Tolstoy

By the onset of autumn 1856 Tolstoy had finished dictating Youth to a copyist and received author’s copies of his first books: War Stories (which brought together his Sebastopol tales together with ‘The Raid’ and ‘The Wood-Felling’), Childhood and Boyhood. He had also submitted his letter of resignation to the army on the grounds of illness, and by the end of November he was once again a civilian.²⁸ On 1 November he set off for Moscow, and then on to St Petersburg, still seeing Valeria as his future wife. The poor girl continued all autumn to receive patronising letters instructing her on what her role was to be, which was a mother (mat’) but not a queen bee (matka), and he asked her whether she understood the difference.²⁹ Some of the letters were long and very attentive, but some of the de-haut-en-bas directives were jaw-dropping in their self-righteous hypocrisy, when one bears in mind his own record. ‘Your chief defect is weakness of character, and all your other minor faults proceed from it,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘Work on improving your willpower. Take yourself in hand and do battle with your bad habits.’³⁰ Tolstoy’s already lukewarm ardour cooled further that autumn, and at the end of 1856 he wrote her a brusque letter breaking off relations, leaving her understandably feeling hurt and confused. In January he wrote a contrite letter of apology, but even then his admission of guilt before himself came before his admission of guilt before her.³¹

Before Tolstoy had signed his contract with The Contemporary he had promised a story to the journal Notes of the Fatherland, which was its main rival, and he spent much of his time in Petersburg that autumn working further on the story he had extracted from his unfinished Novel of a Russian Landowner, which he had been tinkering with ever since he had been in the Caucasus. In A Landowner’s Morning, which was published in December, he fictionalised his own experiences in trying to improve the life of his serfs. In its concern to deal seriously with Russian peasants as fictional characters, it was a kind of A Hunter’s Notes a decade further on, but under the new tsar, so much more could now be said. Importantly, A Landowner’s Morning met with the approval of The Contemporary’s new critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who published a lengthy and influential review of Tolstoy’s work to date in the journal’s December issue.

Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky were the same age, and they both sought the abolition of serfdom, but there was nothing else they had in common. Chernyshevsky came from a new breed of a political radicals whose real goal was revolution. Both he and the younger Alexander Dobrolyubov, who joined The Contemporary in 1857, came from the same social and ideological stock as Belinsky, but they were dismissive of the ineffectual idealists of Turgenev’s generation. As children of clergy, they were raznochintsy – a class which often denoted educated members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds, and they were far more dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose than Nekrasov and Panayev. Chernyshevsky had set the new agenda for The Contemporary in his 1855 essay The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in which he declared that ‘beauty is life’, and proclaimed art to be inferior to science.³² In his review of Tolstoy’s work, Chernyshevsky defined his technique in following the development of the evanescent thoughts and feelings of his characters as the ‘dialectics of the soul’, and compared it to the ability of certain painters ‘to capture a flickering reflection of light on rustling leaves’ or ‘the play of colours in the changing outlines of clouds’.³³ By this he meant that Tolstoy was not so much interested in the end result of a psychological process as in the process itself. It was a deliberately flattering review, but it was clear that Tolstoy would not respond warmly to Chernyshevsky’s utilitarian views about art. As a result of Nekrasov’s support of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of The Contemporary now started to be prioritised over artistic criteria, and this would lead to the journal losing all its top writers to the Russian Messenger in Moscow, Tolstoy included.