Tolstoy (14 page)

Like their father, Dmitry was artistically gifted. When playing games many years earlier, Nikolay had promised his younger brothers that their wishes would be fulfilled if they carried out all the conditions he imposed on them. It was characteristic that Sergey declared his desire to mould horses and chickens out of wax, while Dmitry wanted to draw big pictures like an artist: the Tolstoy museum in Moscow stores in its archive many pencil drawings he executed of rural landscapes which are impressive for a ten-year-old.
¹²
(Lev, meanwhile, could think of nothing he wanted back then except the ability to draw small pictures.)

There are no biographical events at all listed for 1842 and 1843 in the official chronicle of Tolstoy's life and works. Careful sleuthing, however, has established that after Tolstoy turned fourteen in August 1842 his brothers Nikolay and Sergey took him for the first time to a brothel. Many, many years later, his wife castigated him for writing a seduction scene in his last novel
Resurrection,
believing that as an old man (he was then seventy) he ought to be ashamed of writing such 'filth'. This unpleasant altercation induced Tolstoy to confess to a friend that after committing the 'act' for the first time that fateful day in Kazan, he had stood by the woman's bed and wept. And he was deeply shaken when an acquaintance later told him that he had once been a novice at the Monastery of the Cyzicus Martyrs, located on the outskirts of Kazan. Tolstoy responded quietly that it had been in that part of town that he had had his 'first fall'.
¹³
Perhaps his feeling of guilt was heightened by his awareness that his grandfather was buried in the monastery's cemetery along with other dignitaries (the only grave from that period that has survived to the present day).

Tolstoy later regretted the absence of moral guidance in his early teenage years in Kazan. On 1 January 1900 he confided to his diary that he had done a lot of bad things when he was young out of a desire to copy his elders, who drank, smoked and led debauched lives.
¹⁴
Dmitry, of course, whom their brother Nikolay characterised as an extreme 'eccentric', was not included in their number: he practised complete abstention until the age of twenty-five, which in those days, according to Tolstoy, was a great rarity, particularly as far as relations with women were concerned.
¹⁵
This was certainly not true of Sergey, however, who was Dmitry's polar opposite, and a major influence on their youngest brother Lev's waywardness. Of all the brothers, Sergey was the most talented and good-looking, and if Tolstoy loved and 'respected' Nikolay, and was on 'comradely' terms with Dmitry, he 'admired and copied' Sergey. Indeed, as he famously puts it at one point in his memoirs, he actually
wanted to be him
.
¹⁶
Sergey had a reputation for being gregarious and good-humoured, and for singing continually. Where Tolstoy was painfully shy and acutely self-conscious, which interfered with his enjoyment of life, Sergey was an extrovert whose egotism made him supremely oblivious of whether his behaviour and appearance aroused approval or disapproval. For this reason he was all the more attractive to his younger brother, for whom he was a mysterious and unfathomable exotic species. Tolstoy started copying Sergey in early childhood, first by rearing different kinds of speckled and tufted hens and painting pictures of them.
¹⁷
During his adolescence in Kazan, it was Sergey who led Tolstoy into debauchery.
¹⁸

In May 1844, when he was sixteen, Tolstoy formally applied to the rector of Kazan University, Nikolay Lobachevsky (a mathematician famous for developing non-Euclidean geometry) for permission to take the various entrance exams. Tolstoy's letter of application launches the twenty-five volumes of his letters in his
Collected Works.
As ever, Tolstoy wanted to be different, and instead of applying to study mathematics like his brothers, he elected to join the Faculty of Oriental Languages, whose scholarly achievements were already renowned. It was a smart move. By 1828, the year of Tolstoy's birth, the faculty had professorships in Persian, Arabic and Turkish, and by the time he became a student, chairs in Mongolian, Mandarin Chinese, Armenian and Sanskrit had been added. Thanks to Lobachevsky's active support, the teaching of oriental languages at Kazan University was of a quality unsurpassed anywhere in Europe.
¹⁹
Tolstoy was thinking of his future career in making this choice: his plan at this stage was to join the diplomatic service (although when one bears in mind the direction his life took, a less suitable spokesman for Russian imperial policy is hard to imagine).
²⁰
First, however, he had to pass several exams. Tolstoy excelled in his French exam, and did well in German, English, Arabic and Turkish (though he later claimed to have no memory of the last three). He also received good results for mathematics, logic, Russian literature and religious studies, which, like most people of his background, he did not take seriously at all. Much later, in an early draft of
Confession,
he wrote that the whole edifice of theology collapsed for him as soon as he took an interest in philosophy when he was sixteen, and began to see that the catechism was a 'lie'.
²¹
Tolstoy did poorly in his Latin exam, having been unable to translate even two lines of an ode by Horace, and even worse in statistics and geography, his superlative command of the French language clearly not accompanied by even a basic familiarity with the country where it was the mother tongue. His performance in history was also execrable, and he later added the comment in the manuscript of Pavel Biryukov's biography: 'I knew nothing.'
²²
As a result, he was forced to resit these last two exams, and had to spend the summer in Kazan rather than Yasnaya Polyana, where he would much rather have been. In September 1844, however, just after his brother Nikolay graduated, he was admitted as a student.

Tolstoy's university career was not distinguished. He had never before attended an educational institution, so mingling with other students in lecture halls was a novelty at first. It clearly soon wore off, though, despite Tolstoy having the chance to study with the distinguished orientalist Professor Mirza Kazem-Bek, whose scholarship was world-renowned. He ended up failing his first-year exams, which meant having to repeat the year. Rather than face this indignity, he decided to transfer to the less distinguished Law Faculty, but of course had to start from scratch again as a first-year student. He justified this change of direction in a letter he wrote to Aunt Toinette in August 1845, just before the start of the academic year, by maintaining that law was a more practical choice in view of its application in daily life ('je trouve que l'application de cette science est plus facile et plus naturelle que toute autre à notre vie privée').
²³

If Tolstoy did not respond well to the demands placed on him by his tutors at Kazan University, it was because he wanted to be in control of his own educational curriculum. He had already began to read seriously on his own. Occasionally there are references to novels he enjoyed in the scant literature documenting his Kazan years, such as
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte-Cristo,
two contemporary 'best-sellers' by Alexandre Dumas which had just been published in France for the first time, and were also popular in Russia.
²⁴
Dumas's earlier novel
The Fencing Teacher,
meanwhile, had been banned in Russia by Nicholas I for describing the events of the Decembrist Uprising, and the subsequent exile to Siberia of its leaders, as was its author (Dumas was unable to visit Russia until 1858, during the reign of Alexander II). The Russian novel was still in its infancy at this time, but when Tolstoy stumbled upon Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
at a friend's house during these years, he was so entranced that he sat up all night reading it, and started immediately reading it a second time when he got to the end.
²⁵

Tolstoy later drew up a list of the books which had the greatest influence on him between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The most influential Russian works included
Eugene Onegin,
Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time,
Gogol's
Dead Souls
and Turgenev's
A Hunter's Notes.
Amongst the foreign volumes we find Schiller's
The Robbers
and Sterne's
Sentimental Journey.
Others that made a 'huge' impression on him were Dickens's
David Copperfield,
the 'Sermon on the Mount' in the Gospel according to St Matthew, and Rousseau's
Confessions
and
Emile
.
²⁶
Tolstoy was sometimes inaccurate about dates, and certainly in this case, as
David Copperfield
was first published in 1850, but it is nevertheless interesting to see the early appearance of Rousseau on his literary horizon.

It was philosophy which most excited the young Tolstoy during his student years, and it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who probably exercised more influence on Tolstoy than any other thinker over the course of his lifetime. This influence can be seen in Tolstoy's later condemnation of human civilisation for its corruption of human behaviour and distortion of man's true nature (
Discours sur les sciences et les arts,
1750, and
Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité,
1755), in his promotion of a radical child-centred education in a natural environment and his rejection of organised religion in favour of belief based on personal conscience (
Émile, ou de l'éducation,
1762), in his fictional exploration of marital relations and family life (
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse,
1761) and in his advocacy of greater social equality (
Du contrat social,
1762). Tolstoy also took a page out of Rousseau's posthumously published
Les Confessions
(1781-1788) when writing his own autobiographical works, emulating the candour and rigour of the French-Swiss thinker's unsparing self-analysis, not to mention the egocentric belief that the truth he discovered about himself had universal application. It is no wonder that Tolstoy saw himself in Rousseau, who also lost his mother at a young age, and followed a number of different paths in his life before finding his metier. Both figures are united by soaring genius, overweening vanity, a dogged, noble but often misguided sincerity, and a lamentable lack of a sense of humour, the latter being the single thing which sometimes makes the study of Tolstoy's life and works slightly hard-going.

Both Tolstoy and Rousseau were thin-skinned and highly emotional people which led to frequently turbulent relations with their contemporaries. They shared a huge energy and ambition which led them into diverse areas of intellectual and artistic endeavour, and a complete lack of fear in the face of controversy. Their most incisive works were deemed so subversive they were banned by the authorities, and yet neither Rousseau nor Tolstoy, despite their devotion to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, sought revolution, retaining little faith in the efficacy of political activity. Rousseau died shortly before the French Revolution and Tolstoy shortly before the Russian Revolution, events they both inspired and were blamed for. As Robert Wokler writes, Rousseau had a greater impact on his age than almost anyone else in the eighteeenth century:

No other eighteeenth-century thinker contributed more major writings in so wide a range of subjects and forms, nor wrote with such sustained passion and eloquence. No one else managed through both his works and his life to excite or disturb public imagination so deeply. Almost alone among the seminal figures of the Enlightenment, he subjected the main currents of the world he inhabited to censure, even while channelling their direction...
²⁷

One could say that Tolstoy almost picked up where Rousseau left off, for the above achievements are also associated with his prodigious legacy.

After his rather dismal first year at university, Tolstoy spent the summer of 1845 at Yasnaya Polyana, during which time he did a lot of reading and thinking. He became interested in the ethical ideas of the pre-Christian Cynics - Greek philosophers who preached, amongst other things, the virtues of a life without material possessions.
²⁸
For Aunt Toinette, her nephew Lev now became an 'incomprehensible creature' obsessed with plumbing the depths of human existence, and only happy when he met someone prepared to listen to him hold forth passionately about his ideas.
²⁹
Tolstoy's inborn eccentricity had certainly begun to exhibit itself in various ways. Under the influence of Rousseau and the philosophical ideas of Diogenes, one of the chief Cynics, he tried to simplify his life. In the fourth century BC Diogenes chose to live an ascetic and self-sufficient life, jettisoning the idea of marriage and family and rejecting laws and conventional social institutions as corrupt and hypocritical. He was famous for sleeping in a tub on the street. Tolstoy made a start by trying to simplify his own life. Apart from giving up wearing socks, he invented a utilitarian one-piece garment which was buttoned up from the inside, serving him as both daytime clothing and bed-linen-cum-blanket. A party of lady visitors to Yasnaya Polyana were slightly nonplussed when they encountered him in this strange garb. Nor was Aunt Toinette entirely convinced by this Russian Diogenes, though had she been alive during the last decades of his life she might well have thought otherwise.