Tolstoy (23 page)

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