Tolstoy (18 page)

Despite all his good intentions, by autumn 1850 Tolstoy had once again succumbed to drinking, gambling and spending time with the gypsies in Tula. There were some huge losses at cards this time: 4,000 roubles on one occasion.
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Another change of routine was called for, so in December 1850 he again departed for Moscow, where he got out his diary and started compiling rules once more. Some of them were unrealistic ('play the piano for four hours every day'), some were practical ('do exercise every day', 'say as little as you can about yourself', 'speak loudly and clearly'), some were idealistic ('don't have women'), some were quite odd ('before a ball do a lot of thinking and writing'), and some were just plain silly ('don't read novels').
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Tolstoy also drew up elaborate rules for card playing - this time he intended to play cards seriously, and gamble only with people richer than him.
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He went to a lot of balls that winter (there were rules about dancing too), as he wanted to mingle with the
haut monde
of Moscow society and find a wife. It would in fact be a long time before he found the right person to marry, but his socialising meant he was up to date with all the latest intrigues, and so was able to send Aunt Toinette long letters telling her all the gossip doing the rounds of the Moscow salons - such as the scandal surrounding the evidence which implicated Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's aristocratic Russian mistress in the notorious murder of her French rival.
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Toinette greatly enjoyed the letters she received from her favourite nephew. On 27 January 1851 she told him in one of her replies that he wrote so engagingly, and so naturally, that it was if he was standing there before her. But she was concerned about the aimlessness of his life, and his worrying gambling habit. She reminded him reproachfully that he had come back to join his family for Christmas, but had preferred to play cards all night in Tula rather than spend time with his brother Nikolay, who was back 'in Russia', as he put it, on leave from the Caucasus for the first time in nearly four years. Aunt Toinette also despaired of Sergey ('If he had a job which occupied him seriously, he would not have given into that mad passion for the gypsy girl'), and she hoped Lev would find some purpose in his life, and not enter into a marriage of convenience just to pay off his debts.
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She beseeched Tolstoy to take himself in hand.
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He was beginning to. He was already painfully aware of the emptiness of Moscow society, and he had begun to think seriously about writing fiction. It was in December 1850 that he declared in his diary that he wanted to write a story about the gypsies.
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From the very beginning, Tolstoy's ability to hold up a mirror to his blemishes (looking in the mirror too frequently was another habit he faulted himself for at this time) would be fundamental to his powers of psychological analysis. On 8 March 1851 he began keeping a 'Franklin Journal' as a way of monitoring his moral lapses. Benjamin Franklin had described his technique of drawing up a table of virtues, and marking those he had failed to demonstrate each day, in his autobiography
Mémoires de la vie privée,
which was published in Paris in 1791.
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Whether he had finally found his resolve, or whether the arrival of spring simply fired him with new energy, Tolstoy now became rigorous about writing in his own diary every day, convinced that acknowledging his moral failings was half the battle to eliminating them. He was quite successful at keeping up regular gymnastics and fencing lessons, but his behaviour rarely passed muster: the words 'laziness', 'cowardice', 'gluttony', 'false modesty' and 'self-deception' punctuate his diary entries during these months as a regular admonishment of his lack of moral fibre.

As he began experimenting with fiction for the first time, Tolstoy became more reclusive, and he also started to spend even more time reading. Earlier in the year he had been working his way through Montesquieu; now he read Lamartine's newly published
Histoire des Girondins
(1847), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's
Paul et Virginie
(1787), Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), and Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
(1759-1769). During the spring of 1851 he began to be more observant not only of the turbulent emotional and intellectual processes going on inside his head, but of life around him. What Tolstoy had in mind when he embarked on the first draft of
Childhood,
which would become his first published work, was an original kind of
Bildungsroman
in four parts, to be entitled
Four Epochs of Development.
Under the clear influence of
David Copperfield,
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and also Laurence Sterne, amongst many other influences, Tolstoy's goal was to explore the psychological experiences of a young boy growing to adulthood. As with almost every work of fiction he ever published, Tolstoy drew on his own life as raw material for the evocation of particular scenes from two days in his character Nikolenka's childhood. It is important to recognise that his own life was the means and not the end, but as the Tolstoy scholar Richard Gustafson has put it, 'this distortion of personal experience conceals only to reveal',
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since sincerity and emotional truth were always Tolstoy's ultimate goal.
Childhood
is deceptively simple. In order for it to work, Tolstoy had to come up with a convincing narrative voice, thus one of the first problems he wrestled with was whether to have an adult narrator, and risk his story seeming like a memoir, or have the child Niko-lenka himself tell the story of his life, which posed dilemmas of a different kind.
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Tolstoy's artistic techniques were already sophisticated. The fact that he wrote to a friend in Petersburg that spring to ask if he might help negotiate the literary censor was a sign that he was taking his writing seriously.
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Nikolay came to visit him in Moscow that March. The end of his furlough was fast approaching, and he suggested that his brother accompany him back to the Caucasus. Tolstoy immediately agreed, and at the beginning of April he left Moscow and returned to Yasnaya Polyana. The Caucasus offered Tolstoy the opportunity to start from a clean slate. It was a chance to leave behind his debts and his bad habits, and embrace a life of danger and adventure on the most dangerous frontier of the Russian Empire. The famous daguerreotype taken of the two brothers that spring shows the future writer clean-shaven, sitting tensely in rather scruffy clothes, his hands resting on a cane, fixing the viewer with a penetrating stare, while the more relaxed, phlegmatic Nikolay sits beside him in his army uniform, nonchalantly resting his elbow on the back of his brother's chair. By the end of the month the brothers were on the road, deciding to take a scenic route via Kazan, to catch up with family and friends. They took along two Yasnaya Polyana serfs as their personal servants: Alexey Orekhov and Ivan Suvorov (Alyoshka and Vanyushka).

After a pleasant week in Kazan, during which time Tolstoy's head was turned by the demure and pretty Zinaida Molostvova, the brothers headed south. On 30 May, after a glorious week sailing down the Volga from Saratov to Astrakhan and a further week on horses, they finally arrived in Starogladkovskaya, in present-day Chechnya. That same evening Tolstoy got out his diary. 'How did I end up here?' he asked himself. 'I don't know. And why am I here? Also I don't know.'
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As it turned out, Starogladkovskaya was to be Tolstoy's base for the next two and a half years, and the time he spent there was to be the making of him. By the time he left the Caucasus he would be a commissioned officer in the imperial army and a published writer. His first-hand experience of warfare in the Caucasus, furthermore, would prove to be invaluable when he later came to write the battle scenes in
War and Peace.

It was Catherine the Great who had brought Russia into the Caucasus, when she graciously came to the aid of the struggling Orthodox Christians in the Kingdom of Georgia. In truth, she really wanted to keep Persia and the Ottoman Empire at bay, with the ulterior motive of moving closer to realising her 'Greek Project'. She dreamed of defeating the Turks, and placing a Russian ruler on the throne of a newly restored Christian Constantinople. Her
annus mirabilis
was 1783, when she not only conquered the Crimea but signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, thus making Georgia a protectorate of Russia. Aggression by a newly resurgent Persia then played into Russia's hands. In 1795, the last year of Catherine's reign, Russia offered no assistance when the Persians invaded the capital of Tiflis, and Alexander I then violated the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1801 by simply annexing Georgia and abolishing its monarchy. Subsequent wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia over the next decade resulted in the Russian Empire adding other small Caucasian nations to its territories.
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A town quickly grew up around the fortress at the foothill of the mountains which had been established in 1784 to become Russia's main military base in the area. It was optimistically named Vladikavkaz ('Ruler of the Caucasus'), but it took more than building the Georgian Military Highway between Vladikavkaz and Tiflis for the Russians to conquer the Caucasus. Although the Georgians largely surrendered peacefully to the Great White Tsar, with many of their aristocracy later distinguishing themselves in the war with Napoleon, there were many north Caucasian peoples who strongly resisted the Russian presence, chief amongst them the Chechens and Avars in the mountainous east (close to the Caspian Sea), and the Circassians in the west (near to the Black Sea). Russia soon found itself fighting a protracted war against a tenacious resistance movement. General Alexey Ermolov, the first commander-in-chief appointed to run operations in the Caucasus, was notorious for his brutal methods, but the Chechens (whom he saw as primeval savages) often outwitted him, and he was replaced in 1827 by Ivan Paskevich. Other strategies were deployed by subsequent commanders-in-chief until the war finally came to an end in the east in 1859, and in the west in 1864.

Tolstoy's experiences in the Caucasus were restricted to Chechnya in the eastern theatre of war, which had entered its last decade by the time he arrived in 1851. That was also the year in which Russia scored a minor victory. Since the 1830s, the disparate Muslim tribes of the northern Caucasus had been united by the Avar leader Imam Shamil who ruled the peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan. Shamil saw the war with Russia as a holy war, but he did not always enjoy full support from the highlanders. In 1851 he had fallen out with his commander Hadji Murat, a fellow Avar who went over to the Russian side. The following year, Hadji Murat tried to rejoin Shamil, but was murdered by Russian forces. Proof that Tolstoy's involvement in the protracted struggle with the Caucasian highlanders made a deep impression on him is provided by the fact that he decided to turn this litany of betrayals into fiction at the very end of his life.
Hadji Murat
was written at a time when his priorities were more religious than literary, but it is one of his greatest works of fiction.

Before Tolstoy met any Avar or Chechen rebels, he met Cossacks. Starogladkovskaya was one of five Cossack settlements which extended over a distance of about fifty miles along the northern bank of the River Terek. Named after Gladkov, one of the local
atamans,
the settlement was founded in the 1720s and its population contributed to the thousand or so Cossack troops who fought for the Russians in the Caucasian War. They were descendants of the original sixteenth-century Mountain or Terek Cossacks (
Grebenskie
or
Terskie kazaki
) who had settled along the Terek, some of whom had been part of autonomous military units and some of whom had originally fled central Russia to avoid enserfment.
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The Cossacks' desire to maintain their traditional lifestyle of independence and freedom ultimately brought them into (sometimes very violent) conflict with the tsarist authorities, particularly under Catherine the Great. By the end of the eighteenth century they were forced into a position of accommodation, whereby they were granted special status in return for acting as border guards along the edge of the empire, particularly its threatened southern frontier. Although they were subjects of the Russian Empire, and were usually Christian, the Terek Cossacks had their own language and looked very like their Chechen neighbours on the other side of the river, with whom they had peacefully co-existed for centuries.
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The men wore tall fur hats and the same long tunics with strings of cartridges worn across their chest.

Tolstoy was initially quite disappointed by the rather flat landscape where his brother's regiment was stationed - it was not until he started travelling in the Caucasus that he began to see the magnificent mountain scenery which had inspired visiting Russian poets to flights of rhetoric. The Cossack life-style was certainly an eye-opener for him, however. It was completely different from what he knew back home in Russia. The men had a cult of machismo, and left heavy work to their wives, but the women, far from being downtrodden, were often smarter, and usually far more attractive. They had a dignity which came from centuries of defiant independence (no Cossack had ever been a serf), and their standard of living was far higher than that of the average Russian muzhik. They also lived close to nature. Tolstoy would draw deeply on his knowledge of the Terek Cossacks for his fiction. In 1863, just before he embarked on
War and Peace,
he finally finished a novella called
The Cossacks
which he had begun when he was still living in the Caucasus. As a civilian with not much to do while his brother was out on manoeuvres, Tolstoy began to befriend the Cossacks in Starogladkovskaya, and learn their language. He became particularly close to Epifan (Epishka) Sekhin, a tall old Cossack with a big beard, then apparently in his late eighties, who became his first landlord and who was immortalised with great precision as Eroshka in
The Cossacks.
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Epishka took his young Russian friend with him on hunting trips, played the balalaika and regaled him with stories of old Cossack life.