Tolstoy (25 page)

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, the
Russian 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.