Tolstoy (17 page)

Sergey was indeed sceptical of his brother's protestations, and rightly so. He was particularly worried that his younger brother would start gambling again in St Petersburg, where he stood to lose spectacularly large sums to unscrupulous players. Sergey repeatedly implored Tolstoy in letters he sent him that spring to start work, and on no account to play cards. He was generally concerned about Tolstoy's lack of discipline at this time, as well as that of his brother's servant Fyodor, who had stolen money from him, pawned some silver spoons and then spent all the money his master had given him to redeem them on drink.
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Actually, none of the Tolstoy brothers seemed to be coping well with suddenly coming into money: Dmitry's gardener had stolen 7,000 roubles which he had foolishly left in the estate office at Shcherbachevka, and Sergey was himself spending considerable sums in pursuit of Maria (Masha) Shishkina, a girl in the famous Tula gypsy choir, with whom he was madly in love.
²⁰
But that was small fry compared to his brother Lev's recidivism. On 1 May 1849, Tolstoy sent Sergey a letter which he instructed him to read alone:

Seryozha.

I imagine you are already saying that
I am the most empty-headed fellow
[Sergey's pet phrase for Tolstoy], and you will be telling the truth. God knows what I have gone and done! I set off for no reason to Petersburg, did nothing worthwhile there, just spent a heap of money and got into debt. It's stupid. It's unbelievably stupid. You won't believe how much it's tormenting me. The main thing are the debts which I
have
to pay, and
as soon as possible,
because if I don't pay them soon, I will lose my reputation on top of the money. Do this, I beg you: without telling the aunts and Andrey [Sobolev, the estate manager] why and what for, sell [the village of] Vorotinka to either Uvarov or Seleznev...
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Since he had arrived in St Petersburg, Tolstoy had taken two law exams, but then had got bored and given up. His latest half-baked scheme was to join the army as a volunteer.

As soon as the news had reached St Petersburg from France in March 1848 that King Louis Philippe had been overthrown and a republic had been proclaimed, an alarmed Nicholas I had started mobilising his troops. The 1848 French Revolution launched a wave of insurrections across Europe, and Nicholas I was particularly alarmed when revolution broke out in areas of the Habsburg Empire such as Hungary (which shared a border with Russia). The dreaded 'Gendarme of Europe' was thus only too happy to accept the invitation of the Austrian government to help restore order in Hungary by despatching four infantry regiments and an artillery brigade in May 1849, not least because there were two Poles in charge of the Hungarian troops who had been in exile since their own failed uprising against Russian rule in 1831. The solipsistic and rash Tolstoy was oblivious to all the politics, however. He was dreaming of military glory. He now set his sights on joining the Horse Guards, and perhaps even receiving his commission as an officer before completing the standard two-year period of service.
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It was another plan that was not thought through.

Just over a week later Tolstoy wrote again to Sergey to tell him he was, in fact, not going to join the army now, and had gone back to his previous plan of taking his law exams. He also asked Sergey about the possibility of his serf Alexey Petukhov working for him, offering to take care of his family and pay him ten roubles a month (a sum which puts into perspective the thousands of roubles he sometimes lost at cards).
²³
Sergey had been dutifully biting his lip and helping his brother out over the previous months, and he did not bother giving him any advice now, knowing in advance that it would not be heeded. But he did exhort Tolstoy to come back home and sort himself out. 'You say that stupid things only happen once in one's life, and if only that were so!' he wrote, warning him that he was in danger of squandering his entire assets.
²⁴
To Aunt Toinette, before whom he felt ashamed, Tolstoy wrote that he had dropped his earlier idea of working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was intending to come back and prepare for his exams at Yasnaya Polyana. Sometime either at the end of May or the beginning of June in 1849, just as the northern capital's famed 'white nights' were about to reach their peak, he set out to travel home, first to Moscow and then on towards Tula. He was leaving behind a number of creditors, and his unpaid debts would gnaw at his conscience over the next few years.

One person who saw nothing of the white nights that summer was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the talented but impoverished young writer who had published a story bearing the name 'White Nights' the previous year. He was languishing in a jail cell that barely let in any light at all. The week before Tolstoy sent his grovelling letter to Sergey, the tsarist secret police had descended on Dostoyevsky's flat to arrest him. In a coincidence worthy of his later masterpieces, he had been living in the building which faced the Hotel Napoleon on the other side of the street. Dostoyevsky was one of twenty-four members of the left-wing intelligentsia group called the Petrashevsky Circle who were all engaged to varying degrees in the struggle for political freedoms and civil rights. Their crime was to have met on Friday evenings to discuss such incendiary topics as socialism, the abolition of serfdom and censorship. In the suffocating, paranoid climate of Nicholas I's Russia, even discussing such topics was tantamount to conspiracy, particularly in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions. At the Circle's last meeting, on 15 April 1849, someone had read out the celebrated letter to Gogol composed by the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. This was an outspoken and fearless document, written on the eve Belinsky's untimely death, in which he castigated the writer for his seemingly spineless defence of Russian absolutism and all it stood for. Belinsky had written the letter in Germany in 1847, while dying of tuberculosis, and handwritten samizdat copies had spread like wildfire amongst the progressive intelligentsia after being smuggled into Russia.

Dostoyevsky and his comrades were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the notorious, dank prison where Peter the Great's son, Tolstoy's ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich and the Decembrists had all been held. While Tolstoy was still strutting about St Petersburg in suits made by the city's best tailor, and dining at its finest restaurants (it is no surprise who his creditors were), Dostoyevsky was communing with fleas, lice, cockroaches and rats in a damp, dark cell. At the end of 1849 he was clamped in irons and sentenced to four years of hard labour in Siberia.
²⁵
The two giants of Russian literature would spend their lives coming close to each other but never meeting, either physically or ideologically. For one thing Dostoyevsky was socially Tolstoy's inferior, and for another, he was his main rival, but they would also come to espouse radically different worldviews.

Tolstoy brought a German pianist back to Yasnaya Polyana when he returned from Petersburg in June 1849, and he spent much of the summer learning the rudiments of music from him. This was to be a good investment, as music became an important part of his life. When he was not teaching Tolstoy, Rudolf the pianist retreated to the greenhouse to compose, or engaged in inebriated music sessions with all the old servants who had played in Count Volkonsky's serf orchestra. One of those musicians was the former second violinist Foka Demidych, who had been the family's butler while Tolstoy's father was alive. That autumn, Tolstoy co-opted him to become the teacher at the first school he started for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children - twenty little boys who were given lessons in arithmetic and scripture along with being taught how to read and write.
²⁶
It seems to have been a short-lived experiment, about which there is next to no documentation, but it is one of the first signs of Tolstoy's awakening social conscience. Over the course of the next two decades popular education would become a cause very close to his heart.

Tolstoy resumed his diary for one week in June 1850, but this was otherwise another year about which we have little information beyond knowing that he stayed put at Yasnaya Polyana. He became a proud uncle and godfather in January 1850 when his sister Masha gave birth to a little girl, Varvara (Varya). This was not Masha's first child: her first son Pyotr died soon after being born in 1849, but Varya survived (as did Nikolay and Liza, born one and two years later, respectively).
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After the birth of Varya, Tolstoy immediately travelled to Pokrovskoye to attend her christening (it was about fifty miles away from Yasnaya Polyana), but this seems to have been the longest journey he undertook until the end of the year. Most of the travelling he did in 1850 was to nearby Tula. At the end of 1849 Tolstoy had taken a modest civil-service post in the Tula local government (which placed him on the bottom rung of the Table of Ranks as a collegiate registrar), but it was very undemanding, and gave him a good excuse to spend much of that winter socialising with the city's local nobility and consorting with the gypsies.

Tolstoy had his favourites amongst the gypsy girls, but he was chiefly drawn to the gypsies for their sultry, melancholic music and wild dancing. Gypsies had appeared in the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century. Some settled, while others continued to lead a semi-nomadic life, lodging with Russian peasants during the winter months and earning their living by bartering horses in the summer. From the beginning they had also given professional performances of Russian songs as a way of earning money. The first Russian gypsy choir was formed in the 1770s by Count Orlov-Chesmensky, who brought together some of his gypsy-serfs from the family of Ivan Sokolov to perform at his estate outside Moscow. They were given their freedom in 1807, but their reputation only began to soar after the war with Napoleon was over, and they began to be invited to perform late into the night at Moscow's restaurants and taverns. Soon choirs began to spring up in other Russian cities, launching great singing dynasties who performed a cappella, or to the accompaniment of violins and the Russian seven-stringed guitar. The gypsy choirs appealed to both ends of the social spectrum - the merchantry and the nobility (particularly army officers), and they filled a gap. There were no other professional musicians in Russia at that time except for foreign virtuosi, and the chief virtue of the gypsy choirs was that they performed Russian songs, tinged with elements of their own distinct and exotic traditions. Perhaps uniquely, gypsies were not discriminated against in Russia, at least by the people amongst whom they lived. The gypsy choirs reached the peak of their popularity in the 1840s, and the one in Tula was reputed to be one of the best in Russia. Sergey's inamorata Masha Shishkina (herself from one of the great gypsy musical dynasties) was its greatest songbird.
²⁸
Hearing gypsy choirs perform in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod was certainly a highlight of the Marquis de Custine's Russian tour in 1839. He was struck by their differences to other gypsies he had encountered:

Their wild and impassioned song has some distant resemblance to that of the Spanish gitanos. The melodies of the north are less lively, less voluptuous, than those of Andalusia, but they produce a more profoundly pensive impression ... it was nearly midnight, but this house was still full of people, noise, and light. The women struck me as being very handsome; their costume, although in appearance the same as that of other Russian females, takes a foreign character when worn by them: there is magic in their glances, and their features and attitudes are graceful, and at the same time imposing. In short, they resemble the sibyls of Michael Angelo.
²⁹

It was the gypsies who first spurred Tolstoy to think about writing a story, and they feature in one of his early unfinished pieces of fiction from 1853, in which the clearly autobiographical narrator laments that their art has already become debased. 'There was a time when people loved gypsy music more than any other; when the gypsies sang the good old songs,' the narrator writes, going on to maintain that gypsy music in Russia was the 'only way for us to cross from popular to serious music', unapologetic that his love for gypsy music had made him digress.
³⁰

Tolstoy combined his love of popular Russian song with a serious enthusiasm for the classical European repertoire (particularly Beethoven, such as his Piano Trios, Op. 70), with which he largely became acquainted at the keyboard. He was still hell-bent on living up to the absurd standard he kept setting himself, but to judge from his week of diary entries in June 1850, he generally failed to follow his strict daily timetable for swimming, managing his serfs, reading and writing, and playing the piano that summer. Even if he chastised himself when he did not manage to play all twenty-four scales and arpeggios in two octaves every day, however, he could not help but attain a respectable level of proficiency of musicianship. He would continue to play the piano into his old age, sometimes playing duets with his wife Sonya or his sister Masha.

Another source of Tolstoy's dissatisfaction with himself in the summer of 1850 came from his inability to suppress the physical attraction he felt towards the pretty peasant girls on his estate. Like so many Russian landowners during this period, Tolstoy abused the nobleman's 'privilege' of owning serfs and exercised his
droit de seigneur
with peasant girls on a regular basis when he was a young man. He confessed to his diary on 19 June 1850 that he was incapable of controlling himself, and that what made it worse was that seducing girls had become a habit.
³¹
There was one particular innocent young girl who tempted him that summer: Toinette's servant Gasha Trubetskaya, who went on to work for his sister Masha and accompanied her abroad in 1859. Tolstoy's conscience was later sorely troubled by his exploitative behaviour, and in the 1890s he made an attempt at atonement by fictionalising and condemning his moral failings through the experiences of the central characters in his story 'The Devil' and his last novel
Resurrection.
As he was writing the latter in 1898, he confessed to his wife Sonya that he was recycling details from his own life. She had seen Gasha as an old lady, and was disgusted both by the idea of her husband's taking advantage of a peasant girl and by him recalling lascivious details in his old age.
³²
(This is what prompted Tolstoy to confess to a friend about his first experience with a prostitute.) At the end of his life Tolstoy also confessed to having had amorous feelings for Avdotya (Dunyasha) Bannikova, the daughter of the servant who was his first tutor, Nikolay Dmitrievich. Dunyasha later married Tolstoy's servant Alexey Orekhov, and worked as a maid at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was adamant he had not laid a finger on her.
³³
Tolstoy was generally quite predatory as a young man - he also began to develop a passion for hunting with borzois at this time.