Tolstoy

Tolstoy found it intoxicating to be back in civilised surroundings, where there was plenty of intellectual stimulation, but he also craved the intoxication of gypsy music and card games, in which he could seek oblivion and shake off the stresses of the last few years. The poet Afanasy Fet visited one day for mid-morning tea with Turgenev and was told by his servant Zakhar that the gleaming sabre in the corner of the hall belonged to Count Tolstoy. Fet and Turgenev then had to spend the next hour talking in whispers, as the count was still asleep on the couch in the drawing room, having been up all night carousing. Turgenev, though only ten years Tolstoy’s senior, had assumed a kind of paternal role in their relationship and explained that it was the same every night, and that he had long since given up on him.⁶ On 11 December Tolstoy spent all the money he had left throwing a party with gypsy singers at the Hotel Napoleon.⁷

Of all the writers Tolstoy met during his sojourn in St Petersburg, only Fet became a lasting friend, but even he would fail to make the cut when Tolstoy emerged from his spiritual crisis in the 1880s. Much as they all liked Tolstoy, the writers in St Petersburg soon realised that it was actually not all that easy to get on with him. He came out with such provocative opinions, and seemed to go out of his way to be contrary. Many of the writers associated with The Contemporary were either writing about Shakespeare or translating him, for example, but Tolstoy was simply dismissive of him.⁸ And the mild-mannered Turgenev soon found himself having violent arguments with Tolstoy. They were two men from the same patrician background, but Tolstoy did not like compromise, and he instinctively recoiled from Turgenev’s refined elegance and spirit of moderation, which were a great disappointment to him. One evening Turgenev read from the manuscript of his first novel, Rudin, to an assembled company. In comparison with A Hunter’s Notes, Tolstoy found it unbelievably contrived, and could not believe how seriously it was received by the other literati present.

Turgenev had not had a particularly easy time. He was a self-confessed Westerniser, so was anxious to see reform and modernisation in Russia along European lines. He had bravely gone against the grain of his upbringing by befriending the radical critic Belinsky, whose reforming zeal stemmed partly from his lowly social origins, and his implicit criticism of serfdom in his A Hunter’s Notes had made him a very dubious figure in the eyes of the tsarist establishment. Turgenev never shied away from standing up for what he believed was right, or from dealing with political issues in his works. He had defiantly published an obituary of Gogol back in 1852, despite knowing that all mention of a writer who had satirised the Fatherland had been forbidden by the censor (the same censor who disfigured Tolstoy’s ‘Sebastopol in May’). For daring to call Gogol ‘great’, Nicholas I had personally ordered Turgenev’s arrest and imprisonment for a month, to be followed by permanent exile to his estate. It had only been thanks to the future Alexander II, who had liked A Hunter’s Notes, that he had been allowed to travel again at the end of 1853. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev, Tolstoy was intent on carving out a career as a novelist himself, but Rudin cut no ice with him.

Something else marked Tolstoy out from the progressive writers grouped round The Contemporary: his contacts with the St Petersburg aristocracy. Tolstoy came to despise the social conventions of high society, but he made an exception for family, and he would become particularly close to Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstoya, whom he got to know now for the first time. ‘Alexandrine’ was the daughter of his paternal great uncle, and she and her sister Elizaveta had apartments in the Mariinsky Palace opposite the cathedral in St Isaac’s Square, as they were tutors and then ladies-in-waiting to Nicholas I’s daughter Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna and her daughters Maria and Evgenia. If Tolstoy unconsciously looked to Turgenev as a father figure, he jocularly called Alexandra Andreyevna his babushka (grandmother), although, like Turgenev, she was only ten or so years his senior. In the memoir Alexandrine wrote of her relationship with her unruly cousin at the end of her life, she recalled the distinct impression he had made on everyone when he arrived from Sebastopol: