Tolstoy

Another source of Tolstoy’s dissatisfaction with himself in the summer of 1850 came from his inability to suppress the physical attraction he felt towards the pretty peasant girls on his estate. Like so many Russian landowners during this period, Tolstoy abused the nobleman’s ‘privilege’ of owning serfs and exercised his droit de seigneur with peasant girls on a regular basis when he was a young man. He confessed to his diary on 19 June 1850 that he was incapable of controlling himself, and that what made it worse was that seducing girls had become a habit.³¹ There was one particular innocent young girl who tempted him that summer: Toinette’s servant Gasha Trubetskaya, who went on to work for his sister Masha and accompanied her abroad in 1859. Tolstoy’s conscience was later sorely troubled by his exploitative behaviour, and in the 1890s he made an attempt at atonement by fictionalising and condemning his moral failings through the experiences of the central characters in his story ‘The Devil’ and his last novel Resurrection. As he was writing the latter in 1898, he confessed to his wife Sonya that he was recycling details from his own life. She had seen Gasha as an old lady, and was disgusted both by the idea of her husband’s taking advantage of a peasant girl and by him recalling lascivious details in his old age.³² (This is what prompted Tolstoy to confess to a friend about his first experience with a prostitute.) At the end of his life Tolstoy also confessed to having had amorous feelings for Avdotya (Dunyasha) Bannikova, the daughter of the servant who was his first tutor, Nikolay Dmitrievich. Dunyasha later married Tolstoy’s servant Alexey Orekhov, and worked as a maid at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was adamant he had not laid a finger on her.³³ Tolstoy was generally quite predatory as a young man – he also began to develop a passion for hunting with borzois at this time.

Despite all his good intentions, by autumn 1850 Tolstoy had once again succumbed to drinking, gambling and spending time with the gypsies in Tula. There were some huge losses at cards this time: 4,000 roubles on one occasion.³⁴ Another change of routine was called for, so in December 1850 he again departed for Moscow, where he got out his diary and started compiling rules once more. Some of them were unrealistic (‘play the piano for four hours every day’), some were practical (‘do exercise every day’, ‘say as little as you can about yourself’, ‘speak loudly and clearly’), some were idealistic (‘don’t have women’), some were quite odd (‘before a ball do a lot of thinking and writing’), and some were just plain silly (‘don’t read novels’).³⁵ Tolstoy also drew up elaborate rules for card playing – this time he intended to play cards seriously, and gamble only with people richer than him.³⁶ He went to a lot of balls that winter (there were rules about dancing too), as he wanted to mingle with the haut monde of Moscow society and find a wife. It would in fact be a long time before he found the right person to marry, but his socialising meant he was up to date with all the latest intrigues, and so was able to send Aunt Toinette long letters telling her all the gossip doing the rounds of the Moscow salons – such as the scandal surrounding the evidence which implicated Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s aristocratic Russian mistress in the notorious murder of her French rival.³⁷

Toinette greatly enjoyed the letters she received from her favourite nephew. On 27 January 1851 she told him in one of her replies that he wrote so engagingly, and so naturally, that it was if he was standing there before her. But she was concerned about the aimlessness of his life, and his worrying gambling habit. She reminded him reproachfully that he had come back to join his family for Christmas, but had preferred to play cards all night in Tula rather than spend time with his brother Nikolay, who was back ‘in Russia’, as he put it, on leave from the Caucasus for the first time in nearly four years. Aunt Toinette also despaired of Sergey (‘If he had a job which occupied him seriously, he would not have given into that mad passion for the gypsy girl’), and she hoped Lev would find some purpose in his life, and not enter into a marriage of convenience just to pay off his debts.³⁸ She beseeched Tolstoy to take himself in hand.³⁹ He was beginning to. He was already painfully aware of the emptiness of Moscow society, and he had begun to think seriously about writing fiction. It was in December 1850 that he declared in his diary that he wanted to write a story about the gypsies.⁴⁰