Tolstoy

Tolstoy was rarely at peace with himself during this turbulent time. It was not just that his new writing met with a mixed reception, or that he remained unmarried (it was a matter of great consternation to him that his attempts to find a bride always ended in failure). His family life was also troubled: his brothers Dmitry and Nikolay both died of tuberculosis within a few years of each other, and his sister Masha ended an unhappy marriage. Turgenev now became a major part of Tolstoy’s life, but the warm embraces they exchanged when they first met were gradually replaced by fractious disagreements; theirs was a volatile friendship. In 1861 Tolstoy would challenge Turgenev to a duel, and their uneasy reconciliation was followed by a seventeen-year feud. The trajectory of the friendships Tolstoy formed with many other Russian writers followed a similar, albeit less dramatic pattern. It was in the early years following his retirement from the army that Tolstoy had his closest contacts with many of his peers, most of whom were based in St Petersburg. As he shuttled between Yasnaya Polyana, Moscow and the capital, torn by conflicting desires, he discovered that he did not want to be part of the literary community, nor was there any place for him under its rapidly changing agenda. When he returned from his second trip abroad in 1861, he settled in Yasnaya Polyana for good, and made his feelings emphatically clear by not returning to St Petersburg for seventeen years. It was not an outcome he was expecting when he packed his bags in the Crimea, excited at the prospect of the warm reception he was going to receive from his new writer friends.

Tolstoy received his first letter from Turgenev just before leaving Sebastopol in November 1855. The two writers had read each other’s work, but never met. Tolstoy was in awe of his elder contemporary, who had been a fixture of the St Petersburg literary scene for almost a decade by the time he made his own debut. A careful re-reading of A Hunter’s Notes during his second summer in Pyatigorsk had produced the lapidary comment in his diary ‘Writing is a bit difficult after him’.¹ For his part, Turgenev had immediately perceived Tolstoy’s literary talent, and was deeply flattered that ‘The Wood-Felling’ was dedicated to him (no other writer would receive a dedication from Tolstoy). When Turgenev wrote his first letter to Tolstoy, he felt he was addressing someone he already almost knew, as he had met (and rather fallen for) his sister Masha the previous autumn.² Her husband Valerian Petrovich’s Pokrovskoye estate was only twelve miles from Turgenev’s ancestral home, and a shared love of hunting had brought the two neighbours into contact. Naturally, when Tolstoy arrived in St Petersburg, the first person he wanted to see was Turgenev. After checking into a hotel and paying a visit to the bath-house, he went straight round to Turgenev’s apartment, only to find the writer on his way out – in the hope of finding him. They exchanged hearty kisses, and Turgenev immediately insisted that Tolstoy share his flat on the Fontanka river.³ It would be Tolstoy’s home for the next month as he readjusted to civilian life.

As a celebrated author and officer who had arrived straight from the front line, Tolstoy was welcomed like a conquering hero by the editors of The Contemporary. There was also an air of mystery about him. Here was a young man who had submitted an unsolicited manuscript from the Caucasus three years earlier, and no one at The Contemporary had actually met him. In fact only a few people even recognised his name, as he had signed all his stories so far with his initials only. Tolstoy was also anxious to meet the new colleagues he had been corresponding with, and he hoped they would be kindred spirits. He had been a callow and impressionable youth when he had last been in St Petersburg, but now he was a published writer, a war hero and a celebrity. On his first day in St Petersburg Turgenev took Tolstoy round to meet Nekrasov (the editorial offices of The Contemporary were located in a building on the other side of the river), and they had lunch and talked and played chess until eight in the evening.⁴ Nekrasov went into raptures in a letter to a friend, describing Tolstoy as ‘better than his writing’, a ‘falcon’, or perhaps even an ‘eagle’.⁵ There followed meetings with critics and publishers, and dinners with other writers, including the novelist Ivan Goncharov, then working on his masterpiece Oblomov (1859), and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Soon Tolstoy was personally acquainted with all the leading lights of Russian literature, who fell over themselves to express how delighted they were by this talented young artillery officer.