Tolstoy

Tolstoy went to great lengths to try to make a good impression on his contemporaries during his student years, and he also tried enhancing his physical appearance. He was never happy with his looks, but his attempts to improve them did not always meet with very successful results. He once conceived the idea of shaving his eyebrows to make them grow back more bushy, and ended up almost shaving them off completely.³² Shy and lacking in self-confidence, he never quite cut the dashing figure on the dance floor who lived in his imagination, and he was too absent-minded and ungainly to succeed in emulating his suave and debonair brother Sergey. But he nevertheless enjoyed being part of the uppermost echelon of Kazan society, made a few good friends, and even wrote a waltz with one of them.³³

Tolstoy had promised Aunt Toinette in the summer of 1845 that he would work hard in his second year at university, and in his leisure time study music, art and languages. ‘I won’t go into society at all,’ he vowed in a letter (‘Je n’irai pas en société du tout’).³⁴ That autumn, however, he went to all the most prestigious social events, including a grand ball held in October 1845 in honour of the visit of Nicholas I’s son-in-law Maximilian, the Duke of Leuchtenberg. And in January 1846 he had to spend a few days in the university jail for persistently failing to attend lectures.³⁵ This oscillation between the setting of unrealistic, puritanical goals for a future life of purity and self-denial and the self-mortification which followed his actual pursuit and enjoyment in the present of a hedonistic social life, is the leitmotif of Tolstoy’s first diary entry, which he famously began in the university’s venereal diseases clinic in March 1847. In fact, one could say that the battle between these two opposing sides of Tolstoy’s personality was the main theme of his entire life as an adult, and certainly fundamental to his creative processes. Simultaneous possession of these two warring impulses was not unique to Tolstoy, but may be seen as the mark of a quintessentially Russian nature. The early-twentieth-century philosophical thinker Nikolay Berdyaev certainly thought along these lines. As he wrote in his book The Origin of Russian Communism, ‘In the typical Russian two elements are always in opposition – the primitive natural paganism of boundless Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, a reaching out towards the other world.’³⁶

In January 1847, when he was eighteen, Tolstoy started compiling a ‘Journal of Daily Activities’, listing on the left-hand side of the page a strict timetable for each day under the heading ‘The Future’. Here he set out exactly which hours he would devote to his coursework, when he would have lunch, when he would study English, go for a walk or play chess. On the right-hand side, marked ‘The Past’, he entered comments on his performance. Thus on good days, when he maintained his self-discipline, he could write that he had kept to his regime, while on others he was forced to admit that he did ‘nothing’, ‘almost nothing’, did things ‘badly’, ‘read Gogol’ or ‘overslept’.³⁷ This journal was maintained until June. At the same time Tolstoy started compiling rules for developing his willpower. These included getting up at five and going to bed no later than ten, with two hours permissible for sleeping during the day. He resolved to eat moderately, and nothing sweet, to walk for an hour every day, to carry out everything he prescribed for himself and visit a brothel only twice a month. In the second tier of his rules he vowed to disregard luxuries and all public opinion not based on reason, and to love those to whom he could be of service. The rules in the third and last tier called on him to do only one thing at a time, and not allow flights of imagination unless necessary.³⁸

In February 1847 Tolstoy had felt a compulsion to compile some new rules, this time more general ones, concerning his relationship to God, other people and himself, but broke off before setting out exactly what they were.³⁹ In March he started again, delineating forty-seven different rules under twenty headings. He told himself, for example, to never to show his emotions, to stop caring about other people’s opinion of himself, and to do good inconspicuously. He ordered himself to keep away from women, suppress his feelings of lust by working hard and help those more unfortunate than him.⁴⁰ At times Tolstoy’s rules remind one in spirit of the Domostroi, the notoriously cheerless and minutely detailed ‘housekeeping’ rules produced in the pious times of Ivan the Terrible, where we read, for example: