Beshtau (a Turkish name meaning 'five mountains'), was founded as a Russian fortification in 1780. Following the discovery of its mineral springs it was developed as a health spa by imperial decree, and had become a thriving and fashionable resort embellished by Italian architects by the time Tolstoy arrived in 1852. It was, in fact, the most fashionable Russian spa throughout the nineteenth century. Pyatigorsk had also seen its fair share of drama: Lermontov was shot in a duel near the town's cemetery in 1841, and there was still a very real threat of raids by marauding Circassians, which gave an edge to otherwise peaceful rest cures. Tolstoy knew Pyatigorsk in his mind before he arrived because he had read A Hero of Our Time: it provides the setting for the longest of its stories. He followed the recommended treatment of bathing in Pyatigorsk's sulphurous springs for six weeks, and then travelled on to the springs of Zheleznovodsk ('Iron Waters'), situated a little way to the north, for three weeks of treatment there.
Tolstoy rented a little house on the outskirts of Pyatigorsk which had a garden and a beehive and a view of the snowcapped peak of Mount Elbrus, and rolled up his sleeves to get down to work. He did a lot of reading during his cure, particularly of Rousseau, whom he read and re-read, but he also did a lot of writing. On 27 May he finished the third draft of Childhood, and four days later he started on the final draft. In early July, finally happy with his manuscript, he resolved to send it to the editor of The Contemporary, Russia's most prestigious literary journal, without revealing his identity beyond the initials 'L.N.'.56 The Contemporary was a St Petersburg-based journal which had been founded by Pushkin in 1836. Since 1847 it had been edited by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who had cemented its reputation as the platform of the progressive, liberal-minded intelligentsia by publishing the work of leading Westernisers such as Herzen and Turgenev, and inviting the collaboration of prominent critics like Vissarion Belinsky.
On 29 August, three weeks after arriving back in Starogladkovskaya, Tolstoy received a reply from Nekrasov, informing him that he had been impressed by Childhood and would be printing it in the next issue. Tolstoy was over the moon - until he finally received the September issue of the journal at the end of October. He was incensed to see that his text had been mutilated by the censor and, furthermore, was now called A History of My Childhood.57 He had expressly not set out to write the story ofhischildhood, he remonstrated in the angry letter he drafted to Nekrasov, which he ultimately (and wisely) decided not to send. Tolstoy was also crestfallen not to be paid a royalty. He was desperately short of money, and unaware of the practice of Russian literary journals not to pay fledgling authors for their first publication. He had no option but to acquiesce, and at least had the enviable consolation of having an editor who wanted to publish more of his writing. Tolstoy had a very warm reception for his first published work. Critics particularly praised the gifts of psychological analysis which brought Childhood to life. The Russian reading public were also full of praise for the mysterious but extremely promising new author. The members of the author's own family, who had not been forewarned, reacted with delighted surprise when they discovered his identity.58
That autumn Tolstoy carried on writing. He was teeming with new ideas, and he began to think about resigning from the army: the success of Childhood showed him where his future lay, and it was not with the military. He now began to work on several things at once. First of all he resolved to add to Childhood by writing Boyhood. At the same time, as he became increasingly occupied by religious ideas, he began to conceive a novel about a Russian landowner wanting to improve the life of his peasantry. Finally, he was keen to publish stories about the Caucasus. This was the project he brought to completion first. He had already started writing stories inspired by his own experiences with the army, and in late December he sent Nekrasov the manuscript of 'The Raid - A Volunteer's Story'. It was published the following March, again with cuts dictated by the censor. With 'The Raid', Tolstoy turned a new page in the history of Russian writing about the Caucasus. Thanks to Pushkin and Lermontov, readers were used to a romantic and mythologised view of the Caucasus and its peoples. The story Tolstoy made of his memories of the first sortie against the Chechens which he had observed close-hand the previous year was highly realistic. Just beneath the surface we can also detect a nascent anti-militaristic stance.
The spring of 1853 was both the high point and the low point of Tolstoy's time in the Caucasus. He took part in further skirmishes with Chechen rebels, and was commended for his bravery. After being obliged to cede the St George Cross he deserved to an old soldier who stood to receive a decent pension as a result, he was promoted to ensign instead, but then ended up being arrested when a particularly riveting game of chess led him to miss parade. His promotion was therefore cancelled (and he had to wait until 1854 for it to be reinstated). Tolstoy was bitterly disappointed to miss the St George Cross again and there were other disappointments. His brother Nikolay had decided to resign from the army the previous autumn, having served in the army for eight years,59and in February 1853 his papers came through, permitting him to retire at the rank of staff-captain. Tolstoy was already quite lonely in the Caucasus and he felt Nikolay's absence keenly. His financial affairs were also still in a dire state. In April his brother-in-law sold another village on his estate to provide him with funds, which meant losing another 350 acres, plus twenty-six serfs and their families.60 Even his writing suffered: the story he began about a young man in Moscow who goes to a high-society ball, then to a tavern to hear the gypsies was suddenly dropped and never picked up again.
Because fortune had not yet smiled on Tolstoy's military career, he had initially delayed tendering his resignation, thinking it would be just too humiliating for him to return to civilian life as a retired cadet. In the end, however, he decided he would go ahead anyway, and he submitted his resignation request on 30 May 1853.61 Yet again he was unlucky. Russia had just broken off diplomatic relations with Turkey, and after its invasion of the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in June, no officer was permitted to apply for leave or resign. In July Tolstoy returned to Pyatigorsk, where he joined Nikolay and also his sister Masha, whom he had not seen for two years. She had come to spend the summer taking the waters at Pyatigorsk with her husband. It was not a particularly happy time for Tolstoy, who was feeling irritable and restless, and it was made no better by the realisation that he would have to sell the main Yasnaya Polyana mansion to rectify his financial affairs, something he had previously vowed would be an absolute last resort.62 He buried his sorrows in his writing. As well as starting the first draft of what would become his novella The Cossacks, and working further on his sequel to Childhood, he also wrote another completely different story which he started and finished in four days. 'Notes of a Billiard Marker', the only work Tolstoy sent off to Nekrasov that summer, is more strongly autobiographical than most of Tolstoy's stories. It is a bleak tale of a young aristocrat's moral disintegration, inspired by the gambling disaster which had befallen Tolstoy in Tiflis. Close reading of Rousseau's Confessions helped to keep Tolstoy on an even keel at this time, and reminded him that he could only be happy doing good works.63 He was beginning to develop a strong social conscience.
Tolstoy was by this point bored with regimental life in the Caucasus, dissatisfied with himself and longing for a change of scenery, so before he returned to Starogladkovskaya in October, he applied to be transferred to active duty in the war against Turkey. In January 1854, when his request was granted and he was finally promoted to full officer class as an ensign, he decided to travel to his new regiment in Bucharest via Yasnaya Polyana, a detour of over 600 miles. February was an ecstatic month for Tolstoy. He was overjoyed to see Yasnaya Polyana again, and be reunited with his beloved Aunt Toinette. He went to see his sister Masha at Pokrovskoye, and his brother Dmitry at Shcherbachevka, and in Moscow the four Tolstoy brothers posed for a photograph. It was the last time they would ever be together. The visit was over all too soon. On 3 March Tolstoy set off to join his new artillery brigade, travelling via Kursk, Poltava and Kishinyov before finally arriving in Bucharest ten days later, shortly before France and Britain declared war on Russia.
The Crimean War ostensibly blew up over access to the holy sites in Palestine, but was really about Russia's expansionist ambitions, and the threat that they represented to French and British interests. After the annexation of Georgia in 1801, and Bessarabia in 1812, Russia proceeded to defeat the Ottoman Empire in 1829, thus acquiring new powers and new territories (including part of Armenia). For the allies, it was only a matter of time before Nicholas I gained full access to the eastern Mediterranean. Hostilities between Turkey and Russia began in October 1853, most of them taking place around the mouth of the Danube. When France and Britain became involved in March 1854, and Russia was forced to withdraw from Moldavia and Wallachia, wrongly counting on Austrian support (in return for having sent in troops to quash the rebellion in Hungary in 1850), the Crimean peninsula became the main theatre of war. So Tolstoy was out of luck again, as three months after he arrived in Bucharest the main action was transferred elsewhere.
Tolstoy was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of Bucharest, and enjoyed going to the Italian opera and the French theatre when he first arrived.64 Once he was settled, he carried on with his writing. He concentrated on revising and completingBoyhood, and then at the end of March he was posted for two weeks to Oltenita, just north of the Danube, which had been the site of a battle with the Turks the previous November. Then came an attachment to the artillery commander General Serzhputovsky, which meant going on patrol to different parts of Moldavia, Wallachia and Bessarabia. In May Tolstoy observed the last days of the Russian siege of the Ottoman fortress town of Silistra, situated on the south side of the Danube in present-day Bulgaria. Russia needed to take Silistra in order to advance further, and huge numbers of Russian troops had been moved into the area in April when the siege had begun. Tolstoy was not actively involved in the bombardment of the town, but since he was working as an orderly, and for a sadistic superior, he often ended up in the trenches and found himself exposed to mortal danger on more than one occasion. Writing home to Aunt Toinette, he described the strangely magnificent spectacle of watching people killing each other every morning and evening. When he was not relaying orders he was stationed in the Russian camp, located in gardens belonging to Silistra's governor, Mus-tafa-Pasha, which afforded grand views of the Danube and of the besieged town (particularly during the night-time bombardments). A date in June was set for the final storming of Silistra, but at two in the morning, an hour before it was due to commence, Field Marshal Pashkevich sent word that the Tsar, under pressure from Austria, had ordered a retreat. Tolstoy, along with the entire company on the Russian side, was extremely disappointed.65
The Russian forces now began their retreat towards the Russian border, and Tolstoy initially returned to Bucharest, taking with him positive impressions of the Bulgarians he had met in Silistra. It was in Bucharest that a letter sent to him by Nekrasov back in July finally caught up with Tolstoy. Nekrasov was full of praise for the manuscript of Boyhood, which greatly raised his spirits, but in August he lost another 3,000 roubles gambling.66 In early September Tolstoy also headed back to Russia, learning on the way that he was to be promoted to sub-lieutenant. He was stationed at the army's new headquarters in Kishinyov, capital of Bessarabia, where once again he had plenty of time for reading and for music: he had a nice flat with a piano.67 At this point he was reading George Sand and Uncle Tom's Cabin in German translation. He also had time to put together a proposal with some of his fellow officers to launch a weekly forces newspaper. He was greatly excited by this project, and as soon as he heard his brother-in-law had sold the Yasnaya Polyana house that autumn, he wrote to ask him for 1,500 roubles so he could invest in taking the project further.68 The Yasnaya Polyana house had been sold for 5,000 roubles to a local landowner who dismantled it and rebuilt it on his own estate. Tolstoy's brother-in-law rightly had grave misgivings about releasing the funds.69 Meanwhile, the proposal for the forces newspaper was taken to St Petersburg for Nicholas I to consider.
Russia had suffered heavy losses in the war with the allied forces that autumn. The allies had won major battles at Alma, and in September 1854 besieged Sebastopol, Russia's main naval base on the Black Sea. While the Russians started scuttling some of their ships and using the cannons of others to back up their artillery, the allies built trenches and gun redoubts in the south of the city, and were ready for the battle by the middle of October. On the first day of bombardment, on 17 October, a British attack set off the ammunition store on the Malakoff redoubt and killed Admiral Kornilov, but Russian artillery also destroyed a French magazine. Four days earlier, at the end of the Battle of Balaclava, Raglan's Light Brigade had charged into the 'valley of death', and the Russians saw their capture of the British redoubts as a victory. The Battle of Inkerman on 24 October crushed Russian hopes, however, and made it clear that the rest of the war would be fought at Sebastopol.
In Kishinyov, meanwhile, balls were being thrown for two visiting grand dukes, which left a bad taste in Tolstoy's mouth. He began petitioning to be transferred to Sebastopol. First of all he wanted to see the action for himself, but mostly he was driven by his feelings of patriotism, particularly when he learned that the 12th Artillery Brigade he had served with briefly had taken part in the Battle of Balaclava. The Russian military headquarters in St Petersburg finally began sending reinforcements down to the Crimea, and Tolstoy arrived around the same time as the 10th and 11th divisions. By early November he was in Odessa, and a week later he was in the Crimea. He might have arrived earlier, but kissing a pretty young Ukrainian girl through a window in a town south of Kherson led him to spending the night with her.70 When he arrived in Sebastopol, Tolstoy was assigned to the 3rd Battery of the 14th Light Artillery Brigade.71 He was not mobilised to be on active duty at this point, but he remained in the besieged city for nine days, during which time he was able to assess for himself exactly what was going on, by visiting the Russian fortifications and talking to soldiers and officers. He wrote to tell Sergey the harrowing stories he had heard from a wounded soldier who told him about how the taking of a French battery at Inkerman had come to nought, as reinforcements never arrived, and how 160 men in one brigade had valiantly remained at the front, even though they were wounded. Then there were the sailors who had withstood thirty days of constant bombing, and refused to be relieved from their duties. He saw priests with crosses walking along the bastions and saying prayers under fire, and heard about displays of heroism greater than in ancient Greece when Vice Admiral Kornilov had asked the Russian forces if they were prepared to die.72 There were some 35,000 Russian troops stationed in Sebastopol at this point; 13,000 of them would not return home (French and British losses were almost as heavy).73
Tolstoy was greatly moved by the fighting spirit of the troops, but he now could not help seeing why the Russian army was faring so badly. A week after leaving Sebastopol on 15 November and moving north to the Tatar village outside Simferopol where his battery was stationed, he noted in his diary that he had become more convinced than ever before that Russia either needed fundamental reform, or would collapse.74 He had talked to allied prisoners of war in Sebastopol, and was struck by their high self-esteem, and their pride in the contribution they were making to the war effort, confident it was valued. There was none of that in the Russian army, where the military leadership clearly regarded its seemingly inexhaustible supply of infantry as cannon-fodder. Tolstoy also noticed that the artillery used by his brigade was outdated compared to that deployed by the allies, and he started putting together a plan in which he set out a number of detailed reforms.75 Tolstoy had come to see that Russia's military tactics were woefully out of date. He could not fail to be aware that communications between Russia and the Crimea were abysmal, with primitive roads which were often impassable because of mud, and a minuscule railway network. Conditions for rank and file soldiers were also appalling, with military service still set at twenty years and five years in the reserves. Nicholas I's emphasis on drills and parades had meant his troops were not even properly trained.
The Tsar turned down the proposal for a forces newspaper in late November, on the grounds that it was not in the government's interests.76 He suggested instead that Tolstoy and his comrades publish articles in Russian Veteran, the official newspaper patronised by the Ministry of War, which of course they already were entitled to do. The news angered Tolstoy when it reached him, but after collecting more raw impressions from a sortie to Sebastopol in early December with his platoon, he began sketching out an article with which he hoped to respond. This was the first draft of 'Sebastopol in December', his first piece of war reportage, which would bring him national celebrity. On 11 January Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov with the proposal that he send him articles on the war which he promised would be of a quality not inferior to anything else published in The Contemporary. Nekrasov wrote back by return of post giving Tolstoy carte blanche. It was now that Tolstoy learned that his story 'Notes of a Billiard Marker' had been published in the January issue for 1855, and that Boyhood had appeared in the journal back in October. The censor had once again objected to several passages, such as the one where the narrator regrets that some people are poor while his family are rich, and all references to the Church and its rituals, which were at that time prohibited in secular publications (they include the passage about the boy's father making the sign of the cross over the window of the carriage his family is to travel in, and the horse's nickname of 'Deacon').77
Tolstoy was stationed in the quiet Tatar village of Eski-Orda for one and a half months, so he had plenty of time again at his disposal, and enjoyed hunting wild goats, playing duets and dancing with young ladies.78 But in the middle of January 1855 he was transferred to the 3rd Battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, which was stationed on the Balbek river, six miles outside Sebastopol. On the way, he stopped in the city and picked up money sent him by his brother-in-law from the sale of his house at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy earned a reputation amongst his new battalion for his physical strength - one day he impressed his comrades by lying on the floor and lifting a twelve-stone man with his bare hands. The officers in his battalion did not impress him, however; he felt very alienated in this new posting. He was miserable during that cold winter. He had no books, and no one to talk to. It was not a situation conducive to writing either, and the torpor made him vulnerable to his vices. On 3 February he steeled himself to write a difficult letter to his brother Nikolay. He had succumbed once again to his gambling addiction, and over the course of two days and two nights had lost the 1,500 roubles he had just received as seed money for the forces newspaper. Confessing this lapse to Nikolay was Tolstoy's way of doing penance.79
When news of Russia's latest defeat at Evpatoria reached the Tsar on 12 February 1855, he had wept like a child, and no longer wanted to hear any more despatches from the front. On 18 February Nicholas I died. He had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years and his death at the age of fifty-eight was completely unexpected. As far as most of the educated population of Russia was concerned, however, the news was more a reason for celebration than for mourning. The relaxation in censorship which followed soon after Alexander's accession would make an immediate impact, and Russians would begin to speak about a 'thaw', just as they would a century later after Stalin's death. Down in the Crimea, Tolstoy clearly now felt emboldened to extend his reforming plans for the military, for in early March he began sketching out a plan for modernising the entire army, not just the artillery's weapons. He did not mince his words. 'We don't have an army,' wrote Tolstoy, 'but a mob of oppressed disciplined slaves who have submitted to robbers and mercenaries.' The Russian soldier, he went on, was someone legally constricted from satisfying even his most basic needs, and he was certainly not given enough to prevent him from suffering from hunger and cold. Tolstoy divided Russian soldiers into the oppressed, the oppressors and the desperate. It was hardly surprising that an oppressed soldier spent the niggardly seventy kopecks he received every quarter (a 'bitter mockery of his poverty') on drink, and that morale was low. Tolstoy had nothing good to say about those in charge: a lot of the officers were crooks devoid of any sense of duty or honour, while the generals were more often appointed for their acceptability to the Tsar rather than for their abilities.80 Tolstoy abandoned this ambitious project after a few days, no doubt because he realised it would not go anywhere even in the new climate, but it is important to realise that there was a precedent for speaking out when he began railing in public against social and political injustices thirty years later.
At the same time that Tolstoy was preoccupied with military matters, he was also thinking deeply about religious questions. On 4 March 1855 he took communion and made a remarkable declaration in his diary about the founding of a new religion. It is often quoted in view of its prophetic nature:
Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind - the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.81
In a sense, all of Tolstoy's future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist. Tolstoy's literary works, in the compelling argument of Richard Gustafson, can even be seen as 'verbal icons' of his religious view. Until the nineteenth century the icon had fulfilled the role of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church. There simply was no written theological tradition in Russia as there was in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, and when the art of icon painting fell into decline in the nineteenth century, after the Orthodox Church was made into a department of state, it was literature which took its place. As Gustafson has commented, people in Russia began instinctively to understand the role of literature as theology: 'the images created by artists were taken seriously as words which reveal the Truth'. Tolstoy's writing is hailed for its realism, but it is a very emblematic, religious kind of realism.82
At the end of March 1855 Tolstoy began writing properly again. He started Youth, which would end up being the third and last instalment of his projected four-part work. He also began reworking the draft of his article about events at Sebastopol. He did not get very far, however, as he was called into action. After the long winter months, during which time the allies built a railway to speed up the delivery of supply of guns and ammunition, French and British troops were ready to resume their bombardment of Russian defences in Sebastopol. Tolstoy's battery was despatched to the fourth bastion in the south of the city, which was the most dangerous owing to its close proximity to the French position. The new allied bombardment ceased on 7 April, except in the case of the fourth bastion, which continued to be pummelled for another five days. Tolstoy was first on duty between 5 and 6 April, and then in stints of four days, followed by eight days' rest, during which time he retreated to a flat in town and played the piano.83 On 19 April the allies seized the trenches between the fourth and fifth bastions, and the Russian forces began to doubt that they would prevail.
On 25 April Tolstoy finished 'Sebastopol in December', his first, very patriotic and gripping piece of reportage about the realities of fighting in the besieged city, and he sent it straight away to Petersburg. Together with the two other works he wrote which make up the Sebastopol Sketches, it constitutes his most sophisticated writing yet. In this first sketch, the narrator takes the reader on a tour of Sebastopol set in the present tense, so that the experience of hostilities is all the more vivid when it begins, and reminiscent of the experience of watching a film:
The whistle, close at hand, of a shell or a cannonball, just at the very moment you start to climb the hill, gives you a nasty sensation. Suddenly you realise, in an entirely new way, the true significance of those sounds of gunfire you heard from the town. Some quiet, happy memory suddenly flickers to life in your brain; you start thinking more about yourself and less about what you observe around you, and are suddenly gripped by an unpleasant sense of indecision...84
Tolstoy, hailed as the first war correspondent, was adept at combining personal impressions, conveyed in a conversational, intimate tone, with the lofty viewpoint of a historian or epic poet able to speak for the nation. Meanwhile he continued his turns of duty on the fourth bastion. The allied bombardment now became fiercer, particularly during a battle beginning on the evening of 10 May, which resulted in heavy casualties (about 2,500 on each side), and further attrition of Russian defences. The experience of living through these events provided Tolstoy with material for his second despatch. On 15 May he was sent to command the guns of a mountain platoon twelve miles out of Sebastopol, and this ended his tour of duty on the fourth bastion.85
In June Tolstoy once again had time to write. He turned first to 'The Wood-Felling: A Cadet's Tale'. This was a story he had begun earlier about his army experiences in the Caucasus, which now seemed so distant. He finished the story on 18 June, and sent it off to Nekrasov for publication in The Contemporary, where it appeared that September. Meanwhile, 'Sebastopol in December' was published in the June issue, and it created a furore. Russian readers had never been given a true picture of what warfare was like in their literary journals, still less an idea of what it was like for ordinary soldiers while it was still going on. Tolstoy's descriptions of their heroism and suffering were deeply moving, the more so for the calm, unsensational tone in which they were delivered. Tolstoy learned that the Tsar himself had read 'Sebastopol in December', and had ordered it to be translated for publication in the Russian government's French-language journal Le Nord.86 He was flattered, naturally, but his thoughts were now dominated by his longing to retire from the army and concentrate on his writing. The optimism he had expressed in 'Sebastopol in December' was misplaced: the situation was becoming bleaker by the day. On 28 June another of the army's commanders died when Admiral Nakhimov was shot in the head.
On 5 July Tolstoy sent off his second sketch about the siege of Sebastopol to The Contemporary. He was well aware the censor would object to much in 'Sebastopol in May', which is a far bleaker work than 'Sebastopol in December' and represents the first strong expression of Tolstoy's views on the futility of war:
Yes, white flags have been raised on the bastion and all along the trench, the flowering valley is filled with stinking corpses, the resplendent sun is descending toward the dark blue sea, and the sea's blue swell is gleaming in the sun's golden rays. Thousands of men are crowding together, studying one another, speaking to one another, smiling at one another. It might be supposed that when these men - Christians, recognising the same great law of love - see what they have done, they will instantly fall to their knees to repent before Him who, when He gave them life, placed in the soul of each, together with the fear of death, a love of the good and the beautiful, and that they will embrace one another with tears of joy and happiness, like brothers. Not a bit of it! The scraps of white cloth will be put away - and once again the engines of death and suffering will start their whistling; once again the blood of the innocent will flow and the air will be filled with their groans and cursing.87
On 24 August the allies started their sixth and final bombardment of the Sebastopol fortress. Tolstoy took part in the defence of the Malakov redoubt, but it was seized on 27 August. That night, the Russian army began to abandon its positions on the south side of Sebastopol and crossed the river over to the north side. After a year-long siege, Sebastopol had fallen to the allied forces. Tolstoy cried when he saw the once beautiful city in flames, with French flags flying on all the bastions.88 He was still there on 28 August to witness the city fall strangely silent. It was his twenty-seventh birthday, and he remembered back to another gloomy birthday in 1841, when his aunt Aline had died. On the same day, Ivan Panayev, co-editor of The Contemporary, wrote to Tolstoy to tell him that 'Sebastopol in May' had been massacred by the censor, who had reduced its length by about a third. Panayev had wanted to withdraw it from publication, but the censor insisted it be published exactly as it now stood.89 The only consolation was that Panayev published it anonymously, as 'A Night in the Spring of 1855 in Sebastopol' to spare Tolstoy's feelings. It appeared in the August issue of The Contemporary, coinciding with the fall of Sebastopol.
Tolstoy felt listless throughout the warm days of September. He began his third and final piece about the siege - 'Sebastopol in September' - but his heart was not in it. He was burned out and exhausted, and so surrendered to gambling again. This was a bad sign, and he realised he needed to leave the army sooner rather than later. In early November Tolstoy was sent to St Petersburg as a courier. The next stage of his life was about to begin.