Tolstoy

Gambling certainly ran in Tolstoy’s family. While his none-too-bright paternal grandfather was one of the most incompetent gamblers who ever lived, stories of the outrageous stunts pulled by his notorious ‘American’ cousin Fyodor Ivanovich were still circulating in Moscow years after his death in 1846. Tolstoy’s gambling compulsion was not helped by another deeply rooted Russian trait amongst the educated classes: an indifference to money which bordered on contempt. He soon ran up large debts and was left feeling very dissatisfied with himself. As he wrote to Aunt Toinette in December 1848, his life of excess had left him world-weary, and longing for the country air again: ‘I have been completely corrupted in this social world, all that annoys me terribly at the moment, and I am dreaming again of my life in the country which I hope to resume soon’ (‘Je me suis tout à fait débauché dans cette vie du monde, à présent tout cela m’embête affreusement et je rêve de nouveau à ma vie de campagne que je compte reprendre bientôt.’)¹⁷ Instead of returning to Yasnaya Polyana, however, Tolstoy decided on a whim to go to St Petersburg in January 1849, just because some friends were going there.

The impressionable young Tolstoy had never been to the Russian capital, which was a far more sophisticated and aristocratic city than provincial Moscow, and he straight away decided he wanted to settle there. He took a room in the Hotel Napoleon, on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Vosnesensky Streets (it is now the Angleterre Hotel). If he was lucky, he would have been given a room facing the largest church in Russia – construction of the neoclassical St Isaac’s Cathedral was then nearing completion. When he was settled, Tolstoy sat down to write a long letter to his brother Sergey, telling him St Petersburg was having a good effect on him. Everyone was always busy doing things, he wrote, and their industry was rubbing off on him: he was finally planning to take his law exams at the university. Afterwards, he continued in his letter, he planned to take up a job in the civil service. If necessary, he told Sergey, he was prepared to start at the bottom of the Table of Ranks if he failed his exams. No one in the nobility could avoid being hierarchically classified in the table of fourteen ranks that Peter the Great had originally instituted for the court, the civil service and the armed forces. It had led to an obsession with official status which was subjected to magnificent ridicule by Gogol in his story ‘The Nose’ (1836). Tolstoy went on to say that he was aware his brother would greet his assurances that he had changed with some scepticism, having heard the same story twenty times before. He hastened to tell him that this time he really had changed in quite a different way from the way he had changed on previous occasions, and it was no longer just a question of good intentions. For the first time, he declared, he had understood that he could not live on philosophy alone, and needed to undertake practical activities. He did need some money so that he could pay off his gambling debts, however – 1,200 roubles, to be precise – and he asked Sergey to sell off a birch forest at Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸ Selling off bits of his inheritance would become a regular occurrence over the next few years.

Sergey was indeed sceptical of his brother’s protestations, and rightly so. He was particularly worried that his younger brother would start gambling again in St Petersburg, where he stood to lose spectacularly large sums to unscrupulous players. Sergey repeatedly implored Tolstoy in letters he sent him that spring to start work, and on no account to play cards. He was generally concerned about Tolstoy’s lack of discipline at this time, as well as that of his brother’s servant Fyodor, who had stolen money from him, pawned some silver spoons and then spent all the money his master had given him to redeem them on drink.¹⁹ Actually, none of the Tolstoy brothers seemed to be coping well with suddenly coming into money: Dmitry’s gardener had stolen 7,000 roubles which he had foolishly left in the estate office at Shcherbachevka, and Sergey was himself spending considerable sums in pursuit of Maria (Masha) Shishkina, a girl in the famous Tula gypsy choir, with whom he was madly in love.²⁰ But that was small fry compared to his brother Lev’s recidivism. On 1 May 1849, Tolstoy sent Sergey a letter which he instructed him to read alone:

Seryozha.