Tolstoy (22 page)

As a celebrated author and officer who had arrived straight from the front line, Tolstoy was welcomed like a conquering hero by the editors of
The Contemporary.
There was also an air of mystery about him. Here was a young man who had submitted an unsolicited manuscript from the Caucasus three years earlier, and no one at
The Contemporary
had actually met him. In fact only a few people even recognised his name, as he had signed all his stories so far with his initials only. Tolstoy was also anxious to meet the new colleagues he had been corresponding with, and he hoped they would be kindred spirits. He had been a callow and impressionable youth when he had last been in St Petersburg, but now he was a published writer, a war hero and a celebrity. On his first day in St Petersburg Turgenev took Tolstoy round to meet Nekrasov (the editorial offices of
The Contemporary
were located in a building on the other side of the river), and they had lunch and talked and played chess until eight in the evening.
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Nekrasov went into raptures in a letter to a friend, describing Tolstoy as 'better than his writing', a 'falcon', or perhaps even an 'eagle'.
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There followed meetings with critics and publishers, and dinners with other writers, including the novelist Ivan Goncharov, then working on his masterpiece
Oblomov
(1859), and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Soon Tolstoy was personally acquainted with all the leading lights of Russian literature, who fell over themselves to express how delighted they were by this talented young artillery officer.

Tolstoy found it intoxicating to be back in civilised surroundings, where there was plenty of intellectual stimulation, but he also craved the intoxication of gypsy music and card games, in which he could seek oblivion and shake off the stresses of the last few years. The poet Afanasy Fet visited one day for mid-morning tea with Turgenev and was told by his servant Zakhar that the gleaming sabre in the corner of the hall belonged to Count Tolstoy. Fet and Turgenev then had to spend the next hour talking in whispers, as the count was still asleep on the couch in the drawing room, having been up all night carousing. Turgenev, though only ten years Tolstoy's senior, had assumed a kind of paternal role in their relationship and explained that it was the same every night, and that he had long since given up on him.
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On 11 December Tolstoy spent all the money he had left throwing a party with gypsy singers at the Hotel Napoleon.
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Of all the writers Tolstoy met during his sojourn in St Petersburg, only Fet became a lasting friend, but even he would fail to make the cut when Tolstoy emerged from his spiritual crisis in the 1880s. Much as they all liked Tolstoy, the writers in St Petersburg soon realised that it was actually not all that easy to get on with him. He came out with such provocative opinions, and seemed to go out of his way to be contrary. Many of the writers associated with
The Contemporary
were either writing about Shakespeare or translating him, for example, but Tolstoy was simply dismissive of him.
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And the mild-mannered Turgenev soon found himself having violent arguments with Tolstoy. They were two men from the same patrician background, but Tolstoy did not like compromise, and he instinctively recoiled from Turgenev's refined elegance and spirit of moderation, which were a great disappointment to him. One evening Turgenev read from the manuscript of his first novel,
Rudin,
to an assembled company. In comparison with
A Hunter's Notes,
Tolstoy found it unbelievably contrived, and could not believe how seriously it was received by the other literati present.

Turgenev had not had a particularly easy time. He was a self-confessed Westerniser, so was anxious to see reform and modernisation in Russia along European lines. He had bravely gone against the grain of his upbringing by befriending the radical critic Belinsky, whose reforming zeal stemmed partly from his lowly social origins, and his implicit criticism of serfdom in his
A Hunter's Notes
had made him a very dubious figure in the eyes of the tsarist establishment. Turgenev never shied away from standing up for what he believed was right, or from dealing with political issues in his works. He had defiantly published an obituary of Gogol back in 1852, despite knowing that all mention of a writer who had satirised the Fatherland had been forbidden by the censor (the same censor who disfigured Tolstoy's 'Sebastopol in May'). To punish him for the crime of daring to call Gogol 'great', Nicholas I had personally ordered Turgenev's arrest and imprisonment for a month, to be followed by permanent exile to his estate. It had only been thanks to the future Alexander II, who had liked
A Hunter's Notes,
that he had been allowed to travel again at the end of 1853. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev, Tolstoy was intent on carving out a career as a novelist himself, but
Rudin
did not impress him.

Something else marked Tolstoy out from the progressive writers grouped round
The Contemporary:
his contacts with the St Petersburg aristocracy. Tolstoy came to despise the social conventions of high society, but he made an exception for family, and he would become particularly close to Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstoya, whom he got to know now for the first time. 'Alexandrine' was the daughter of his paternal great uncle, and she and her sister Elizaveta had apartments in the Mariinsky Palace opposite the cathedral in St Isaac's Square, as they were tutors and then ladies-in-waiting to Nicholas I's daughter Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna and her daughters Maria and Evgenia. If Tolstoy unconsciously looked to Turgenev as a father figure, he jocularly called Alexandra Andreyevna his
babushka
(grandmother), although, like Turgenev, she was only ten or so years his senior. In the memoir Alexandrine wrote of her relationship with her unruly cousin at the end of her life, she recalled the distinct impression he had made on everyone when he arrived from Sebastopol:

He himself was very simple, extremely modest [this was early in his career] and so playful that his presence enlivened everybody. He spoke very rarely about himself [one rule he had followed!], but examined each new face with particular attention, and then relayed his impressions, which were nearly always quite extreme, in a most amusing way. The adjective
thin-skinned,
which his wife later applied to him, suited him exactly, so strongly was he affected by the slightest nuance that he caught. His unattractive face, with clever, kind and expressive eyes, replaced with their expression everything he lacked by way of refinement, and, it may be said, was superior to beauty.
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Along with Aunt Toinette, Alexandrine was one of the few women in Tolstoy's life whom he really respected. She had not married or had children, and so he did not categorise her as a 'typical' woman, although he was certainly attracted to her. She clearly also felt there was a frisson between them. They were to fall out very badly over religion later on, at a time when Tolstoy burned his boats with nearly everyone he was close to, but they cared for each other deeply. Alexandrine was a tremendously intelligent, no-nonsense woman whose company Tolstoy greatly enjoyed. After Tolstoy became ensconced at Yasnaya Polyana, their contact became more sporadic, but their correspondence was always lively. It was to Alexandrine, of course, that Tolstoy invariably turned to when he needed a direct line to the Tsar, as she was extremely well connected at court. Addressing personal letters to the Tsar would become something of a habit with Tolstoy, and in the early days Alexandrine was a willing intermediary, although rather less so when her cousin became a public liability towards the end of his life by openly going head to head with the Russian government.

At the end of November, Tolstoy wrote an ebullient letter to his sister Masha to tell her how his meeting with Turgenev had gone (and how unscin-tillating Nekrasov had turned out to be). Just a few days later he received a letter from her, in which she exhorted him to come and visit their brother Dmitry, who was now gravely ill. Since Tolstoy was technically still on active duty with the army, he had to apply for leave, and was unable to get away until 1 January. By that time he had been transferred to a naval munitions unit in St Petersburg, which effectively left him free to pursue his own interests. Dmitry was now living in Oryol, south-west of Tula, and was being cared for by Masha and her husband along with Aunt Toinette and his common-law wife - a former prostitute also called Masha. Tolstoy arrived on 9 January to find Dmitry ravaged by tuberculosis, and in great suffering, his emaciated face dominated by huge staring eyes. Unwilling to accept that he was going to die, Dmitry was convinced he would be healed with the help of a miracle-working icon, to which he prayed constantly. Tolstoy found the experience so distressing he left the next day. Dmitry died in his wife's arms on 22 January 1856.

Tolstoy had not been in touch with Dmitry for over a year, and had not even known his brother was ill. All the Tolstoys had their share of
dikost,
particularly Lev, but Dmitry gave him a good run for his money. They shared the same uncompromising maximalist impulse. After the fiasco Dmitry had suffered in St Petersburg, he had returned to his estate in Kursk province, and taken a minor job in local government. In 1853 he had fallen seriously ill in Moscow, where he grew a huge beard and became very reclusive. When he realised he had not much longer to live, he suddenly relinquished all his ascetic habits and former piety and abandoned himself to a debauched life of drinking, gambling and whoring. He had 'bought out' Masha from her brothel, and then treated her very badly, throwing her out only to call her back.
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Dmitry, the 'unloved' brother, had written his last letter to Tolstoy from his Shcherbachevka estate in October 1854, telling him he had racked up nearly 7,000 roubles of debts and was sitting at home working in the garden and on the estate. Without telling his brother he was dying, he told him he was sad rather than bored: 'sad because I am alone, and not what I might have been, and finally because
nothing has quite worked out
'.
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Tolstoy had not approved of Dmitry's sudden change of lifestyle, and did not reply. While he was in Oryol visiting Dmitry, he noted in his diary that all the bad thoughts he had harboured about him 'crumbled to dust' as soon as he saw him, but he still left.
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From Dmitry's deathbed, Tolstoy had travelled to Moscow, and it was here that he learned of his brother's death when the former prostitute Masha arrived back in the city. She told Tolstoy that Dmitry had only realised the hopelessness of his situation hours before he passed away, when he had started asking for a priest and a doctor, and pleading to be taken to Yasnaya Polyana so he could die quietly there. It was at Yasnaya Polyana that he was buried. Tolstoy later repented bitterly of being so wrapped up in his own life that he had not noticed the seriousness of his brother's condition earlier. He also felt remorse for the caddish way he had behaved towards him. In
Anna Karenina
he would bring Dmitry back to life again as Levin's brother Nikolay, a character who also has a relationship with a former prostitute. Having missed the real event, Tolstoy took particular care when it came to describing Nikolay's agonising demise in the only chapter in the novel to bear a title ('Death'), by which time he could also draw on the experience of witnessing his brother Nikolay die. Tolstoy also went out of his way at the end of his life to write at length about the real-life Dmitry in his memoirs.

Tolstoy stayed on in Moscow for about a month before returning to St Petersburg, which gave him the opportunity to meet those writers who were based in the old capital, such as Sergey and Konstantin Aksakov. As prominent Slavophiles opposed to to Russia's Westernisation, the Aksakovs would have never dreamed of living in the European-looking St Petersburg. The controversy amongst the Russian intelligentsia between the two warring camps of the Slavophiles and Westernisers had first flared up in the previous decade, and the impassioned public debates about Russia's present and future would continue for the rest of Tolstoy's life. He probably already knew he was not a Westerniser, but he would typically also come to reject Slavophile ideology in time, even though his preoccupation with traditional forms of native rural life would seem to make him a natural ally. When it came down to it, Tolstoy's egotism would simply not allow him to become part of a movement in which he and his ideas did not take centre stage. He returned to Petersburg at the end of January 1856. This time he wisely lived on his own, and stayed in the capital until the middle of May. The last of his war stories was published in
The Contemporary
in the January issue, but this time with a difference: 'Sebastopol in August' was the first of his works to be signed 'Count L. Tolstoy'.
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That spring he worked hard on two further stories, which were both published in
The Contemporary.
The first was 'The Snowstorm', which appeared in March, an artistically ambitious and visionary work inspired by the atrocious weather he had encountered during his journey home from the Caucasus in January 1854. 'The Two Hussars' was a gambling tale with a moral which compared two generations of the Russian nobility. It was dedicated to Tolstoy's sister Masha and appeared in May. As far as the editors of
The Contemporary
were concerned, Tolstoy was still their star writer, and at some point that spring he signed a contract with the journal. Along with Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Grigorovich, the journal's three other most valued writers, Tolstoy promised first refusal on new works for the next four years, in return for a share of its profits.
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