Tolstoy (16 page)

If Tolstoy's siblings seemed more settled than he was, it was because none of them nurtured such huge aspirations. As a female member of the provincial nobility, nothing was really expected of Maria except decorum. She and Valerian set up home at his Pokrovskoye estate in the Tula region, a day's travel by carriage from Yasnaya Polyana, and they soon launched themselves into family life. Nikolay was serving in the Caucasus, having joined the army as a volunteer after leaving university in 1844. He had received his commission eighteen months later, and was now an ensign with the 20th Artillery Brigade, but his was by no means a brilliant army career, not least because he lacked ambition.
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The gifted, dashing Sergey would also join the army a few years later, and was expected to excel, but he lasted all of a year, due to his unwillingness to submit to authority and a similar lack of drive and ambition. The Pirogovo stud farm and large kennels he inherited were enough to keep him busy. Like Tolstoy, Sergey was passionate about hunting - he had soon shot so many wolves that he had enough bones to make an original fence along one of the paths on his estate.
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Otherwise his main passion in life was a gypsy girl in Tula.

Dmitry had ensconced himself on his Shcherbachevka estate in Kursk province. Like most of his class, he did not question the institution of serfdom, but he did feel morally obliged to show concern for his serfs. He also felt it was his duty as a Russian nobleman to serve, a conviction which was perhaps a vestige of Peter the Great's rule, when lifelong service was imposed on the gentry in return for the privileges of noble status. The length of compulsory service to the state had been progressively reduced over the course of the eighteenth century until it became merely a matter of honour under Catherine the Great, but the idea of serving clearly lingered for high-minded young men like Dmitry Tolstoy. Accordingly, he set off for St Petersburg, where he naively presented himself to one of the Ministry of Justice's mandarins and declared that he wished to be useful. Since he failed to specify what exactly he wanted to do, however, he was despatched to copy Chancellery documents, and was soon living the life of Akaky Akakievich in Gogol's immortal story 'The Overcoat' (1842). In this merciless satire of the St Petersburg bureaucracy, the lowly copyist Akaky Akakievich, a man who is oblivious to his threadbare clothes, is eventually compelled to buy a new overcoat. In order to save enough money to pay his tailor, he practises extreme self-denial, and then the coat is stolen from him on the first day he wears it. Dmitry Tolstoy similarly paid no thought to his clothes, and merely dressed to cover his body, but his coat, ironically, was practically all he had. According to Tolstoy's memoirs, his brother one day decided to visit a family acquaintance in the hope that he might help him find a better job. After arriving at Dmitry Obolensky's dacha, and being invited to take off his coat and join the other guests, it turned out, to the embarrassment of all present, he was wearing nothing underneath, having decided a shirt was unnecessary.
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Apart from being actually quite well off, Dmitry differed from the hapless Akaky Akakievich in one other important respect: he became rapidly disillusioned at becoming another faceless cog in Nicholas I's vast bureaucratic machine, and he soon retreated back to his estate, sending Obolensky a valedictory letter which made Tolstoy and Sergey wince (whatever Dmitry had written, Sergey told Tolstoy that it made him break out in a sweat, go red in the face and start pacing about the room in excruciating embarrassment).
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'The Overcoat' was naturally one of the masterpieces of Russian literature which Tolstoy devoured in the 1840s, along with many other works by Gogol, including the novel
Dead Souls,
published in 1842. Perhaps because he did not need to tell himself to read, it was an activity he enjoyed, and it was fundamental to his intellectual and artistic development in the years immediately following his departure from Kazan. He read voraciously. Tolstoy came of age at a very bleak time in Russia's history, which was something he became aware of only gradually. Nicholas I had begun his reign in 1825 by suppressing the Decembrist Uprising, and his regime had grown more repressive and reactionary as time went on. Foreign visitors were shocked. In the book the Marquis de Custine wrote following his visit to Russia in 1839,
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he described the country as a police state ruled by a despot. De Custine's condemnation of the Russian nobility as 'regimented Tatars' who confused splendour with elegance, and luxury with refinement, touched a raw nerve. Not surprisingly, his book was banned when it was published in 1843 (as it would be by Stalin in the twentieth century, in view of its alarmingly accurate prophetic qualities).
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When the spectre of revolution raised its head again in Europe in the late 1840s, Nicholas responded by increasing censorship, yet in this suffocating atmosphere, or perhaps because of it, literature managed to flourish. Indeed, writers were now expected to provide moral leadership as well as entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.

By the end of the 1840s many works of Russian literature had made a deep impression on Tolstoy. Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
(1833), Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time
(1840) and Gogol's
Dead Souls
(1842) were Russia's first 'proper' novels, but their form was already highly idiosyncratic:
Eugene Onegin
is a novel in verse,
A Hero of Our Time
is a collation of interlinked stories and
Dead Souls
is sub-titled 'A Poem'. Tolstoy would later proudly uphold the Russian refusal to conform to the European model by asserting the sui generis form of
War and Peace,
which he adamantly insisted was not a novel. From the beginning Tolstoy was drawn to prose rather than poetry, whose 'Golden Age' had in any case given way at the end of the 1830s to an era of realist fiction. He regarded 'Taman', one of the constituent stories in
A Hero of Our Time,
as a paragon of artistic perfection (a view Chekhov would later share).
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Talented new writers emerged in the 1840s to assume the mantle of Pushkin and Gogol, who had dominated the literary scene in the previous decade, and chief amongst them was Turgenev, who published the first of the stories which make up his
A Hunter's Notes
in 1847, the year in which Tolstoy took up residence again at Yasnaya Polyana. Turgenev's stories about contemporary rural life created a furore, not so much for their form as for their content, since they were the first works of Russian literature to depict peasants as three-dimensional human beings. As a liberal-minded Westerniser who abhorred the institution of serfdom, Turgenev consciously set out in his fiction to endow the peasants with a natural dignity, and as worthy of as much respect and artistic attention as the gentlemen who owned them. His oblique criticism of serfdom was all the more powerful for its subtlety, and forced his readers, including the future Alexander II, to confront the evil which had engendered such an iniquitous system. The embarrassment, indignation and then disgust which Turgenev declared he felt with respect to his own land-owning noble class would eventually lead him to move abroad.
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Tolstoy, by contrast, did not yet subscribe to the view that serfdom should be abolished. In this he was no different from most of the landowning nobility, and he was later frank about it in his memoirs, where he points out that treating the serfs justly was already a sign of enlightened ownership. But Turgenev's
A Hunter's Notes,
a collection whose political importance was equal to its artistic merit, could not but make Tolstoy think as he came into his inheritance.

There were also numerous other foreign authors who stimulated Tolstoy's imagination during these formative years. He could justly be proud of acquiring a sufficient command of English to read writers like Dickens in the original (one rule he appears to have managed to abide by).
David Copperfield
(1850) was the Dickens novel Tolstoy most enjoyed as a young man, and he also greatly admired Laurence Sterne's
Sentimental Journey
(1768). Both Dickens and Sterne were powerful influences on Tolstoy when he first embarked on writing fiction. He was still quite eclectic in his tastes however, enjoying William Prescott's epic
History of the Conquest of Mexico
(1843) and Schiller's play
The Robbers
(1781).
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It was Rousseau who still captivated him most, however. The
Confessions, Emile
and
The New Helo'ise
were instrumental in his moral education.
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Beyond some of the books on his reading list, we know little else about Tolstoy's life in the late 1840s, but we do know that he brought his beloved Aunt Toinette back to live at Yasnaya Polyana. For a while her sister Elizaveta lived at Yasnaya Polyana too, otherwise she was based with her son Valerian Petrovich and new daughter-in-law Maria. Elizaveta's place at Yasnaya Polyana was permanently taken by Natalya Petrovna, an impoverished widow who became Toinette's companion (no Russian estate was complete without its meek and deferential
prizhivaltsy,
who were always acutely conscious of their status as dependants). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Aunt Toinette to Tolstoy during his early twenties. She was his rock, and the most frequent recipient of his letters when he was away. It was she who kept him on an even keel, and she was also the one to entreat him to take up writing. She believed in his talent.

In October 1848 Tolstoy suddenly upped sticks and moved to Moscow, ostensibly to prepare for his law examinations, which he had finally decided to take. He rented the annexe of a building occupied by some friends in the Arbat area, not far from where he had lived as a boy. Having not been in the city since his childhood, he was excited to be back, but he never went anywhere near his law books. Instead, he was lured by the bright lights of the city into experiencing Moscow high society. He was twenty years old and well educated, he was the owner of a handsome country estate, he had a title and an income - in short, he was an eligible bachelor, welcomed in all the best drawing rooms in the city. It was all very flattering to the ego, although Tolstoy's vanity was checked by shyness and an acute self-consciousness about his looks which caused him to feel awkward in polite society. Without the inconvenience of a job, or even any real obligation to study, Tolstoy led a completely hedonistic life that winter, during which time he developed a passion for playing cards, or rather for gambling. It was a passion which would last for well over a decade, and was an expensive habit which brought some serious personal consequences in its wake.

Tolstoy was far from the first Russian nobleman to acquire a gambling addiction - he had some illustrious forebears here, not least amongst his own family. The deeply ingrained recklessness of Russian gamblers (which led some foreign visitors to assume that betting was a national pastime) may have been attributable to the need to assert a degree of independence in Russia's repressive and rigidly hierarchical society, where even private life was subject to state surveillance. Russian writers seemed particularly susceptible to gambling, and many made it a theme of their work.
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Pushkin, author of the quintessential gambling story 'The Queen of Spades' (1834), staked money on his own poetry and ended up having to surrender precious manuscripts.
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'The Fatalist', one of the stories in Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time,
is devoted to a game of Russian roulette, while the principal characters of Gogol's play
The Gamblers
(1836) are two incorrigible card sharps. Turgenev grew up with a father who gambled, and there was a room at their family estate which his mother called the 'casino'. Along with Gogol, he was a rare example of a Russian writer able to resist the lure of the betting tables in German casinos. Dostoyevsky, author of the classic novella
The Gambler
(1867), had an addiction to excitement which led him on one occasion to gamble everything he had, leaving him with nothing but the shirt on his back.

Gambling certainly ran in Tolstoy's family. While his none-too-bright paternal grandfather was one of the most incompetent gamblers who ever lived, stories of the outrageous stunts pulled by his notorious 'American' cousin Fyodor Ivanovich were still circulating in Moscow years after his death in 1846. Tolstoy's gambling compulsion was not helped by another deeply rooted Russian trait amongst the educated classes: an indifference to money which bordered on contempt. He soon ran up large debts and was left feeling very dissatisfied with himself. As he wrote to Aunt Toinette in December 1848, his life of excess had left him world-weary, and longing for the country air again: 'I have been completely corrupted in this social world, all that annoys me terribly at the moment, and I am dreaming again of my life in the country which I hope to resume soon' ('Je me suis tout à fait débauché dans cette vie du monde, à présent tout cela m'embête affreusement et je rêve de nouveau à ma vie de campagne que je compte reprendre bientôt.')
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Instead of returning to Yasnaya Polyana, however, Tolstoy decided on a whim to go to St Petersburg in January 1849, just because some friends were going there.

The impressionable young Tolstoy had never been to the Russian capital, which was a far more sophisticated and aristocratic city than provincial Moscow, and he straight away decided he wanted to settle there. He took a room in the Hotel Napoleon, on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Vosne-sensky Streets (it is now the Angleterre Hotel). If he was lucky, he would have been given a room facing the largest church in Russia - construction of the neoclassical St Isaac's Cathedral was then nearing completion. When he was settled, Tolstoy sat down to write a long letter to his brother Sergey, telling him St Petersburg was having a good effect on him. Everyone was always busy doing things, he wrote, and their industry was rubbing off on him: he was finally planning to take his law exams at the university. Afterwards, he continued in his letter, he planned to take up a job in the civil service. If necessary, he told Sergey, he was prepared to start at the bottom of the Table of Ranks if he failed his exams. No one in the nobility could avoid being hierarchically classified in the table of fourteen ranks that Peter the Great had originally instituted for the court, the civil service and the armed forces. It had led to an obsession with official status which was subjected to magnificent ridicule by Gogol in his story 'The Nose' (1836). Tolstoy went on to say that he was aware his brother would greet his assurances that he had changed with some scepticism, having heard the same story twenty times before. He hastened to tell him that this time he really
had
changed in quite a different way from the way he had changed on previous occasions, and it was no longer just a question of good intentions. For the first time, he declared, he had understood that he could not live on philosophy alone, and needed to undertake practical activities. He did need some money so that he could pay off his gambling debts, however - 1,200 roubles, to be precise - and he asked Sergey to sell off a birch forest at Yasnaya Polyana.
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Selling off bits of his inheritance would become a regular occurrence over the next few years.