Tolstoy (15 page)

While he was walking incognito in this garment one day, Tolstoy was able to listen in on unguarded conversations amongst his peasants. This was how he first discovered how hated the nobility were by the peasants, and how little respect the peasants accorded their owners.
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It came as a shock for him to hear such sentiments from his own serfs. More shocking to him, though, was the contempt generally shown by the Russian ruling class for the well-being of their serfs, particularly since it was the peasants who habitually had to bail their masters out - literally, in Tolstoy's case. One warm day during a visit to the Yushkovs' country estate on the banks of the Volga, Tolstoy took it into his head to impress the young ladies amongst the guests by throwing himself head-first into the large pond near the house, fully dressed, intending to swim to the island in the middle. He had to be rescued from drowning by peasant women who had been gathering hay nearby: they hauled him out of the water with their rakes.
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Tolstoy's social conscience was beginning to awaken, but it would be a long time yet before he would renounce his aristocratic birthright and become a fully fledged 'repentant nobleman'.

Tolstoy went to great lengths to try to make a good impression on his contemporaries during his student years, and he also tried enhancing his physical appearance. He was never happy with his looks, but his attempts to improve them did not always meet with very successful results. He once conceived the idea of shaving his eyebrows to make them grow back more bushy, and ended up almost shaving them off completely.
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Shy and lacking in self-confidence, he never quite cut the dashing figure on the dance floor who lived in his imagination, and he was too absent-minded and ungainly to succeed in emulating his suave and debonair brother Sergey. But he nevertheless enjoyed being part of the uppermost echelon of Kazan society, made a few good friends, and even wrote a waltz with one of them.
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Tolstoy had promised Aunt Toinette in the summer of 1845 that he would work hard in his second year at university, and in his leisure time study music, art and languages. 'I won't go into society at all,' he vowed in a letter ('Je n'irai pas en société du tout').
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That autumn, however, he went to all the most prestigious social events, including a grand ball held in October 1845 in honour of the visit of Nicholas I's son-in-law Maximilian, the Duke of Leuchtenberg. And in January 1846 he had to spend a few days in the university jail for persistently failing to attend lectures.
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This oscillation between the setting of unrealistic, puritanical goals for a future life of purity and self-denial and the self-mortification which followed his actual pursuit and enjoyment in the present of a hedonistic social life, is the leitmotif of Tolstoy's first diary entry, which he famously began in the university's venereal diseases clinic in March 1847. In fact, one could say that the battle between these two opposing sides of Tolstoy's personality was the main theme of his entire life as an adult, and certainly fundamental to his creative processes. Simultaneous possession of these two warring impulses was not unique to Tolstoy, but may be seen as the mark of a quintessential^ Russian nature. The early-twentieth-century philosophical thinker Nikolay Berdyaev certainly thought along these lines. As he wrote in his book
The Origin of Russian Communism,
'In the typical Russian two elements are always in opposition - the primitive natural paganism of boundless Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, a reaching out towards the other world.'
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In January 1847, when he was eighteen, Tolstoy started compiling a 'Journal of Daily Activities', listing on the left-hand side of the page a strict timetable for each day under the heading 'The Future'. Here he set out exactly which hours he would devote to his coursework, when he would have lunch, when he would study English, go for a walk or play chess. On the right-hand side, marked 'The Past', he entered comments on his performance. Thus on good days, when he maintained his self-discipline, he could write that he had kept to his regime, while on others he was forced to admit that he did 'nothing', 'almost nothing', did things 'badly', 'read Gogol' or 'overslept'.
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This journal was maintained until June. At the same time Tolstoy started compiling rules for developing his willpower. These included getting up at five and going to bed no later than ten, with two hours permissible for sleeping during the day. He resolved to eat moderately, and nothing sweet, to walk for an hour every day, to carry out everything he prescribed for himself and visit a brothel only twice a month. In the second tier of his rules he vowed to disregard luxuries and all public opinion not based on reason, and to love those to whom he could be of service. The rules in the third and last tier called on him to do only one thing at a time, and not allow flights of imagination unless necessary.
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In February 1847 Tolstoy had felt a compulsion to compile some new rules, this time more general ones, concerning his relationship to God, other people and himself, but broke off before setting out exactly what they were.
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In March he started again, delineating forty-seven different rules under twenty headings. He told himself, for example, to never show his emotions, to stop caring about other people's opinion of himself, and to do good inconspicuously. He ordered himself to keep away from women, suppress his feelings of lust by working hard and help those more unfortunate than him.
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At times Tolstoy's rules remind one in spirit of the
Domostroi,
the notoriously cheerless and minutely detailed 'housekeeping' rules produced in the pious times of Ivan the Terrible, where we read, for example:

A man cannot be healed if he is insolent and disorderly; does not fear God or comply with His will; does not keep Christian law and the tradition of the Fathers on the Church and on Church singing, on reading from the holy books before communion, on prayer; if he is not concerned with praising God; if he eats and drinks to excess and fills himself with food and wine when it is not fitting to do so; does not honour Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, the holy days, the great Lent, the Lent of the Mother of God; if he fornicates with no restraint, at improper times...
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It has to be said, Tolstoy does not come across as a particularly attractive person at this point, his self-absorption and sanctimoniousness detracting somewhat from his worthy aspirations and self-deprecation.

On 17 March, six days after entering the university clinic, where he was being treated for gonorrhoea, Tolstoy began writing a proper diary. He welcomed this period of complete solitude, with no servant nearby, since it enabled him to perceive that the dissolute life led by the majority of his class during their youth was the consequence of 'an early corruption of the soul'. He was talking about himself, of course. In condemning his way of life, however, he was already cognisant that it was easier to read ten tomes of philosophy than to put one principle into practice.
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The following day, in the absence of anything better to do (he spent almost a month in the clinic), Tolstoy started to tackle an assignment given to second-year law students, in which they were asked to compare Catherine the Great's
Nakaz
(or
Instruction),
first drafted in 1765, with Montesquieu's 1749
De l'esprit des lois.
Although he failed to complete the assignment, rather to his surprise he became engrossed in Catherine's proposals for a new code of laws, and ended up spending over a week dissecting them at great length on the pages of his diary.
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Tolstoy criticises autocratic rule as despotic, since laws provide no protection in a state where they are applied at whim by the sovereign. And he challenges Catherine's insistence that the autocrat's limitless powers are, in fact, limited by the sovereign's conscience, by pointing out that the assertion of limitless powers is predicated on an absence of conscience.
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There was also a limit to Tolstoy's republican tendencies, however. As Count Tolstoy, the scion of a distinguished noble family, he argues that the aristocracy, guided by honour, are the essential ballast needed to limit a monarch's powers. The views he puts forward here about the moral duties of the Russian aristocracy were to reach their fullest expression, of course, in
War and Peace.
Since he was preoccupied with the moral relationship between landowners and peasants, there is little in Tolstoy's analysis of the
Nakaz
which relates to the fundamental injustice of serfdom. He comments that serfdom impedes the development of trade, but never raises the idea that it should be abolished, since, as he would later record in his memoirs, that simply never occurred to anyone from his milieu in the 1840s.
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Meanwhile, on 11 April 1847, the legal document setting out the division of the Tolstoy family property was drawn up, having been the subject of negotiations for many months. The very next day Tolstoy requested permission to leave Kazan University for 'health' and 'domestic' reasons. The study of the
Nakaz
had fired him with a desire to continue his studies independently, and he felt his university curriculum would actually now hinder them. Also, both Dmitry and Sergey were about to graduate, while Masha had already left Kazan, and was living at Yasnaya Polyana. Unwilling to remain in Kazan on his own, and fulfil university requirements he found tedious, Tolstoy left without taking a degree, having completed only the first two years of his law course.

Under Russian law in the 1840s, daughters were entitled to inherit one-eighth of their late parents' property and a fourteenth share of everything else, but the Tolstoy brothers voted to share their inheritance equally with their sister. Nikolay was assigned the Nikolskoye estate in Tula province, together with 317 male serfs (the only ones considered worth counting), and a large piece of land. As a great horse-lover, Sergey inherited the Pirogovo estate, also in Tula province, together with its stud farm and 316 male serfs. Maria received land in the same village, a flour mill, and a large sum of money. Dmitry received Shcherbachevka, the family estate in Kursk province, and over 300 serfs, while Lev inherited Yasnaya Polyana and its neighbouring villages, and also some 300 serfs. There were also sums of money given and received to even everything out.
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The legal document was signed by all parties on 11 July 1847 in Tula, after which they departed for their new properties. That November Masha, who throughout the previous few years had lived rather apart from her brothers, married their distant cousin Valerian Petrovich, who was a nephew of Fyodor Tolstoy, the famous 'American' (and indeed of Aunt Toinette). She was seventeen; he was thirty-four. In August 1847 Tolstoy turned nineteen, and now had the freedom to do as he wanted.

5. LANDOWNER, GAMBLER, OFFICER, WRITER

Call things by their name.

Diary entry, 21 February 1851
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TOLSTOY HAD GRAND PLANS
for his new life as a member of Russia's landowning nobility. He wanted to use his time wisely, and for a noble and worthwhile purpose, so on 17 April 1847 he set out in his diary what he planned to do over the next two years as the owner of Yasnaya Polyana. He would study French, German, English, Italian, Russian and Latin as well as acquire a 'moderate degree of perfection' in music and painting. He would devote himself to history, geography, statistics, mathematics and natural sciences, practical and theoretical medicine, and farming in all its aspects. He would complete his course of study in law, so that he could take his final exam and graduate. He would write a dissertation. He would write essays on all the subjects he was going to study. And he would write down rules. But all those good intentions came to nothing. The very next day he admitted somewhat sheepishly to himself that he was not actually capable of meeting his own expectations, and so he scaled everything back, deciding he would stick to following just one rule at a time. The first rule he resolved to follow was to carry out whatever task he set himself - except that he failed at the first hurdle. On 19 April he admitted in his diary that he had got up very late, and only decided what he would do that day at two o'clock in the afternoon. There was an easy way out: on 20 April he stopped writing his diary. There were a further three entries in June, then it completely petered out. After the entry on 16 June, in which he lambasted women for emasculating men, and resolved to avoid them as far as possible, came a three-year silence.
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The period from June 1847 to October 1848 is almost a complete blank page in Tolstoy's biography: there are not even any letters from him which could shed light on what he did when he was not adhering to his rules. Presumably he threw himself into the farming at Yasnaya Polyana, and discovered it was very hard work. Not only had he never worked on the land, and knew nothing about agriculture, but he had no experience in managing the serfs he owned. When his brother Dmitry wrote to ask him in September 1847 whether he had grown bored of running the estate at Yasnaya Polyana yet, we can assume the answer was affirmative.
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Tolstoy seems to have been a very fickle youth at this time. Some indication of his volatility comes from the fact that in the early autumn of 1847 he apparently decided on a whim to accompany his future brother-in-law to Siberia, and jumped into his carriage as he was setting off, thinking twice about it only when he realised he did not have a hat. In the end Valerian Petrovich set off alone to tie up his business in Tobolsk, in advance of marrying Tolstoy's sister Maria.
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