Tolstoy

Tolstoy did try to fit in and be part of the collective. At the end of March he arranged for a group photograph to be taken to mark the visit to St Petersburg of Alexander Ostrovsky, a promising new playwright.¹⁶ This was quite an event, as Sergey Levitsky, the pioneer of Russian photography, had only just set up his studio on Nevsky Prospekt. In time he would receive an imperial warrant to photograph the Romanovs, but one of his most famous photographs remained the portrait organised by Tolstoy, the only writer in the shot wearing army uniform. Levitsky had studied in Paris and set up a studio there before returning to Russia, and he was an interesting man in his own right: apart from being Alexander Herzen’s cousin, he had taken celebrated photographs of the Caucasus in the late 1840s, and much later on would inadvertently provoke Tolstoy into suddenly taking Orthodox Christianity very seriously. The 1856 photograph of The Contemporary’s writers became a permanent fixture on the wall of Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy would get to know Ostrovsky better a few years later, when he rented a house near to where he lived in Moscow. Ostrovsky’s father was a Moscow lawyer, and he came from a far less privileged background than Tolstoy and Turgenev. His first play, Bankruptcy, had been personally censored in 1850 by Nicholas I, who had been so appalled by its depiction of Russian merchants as dishonest that he had placed the playwright under police surveillance. Ostrovsky’s first stage success had come in 1853 with the production of his third play, Don’t Get Into Someone Else’s Sleigh, and he was now about to widen his horizons. In the optimistic climate following Nicholas I’s death, the Tsar’s liberal-minded younger brother Grand Duke Konstantin, who was in charge of the Marine Ministry, hatched an enlightened plan to send a group of eight young writers, rather than bureaucrats, on an expedition down the Volga to study the lives of those who fished and navigated its waters. Ostrovsky was one of the eight, and he left for the Volga in April 1856, as soon as the police surveillance on him was lifted.

April 1856 was also an important month for Tolstoy. At the end of March Alexander II had given the famous speech in Moscow in which he declared that it was better to abolish serfdom ‘from above’ than to wait for it to abolish itself ‘from below’. The prospect of the Russian peasantry being freed was sensational news, and spread rapidly throughout the country.¹⁷ Tolstoy immediately began to sketch out a project to free his serfs, having by this time joined the distinguished ranks of the Russian gentry whose awakened social conscience caused them to become ‘repentant noblemen’. The first had been the eighteenth-century writer Alexander Radishchev, whom Catherine the Great exiled to Siberia in 1790 for exposing the evil of serfdom in his book A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. As a credulous young man, Radishchev had believed the myth that Catherine was enlightened and just. He had enjoyed an elite education, and so was frequently exposed to the ‘richness and splendour’ of the Russian court which for the British visitor William Coxe in the 1780s almost surpassed description.¹⁸

Radishchev was consequently shocked after the opulence of St Petersburg to discover quite how wretched the living conditions of the Russian peasantry really were when he left the city and began his journey to Moscow. He now began to see the immorality of the whole edifice of the tsarist autocracy for the first time, and also the role of the Russian nobility in supporting such an inhumane system, as becomes abundantly clear in the following passage: