Measuring myself against my former Yasnaya memories, I can feel how much I have changed in the liberal sense.
Diary entry, May 1856
NO PERIOD OF TOLSTOY'S LIFE was uneventful, but the years between the time he left the Crimea in 1855 and married in 1862 were particularly crucial in terms of his artistic and intellectual formation. Tolstoy had been away from Russian metropolitan life for four years, and arriving back in the city was a big shock to the system. He had launched his career from outside the Russian literary establishment, and his talent had catapulted him right into its midst. Now he had to contend with it face to face, which meant living up to expectations - his own, and those of his new colleagues. It also meant confronting insecurities with regard to more established writers, and discovering where his allegiances lay. But during this time of great social change, he began to recognise within himself an impulse which ran counter to the pursuit of an artistic career: a deep moral need to do something about social inequality in Russia. He had taken jejune steps in this direction when he first came into his inheritance, but the experience of standing next to common soldiers in the Crimean War had been more than chastening: Sebastopol marked Tolstoy for life. He began this seven-year period as an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old writer anxious to consolidate his early successes, but he ended it as a village schoolteacher.
Tolstoy was rarely at peace with himself during this turbulent time. It was not just that his new writing met with a mixed reception, or that he remained unmarried (it was a matter of great consternation to him that his attempts to find a bride always ended in failure). His family life was also troubled: his brothers Dmitry and Nikolay both died of tuberculosis within a few years of each other, and his sister Masha ended an unhappy marriage. Turgenev now became a major part of Tolstoy's life, but the warm embraces they exchanged when they first met were gradually replaced by fractious disagreements; theirs was a volatile friendship. In 1861 Tolstoy would challenge Turgenev to a duel, and their uneasy reconciliation was followed by a seventeen-year feud. The trajectory of the friendships Tolstoy formed with many other Russian writers followed a similar, albeit less dramatic pattern. It was in the early years following his retirement from the army that Tolstoy had his closest contacts with many of his peers, most of whom were based in St Petersburg. As he shuttled between Yasnaya Polyana, Moscow and the capital, torn by conflicting desires, he discovered that he did not want to be part of the literary community, nor was there any place for him under its rapidly changing agenda. When he returned from his second trip abroad in 1861, he settled in Yasnaya Polyana for good, and made his feelings emphatically clear by not returning to St Petersburg for seventeen years. It was not an outcome he was expecting when he packed his bags in the Crimea, excited at the prospect of the warm reception he was going to receive from his new writer friends.
Tolstoy received his first letter from Turgenev just before leaving Sebastopol in November 1855. The two writers had read each other's work, but never met. Tolstoy was in awe of his elder contemporary, who had been a fixture of the St Petersburg literary scene for almost a decade by the time he made his own debut. A careful re-reading of A Hunter's Notes during his second summer in Pyatigorsk had produced the lapidary comment in his diary 'Writing is a bit difficult after him'.1 For his part, Turgenev had immediately perceived Tolstoy's literary talent, and was deeply flattered that 'The Wood-Felling' was dedicated to him (no other writer would receive a dedication from Tolstoy). When Turgenev wrote his first letter to Tolstoy, he felt he was addressing someone he already almost knew, as he had met (and rather fallen for) his sister Masha the previous autumn.2 Her husband Valerian Petrovich's Pokrovskoye estate was only twelve miles from Turgenev's ancestral home, and a shared love of hunting had brought the two neighbours into contact. Naturally, when Tolstoy arrived in St Petersburg, the first person he wanted to see was Turgenev. After checking into a hotel and paying a visit to the bath-house, he went straight round to Turgenev's apartment, only to find the writer on his way out - in the hope of finding him. They exchanged hearty kisses, and Turgenev immediately insisted that Tolstoy share his flat on the Fontanka river.3 It would be Tolstoy's home for the next month as he readjusted to civilian life.
As a celebrated author and officer who had arrived straight from the front line, Tolstoy was welcomed like a conquering hero by the editors of The Contemporary. There was also an air of mystery about him. Here was a young man who had submitted an unsolicited manuscript from the Caucasus three years earlier, and no one at The Contemporary had actually met him. In fact only a few people even recognised his name, as he had signed all his stories so far with his initials only. Tolstoy was also anxious to meet the new colleagues he had been corresponding with, and he hoped they would be kindred spirits. He had been a callow and impressionable youth when he had last been in St Petersburg, but now he was a published writer, a war hero and a celebrity. On his first day in St Petersburg Turgenev took Tolstoy round to meet Nekrasov (the editorial offices of The Contemporary were located in a building on the other side of the river), and they had lunch and talked and played chess until eight in the evening.4 Nekrasov went into raptures in a letter to a friend, describing Tolstoy as 'better than his writing', a 'falcon', or perhaps even an 'eagle'.5 There followed meetings with critics and publishers, and dinners with other writers, including the novelist Ivan Goncharov, then working on his masterpiece Oblomov (1859), and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Soon Tolstoy was personally acquainted with all the leading lights of Russian literature, who fell over themselves to express how delighted they were by this talented young artillery officer.
Tolstoy found it intoxicating to be back in civilised surroundings, where there was plenty of intellectual stimulation, but he also craved the intoxication of gypsy music and card games, in which he could seek oblivion and shake off the stresses of the last few years. The poet Afanasy Fet visited one day for mid-morning tea with Turgenev and was told by his servant Zakhar that the gleaming sabre in the corner of the hall belonged to Count Tolstoy. Fet and Turgenev then had to spend the next hour talking in whispers, as the count was still asleep on the couch in the drawing room, having been up all night carousing. Turgenev, though only ten years Tolstoy's senior, had assumed a kind of paternal role in their relationship and explained that it was the same every night, and that he had long since given up on him.6 On 11 December Tolstoy spent all the money he had left throwing a party with gypsy singers at the Hotel Napoleon.7
Of all the writers Tolstoy met during his sojourn in St Petersburg, only Fet became a lasting friend, but even he would fail to make the cut when Tolstoy emerged from his spiritual crisis in the 1880s. Much as they all liked Tolstoy, the writers in St Petersburg soon realised that it was actually not all that easy to get on with him. He came out with such provocative opinions, and seemed to go out of his way to be contrary. Many of the writers associated with The Contemporary were either writing about Shakespeare or translating him, for example, but Tolstoy was simply dismissive of him.8 And the mild-mannered Turgenev soon found himself having violent arguments with Tolstoy. They were two men from the same patrician background, but Tolstoy did not like compromise, and he instinctively recoiled from Turgenev's refined elegance and spirit of moderation, which were a great disappointment to him. One evening Turgenev read from the manuscript of his first novel, Rudin, to an assembled company. In comparison withA Hunter's Notes, Tolstoy found it unbelievably contrived, and could not believe how seriously it was received by the other literati present.
Turgenev had not had a particularly easy time. He was a self-confessed Westerniser, so was anxious to see reform and modernisation in Russia along European lines. He had bravely gone against the grain of his upbringing by befriending the radical critic Belinsky, whose reforming zeal stemmed partly from his lowly social origins, and his implicit criticism of serfdom in his A Hunter's Notes had made him a very dubious figure in the eyes of the tsarist establishment. Turgenev never shied away from standing up for what he believed was right, or from dealing with political issues in his works. He had defiantly published an obituary of Gogol back in 1852, despite knowing that all mention of a writer who had satirised the Fatherland had been forbidden by the censor (the same censor who disfigured Tolstoy's 'Sebastopol in May'). To punish him for the crime of daring to call Gogol 'great', Nicholas I had personally ordered Turgenev's arrest and imprisonment for a month, to be followed by permanent exile to his estate. It had only been thanks to the future Alexander II, who had liked A Hunter's Notes, that he had been allowed to travel again at the end of 1853. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev, Tolstoy was intent on carving out a career as a novelist himself, but Rudin did not impress him.
Something else marked Tolstoy out from the progressive writers grouped round The Contemporary: his contacts with the St Petersburg aristocracy. Tolstoy came to despise the social conventions of high society, but he made an exception for family, and he would become particularly close to Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstoya, whom he got to know now for the first time. 'Alexandrine' was the daughter of his paternal great uncle, and she and her sister Elizaveta had apartments in the Mariinsky Palace opposite the cathedral in St Isaac's Square, as they were tutors and then ladies-in-waiting to Nicholas I's daughter Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna and her daughters Maria and Evgenia. If Tolstoy unconsciously looked to Turgenev as a father figure, he jocularly called Alexandra Andreyevna his babushka (grandmother), although, like Turgenev, she was only ten or so years his senior. In the memoir Alexandrine wrote of her relationship with her unruly cousin at the end of her life, she recalled the distinct impression he had made on everyone when he arrived from Sebastopol:
He himself was very simple, extremely modest [this was early in his career] and so playful that his presence enlivened everybody. He spoke very rarely about himself [one rule he had followed!], but examined each new face with particular attention, and then relayed his impressions, which were nearly always quite extreme, in a most amusing way. The adjective thin-skinned, which his wife later applied to him, suited him exactly, so strongly was he affected by the slightest nuance that he caught. His unattractive face, with clever, kind and expressive eyes, replaced with their expression everything he lacked by way of refinement, and, it may be said, was superior to beauty.9
Along with Aunt Toinette, Alexandrine was one of the few women in Tolstoy's life whom he really respected. She had not married or had children, and so he did not categorise her as a 'typical' woman, although he was certainly attracted to her. She clearly also felt there was a frisson between them. They were to fall out very badly over religion later on, at a time when Tolstoy burned his boats with nearly everyone he was close to, but they cared for each other deeply. Alexandrine was a tremendously intelligent, no-nonsense woman whose company Tolstoy greatly enjoyed. After Tolstoy became ensconced at Yasnaya Polyana, their contact became more sporadic, but their correspondence was always lively. It was to Alexandrine, of course, that Tolstoy invariably turned to when he needed a direct line to the Tsar, as she was extremely well connected at court. Addressing personal letters to the Tsar would become something of a habit with Tolstoy, and in the early days Alexandrine was a willing intermediary, although rather less so when her cousin became a public liability towards the end of his life by openly going head to head with the Russian government.
At the end of November, Tolstoy wrote an ebullient letter to his sister Masha to tell her how his meeting with Turgenev had gone (and how unscin-tillating Nekrasov had turned out to be). Just a few days later he received a letter from her, in which she exhorted him to come and visit their brother Dmitry, who was now gravely ill. Since Tolstoy was technically still on active duty with the army, he had to apply for leave, and was unable to get away until 1 January. By that time he had been transferred to a naval munitions unit in St Petersburg, which effectively left him free to pursue his own interests. Dmitry was now living in Oryol, south-west of Tula, and was being cared for by Masha and her husband along with Aunt Toinette and his common-law wife - a former prostitute also called Masha. Tolstoy arrived on 9 January to find Dmitry ravaged by tuberculosis, and in great suffering, his emaciated face dominated by huge staring eyes. Unwilling to accept that he was going to die, Dmitry was convinced he would be healed with the help of a miracle-working icon, to which he prayed constantly. Tolstoy found the experience so distressing he left the next day. Dmitry died in his wife's arms on 22 January 1856.
Tolstoy had not been in touch with Dmitry for over a year, and had not even known his brother was ill. All the Tolstoys had their share of dikost, particularly Lev, but Dmitry gave him a good run for his money. They shared the same uncompromising maximalist impulse. After the fiasco Dmitry had suffered in St Petersburg, he had returned to his estate in Kursk province, and taken a minor job in local government. In 1853 he had fallen seriously ill in Moscow, where he grew a huge beard and became very reclusive. When he realised he had not much longer to live, he suddenly relinquished all his ascetic habits and former piety and abandoned himself to a debauched life of drinking, gambling and whoring. He had 'bought out' Masha from her brothel, and then treated her very badly, throwing her out only to call her back.10 Dmitry, the 'unloved' brother, had written his last letter to Tolstoy from his Shcherbachevka estate in October 1854, telling him he had racked up nearly 7,000 roubles of debts and was sitting at home working in the garden and on the estate. Without telling his brother he was dying, he told him he was sad rather than bored: 'sad because I am alone, and not what I might have been, and finally because nothing has quite worked out'.11 Tolstoy had not approved of Dmitry's sudden change of lifestyle, and did not reply. While he was in Oryol visiting Dmitry, he noted in his diary that all the bad thoughts he had harboured about him 'crumbled to dust' as soon as he saw him, but he still left.12
From Dmitry's deathbed, Tolstoy had travelled to Moscow, and it was here that he learned of his brother's death when the former prostitute Masha arrived back in the city. She told Tolstoy that Dmitry had only realised the hopelessness of his situation hours before he passed away, when he had started asking for a priest and a doctor, and pleading to be taken to Yasnaya Polyana so he could die quietly there. It was at Yasnaya Polyana that he was buried. Tolstoy later repented bitterly of being so wrapped up in his own life that he had not noticed the seriousness of his brother's condition earlier. He also felt remorse for the caddish way he had behaved towards him. In Anna Karenina he would bring Dmitry back to life again as Levin's brother Nikolay, a character who also has a relationship with a former prostitute. Having missed the real event, Tolstoy took particular care when it came to describing Nikolay's agonising demise in the only chapter in the novel to bear a title ('Death'), by which time he could also draw on the experience of witnessing his brother Nikolay die. Tolstoy also went out of his way at the end of his life to write at length about the real-life Dmitry in his memoirs.
Tolstoy stayed on in Moscow for about a month before returning to St Petersburg, which gave him the opportunity to meet those writers who were based in the old capital, such as Sergey and Konstantin Aksakov. As prominent Slavophiles opposed to to Russia's Westernisation, the Aksakovs would have never dreamed of living in the European-looking St Petersburg. The controversy amongst the Russian intelligentsia between the two warring camps of the Slavophiles and Westernisers had first flared up in the previous decade, and the impassioned public debates about Russia's present and future would continue for the rest of Tolstoy's life. He probably already knew he was not a Westerniser, but he would typically also come to reject Slavophile ideology in time, even though his preoccupation with traditional forms of native rural life would seem to make him a natural ally. When it came down to it, Tolstoy's egotism would simply not allow him to become part of a movement in which he and his ideas did not take centre stage. He returned to Petersburg at the end of January 1856. This time he wisely lived on his own, and stayed in the capital until the middle of May. The last of his war stories was published in The Contemporary in the January issue, but this time with a difference: 'Sebastopol in August' was the first of his works to be signed 'Count L. Tolstoy'.13
That spring he worked hard on two further stories, which were both published in The Contemporary. The first was 'The Snowstorm', which appeared in March, an artistically ambitious and visionary work inspired by the atrocious weather he had encountered during his journey home from the Caucasus in January 1854. 'The Two Hussars' was a gambling tale with a moral which compared two generations of the Russian nobility. It was dedicated to Tolstoy's sister Masha and appeared in May. As far as the editors ofThe Contemporary were concerned, Tolstoy was still their star writer, and at some point that spring he signed a contract with the journal. Along with Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Grigorovich, the journal's three other most valued writers, Tolstoy promised first refusal on new works for the next four years, in return for a share of its profits.14
Tolstoy came to regret signing that contract. His headstrong and eccentric views had been met with raised eyebrows and pursed lips during his first meetings with the Petersburg literary fraternity, but after he came back from Moscow in January there were remonstrations and then arguments, some of which became very heated, particularly with Turgenev. Tolstoy took offence easily, but he also gave offence easily. He was younger than his new friends, and sometimes seemed to be contrary just for the sake of it - he liked being outrageous. And then were arguments on subjects he had strong and dogmatic views about, such as the 'woman question'. The first major conflict arose in early February over the prolific French novelist George Sand, whom Turgenev greatly admired for her bravery and independent spirit. Tolstoy believed in the institution of marriage, and was not an adherent of women's emancipation (the 'girls' he visited in Petersburg's brothels were another matter, of course). It was a particularly charged argument, because of the menage a trois arrangement maintained by Nekrasov and his co-editor Panayev, whose wife Advotya was Nekrasov's mistress, as Tolstoy well knew. Another altercation with one of Nekrasov's colleagues on 19 March even led Tolstoy to challenge him to a duel. The challenge went unanswered, and for a while Tolstoy considered giving up literature and moving back to the country.15
Tolstoy did try to fit in and be part of the collective. At the end of March he arranged for a group photograph to be taken to mark the visit to St Petersburg of Alexander Ostrovsky, a promising new playwright.16 This was quite an event, as Sergey Levitsky, the pioneer of Russian photography, had only just set up his studio on Nevsky Prospekt. In time he would receive an imperial warrant to photograph the Romanovs, but one of his most famous photographs remained the portrait organised by Tolstoy, the only writer in the shot wearing army uniform. Levitsky had studied in Paris and set up a studio there before returning to Russia, and he was an interesting man in his own right: apart from being Alexander Herzen's cousin, he had taken celebrated photographs of the Caucasus in the late 1840s, and much later on would inadvertently provoke Tolstoy into suddenly taking Orthodox Christianity very seriously. The 1856 photograph of The Contemporary's writers became a permanent fixture on the wall of Tolstoy's study at Yasnaya Polyana.
Tolstoy would get to know Ostrovsky better a few years later, when he rented a house near to where he lived in Moscow. Ostrovsky's father was a Moscow lawyer, and he came from a far less privileged background than Tolstoy and Turgenev. His first play,Bankruptcy, had been personally censored in 1850 by Nicholas I, who had been so appalled by its depiction of Russian merchants as dishonest that he had placed the playwright under police surveillance. Ostrovsky's first stage success had come in 1853 with the production of his third play, Don't Get Into Someone Else's Sleigh, and he was now about to widen his horizons. In the optimistic climate following Nicholas I's death, the Tsar's liberal-minded younger brother Grand Duke Konstantin, who was in charge of the Marine Ministry, hatched an enlightened plan to send a group of eight young writers, rather than bureaucrats, on an expedition down the Volga to study the lives of those who fished and navigated its waters. Ostrovsky was one of the eight, and he left for the Volga in April 1856, as soon as the police surveillance on him was lifted.
April 1856 was also an important month for Tolstoy. At the end of March Alexander II had given the famous speech in Moscow in which he declared that it was better to abolish serfdom 'from above' than to wait for it to abolish itself 'from below'. The prospect of the Russian peasantry being freed was sensational news, and spread rapidly throughout the country.17 Tolstoy immediately began to sketch out a project to free his serfs, having by this time joined the distinguished ranks of the Russian gentry whose awakened social conscience caused them to become 'repentant noblemen'. The first had been the eighteenth-century writer Alexander Radishchev, whom Catherine the Great exiled to Siberia in 1790 for exposing the evil of serfdom in his book A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. As a credulous young man, Radishchev had believed the myth that Catherine was enlightened and just. He had enjoyed an elite education, and so was frequently exposed to the 'richness and splendour' of the Russian court which for the British visitor William Coxe in the 1780s almost surpassed description.18
Radishchev was consequently shocked after the opulence of St Petersburg to discover quite how wretched the living conditions of the Russian peasantry really were when he left the city and began his journey to Moscow. He now began to see the immorality of the whole edifice of the tsarist autocracy for the first time, and also the role of the Russian nobility in supporting such an inhumane system, as becomes abundantly clear in the following passage:
Twice every week all of the Russian Empire is informed that N. N. or B. B. is unable or unwilling to pay what he has borrowed, taken or what is demanded from him. The borrowed money has been gambled away, traveled away, spent away, eaten away, drunk away, given away or has perished in fire and water ... Any case will do for the announcement which reads: At ten o'clock this morning, on order of the county court or city magistrate, the real estate of retired captain'T ... consisting of house no. X, in such and such a district, and six male and female souls, will be sold at auction ... Everyone is interested in a bargain. The day and hour of the sale has arrived. Buyers are assembling from all around. In the hall where the sale is to take place, the condemned are standing motionless. An old man of 75 years, leaning on an elmwood cane, is anxious to find out into whose hands his fate will pass, who will close his eyes. He served with the Master's father in the Crimean campaign under Field Marshal Munnich. At the battle of Frankfurt he carried his wounded master off the field of battle on his shoulders. Returning home, he became the tutor for his young master. In [the Master's] childhood, he had saved the boy from drowning, jumping into the river into which he had fallen while crossing on a ferry, and putting his life at risk, pulled him out. In [the Master's] youth he had bailed him out of prison where he had been confined for his debts incurred while serving as a junior officer...19
It was Radishchev's book (republished by Herzen in London in 1858) which launched the birth of Russia's intellectual aristocracy - its intelligentsia. For the most progressive members of this class of Russians defined by their opposition to the state, of whom the editorial staff on The Contemporary were amongst their number, the abolition of serfdom was the single burning issue which needed to be addressed. Only writers had dared to broach this and other sensitive topics before the accession of Alexander II, hence their hallowed status in Russia, and the noble tradition of the writer as the moral voice of the nation would in time be continued by Tolstoy.
Tolstoy had become a confirmed opponent of serfdom while he was in Sebastopol, but his views were no doubt further influenced by the conversations he had with Nekrasov and his new colleagues. After many meetings and consultations, including with the historian and liberal thinker Konstantin Kavelin, whose proposal for the emancipation of the serfs had been circulating in samizdat form for the previous year, Tolstoy went to discuss his own emancipation plan with a senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His intention was to give his serfs complete personal freedom, and to sell the land to them over a thirty-year period for 150 roubles for each desya-tina (2.7 acres). The Ministry was not yet ready to make decisions on such matters at this point, but Tolstoy was firmly resolved.
Although he was promoted in March 1856 to the rank of lieutenant for his bravery in Sebastopol,20 Tolstoy had little interest in continuing his military career. He immediately put in a petition for an eleven-month leave. The winter months he had spent in Petersburg had been exceptionally busy. He had largely managed to curb his degenerate habits and had worked hard on his writing, but there were a few cultural outings. The flat he had taken on Ofitserskaya Street was close to the city's two main opera houses, and on 4 May he sat in the same box as the composer at the premiere of Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka at the Circus-Theatre (home to the Russian opera, and forerunner of the Mariinsky Theatre).21 Later in the month he took the train out to Pavlovsk, and is bound to have been at the second concert given that season by Johann Strauss Jr and his orchestra. Pavlovsk had become an important concert venue after the opening of the railway link with St Petersburg in 1837 (the first in Russia). The country's first railway station - called, for reasons that are not entirely clear, a vokzal after the English 'Vauxhall' - included a spacious and well-appointed pavilion where the performance of light music had turned into regular orchestral concerts during the summer months, and one of the first signs of the liberalisation of Russian society under Alexander II was the invitation to the 'Waltz King' to come to Russia. The arrival in Russia of dance music seemed to augur well for the new reign. On 16 May, the day after he went to Pavlovsk, Tolstoy was finally given permission to go on leave, which meant he could finally head back to Yasnaya Polyana and put his emancipation plans into action. Within two days he had packed his bags and departed.
By the end of May, after stopping in Moscow for a few days, and visiting the Trinity St Sergius Monastery with his aunt Polina, Tolstoy was finally back in Yasnaya Polyana. He had not lived at home for about five years, and he initially found it hard to readjust. First of all he had to get used to the gaping hole where his family home had stood, and it was strange living in one of the house's two identical wings. Secondly, after all the liberal talk in St Petersburg, the very idea of his being a landowner with serfs now seemed utterly repellent to him. He even found it difficult being with dear old ancien régime Aunt Toinette at first, as even she seemed 'unpleasant'.22 Tolstoy immediately called a meeting with his peasants to propose his scheme for freeing them, but, to his surprise, they were suspicious of his motives, and did not give him a definitive response. The peasants were convinced they would be given their freedom when the new tsar was crowned, and so believed Tolstoy's offer of a contract was just a cunning ruse to swindle them. After several more meetings they refused all his revised offers. It was very frustrating for him, as he had not anticipated such distrust.23 He resolved to put his emancipation plans to one side.
Tolstoy threw his energies instead into reading (Dickens's Little Dorrit was one book he immersed himself in that summer) and writing. Mostly he worked on Youth, the third and final volume of the quartet of short novels he had originally planned about the early life of a young noble, and the first draft of what came to be the novella A Landowner's Morning, in which he focused on Russian peasants for the first time. During the summer months Tolstoy also went on visits to his sister Masha and her husband, and rode over from their house to visit Turgenev at his estate at Spasskoye. His brother Nikolay by this time was back in the Caucasus. Despite having resigned from the army in 1854, the following summer he had applied to rejoin, and he had been posted back to Starogladkovskaya.24 Sergey was briefly in the army too at this time, and Tolstoy was reunited with him in July in Mtsensk, where he was serving with the Life-Guards 4th Imperial Family Rifle Regiment (he had joined the army in March 1855, presumably on a wave of patriotic fervour engendered by the Crimean War, but he had already begun to tire of it, and was about to resign).25
What claimed most of Tolstoy's attention that summer was romance. His old university friend Dmitry Dyakov had suggested he marry Valeria Arseneva, a twenty-year-old neighbour who had become his ward upon the death of her father in 1854. Her family home was five miles away from Yasnaya Polyana on the road to Tula, and Tolstoy started making frequent visits, and cultivating her as a potential bride. It was an awkward relationship, as Tolstoy was not prepared to accept Valeria as she was - he wanted to mould her according to his ideal of womanhood. He was dreadfully disappointed when she seemed to take too much interest in dresses and dancing, while she seemed to have little idea of what he wanted from her. Reading between the lines of the many entries Tolstoy made in his diary about her, it appears his feelings of affection for Valeria were mostly wishful thinking. He wanted to be in love with her, and sometime he was 'almost' in love with her, but it was all too contrived.26 All the time that he was courting her that summer, he found it impossible to restrain his guilt-provoking urges to pursue peasant women.27
By the onset of autumn 1856 Tolstoy had finished dictating Youth to a copyist and received author's copies of his first books: War Stories (which brought together his Sebastopol tales with 'The Raid' and 'The Wood-Felling'), Childhood and Boyhood.He had also submitted his letter of resignation to the army on the grounds of illness, and by the end of November he was once again a civilian.28 On 1 November he set off for Moscow, and then on to St Petersburg, still seeing Valeria as his future wife. The poor girl continued all autumn to receive patronising letters instructing her on what her role was to be, which was a mother (mat') but not a queen bee (matka), and he asked her whether she understood the difference.29 Some of the letters were long and very attentive, but some of the de-haut-en-bas directives were jaw-dropping in their self-righteous hypocrisy, when one bears in mind his own record. 'Your chief defect is weakness of character, and all your other minor faults proceed from it,' he wrote in one letter. 'Work on improving your willpower. Take yourself in hand and do battle with your bad habits.' 30 Tolstoy's already lukewarm ardour cooled further that autumn, and at the end of 1856 he wrote her a brusque letter breaking off relations, leaving her understandably feeling hurt and confused. In January he wrote a contrite letter of apology, but even then his admission of guilt to himself came before his admission of guilt to her.31
Before Tolstoy had signed his contract with The Contemporary he had promised a story to the journal Notes of the Fatherland, which was its main rival, and he spent much of his time in Petersburg that autumn working further on the story he had extracted from his unfinished Novel of a Russian Landowner, which he had been tinkering with ever since he had been in the Caucasus. In A Landowner's Morning, which was published in December, he fictionalised his own experiences in trying to improve the life of his serfs. In its concern to deal seriously with Russian peasants as fictional characters, it was a kind of A Hunter's Notes a decade further on, but under the new tsar, so much more could now be said. Importantly, A Landowner's Morning met with the approval ofThe Contemporary's new critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who published a lengthy and influential review of Tolstoy's work to date in the journal's December issue.
Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky were the same age, and they both sought the abolition of serfdom, but there was nothing else they had in common. Chernyshevsky came from a new breed of political radicals whose real goal was revolution. Both he and the younger Alexander Dobrolyubov, who joined The Contemporary in 1857, came from the same social and ideological stock as Belinsky, but they were dismissive of the ineffectual idealists of Turgenev's generation. As children of clergy, they were raznochintsy - a class which often denoted educated members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds, and they were far more dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose than Nekrasov and Panayev. Chernyshevsky had set the new agenda for The Contemporary in his 1855 essay The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in which he declared that 'beauty is life', and proclaimed art to be inferior to science.32 In his review of Tolstoy's work, Chernyshevsky defined his technique in following the development of the evanescent thoughts and feelings of his characters as the 'dialectics of the soul', and compared it to the ability of certain painters 'to capture a flickering reflection of light on rustling leaves' or 'the play of colours in the changing outlines of clouds'.33 By this he meant that Tolstoy was not so much interested in the end result of a psychological process as in the process itself. It was a deliberately flattering review, but it was clear that Tolstoy would not respond warmly to Chernyshevsky's utilitarian views about art. As a result of Nekrasov's support of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of The Contemporary now started to be prioritised over artistic criteria, and this would lead to the journal losing all its top writers to the Russian Messenger in Moscow, Tolstoy included.
Once Tolstoy received his resignation papers from the army at the end of November, he was free to leave St Petersburg for good. He had set himself two goals, and accomplished both. Firstly, he had 'tested' his feelings for Valeria Arseneva, and proved to himself they had no substance, and secondly, he had completed Youth and submitted it for publication in January 1857. All he had to do now was obtain a foreign passport so that he could make his first trip abroad. After a month of tedious bureaucratic procedures, he was ready to set off for Moscow to prepare for his trip, and on 9 November (21 November according to the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe), he arrived in Paris at the end of a twelve-day journey. He had decided to travel alone, without a servant. The same evening, after unpacking his bags at the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, he set off to go to the traditional 'Samedi Gras' ball at the Paris Opéra, where he joined Nekrasov and Turgenev.
Tolstoy's six weeks in Paris were coloured by his meetings with Turgenev, whom he saw most days. By and large, they got on. Turgenev was spending more and more time abroad and knew the city extremely well, so would have been a marvellous guide. Tolstoy surrendered himself to sightseeing - the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Musée de Cluny, Napoleon's tomb at the Hôtel des Invalides ('terrible deification'),34 the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and then trips out to Versailles, to Fontainebleau and further afield to Dijon. He also saw a lot of shows. He went to the Théâtre Français to see Molière and Racine, he heard Rigoletto, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Fille du régiment at the Italian Opera, an operetta at the Bouffes Parisiens and watched a farce at the Théâtre des Variétés. He also went to lectures at the Sorbonne. And then early in the morning of 25 March he went to witness a public execution by guillotine, an experience which traumatised him so much that he could no longer stay in Paris. Despite having had plans to go on to London (he had been taking English lessons in Paris), he headed instead for Geneva, for a reunion with Alexandrine and her sister, who were holidaying there along with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna.35 He told his sister by letter that he had arrived just before the end of Great Lent, and had fasted in order to take communion.36
Relieved to have escaped from 'Sodom and Gomorrah', as he referred to Paris, Tolstoy spent the next three and half months restoring his spirits in Switzerland. He also picked up his pen again, and caught up with his reading, which was eclectic, and included Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, De Tocqueville, Proudhon, Balzac, Las Cases' memoirs of Napoleon, and Goethe. Turgenev still found Tolstoy very bemusing. 'He's a strange person,' he confided in a letter to a friend. 'I've never met anyone like him, and don't quite understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic, nobleman - something reminiscent of Rousseau, but more honest than Rousseau - highly moral and at the same time unattractive.'37 Turgenev did understand Tolstoy better than most, and, knowing how quickly he became bored, predicted that his friend would soon tire of Lake Geneva. In fact, Tolstoy enjoyed his stay in Switzerland. It is true he did not stay still for very long, but the company of Alexandrine was very congenial. After two weeks they took a ferry across the lake to Clarens, from where he wrote excitedly to Aunt Toinette, telling her it was the same village where Rousseau's Julie had lived in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The scenery was ravishing. 'I won't try to describe to you the beauty of this country, particularly at the moment, when everything is in leaf and blossoming' ('Je n'essayerais pas de vous dépeindre la beauté de ce pays surtout à présent quand tout est en feuilles et en fleurs'), he wrote, telling her he found it impossible to detach his gaze from the lake. He spent most of his time going on walks, or just looking out of the window in his room.38
From Clarens there were excursions to Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux and Chillon, with walks in the mountains and picnics with other Russian visitors. At the end of May Alexandrine and her sister went back to Geneva and Tolstoy went on a walking tour in the Alps, taking with him for company Sasha Polivanov, the eleven-year-old son of some Russian acquaintances, as well as his diary and a supply of paper in his knapsack. It was the first time he had been in the mountains since being stationed in the Caucasus five years earlier, but the tranquillity of the picture-book Alpine pastures full of narcissi and well-fed cows with bells round their necks was a far cry from Chechnya. When the travellers got to Grindelwald, where Tolstoy went down a glacier, he started writing up his travel notes, thinking they could be published in some form or other in The Contemporary. The main focus of Tolstoy's writing in Switzerland, however, was the story which would eventually become The Cossacks.
Turgenev was right about Tolstoy being restless. Soon after returning from his eleven-day walking tour he was off again, to Bern and Fribourg. A few days after that he went back to Geneva, then on to Chambery in Savoie, and many other places which brought the Savoyard vicar from Rousseau's Emile to mind. In Turin, Tolstoy met up with his friends the Botkins and Alexander Druzhinin. The return journey to Switzerland took Tolstoy first to Ivrea, followed by two ascents of Monte Rosa. Then came stops in Pont Saint-Martin, Gressoney and Chambave, and a night in the famous hospice founded by St Bernard in 1049, located at the highest point of the Great St Bernard Pass (the oldest in the Alps). Before descending, he looked round the monastery church and inspected the St Bernard dogs, who had been part of the monastery since the seventeenth century, and had saved the lives of hundreds of travellers stuck in avalanches.39 Then it was back down into Switzerland, via the glorious Pissevache waterfall. The 114 metre-high fall had been visited by Rousseau and, in 1779, inspired Goethe to flights of rhetoric. By this stage, Tolstoy was making only brief notes in his diary, and his own enigmatic verdict on the waterfall was 'tumbling rye'.40 Down on the lake at Villeneuve, Tolstoy caught a ferry back to Clarens.41
In early July Tolstoy travelled via Bern to Lucerne, where he took a room in the Schweizerhof Hotel and was reunited with Alexandrine. The Schweizerhof, built overlooking the lake in the heart of the old town in 1845, was as luxurious then as it is today (it prides itself on being one of the few hotels in Switzerland of 'national significance'). In 1857 it seemed to Tolstoy to be overrun with 'frigid', 'stuffy' English tourists, who seemed to like dining in complete silence. Tolstoy was also struck by the fact that they seemed oblivious to their surroundings, as demonstrated by an incident he later turned into a short story. One evening, after visiting a brothel, he came across a busker singing Tyrolean folksongs and accompanying himself on a guitar.42 He was rather good, so Tolstoy suggested he go and sing under the windows of the Schweizerhof. There were soon wealthy guests flocking round him and enjoying his songs, but each time he proffered his cap, it remained empty. Tolstoy was astounded, and when the busker started trudging back into town he ran after him, took him back to the hotel and ordered a bottle of Moet. The passionate anger aroused in Tolstoy by the miserliness of the Schweizerhof's wealthy guests was initially expressed in a letter to one of his friends, and then turned into a story. But 'Lucerne' was pointedly not written in the Schweizerhof, as the hotel likes to claim, but in the modest pension he moved into straight afterwards.43 Indeed, as a symbol of bourgeois Western civilisation, it is the object of the passionate invective unleashed in that story. Tolstoy read it to Nekrasov soon after arriving back in St Petersburg on the steamer he had boarded in the Prussian port of Stettin. 'Lucerne' was published in The Contemporary in September 1857 to a mixed response.
From Switzerland Tolstoy travelled to Germany, and on 24 July arrived in Baden-Baden, where his strength of will failed him. He soon lost all his money at the roulette tables, which necessitated humiliating begging letters to Alexandrine, Nekrasov and Turgenev. On 31 July Turgenev arrived in person and gamely bailed his friend out, and for once Tolstoy's customary derogatory diary entries about him changed to 'Vanechka is very nice'. Tolstoy then immediately gambled away all the money Turgenev lent him. His plans to travel to Holland and England now went up in smoke as he was forced to retreat to Russia. He also received a letter from home informing him that his sister Masha had separated from her husband, which was another reason for returning home quickly. None of the Tolstoy brothers had particularly liked Valerian Petrovich, but they had not known quite how depraved he was. It now emerged that when he was not away on hunting expeditions, or continuing to spend periods living with his peasant mistress, who had borne him several children, he had been a cruel and despotic husband. Turgenev described Valerian Petrovich as a 'most disgusting kind of rural Henry VIII'.44 The saving grace for Masha, who had stoically put up with her lot for ten years, were her three children. In the summer of 1857, no longer prepared to be the 'chief sultaness' in her husband's harem (Valerian Petrovich had at that point four mistresses, and was openly plotting his next move with one of them should he 'happen' to become a widower), Masha decided to leave him. She moved to her part of the Pirogovo estate and became Sergey's neighbour. Tolstoy went there the day after he arrived home.
Tolstoy was glad to be back at Yasnaya Polyana, but found that the 'crude, mendacious' side of Russian life only stood out in sharper relief after the freedoms taken for granted in other countries.45 Despite having gravitated towards his fellow countrymen while he had been abroad (a proclivity he shared with many Russian travellers), and despite rejoicing in seeing birch trees again,46 Tolstoy found the return to his homeland rather depressing. Imperial Russia was no longer the police state it had been under Nicholas I, but it was still a very long way from embracing the kinds of civil liberties that were the bedrock of Western civilisation. Russia was 'horrible, horrible, horrible,' he wrote to Alexandrine, describing to her numerous instances of casual brutality he had witnessed in the course of the first week he had been back. They included seeing a woman beating her servant girl and an official thrashing an old man whom he wrongly believed had tripped him up.47 Tolstoy buried himself in Beethoven and the Iliad. He also renewed his efforts to come to a better arrangement with his serfs. Eventually they all transferred from the old corvée system to quit rent (effectively a 'buy-out' payment freeing them from their obligation to serve and enabling them to work the land for themselves), though years later he continued to feel guilty for demanding any kind of financial compensation from his serfs in return for allowing them to take over their own land. On what remained of his own property he now used hired labour, and freed all his house serfs.48Much of his experience negotiating with his serfs is reflected in Part Three of Anna Karenina, where Tolstoy describes how Levin's goodwill is rebuffed by his mistrustful peasants.
In October 1857 Tolstoy set off with Masha and her children to spend the winter in Moscow, settling in the unfashionable merchant quarter, the Zamoskvorechie, where the playwright Ostrovsky lived. Nikolay joined them there, having retired from army service for a second and final time. Tolstoy made two brief visits to St Petersburg that winter. During the nine days he spent in the capital at the end of October he had meetings with the Minister of State Property about a forestry project he had in mind, and spent time with Alexandrine. He also enjoyed a performance of Verdi's Trovatore (the prestigious St Petersburg Italian Opera was at the zenith of its popularity at the time), but otherwise it was a sobering visit. Tolstoy's new work had not been met with the acclaim that had greeted his first publications, and by criticising Western bourgeois civilisation in 'Lucerne' he was throwing down the gauntlet to critics like Chernyshevsky, who were heavily influenced by Western ideologies. Tolstoy had no interest in making contemporary political and social issues the subject of his writing, and he even toyed with the idea of founding a journal to counter these trends.49 He was alienated by the new militant strain in Russian letters which brandished literature as a weapon for social reform, and dismissed aesthetic concerns as outmoded.
In February 1858 Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov to tell him he wanted to end his contract with The Contemporary,50 and when he went to St Petersburg for a brief visit in March he handed over the manuscript of his last work to appear in the journal.51 Like 'Lucerne', the story 'Albert' is about an impoverished musician, and had taken Tolstoy over a year to finish. Notwithstanding the delay caused by the censor, Nekrasov took his time, publishing 'Albert' in the August issue of The Contemporary, which was its nearest equivalent to a 'graveyard slot' as the journal no longer wanted to solicit this kind of fiction.52 'Albert' is also another profession de foi in the sense that it expresses Tolstoy's belief that art should deal with eternal moral truth (istina) rather than the ephemeral truth of political ideology (pravda). His defiant defence of beauty was his way of responding to the challenge issued by Chernyshevsky, and it is probably not a coincidence that during his visit to St Petersburg in March he went to the Hermitage. One of the few highlights of Nicholas I's cultural policy was his decision to open the Hermitage as a public museum in 1852.53 Tolstoy was impressed most of all by Ruisdael's landscapes, Rembrandt's Prodigal Son and The Descent from the Cross by Rubens.
During the winter season Tolstoy took another stand on behalf of the fine arts by helping to organise regular Saturday concerts, and even tried to set up a 'quartet society'.54 He also was still hunting for a wife, and in December 1857 he had started homing in on the poet Tyutchev's young daughter Ekaterina. He was also slightly attracted to another young woman called Praskovya Shcherbatova, but in the end, despite Turgenev hearing rumours in Rome that his dalliance with Ekaterina Tyutcheva was becoming serious, he married neither of them.55 Their names came in useful later on, however. Ekaterina Tyutcheva and her sister Darya were known affectionately as Dolly and Kitty, and they had an elder sister called Anna. In Anna Karenina, Kitty's surname is Shcherbatskaya, which is not so far off Shcherbatova.56 In April 1858 Tolstoy headed back to Yasnaya Polyana. He had spent the previous winter participating in conventional social activities, but he was now about to make a break with the life he had led since returning from Sebastopol and settle permanently in the country.
Tolstoy did not stop writing in the summer of 1858, but this was the time of year he preferred to devote to working on the land. He now threw himself into farming, acquiring the most modern ploughs and the best fertilisers, and reading up on the latest developments in agriculture. He occupied himself with forestry, planting trees in the Yasnaya Polyana park and selling peach, plum and pear trees that had been cultivated in his greenhouses. He worked in the vegetable garden and in the fields, ploughing, sowing and reaping, and also did a lot of physical exercise to keep fit and maintain his strength. As his brother Nikolay commented, he always wanted to 'embrace everything all at once, without leaving anything out, even gymnastics'. Sometimes the steward would come up to Yasnaya Polyana to receive instructions, and be greeted by Tolstoy hanging red-faced upside down from a bar he had installed outside the window of his study.57
That summer another side ofTolstoy's physicality manifested itself when he fell in love, more deeply than he had ever been before, with a young peasant girl from a village six miles from Yasnaya Polyana. Aksinya Bazykina had a largely absent husband, and Tolstoy found it hard to resist her charms. Their relationship was a serious one, and lasted for over a year. Later Aksinya gave birth to a son, who was regarded by everyone at Yasnaya Polyana as Tolstoy's illegitimate son (Timofey grew up to be a tall young man with fair hair and grey eyes, and he worked for Tolstoy as a coachman).58 In his diaries Tolstoy recorded his trysts with 'A.' in the forest, and the times when he waited for her in vain, in one entry admitting to feeling more like a husband than a 'stag'.59 At the end of his life, he would come to experience feelings of bitter remorse over the affair, which he sublimated in the writing of his late story 'The Devil'.
While Tolstoy enjoyed a euphoric summer of love in 1858, his sister Masha was pining. A tentative romance had sprung up between her and Turgenev since their first meeting in 1854, and now that she was free of her dreadful husband, she was keen for it to blossom. Turgenev had failed to come back to Russia that year, however, and she was upset and lonely. Tolstoy, who knew all about Turgenev's devotion to the married opera singer Pauline Viardot, whom he followed around Europe, was incensed on Masha's behalf, feeling it very wrong to have made overtures to a young lady he had no intention of marrying.60 It was a major factor in his rapidly deteriorating relationship with Turgenev.
In the winter, when Tolstoy could not so easily go on the prowl looking for Aksinya, he hunted animals. In late December 1858 he and his brother Nikolay were invited to go bear hunting with some friends - it was traditional to hunt bears in Russia while they were hibernating.61 On the first day, armed with two rifles and a dagger, Tolstoy killed a bear, but on the second a bear nearly killed him after being frightened by the sound of a gunshot. Tolstoy was left with a permanent scar on his forehead and an anecdote to dine out on for the rest of his life (which he later wrote up as a story for children). Being of stern mettle, he was, of course, undeterred by his injury, and a few weeks later killed the bear which had attacked him.62 The bearskin ended up as a rug for Yasnaya Polyana. That spring Tolstoy also went wolf and fox hunting. He had not completely abandoned writing since settling at Yasnaya Polyana. In January 1859 he published a story called 'Three Deaths'. A parable of art and morality which compares the deaths of a coachman, a tree and a cantankerous noblewoman, it is of a piece with 'Lucerne' and 'Albert', and also met a cool and uncomprehending reception. A much longer work published that year was the short novel Family Happiness, whose plot (older man marries a much younger girl who is his ward) clearly drew on his experiences with Valeria Arseneva. He was later very displeased with this work, which was also not particularly popular with the reading public, but it has many interesting qualities, not the least of which is the fact that it is narrated by a woman. It is also in this work more than any other that Tolstoy seems to be wrestling with the father figure of Turgenev as a writer, in a determined attempt to emerge from his shadow.63
Tolstoy's popularity with Russian readers may have dipped slightly, but his fiction was beginning to command princely sums. Tolstoy was paid 1,500 roubles by Mikhail Katkov for Family Happiness, which was published in the journal he edited, theRussian Messenger. Tolstoy immediately went and blew the lot during a session of Chinese billiards (a game similar to bagatelle, played on a board).64 He would not publish any more fiction for almost three years, as what really claimed his attention now was popular education. When Tolstoy had come to the realisation that the peasants had so far resisted his efforts to improve their conditions because they were simply too uneducated even to understand that he was working in their best interests, he resolved to teach them how to read and write. Less than six per cent of the rural population were literate in the 1850s.65 There were no state schools in the countryside, even at the primary level, and what little tuition there was on offer from a village priest or a retired soldier (learning to read and write was one of the few benefits of army service) was primitive and had to be paid for. Teachers taught unimaginatively by rote, with the assistance of corporal punishment. Landowners were under no obligation to educate their serfs, and it is not surprising that in a country where the peasants were treated almost as a sub-human species, very few did. Tolstoy did not see the point in introducing railways, telegraphs and other forms of modernisation to Russia while there was no public education.66
In October 1859 Tolstoy reopened his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana on a more serious footing than before. The peasants were initially very wary of the enterprise, not least because there was no charge (Tolstoy paid for everything out of his own pocket), but by March 1860 there were fifty pupils enrolled - boys, girls and also some adults. Tolstoy's main mission as an educator was to introduce freedom into the learning experience, so pupils were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and there was no corporal punishment. There was a solid curriculum of twelve subjects, but Tolstoy placed great importance on the need for flexibility, to suit the needs of his pupils rather than those of the teacher. This was highly innovative. It was the Yasnaya Polyana school which gave Tolstoy an inkling of what he felt might be his true calling, as it was only when he undertook practical measures to redeem Russia's enormous debt towards its benighted peasantry that the voice of his conscience was stilled. As time went on, he realised it was going to be his destiny to challenge conventional thinking, but he was now starting to feel more comfortable about following his own path.
In May 1860 Tolstoy's brothers Nikolay and Sergey went abroad to Germany. Nikolay was now suffering from tuberculosis, as Dmitry had, and their plan was for him to undertake a cure at the spa town of Soden. Their hypochondriac sister Masha also felt unwell, so she too had decided to go for treatment abroad, taking her three children with her, and Tolstoy elected to accompany them. Classes at the school stopped anyway in the summer, when the children were needed to help in the fields, and he found an excellent deputy in Pyotr Morozov, a former seminary student, to take over from him as teacher at the Yasnaya Polyana school while he was away. He planned now to go to Europe to find out as much as he could about primary education in other countries. He would be away for almost a year.
Four days after leaving St Petersburg, Tolstoy was in Berlin. Masha took Varya, Nikolay and Liza off to join Nikolay and Sergey in Soden, but Tolstoy went instead to Bad Kissingen, which was about sixty miles away. He was far more interested in finding out about German educational methods than taking the waters. The day after his arrival he set off to inspect the local schools, where he was horrified to observe coerced rote learning and liberal use of corporal punishment. He also started studying and making notes on various theoretical works on pedagogy. Pride of place in his reading list went to the four volumes of Karl Georg von Raumer's recently published History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to Our Own Time. In this work Tolstoy was pleased to discover that Martin Luther had been a pioneer of popular education, and also that his own belief in the necessity of freedom in teaching and learning had first been voiced by Montaigne in the sixteenth century.67 Tolstoy's next step was to talk to teachers in the village schools around Bad Kissingen. He also met the politician nephew of Friedrich Froebel, who had founded the kindergarten system, and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who had begun to publish his Natural History of the German People as the Foundation of German Social Politics.
Three months into his stay, Tolstoy received a visit from his sick brother Nikolay, whose condition was now worsening. Nikolay's doctors recommended he repair to somewhere with a warmer climate, so at the end of August, accompanied by Masha and the children, Tolstoy took him down to Hyeres in the south of France. On 20 September, two weeks after they arrived, Nikolay died in Tolstoy's arms. Writing to Sergey afterwards, Tolstoy recalled that Nikolay had been a person whom they had loved and respected more than anyone else on earth. Indeed, Tolstoy had regarded Nikolay as his best friend, so his death was an incalculable blow.68 Nikolay had never quite delivered on his great promise. He published a well-written sketch entitled 'Hunting in the Caucasus' in The Contemporary in February 1857, but had not followed it up with anything else. In a haze of grief, Tolstoy took himself off to Marseilles, where he visited eight primary schools and was again dismayed to encounter a narrow, lifeless approach to the education of young minds.
Tolstoy remained in Hyeres with Masha and the children until the end of the year, and then in early 1861 travelled on to Nice and Florence, where he was excited to meet the recently amnestied Decembrist Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who was his distant relative and now an old man. From Florence Tolstoy travelled to Livorno, and then to Naples and Rome, where he met the painter Nikolay Ge, with whom he would later become great friends.69 Tolstoy enjoyed seeing Italy, but his great passion at this time was still for pedagogy. In February he arrived in Paris, where he set off to visit French schools, armed with a letter of recommendation from the Russian Ministry of Education. He also accumulated large numbers of books on pedagogy which were duly shipped back to Yasnaya Polyana. Then on 1 March he travelled on to London for his first visit to England, where he suffered severe toothache and confirmed his prejudices against the English. There is sadly very little documentation about Tolstoy's only visit to England, but we do know that the well-connected lawyer and journalist Henry Reeve sponsored his honorary membership of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall from 5 March to 6 April 1861.70
The most important meeting for Tolstoy in London was with the socialist thinker Alexander Herzen, who had emigrated from Russia in 1847. In 1852 Herzen had settled in London, where he first founded the Free Russian Press and then in 1857 the important newspaper The Bell, which campaigned for reform in Russia. Tolstoy made the journey to Herzen's handsome detached residence, Orsett House (located on Westbourne Terrace, near Padding-ton), several times during the sixteen days he spent in England. On 7 March Herzen wrote to Turgenev to tell him he had already quarrelled with Tolstoy, who was in his opinion 'stubborn' and talked 'nonsense', but was nevertheless an 'ingenuous, good person'.71 On 11 March Tolstoy spent three hours at the Houses of Parliament, where he heard the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, give a speech on naval policy, which he found very boring. Of far greater interest to him was the reading given the following evening at St James's Hall, Piccadilly, by Charles Dickens, who was one of his favourite writers (as he was for many Russians). But his priority was to learn about British education. On 12 March, having been assisted by Matthew Arnold, an inspector of schools who had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, Tolstoy visited the Practising School at the College of St Mark in Chelsea, where he asked the boys in Class 3B to write an essay for him. He took their work back home to Russia.72 Arnold arranged for Tolstoy to visit primary schools in Bethnal Green, Brentford, Spitalfields, Hoxton, Westminster and Stratford, but Tolstoy did not keep a diary while he was in England, and it is not clear where exactly he went. We do know, however, that he enjoyed working in the library attached to the South Kensington Museum, which contained many interesting pedagogical materials. The future Victoria and Albert Museum had opened its doors two years earlier.
On 17 March (5 March in Russia), the day that Tolstoy left London, the Emancipation of Serfdom manifesto, which had been signed on 3 March (19 February), on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's accession to the throne, was finally published.73The manifesto had been written by Metropolitan Filaret in a deliberately grandiloquent language suitable to be read in every church and published in every newspaper and Tolstoy was indignant, realising the peasants would never understand it. He was also angered by its tone, which seemed to suggest the manifesto was granting a favour rather than rectifying a grave injustice.74 He was right to be angry. The peasants were no longer the property of landowners, but the terms by which they were freed left them no better off than before.
Tolstoy's next stop was Brussels, where he met the socialist politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,75 author of The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), amongst other works, and the former Polish politician Joachim Lelewel, who had taken part in the 1830 Warsaw Uprising. He also visited Belgian schools and had his photograph taken. The last portrait, taken in St Petersburg, had shown a serious-looking mustachioed officer with short-cropped hair. For his European travels, Tolstoy had dressed to the nines in long frock-coat and top hat, but was now already sporting the beard that would become an intrinsic part of his identity. After Brussels came his last months of travelling - to Antwerp, Frankfurt, Eisenach and Weimar, where there were more schools to inspect. He was hankering to go home at this point, but he wanted to get as much done as he could while he was in Europe, not knowing when he would return. (Never, as it turned out.) There were further stays in Jena, Dresden and Weimar, where he met Gustav Keller, a young mathematics teacher, whom he invited to come and teach at the Yasnaya Polyana school.76 His final stop was Berlin, where he sought out the writer Berthold Auerbach, whose weighty (and now largely forgotten) novel A New Life (1851) had been highly influential on his decision to start his school for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children in the first place. Tolstoy had clearly identified with its protagonist Eugen Baumann, an aristocrat who becomes a village schoolteacher. Without giving his name, Tolstoy simply marched up to Auerbach and announced 'Ich bin Eugen Baumann'.77 He was very excited to meet Auerbach, recording the event with fifteen exclamation marks in his diary.78
On 13 April Tolstoy finally arrived back in St Petersburg. Before returning home he arranged meetings with the Minister of Education in order to ask formal permission to found a pedagogical journal, which was granted (no one in the ministry had any idea at this point quite how subversive Tolstoy's educational ideas would turn out to be). By May he was back in Yasnaya Polyana and holding classes in the apple orchard, but was restless as usual. At the end of the month, he travelled over to Spasskoye-Lutovinovo to visit Turgenev, who had just finished Fathers and Sons, the novel which explores the clash between the radical new 'nihilists' of the 1860s and the old-world generation of the 1840s. Turgenev read it aloud, and Tolstoy found it so boring he fell asleep. Turgenev was mortally offended. A couple of days later an argument flared up between them over a trivial matter when they went to visit Fet at his newly acquired country property. Tolstoy this time felt so insulted that he challenged Turgenev to a duel. He sent for arms from his nearby Nikolskoye estate, which he had inherited from his brother Nikolay, and spent a sleepless night, but the duel was never fought. Neither, though, was the friendship ever fully repaired. There followed a flurry of recriminations, apologies and letters which either failed to arrive at the right place or were read too late, and the situation was exacerbated by rumours of copies of these letters circulating in Moscow. Tolstoy considered Turgenev a coward, despised his liberalism and could not forgive him his lack of passion.79 They agreed to cease all communication.
Turgenev was not the only person Tolstoy had testy conversations with that spring. Soon after returning home from abroad, he had learned that he had been appointed Justice of the Peace in his district by the liberal Tula governor.80 The government had decided that arbiters should be elected from amongst the nobility to oversee the implementation of the manifesto and mediate between landowners and peasants. It was not an easy job for any Russian noble, but it was particularly challenging for Tolstoy, who was already loathed by his conservative neighbours for having granted his peasants their freedom ahead of the manifesto. Within a month he had fallen out with all of them. Many of the nobility saw it as their God-given right to have slaves, and so viewed the Emancipation of Serfdom Act as a disaster. In their opinion, Alexander II had robbed them. What on earth was a peasant going to do with his 'personal freedom' they wondered. A free peasant in their view was like a stray dog - not worth giving a crust to, as it would eventually come to grief anyway. It never occurred to Russia's reactionary nobles that the peasants were human beings like themselves, and that they were just as responsible in creating the ignorance and misery which led the peasants to drink as the regime. The reactionary nobility looked to the Justices of the Peace to take care of their interests, and be on their side. Tolstoy, however, had the peasants' interests at heart, and he now viewed most of his fellow nobles as vile parasites.81 His neighbours had soon filed a barrage of complaints about him, which they sometimes did en masse, but this only made Tolstoy rub his hands with glee. He took relish in exposing the dishonesty and cruelty of the krepostniki - the defenders of serfdom - and was not deterred even when he received threatening and abusive letters or was summoned to fight duels.
Tolstoy had also not endeared himself to his neighbours by wanting to educate his peasants. It seemed preposterous to the krepostniks that a count, a retired officer, should become a teacher, while the very idea of a school for peasant children seemed outlandish to these hardened apologists of patriarchal Russia. The Yasnaya Polyana school was flourishing, but it was the only one in the whole district. With 9,000 peasants living in the area, however, Tolstoy wanted to do more. Using his position as Justice of the Peace, he had twenty-one schools up and running locally by the autumn of 1861. The schools were set up in peasant huts. There were no desks or chairs or blackboards, but the walls were usually so dirty that they served very well to write on with chalk. Some of the teachers were the usual priests and ex-soldiers, but Tolstoy also employed former university students who were in need of employment. Widespread demonstrations had erupted the previous October when the government introduced a series of ill-conceived university reforms, including obligatory attendance and fees which many students could not afford, and large numbers of them had been expelled. Each student teacher was paid fifty kopecks per pupil per month, so monthly salaries averaged about ten roubles. Teachers were also paid an honorarium for contributing to the Yasnaya Polyana journal.82
The first issue of Yasnaya Polyana was published in January 1862, and eleven more followed. Although some articles were written by teachers, the journal's editor Tolstoy was also its most prolific contributor. In the first issue he provided an account of the day-to-day life at the school in Yasnaya Polyana:
No one brings anything with him, neither books nor copybooks. No homework is set them. Not only do they carry nothing in their hands, they have nothing to carry even in their heads. They are not obliged to remember any lesson, nor any of yesterday's work. They are not tormented by the thought of the impending lesson. They bring only themselves, their receptive nature, and an assurance that it will be as jolly in school today as it was yesterday ... No one is ever scolded for being late ... They sit where they like: on the benches, tables, window-sills, floor or in the armchair ... By the timetable there should be four lessons before dinner, but sometimes in practice these become three or two, and may be on quite different subjects ... In my opinion this external disorder is useful and necessary, however strange and inconvenient it may seem to the teacher ... First this disorder, or free order, only frightens us because we were ourselves educated in and are accustomed to something quite different. Secondly, in this as in many similar cases, coercion is used only from hastiness or lack of respect for human nature...83
Tolstoy's child-centred approach, then, was based on there being a complete freedom to learn. In addition to accounts of the activities of his schools, Tolstoy contributed lengthy articles about his teaching methods to the Yasnaya Polyana journal, arguing that the much-vaunted European system was fundamentally flawed, and inapplicable to Russia, which had to find its own way.84 The journal issues were accompanied by supplements of reading matter for children. These contained stories written by the pupils at Tolstoy's schools, or written down by their teachers, and brief articles written in a clear, simplified language on historical topics. Tolstoy invested an enormous amount of effort in his schools, and he loved all his peasant pupils. The feeling was mutual, and was helped by the fact that he had begun to dress like a peasant, and never stood on ceremony. He was a marvellous storyteller, of course, but he also threw himself into other extra-mural activities, such as snowball fights and tobogganing in the winter. For Shrovetide in 1862 Tolstoy invited 100 pupils from different villages to Yasnaya Polyana for bliny. At Easter the children received gifts of pencils, mouth-organs and pieces of calico which could be used by their mothers to make shirts for them.85
While the Ministry of Education approved of Tolstoy's pedagogical activities, the Ministry of Internal Affairs took a very different view. Along with Tolstoy's adversaries amongst the landowners in his district, the Ministry of Internal Affairs perceived Tolstoy's schools as hotbeds of anarchy and revolution. The arrival of radical students was the last straw, and a secret police file was opened on Tolstoy in January 1862. It detailed Tolstoy's contacts abroad with dangerous figures like Herzen and Lelewel, his employment of politically active students and the trouble that had been caused by his actions as a Justice of the Peace. Tolstoy's landowner neighbours were delighted to supply the police with regular denunciations, including the spurious charge that Tolstoy had set up an underground printing press. A fat file of evidence against Tolstoy started to build up.
In the tense atmosphere that was exacerbated by peasant riots and student unrest around the time of the emancipation, the publication of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in March 1862 was like the explosion of a bomb. In his young university graduate hero, the 'nihilist' Bazarov, Turgenev had created the first fictional raznochinets, but both the 'fathers' and the 'sons' felt they had been ridiculed, and the novel created a storm of controversy. As its first English translator commented a few years later, 'passionate criticisms, calumnies, and virulent attacks abounded ... Of course the more the book was abused, the more it was read. Its success has been greater than that of any other Russian book.'86 Tolstoy was probably the only person in Russia who found it boring. His mind was on other matters that spring. The stress caused by other Justices of the Peace obstructing all his initiatives and the mounds of paperwork generated by his job were debilitating, and had started to make him ill. To the rejoicing of all the vindictive landowners who wanted revenge on the man who had ruined their corrupt livelihoods, Tolstoy resigned his post in April 1862. Shortly afterwards he set off for the steppes beyond Samara, taking with him two of his favourite pupils and his servant Alexey. He planned to undergo a koumiss cure, hoping to restore his frayed nerves.87 Tolstoy's hostile neighbours wreaked their greatest revenge on him later that summer. In July 1862, soon after the government had shut down The Contemporary, Chernyshevsky was arrested for spreading revolutionary propaganda and exiled to Siberia. That same month the tsarist secret police descended on Yasnaya Polyana, where they conducted a two-day search of the estate, hoping to find seditious material connected with his schools. Aunt Toinette was so traumatised by the intrusion of the police into the tranquillity of her home that she became ill, and Tolstoy's sister Masha, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana and sleeping in his study, had to endure tsarist gendarmes rifling through her brother's papers and reading everything he had ever written. The police ransacked the entire house, including the cellars and the water-closet, and placed Tolstoy's twelve student teachers under arrest, but were forced to go away empty-handed.88 Tolstoy was livid when he discovered what had happened upon his return from Samara at the end of July, and he vented his fury and anguish in a passionate letter to Alexandrine. 'It was my whole life, my monastery, my church, in which I found salvation, and saved myself from all the worries, doubts and temptations of life,' he wrote, describing how important his school work was to him.89 Fearing that the police action had irreparably damaged his reputation for probity amongst the peasants, he decided he should close his schools down, and by the following spring all the teachers had left (Gustav Keller, the young German mathematics teacher, went to tutor Sergey Tolstoy's son Grisha). But there was another reason why Tolstoy suddenly lost interest in his schools: he had finally found the woman he wanted to marry.