Tolstoy

That autumn Tolstoy carried on writing. He was teeming with new ideas, and he began to think about resigning from the army: the success of Childhood showed him where his future lay, and it was not with the military. He now began to work on several things at once. First of all he resolved to add to Childhood by writing Boyhood. At the same time, as he became increasingly occupied by religious ideas, he began to conceive a novel about a Russian landowner wanting to improve the life of his peasantry. Finally, he was keen to publish stories about the Caucasus. This was the project he brought to completion first. He had already started writing stories inspired by his own experiences with the army, and in late December he sent Nekrasov the manuscript of ‘The Raid – A Volunteer’s Story’. It was published the following March, again with cuts dictated by the censor. With ‘The Raid’, Tolstoy turned a new page in the history of Russian writing about the Caucasus. Thanks to Pushkin and Lermontov, readers were used to a romantic and mythologised view of the Caucasus and its peoples. The story Tolstoy made of his memories of the first sortie against the Chechens which he had observed close-hand the previous year was highly realistic. Just beneath the surface we can also detect a nascent anti-militaristic stance.

The spring of 1853 was both the high point and the low point of Tolstoy’s time in the Caucasus. He took part in further skirmishes with Chechen rebels, and was commended for his bravery. After being obliged to cede the St George Cross he deserved to an old soldier who stood to receive a decent pension as a result, he was promoted to ensign instead, but then ended up being arrested when a particularly riveting game of chess led him to miss parade. His promotion was therefore cancelled (and he had to wait until 1854 for it to be reinstated). Tolstoy was bitterly disappointed to miss the St George Cross again and there were other disappointments. His brother Nikolay had decided to resign from the army the previous autumn, having served in the army for eight years,⁵⁹ and in February 1853 his papers came through, permitting him to retire at the rank of staff-captain. Tolstoy was already quite lonely in the Caucasus and he felt Nikolay’s absence keenly. His financial affairs were also still in a dire state. In April his brother-in-law sold another village on his estate to provide him with funds, which meant losing another 350 acres, plus twenty-six serfs and their families.⁶⁰ Even his writing suffered: the story he began about a young man in Moscow who goes to a high-society ball, then to a tavern to hear the gypsies was suddenly dropped and never picked up again.

Because fortune had not yet smiled on Tolstoy’s military career, he had initially delayed tendering his resignation, thinking it would be just too humiliating for him to return to civilian life as a retired cadet. In the end, however, he decided he would go ahead anyway, and he submitted his resignation request on 30 May 1853.⁶¹ Yet again he was unlucky. Russia had just broken off diplomatic relations with Turkey, and after its invasion of the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in June, no officer was permitted to apply for leave or resign. In July Tolstoy returned to Pyatigorsk, where he joined Nikolay and also his sister Masha, whom he had not seen for two years. She had come to spend the summer taking the waters at Pyatigorsk with her husband. It was not a particularly happy time for Tolstoy, who was feeling irritable and restless, and it was made no better by the realisation that he would have to sell the main Yasnaya Polyana mansion to rectify his financial affairs, something he had previously vowed would be an absolute last resort.⁶² He buried his sorrows in his writing. As well as starting the first draft of what would become his novella The Cossacks, and working further on his sequel to Childhood, he also wrote another completely different story which he started and finished in four days. ‘Notes of a Billiard Marker’, the only work Tolstoy sent off to Nekrasov that summer, is more strongly autobiographical than most of Tolstoy’s stories. It is a bleak tale of a young aristocrat’s moral disintegration, inspired by the gambling disaster which had befallen Tolstoy in Tiflis. Close reading of Rousseau’s Confessions helped to keep Tolstoy on an even keel at this time, and reminded him that he could only be happy doing good works.⁶³ He was beginning to develop a strong social conscience.