Tolstoy (24 page)

Before Tolstoy had signed his contract with
The Contemporary
he had promised a story to the journal
Notes of the Fatherland,
which was its main rival, and he spent much of his time in Petersburg that autumn working further on the story he had extracted from his unfinished
Novel of a Russian Landowner,
which he had been tinkering with ever since he had been in the Caucasus. In
A Landowner's Morning,
which was published in December, he fictionalised his own experiences in trying to improve the life of his serfs. In its concern to deal seriously with Russian peasants as fictional characters, it was a kind of
A Hunter's Notes
a decade further on, but under the new tsar, so much more could now be said. Importantly,
A Landowner's Morning
met with the approval of
The Contemporary
's new critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who published a lengthy and influential review of Tolstoy's work to date in the journal's December issue.

Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky were the same age, and they both sought the abolition of serfdom, but there was nothing else they had in common. Chernyshevsky came from a new breed of political radicals whose real goal was revolution. Both he and the younger Alexander Dobrolyubov, who joined
The Contemporary
in 1857, came from the same social and ideological stock as Belinsky, but they were dismissive of the ineffectual idealists of Turgenev's generation. As children of clergy, they were
raznochintsy
- a class which often denoted educated members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds, and they were far more dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose than Nekrasov and Panayev. Chernyshevsky had set the new agenda for
The Contemporary
in his 1855 essay
The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,
in which he declared that 'beauty is life', and proclaimed art to be inferior to science.
³²
In his review of Tolstoy's work, Chernyshevsky defined his technique in following the development of the evanescent thoughts and feelings of his characters as the 'dialectics of the soul', and compared it to the ability of certain painters 'to capture a flickering reflection of light on rustling leaves' or 'the play of colours in the changing outlines of clouds'.
³³
By this he meant that Tolstoy was not so much interested in the end result of a psychological process as in the process itself. It was a deliberately flattering review, but it was clear that Tolstoy would not respond warmly to Chernyshevsky's utilitarian views about art. As a result of Nekrasov's support of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of
The Contemporary
now started to be prioritised over artistic criteria, and this would lead to the journal losing all its top writers to the
Russian Messenger
in Moscow, Tolstoy included.

Once Tolstoy received his resignation papers from the army at the end of November, he was free to leave St Petersburg for good. He had set himself two goals, and accomplished both. Firstly, he had 'tested' his feelings for Valeria Arseneva, and proved to himself they had no substance, and secondly, he had completed
Youth
and submitted it for publication in January 1857. All he had to do now was obtain a foreign passport so that he could make his first trip abroad. After a month of tedious bureaucratic procedures, he was ready to set off for Moscow to prepare for his trip, and on 9 November (21 November according to the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe), he arrived in Paris at the end of a twelve-day journey. He had decided to travel alone, without a servant. The same evening, after unpacking his bags at the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, he set off to go to the traditional 'Samedi Gras' ball at the Paris Opéra, where he joined Nekrasov and Turgenev.

Tolstoy's six weeks in Paris were coloured by his meetings with Turgenev, whom he saw most days. By and large, they got on. Turgenev was spending more and more time abroad and knew the city extremely well, so would have been a marvellous guide. Tolstoy surrendered himself to sightseeing - the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Musée de Cluny, Napoleon's tomb at the Hôtel des Invalides ('terrible deification'),
³⁴
the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and then trips out to Versailles, to Fontainebleau and further afield to Dijon. He also saw a lot of shows. He went to the Théâtre Français to see Molière and Racine, he heard
Rigoletto, Il Barbiere di Siviglia
and
La Fille du régiment
at the Italian Opera, an operetta at the Bouffes Parisiens and watched a farce at the Théâtre des Variétés. He also went to lectures at the Sorbonne. And then early in the morning of 25 March he went to witness a public execution by guillotine, an experience which traumatised him so much that he could no longer stay in Paris. Despite having had plans to go on to London (he had been taking English lessons in Paris), he headed instead for Geneva, for a reunion with Alexandrine and her sister, who were holidaying there along with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna.
³⁵
He told his sister by letter that he had arrived just before the end of Great Lent, and had fasted in order to take communion.
³⁶

Relieved to have escaped from 'Sodom and Gomorrah', as he referred to Paris, Tolstoy spent the next three and half months restoring his spirits in Switzerland. He also picked up his pen again, and caught up with his reading, which was eclectic, and included Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë,
De Tocqueville, Proudhon, Balzac, Las Cases' memoirs of Napoleon, and Goethe. Turgenev still found Tolstoy very bemusing. 'He's a strange person,' he confided in a letter to a friend. 'I've never met anyone like him, and don't quite understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic, nobleman - something reminiscent of Rousseau, but more honest than Rousseau - highly moral and at the same time unattractive.'
³⁷
Turgenev did understand Tolstoy better than most, and, knowing how quickly he became bored, predicted that his friend would soon tire of Lake Geneva. In fact, Tolstoy enjoyed his stay in Switzerland. It is true he did not stay still for very long, but the company of Alexandrine was very congenial. After two weeks they took a ferry across the lake to Clarens, from where he wrote excitedly to Aunt Toinette, telling her it was the same village where Rousseau's Julie had lived in
La Nouvelle Héloïse.
The scenery was ravishing. 'I won't try to describe to you the beauty of this country, particularly at the moment, when everything is in leaf and blossoming' ('Je n'essayerais pas de vous dépeindre la beauté de ce pays surtout à présent quand tout est en feuilles et en fleurs'), he wrote, telling her he found it impossible to detach his gaze from the lake. He spent most of his time going on walks, or just looking out of the window in his room.
³⁸

From Clarens there were excursions to Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux and Chillon, with walks in the mountains and picnics with other Russian visitors. At the end of May Alexandrine and her sister went back to Geneva and Tolstoy went on a walking tour in the Alps, taking with him for company Sasha Polivanov, the eleven-year-old son of some Russian acquaintances, as well as his diary and a supply of paper in his knapsack. It was the first time he had been in the mountains since being stationed in the Caucasus five years earlier, but the tranquillity of the picture-book Alpine pastures full of narcissi and well-fed cows with bells round their necks was a far cry from Chechnya. When the travellers got to Grindelwald, where Tolstoy went down a glacier, he started writing up his travel notes, thinking they could be published in some form or other in
The Contemporary.
The main focus of Tolstoy's writing in Switzerland, however, was the story which would eventually become
The Cossacks.

Turgenev was right about Tolstoy being restless. Soon after returning from his eleven-day walking tour he was off again, to Bern and Fribourg. A few days after that he went back to Geneva, then on to Chambery in Savoie, and many other places which brought the Savoyard vicar from Rousseau's
Emile
to mind. In Turin, Tolstoy met up with his friends the Botkins and Alexander Druzhinin. The return journey to Switzerland took Tolstoy first to Ivrea, followed by two ascents of Monte Rosa. Then came stops in Pont Saint-Martin, Gressoney and Chambave, and a night in the famous hospice founded by St Bernard in 1049, located at the highest point of the Great St Bernard Pass (the oldest in the Alps). Before descending, he looked round the monastery church and inspected the St Bernard dogs, who had been part of the monastery since the seventeenth century, and had saved the lives of hundreds of travellers stuck in avalanches.
³⁹
Then it was back down into Switzerland, via the glorious Pissevache waterfall. The 114 metre-high fall had been visited by Rousseau and, in 1779, inspired Goethe to flights of rhetoric. By this stage, Tolstoy was making only brief notes in his diary, and his own enigmatic verdict on the waterfall was 'tumbling rye'.
⁴⁰
Down on the lake at Villeneuve, Tolstoy caught a ferry back to Clarens.
⁴¹

In early July Tolstoy travelled via Bern to Lucerne, where he took a room in the Schweizerhof Hotel and was reunited with Alexandrine. The Schweizerhof, built overlooking the lake in the heart of the old town in 1845, was as luxurious then as it is today (it prides itself on being one of the few hotels in Switzerland of 'national significance'). In 1857 it seemed to Tolstoy to be overrun with 'frigid', 'stuffy' English tourists, who seemed to like dining in complete silence. Tolstoy was also struck by the fact that they seemed oblivious to their surroundings, as demonstrated by an incident he later turned into a short story. One evening, after visiting a brothel, he came across a busker singing Tyrolean folksongs and accompanying himself on a guitar.
⁴²
He was rather good, so Tolstoy suggested he go and sing under the windows of the Schweizerhof. There were soon wealthy guests flocking round him and enjoying his songs, but each time he proffered his cap, it remained empty. Tolstoy was astounded, and when the busker started trudging back into town he ran after him, took him back to the hotel and ordered a bottle of Moet. The passionate anger aroused in Tolstoy by the miserliness of the Schweizerhof's wealthy guests was initially expressed in a letter to one of his friends, and then turned into a story. But 'Lucerne' was pointedly not written in the Schweizerhof, as the hotel likes to claim, but in the modest pension he moved into straight afterwards.
⁴³
Indeed, as a symbol of bourgeois Western civilisation, it is the object of the passionate invective unleashed in that story. Tolstoy read it to Nekrasov soon after arriving back in St Petersburg on the steamer he had boarded in the Prussian port of Stettin. 'Lucerne' was published in
The Contemporary
in September 1857 to a mixed response.

From Switzerland Tolstoy travelled to Germany, and on 24 July arrived in Baden-Baden, where his strength of will failed him. He soon lost all his money at the roulette tables, which necessitated humiliating begging letters to Alexandrine, Nekrasov and Turgenev. On 31 July Turgenev arrived in person and gamely bailed his friend out, and for once Tolstoy's customary derogatory diary entries about him changed to 'Vanechka is very nice'. Tolstoy then immediately gambled away all the money Turgenev lent him. His plans to travel to Holland and England now went up in smoke as he was forced to retreat to Russia. He also received a letter from home informing him that his sister Masha had separated from her husband, which was another reason for returning home quickly. None of the Tolstoy brothers had particularly liked Valerian Petrovich, but they had not known quite how depraved he was. It now emerged that when he was not away on hunting expeditions, or continuing to spend periods living with his peasant mistress, who had borne him several children, he had been a cruel and despotic husband. Turgenev described Valerian Petrovich as a 'most disgusting kind of rural Henry VIII'.
⁴⁴
The saving grace for Masha, who had stoically put up with her lot for ten years, were her three children. In the summer of 1857, no longer prepared to be the 'chief sultaness' in her husband's harem (Valerian Petrovich had at that point four mistresses, and was openly plotting his next move with one of them should he 'happen' to become a widower), Masha decided to leave him. She moved to her part of the Pirogovo estate and became Sergey's neighbour. Tolstoy went there the day after he arrived home.

Tolstoy was glad to be back at Yasnaya Polyana, but found that the 'crude, mendacious' side of Russian life only stood out in sharper relief after the freedoms taken for granted in other countries.
⁴⁵
Despite having gravitated towards his fellow countrymen while he had been abroad (a proclivity he shared with many Russian travellers), and despite rejoicing in seeing birch trees again,
⁴⁶
Tolstoy found the return to his homeland rather depressing. Imperial Russia was no longer the police state it had been under Nicholas I, but it was still a very long way from embracing the kinds of civil liberties that were the bedrock of Western civilisation. Russia was 'horrible, horrible, horrible,' he wrote to Alexandrine, describing to her numerous instances of casual brutality he had witnessed in the course of the first week he had been back. They included seeing a woman beating her servant girl and an official thrashing an old man whom he wrongly believed had tripped him up.
⁴⁷
Tolstoy buried himself in Beethoven and the
Iliad.
He also renewed his efforts to come to a better arrangement with his serfs. Eventually they all transferred from the old
corvée
system to quit rent (effectively a 'buy-out' payment freeing them from their obligation to serve and enabling them to work the land for themselves), though years later he continued to feel guilty for demanding any kind of financial compensation from his serfs in return for allowing them to take over their own land. On what remained of his own property he now used hired labour, and freed all his house serfs.
⁴⁸
Much of his experience negotiating with his serfs is reflected in Part Three of
Anna Karenina,
where Tolstoy describes how Levin's goodwill is rebuffed by his mistrustful peasants.