Tolstoy

A man cannot be healed if he is insolent and disorderly; does not fear God or comply with His will; does not keep Christian law and the tradition of the Fathers on the Church and on Church singing, on reading from the holy books before communion, on prayer; if he is not concerned with praising God; if he eats and drinks to excess and fills himself with food and wine when it is not fitting to do so; does not honour Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, the holy days, the great Lent, the Lent of the Mother of God; if he fornicates with no restraint, at improper times …⁴¹

It has to be said, Tolstoy does not come across as a particularly attractive person at this point, his self-absorption and sanctimoniousness detracting somewhat from his worthy aspirations and self-deprecation.

On 17 March, six days after entering the university clinic, where he was being treated for gonorrhoea, Tolstoy began writing a proper diary. He welcomed this period of complete solitude, with no servant nearby, since it enabled him perceive that the dissolute life led by the majority of his class during their youth was the consequence of ‘an early corruption of the soul’. He was talking about himself, of course. In condemning his way of life, however, he was already cognisant that it was easier to read ten tomes of philosophy than to put one principle into practice.⁴² The following day, in the absence of anything better to do (he spent almost a month in the clinic), Tolstoy started to tackle an assignment given to second-year law students, in which they were asked to compare Catherine the Great’s Nakaz (or Instruction), first drafted in 1765, with Montesquieu’s 1749 De l’esprit des lois. Although he failed to complete the assignment, rather to his surprise he became engrossed in Catherine’s proposals for a new code of laws, and ended up spending over a week dissecting them at great length on the pages of his diary.⁴³ Tolstoy criticises autocratic rule as despotic, since laws provide no protection in a state where they are applied at whim by the sovereign. And he challenges Catherine’s insistence that the autocrat’s limitless powers are, in fact, limited by the sovereign’s conscience, by pointing out that the assertion of limitless powers is predicated on an absence of conscience.⁴⁴ There was also a limit to Tolstoy’s republican tendencies, however. As Count Tolstoy, the scion of a distinguished noble family, he argues that the aristocracy, guided by honour, are the essential ballast needed to limit a monarch’s powers. The views he puts forward here about the moral duties of the Russian aristocracy were to reach their fullest expression, of course, in War and Peace. Since he was preoccupied with the moral relationship between landowners and peasants, there is little in Tolstoy’s analysis of the Nakaz which relates to the fundamental injustice of serfdom. He comments that serfdom impedes the development of trade, but never raises the idea that it should be abolished, since, as he would later record in his memoirs, that simply never occurred to anyone from his milieu in the 1840s.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, on 11 April 1847, the legal document setting out the division of the Tolstoy family property was drawn up, having been the subject of negotiations for many months. The very next day Tolstoy requested permission to leave Kazan university for ‘health’ and ‘domestic’ reasons. The study of the Nakaz had fired him with a desire to continue his studies independently, and he felt his university curriculum would actually now hinder them. Also, both Dmitry and Sergey were about to graduate, while Masha had already left Kazan, and was living at Yasnaya Polyana. unwilling to remain in Kazan on his own, and fulfil university requirements he found tedious, Tolstoy left without taking a degree, having completed only the first two years of his law course.