Tolstoy (19 page)

Tolstoy's first experience of Chechens came a month after his arrival in the Caucasus. In June he followed his brother's regiment to the fortress at Stary Yurt, some thirty miles away, and took part as a volunteer in a raid. By chance, General Prince Alexander Baryatinsky, who was in charge of the army's operations in the eastern Caucasus, happened to be present, and Nikolay relayed to his brother that he had been impressed by the young volunteer. Flattered by the attention of one of the most important Russian soldiers in the Caucasus (in 1856 he would be appointed commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army, and viceroy in the region), and encouraged by his brother, Tolstoy decided to join up. First, however, he had to obtain a letter from the Tula local government giving him leave to resign from the post he still nominally held.

Meanwhile, since he had a lot of time on his hands, he carried on with reading and writing: he was now working on his second draft of
Childhood.
He also played a lot of card games with Russian officers. On 13 June he lost 850 roubles in one sitting, which meant asking his brother-in-law to sell off another of his villages.
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Tolstoy found it very hard to renounce gambling, but it did at least give him the opportunity to teach a Chechen how to count. Not all Chechens were hostile, and he became friends with a hot-headed young man called Sado Miserbiyev who was often cheated by the Russian officers with whom he played cards. Tolstoy took him under his wing and was rewarded with undying loyalty and a Chechen sword. He was also later bailed out by his devoted
kunak
(a Caucasian term for friend) when he suffered another terrible gambling loss.

That first autumn Tolstoy began to travel further afield, including to the Russian fortress at Groznaya (current-day Grozny), a new outpost built in 1818 by General Alexey Ermolov. The forbiddingly named Groznaya (which means 'threatening') was one of a number of new forts he built and named with the intention of terrorising the locals, such as Vnezapnaya ('Sudden') and Burnaya ('Stormy'). It was also Ermolov who in 1817 had completed major improvements to the 126-mile-long Georgian Military Highway which served as a vital artery for Russian troops over the mountains. It was the only passable road crossing the Caucasian range, and one of the highest in the world - higher than the Simplon Pass. When Pushkin had shared his impressions of the Highway in his
Journey to Erzerum
(1829) it was still extremely dangerous: travellers had to go with a convoy of 500 soldiers and a cannon, and sometimes covered only ten miles a day. By Tolstoy's time it had become both safer and faster.
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He travelled along it for the first time with his brother when they went to Tiflis in October 1851, and now he was finally rewarded with the spectacular views of the snow-capped peaks which Pushkin and Lermontov had found so exhilarating before him.

Resigning his civil-service post and joining the army proved to be a lengthy bureaucratic procedure, and Tolstoy was forced to remain in Tiflis for over two months, where he also lost all his money at billiards and fell ill. During that solitary time, when he carried on working on
Childhood
and tried to stop himself womanising, he wrote fond, homesick letters to Aunt Toinette, who was his only regular correspondent. He told her how glad he was to be able to play the piano again, as it was the only thing he missed in his new life at the Starogladkovskaya camp (around this time he also decided to give his grand piano at Yasnaya Polyana to his sister Masha, knowing he would not soon return home). Tolstoy was also able to hear some music at the Tiflis Opera House which had just opened. For that, and for the city's new tree-lined streets and its first Russian newspaper, Tolstoy had Prince Mikhail Vorontsov to thank. Commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army from 1844 to 1854, and the first imperial viceroy in the region, the British-educated Vorontsov was a moderniser who had previously transformed Odessa, and he had now brought his enlightened city-planning ideas to Tiflis.
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Following his formal application to join the artillery regiment in which his brother served, Tolstoy needed to sit an exam. Passing it entitled him to call himself a cadet, or, to use the Russian term, a
yunker
(a corruption of the German 'Jung Herr', the rank for junior under-officers from the nobility). On 3 January 1852 Tolstoy was appointed
Feierverker
(Bombardier), 4th class, in the 4th Battery of the Russian Army's 20th Artillery Brigade - though his appointment would not become official until his resignation from the Tula government was formalised. Two weeks later he was back in Starogladkovskaya, but left again immediately to take part in a month of raids against the Chechens for the first time as a full-time soldier, often side by side with his brother. It was relentless, intense and very dangerous, but after decades of successful guerrilla warfare from the Chechens and other mountain tribes, the Russians were beginning to gain the upper hand.

To begin with, Russian military strategy in the Caucasus was designed with a conventional European army in mind as the enemy, but this was no ordinary theatre of war. The Russians were not fighting large numbers of conventional troops with bayonets on a plateau, but small, heterogeneous bands of rebels on heavily wooded mountain slopes. Their enemies knew every inch of the land and were adept at knowing how to take cover. Eventually the Russian army changed its tactics. Under Vorontsov, who was as ruthless as Ermolov, the new strategy was to cut back forests and decimate villages so as to undermine the Chechen defence system.
⁵⁴
It began to produce results. Tolstoy relished the opportunity to prove his mettle in his first raids against the Chechens, and his valour should have been rewarded with the St George Cross, but since his papers had not come through from Tula, he was still technically a volunteer, and so not officially eligible. He was bitterly disappointed. His papers finally arrived at the end of March.
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Tolstoy took part in several forest-clearing expeditions that spring, and the following year he would start distilling his experiences into the story 'The Wood-Felling', but his first priority was to complete
Childhood,
and when he came back to Starogladkovskaya in March he began working on his third draft. It was ironicallyjust at the time that he joined the army that he began distancing himself from his rowdy fellow officers, who found his aloofness arrogant. Nikolay was happy to sit up all night drinking, but not Lev, who now began to prefer chess and fencing, and sitting with a book. His army duties were fairly light. In April he travelled a little way east to Kizlyar where he consulted a doctor about his poor health, and May found him undertaking a much longer journey, a few hundred miles west this time, to Pyatigorsk in the foothills of the north Caucasus, where he would undertake treatment. He would not return to Starogladkovskaya until August, by which time he had not only finished and submitted
Childhood,
but learned that it was accepted for publication.

Pyatigorsk ('Five Mountains'), so-called because it is overlooked by the five peaks of Mount Beshtau (a Turkish name meaning 'five mountains'), was founded as a Russian fortification in 1780. Following the discovery of its mineral springs it was developed as a health spa by imperial decree, and had become a thriving and fashionable resort embellished by Italian architects by the time Tolstoy arrived in 1852. It was, in fact, the most fashionable Russian spa throughout the nineteenth century. Pyatigorsk had also seen its fair share of drama: Lermontov was shot in a duel near the town's cemetery in 1841, and there was still a very real threat of raids by marauding Circassians, which gave an edge to otherwise peaceful rest cures. Tolstoy knew Pyatigorsk in his mind before he arrived because he had read
A Hero of Our Time:
it provides the setting for the longest of its stories. He followed the recommended treatment of bathing in Pyatigorsk's sulphurous springs for six weeks, and then travelled on to the springs of Zheleznovodsk ('Iron Waters'), situated a little way to the north, for three weeks of treatment there.

Tolstoy rented a little house on the outskirts of Pyatigorsk which had a garden and a beehive and a view of the snowcapped peak of Mount Elbrus, and rolled up his sleeves to get down to work. He did a lot of reading during his cure, particularly of Rousseau, whom he read and re-read, but he also did a lot of writing. On 27 May he finished the third draft of
Childhood,
and four days later he started on the final draft. In early July, finally happy with his manuscript, he resolved to send it to the editor of
The Contemporary,
Russia's most prestigious literary journal, without revealing his identity beyond the initials 'L.N.'.
⁵⁶
The Contemporary
was a St Petersburg-based journal which had been founded by Pushkin in 1836. Since 1847 it had been edited by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who had cemented its reputation as the platform of the progressive, liberal-minded intelligentsia by publishing the work of leading Westernisers such as Herzen and Turgenev, and inviting the collaboration of prominent critics like Vissarion Belinsky.

On 29 August, three weeks after arriving back in Starogladkovskaya, Tolstoy received a reply from Nekrasov, informing him that he had been impressed by
Childhood
and would be printing it in the next issue. Tolstoy was over the moon - until he finally received the September issue of the journal at the end of October. He was incensed to see that his text had been mutilated by the censor and, furthermore, was now called
A History of My
Childhood.
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He had expressly not set out to write the story of
his
childhood, he remonstrated in the angry letter he drafted to Nekrasov, which he ultimately (and wisely) decided not to send. Tolstoy was also crestfallen not to be paid a royalty. He was desperately short of money, and unaware of the practice of Russian literary journals not to pay fledgling authors for their first publication. He had no option but to acquiesce, and at least had the enviable consolation of having an editor who wanted to publish more of his writing. Tolstoy had a very warm reception for his first published work. Critics particularly praised the gifts of psychological analysis which brought
Childhood
to life. The Russian reading public were also full of praise for the mysterious but extremely promising new author. The members of the author's own family, who had not been forewarned, reacted with delighted surprise when they discovered his identity.
⁵⁸

That autumn Tolstoy carried on writing. He was teeming with new ideas, and he began to think about resigning from the army: the success of
Childhood
showed him where his future lay, and it was not with the military. He now began to work on several things at once. First of all he resolved to add to
Childhood
by writing
Boyhood.
At the same time, as he became increasingly occupied by religious ideas, he began to conceive a novel about a Russian landowner wanting to improve the life of his peasantry. Finally, he was keen to publish stories about the Caucasus. This was the project he brought to completion first. He had already started writing stories inspired by his own experiences with the army, and in late December he sent Nekrasov the manuscript of 'The Raid - A Volunteer's Story'. It was published the following March, again with cuts dictated by the censor. With 'The Raid', Tolstoy turned a new page in the history of Russian writing about the Caucasus. Thanks to Pushkin and Lermontov, readers were used to a romantic and mythologised view of the Caucasus and its peoples. The story Tolstoy made of his memories of the first sortie against the Chechens which he had observed close-hand the previous year was highly realistic. Just beneath the surface we can also detect a nascent anti-militaristic stance.

The spring of 1853 was both the high point and the low point of Tolstoy's time in the Caucasus. He took part in further skirmishes with Chechen rebels, and was commended for his bravery. After being obliged to cede the St George Cross he deserved to an old soldier who stood to receive a decent pension as a result, he was promoted to ensign instead, but then ended up being arrested when a particularly riveting game of chess led him to miss parade. His promotion was therefore cancelled (and he had to wait until 1854 for it to be reinstated). Tolstoy was bitterly disappointed to miss the St George Cross again and there were other disappointments. His brother Nikolay had decided to resign from the army the previous autumn, having served in the army for eight years,
⁵⁹
and in February 1853 his papers came through, permitting him to retire at the rank of staff-captain. Tolstoy was already quite lonely in the Caucasus and he felt Nikolay's absence keenly. His financial affairs were also still in a dire state. In April his brother-in-law sold another village on his estate to provide him with funds, which meant losing another 350 acres, plus twenty-six serfs and their families.
⁶⁰
Even his writing suffered: the story he began about a young man in Moscow who goes to a high-society ball, then to a tavern to hear the gypsies was suddenly dropped and never picked up again.

Because fortune had not yet smiled on Tolstoy's military career, he had initially delayed tendering his resignation, thinking it would be just too humiliating for him to return to civilian life as a retired cadet. In the end, however, he decided he would go ahead anyway, and he submitted his resignation request on 30 May 1853.
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Yet again he was unlucky. Russia had just broken off diplomatic relations with Turkey, and after its invasion of the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in June, no officer was permitted to apply for leave or resign. In July Tolstoy returned to Pyatigorsk, where he joined Nikolay and also his sister Masha, whom he had not seen for two years. She had come to spend the summer taking the waters at Pyatigorsk with her husband. It was not a particularly happy time for Tolstoy, who was feeling irritable and restless, and it was made no better by the realisation that he would have to sell the main Yasnaya Polyana mansion to rectify his financial affairs, something he had previously vowed would be an absolute last resort.
⁶²
He buried his sorrows in his writing. As well as starting the first draft of what would become his novella
The Cossacks,
and working further on his sequel to
Childhood,
he also wrote another completely different story which he started and finished in four days. 'Notes of a Billiard Marker', the only work Tolstoy sent off to Nekrasov that summer, is more strongly autobiographical than most of Tolstoy's stories. It is a bleak tale of a young aristocrat's moral disintegration, inspired by the gambling disaster which had befallen Tolstoy in Tiflis. Close reading of Rousseau's
Confessions
helped to keep Tolstoy on an even keel at this time, and reminded him that he could only be happy doing good works.
⁶³
He was beginning to develop a strong social conscience.