Tolstoy

‘The Overcoat’ was naturally one of the masterpieces of Russian literature which Tolstoy devoured in the 1840s, along with many other works by Gogol, including the novel Dead Souls, published in 1842. Perhaps because he did not need to tell himself to read, it was an activity he enjoyed, and it was fundamental to his intellectual and artistic development in the years immediately following his departure from Kazan. He read voraciously. Tolstoy came of age at a very bleak time in Russia’s history, which was something he became aware of only gradually. Nicholas I had begun his reign in 1825 by suppressing the Decembrist uprising, and his regime had grown more repressive and reactionary as time went on. Foreign visitors were shocked. In the book the Marquis de Custine wrote following his visit to Russia in 1839,⁹ he described the country as a police state ruled by a despot. De Custine’s condemnation of the Russian nobility as ‘regimented Tatars’ who confused splendour with elegance, and luxury with refinement, touched a raw nerve. Not surprisingly, his book was banned when it was published in 1843 (as it would be by Stalin in the twentieth century, in view of its alarmingly accurate prophetic qualities).¹⁰ When the spectre of revolution raised its head again in Europe in the late 1840s, Nicholas responded by increasing censorship, yet in this suffocating atmosphere, or perhaps because of it, literature managed to flourish. Indeed, writers were now expected to provide moral leadership as well as entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.

By the end of the 1840s many works of Russian literature had made a deep impression on Tolstoy. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) were Russia’s first ‘proper’ novels, but their form was already highly idiosyncratic: Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse, A Hero of Our Time is a collation of interlinked stories and Dead Souls is sub-titled ‘A Poem’. Tolstoy would later proudly uphold the Russian refusal to conform to the European model by asserting the sui generis form of War and Peace, which he adamantly insisted was not a novel. From the beginning Tolstoy was drawn to prose rather than poetry, whose ‘Golden Age’ had in any case given way at the end of the 1830s to an era of realist fiction. He regarded ‘Taman’, one of the constituent stories in A Hero of Our Time, as a paragon of artistic perfection (a view Chekhov would later share).¹¹

Talented new writers emerged in the 1840s to assume the mantle of Pushkin and Gogol, who had dominated the literary scene in the previous decade, and chief amongst them was Turgenev, who published the first of the stories which make up his A Hunter’s Notes in 1847, the year in which Tolstoy took up residence again at Yasnaya Polyana. Turgenev’s stories about contemporary rural life created a furore, not so much for their form as for their content, since they were the first works of Russian literature to depict peasants as three-dimensional human beings. As a liberal-minded Westerniser who abhorred the institution of serfdom, Turgenev consciously set out in his fiction to endow the peasants with a natural dignity, and as worthy of as much respect and artistic attention as the gentlemen who owned them. His oblique criticism of serfdom was all the more powerful for its subtlety, and forced his readers, including the future Alexander II, to confront the evil which had engendered such an iniquitous system. The embarrassment, indignation and then disgust which Turgenev declared he felt with respect to his own landowning noble class would eventually lead him to move abroad.¹² Tolstoy, by contrast, did not yet subscribe to the view that serfdom should be abolished. In this he was no different from most of the landowning nobility, and he was later frank about it in his memoirs, where he points out that treating the serfs justly was already a sign of enlightened ownership. But Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Notes, a collection whose political importance was equal to its artistic merit, could not but make Tolstoy think as he came into his inheritance.