Tolstoy

From the very beginning, Tolstoy’s ability to hold up a mirror to his blemishes (looking in the mirror too frequently was another habit he faulted himself for at this time) would be fundamental to his powers of psychological analysis. On 8 March 1851 he began keeping a ‘Franklin Journal’ as a way of monitoring his moral lapses. Benjamin Franklin had described his technique of drawing up a table of virtues, and marking those he had failed to demonstrate each day, in his autobiography Mémoires de la vie privée, which was published in Paris in 1791.⁴¹ Whether he had finally found his resolve, or whether the arrival of spring simply fired him with new energy, Tolstoy now became rigorous about writing in his own diary every day, convinced that acknowledging his moral failings was half the battle to eliminating them. He was quite successful at keeping up regular gymnastics and fencing lessons, but his behaviour rarely passed muster: the words ‘laziness’, ‘cowardice’, ‘gluttony’, ‘false modesty’ and ‘self-deception’ punctuate his diary entries during these months as a regular admonishment of his lack of moral fibre.

As he began experimenting with fiction for the first time, Tolstoy became more reclusive, and he also started to spend even more time reading. Earlier in the year he had been working his way through Montesquieu; now he read Lamartine’s newly published Histoire des Girondins (1847), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1769). During the spring of 1851 he began to be more observant not only of the turbulent emotional and intellectual processes going on inside his head, but of life around him. What Tolstoy had in mind when he embarked on the first draft of Childhood, which would become his first published work, was an original kind of Bildungsroman in four parts, to be entitled Four Epochs of Development. under the clear influence of David Copperfield,⁴² and also Laurence Sterne, amongst many other influences, Tolstoy’s goal was to explore the psychological experiences of a young boy growing to adulthood. As with almost every work of fiction he ever published, Tolstoy drew on his own life as raw material for the evocation of particular scenes from two days in his character Nikolenka’s childhood. It is important to recognise that his own life was the means and not the end, but as the Tolstoy scholar Richard Gustafson has put it, ‘this distortion of personal experience conceals only to reveal’,⁴³ since sincerity and emotional truth were always Tolstoy’s ultimate goal. Childhood is deceptively simple. In order for it to work, Tolstoy had to come up with a convincing narrative voice, thus one of the first problems he wrestled with was whether to have an adult narrator, and risk his story seeming like a memoir, or have the child Nikolenka himself tell the story of his life, which posed dilemmas of a different kind.⁴⁴ Tolstoy’s artistic techniques were already sophisticated. The fact that he wrote to a friend in Petersburg that spring to ask if he might help negotiate the literary censor was a sign that he was taking his writing seriously.⁴⁵

Nikolay came to visit him in Moscow that March. The end of his furlough was fast approaching, and he suggested that his brother accompany him back to the Caucasus. Tolstoy immediately agreed, and at the beginning of April he left Moscow and returned to Yasnaya Polyana. The Caucasus offered Tolstoy the opportunity to start from a clean slate. It was a chance to leave behind his debts and his bad habits, and embrace a life of danger and adventure on the most dangerous frontier of the Russian Empire. The famous daguerreotype taken of the two brothers that spring shows the future writer clean-shaven, sitting tensely in rather scruffy clothes, his hands resting on a cane, fixing the viewer with a penetrating stare, while the more relaxed, phlegmatic Nikolay sits beside him in his army uniform, nonchalantly resting his elbow on the back of his brother’s chair. By the end of the month the brothers were on the road, deciding to take a scenic route via Kazan, to catch up with family and friends. They took along two Yasnaya Polyana serfs as their personal servants: Alexey Orekhov and Ivan Suvorov (Alyoshka and Vanyushka).