Tolstoy

One person who saw nothing of the white nights that summer was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the talented but impoverished young writer who had published a story bearing the name ‘White Nights’ the previous year. He was languishing in a jail cell that barely let in any light at all. The week before Tolstoy sent his grovelling letter to Sergey, the tsarist secret police had descended on Dostoyevsky’s flat to arrest him. In a coincidence worthy of his later masterpieces, he had been living in the building which faced the Hotel Napoleon on the other side of the street. Dostoyevsky was one of twenty-four members of the left-wing intelligentsia group called the Petrashevsky Circle who were all engaged to varying degrees in the struggle for political freedoms and civil rights. Their crime was to have met on Friday evenings to discuss such incendiary topics as socialism, the abolition of serfdom and censorship. In the suffocating, paranoid climate of Nicholas I’s Russia, even discussing such topics was tantamount to conspiracy, particularly in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions. At the Circle’s last meeting, on 15 April 1849, someone had read out the celebrated letter to Gogol composed by the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. This was an outspoken and fearless document, written on the eve Belinsky’s untimely death, in which he castigated the writer for his seemingly spineless defence of Russian absolutism and all it stood for. Belinsky had written the letter in Germany in 1847, while dying of tuberculosis, and handwritten samizdat copies had spread like wildfire amongst the progressive intelligentsia after being smuggled into Russia.

Dostoyevsky and his comrades were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the notorious, dank prison where Peter the Great’s son, Tolstoy’s ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich and the Decembrists had all been held. While Tolstoy was still strutting about St Petersburg in suits made by the city’s best tailor, and dining at its finest restaurants (it is no surprise who his creditors were), Dostoyevsky was communing with fleas, lice, cockroaches and rats in a damp, dark cell. At the end of 1849 he was clamped in irons and sentenced to four years of hard labour in Siberia.²⁵ The two giants of Russian literature would spend their lives coming close to each other but never meeting, either physically or ideologically. For one thing Dostoyevsky was socially Tolstoy’s inferior, and for another, he was his main rival, but they would also come to espouse radically different worldviews.

Tolstoy brought a German pianist back to Yasnaya Polyana when he returned from Petersburg in June 1849, and he spent much of the summer learning the rudiments of music from him. This was to be a good investment, as music became an important part of his life. When he was not teaching Tolstoy, Rudolf the pianist retreated to the greenhouse to compose, or engaged in inebriated music sessions with all the old servants who had played in Count Volkonsky’s serf orchestra. One of those musicians was the former second violinist Foka Demidych, who had been the family’s butler while Tolstoy’s father was alive. That autumn, Tolstoy co-opted him to become the teacher at the first school he started for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children – twenty little boys who were given lessons in arithmetic and scripture along with being taught how to read and write.²⁶ It seems to have been a short-lived experiment, about which there is next to no documentation, but it is one of the first signs of Tolstoy’s awakening social conscience. Over the course of the next two decades popular education would become a cause very close to his heart.

Tolstoy resumed his diary for one week in June 1850, but this was otherwise another year about which we have little information beyond knowing that he stayed put at Yasnaya Polyana. He became a proud uncle and godfather in January 1850 when his sister Masha gave birth to a little girl, Varvara (Varya). This was not Masha’s first child: her first son Pyotr died soon after being born in 1849, but Varya survived (as did Nikolay and Liza, born one and two years later, respectively).²⁷ After the birth of Varya, Tolstoy immediately travelled to Pokrovskoye to attend her christening (it was about fifty miles away from Yasnaya Polyana), but this seems to have been the longest journey he undertook until the end of the year. Most of the travelling he did in 1850 was to nearby Tula. At the end of 1849 Tolstoy had taken a modest civil-service post in the Tula local government (which placed him on the bottom rung of the Table of Ranks as a collegiate registrar), but it was very undemanding, and gave him a good excuse to spend much of that winter socialising with the city’s local nobility and consorting with the gypsies.