There were also numerous other foreign authors who stimulated Tolstoy’s imagination during these formative years. He could justly be proud of acquiring a sufficient command of English to read writers like Dickens in the original (one rule he appears to have managed to abide by).
In October 1848 Tolstoy suddenly upped sticks and moved to Moscow, ostensibly to prepare for his law examinations, which he had finally decided to take. He rented the annexe of a building occupied by some friends in the Arbat area, not far from where he had lived as a boy. Having not been in the city since his childhood, he was excited to be back, but he never went anywhere near his law books. Instead, he was lured by the bright lights of the city into experiencing Moscow high society. He was twenty years old and well educated, he was the owner of a handsome country estate, he had a title and an income – in short, he was an eligible bachelor, welcomed in all the best drawing rooms in the city. It was all very flattering to the ego, although Tolstoy’s vanity was checked by shyness and an acute self-consciousness about his looks which caused him to feel awkward in polite society. Without the inconvenience of a job, or even any real obligation to study, Tolstoy led a completely hedonistic life that winter, during which time he developed a passion for playing cards, or rather for gambling. It was a passion which would last for well over a decade, and was an expensive habit which brought some serious personal consequences in its wake.
Tolstoy was far from the first Russian nobleman to acquire a gambling addiction – he had some illustrious forebears here, not least amongst his own family. The deeply ingrained recklessness of Russian gamblers (which led some foreign visitors to assume that betting was a national pastime) may have been attributable to the need to assert a degree of independence in Russia’s repressive and rigidly hierarchical society, where even private life was subject to state surveillance. Russian writers seemed particularly susceptible to gambling, and many made it a theme of their work.15 Pushkin, author of the quintessential gambling story ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1834), staked money on his own poetry and ended up having to surrender precious manuscripts.16 ‘The Fatalist’, one of the stories in Lermontov’s