Tolstoy

From Clarens there were excursions to Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux and Chillon, with walks in the mountains and picnics with other Russian visitors. At the end of May Alexandrine and her sister went back to Geneva and Tolstoy went on a walking tour in the Alps, taking with him for company Sasha Polivanov, the eleven-year-old son of some Russian acquaintances, as well as his diary and a supply of paper in his knapsack. It was the first time he had been in the mountains since being stationed in the Caucasus five years earlier, but the tranquillity of the picture-book Alpine pastures full of narcissi and well-fed cows with bells round their necks was a far cry from Chechnya. When the travellers got to Grindelwald, where Tolstoy went down a glacier, he started writing up his travel notes, thinking they could be published in some form or other in The Contemporary. The main focus of Tolstoy’s writing in Switzerland, however, was the story which would eventually become The Cossacks.

Turgenev was right about Tolstoy being restless. Soon after returning from his eleven-day walking tour he was off again, to Bern and Fribourg. A few days after that he went back to Geneva, then on to Chambéry in Savoie, and many other places which brought the Savoyard vicar from Rousseau’s Emile to mind. In Turin, Tolstoy met up with his friends the Botkins and Alexander Druzhinin. The return journey to Switzerland took Tolstoy first to Ivrea, followed by two ascents of Monte Rosa. Then came stops in Pont Saint-Martin, Gressoney and Chambave, and a night in the famous hospice founded by St Bernard in 1049, located at the highest point of the Great St Bernard Pass (the oldest in the Alps). Before descending, he looked round the monastery church and inspected the St Bernard dogs, who had been part of the monastery since the seventeenth century, and had saved the lives of hundreds of travellers stuck in avalanches.³⁹ Then it was back down into Switzerland, via the glorious Pissevache waterfall. The 114 metre-high fall had been visited by Rousseau and, in 1779, inspired Goethe to flights of rhetoric. By this stage, Tolstoy was making only brief notes in his diary, and his own enigmatic verdict on the waterfall was ‘tumbling rye’.⁴⁰ Down on the lake at Villeneuve, Tolstoy caught a ferry back to Clarens.⁴¹

In early July Tolstoy travelled via Bern to Lucerne, where he took a room in the Schweizerhof Hotel and was reunited with Alexandrine. The Schweizerhof, built overlooking the lake in the heart of the old town in 1845, was as luxurious then as it is today (it prides itself on being one of the few hotels in Switzerland of ‘national significance’). In 1857 it seemed to Tolstoy to be overrun with ‘frigid’, ‘stuffy’ English tourists, who seemed to like dining in complete silence. Tolstoy was also struck by the fact that they seemed oblivious to their surroundings, as demonstrated by an incident he later turned into a short story. One evening, after visiting a brothel, he came across a busker singing Tyrolean folksongs and accompanying himself on a guitar.⁴² He was rather good, so Tolstoy suggested he go and sing under the windows of the Schweizerhof. There were soon wealthy guests flocking round him and enjoying his songs, but each time he proffered his cap, it remained empty. Tolstoy was astounded, and when the busker started trudging back into town he ran after him, took him back to the hotel and ordered a bottle of Moët. The passionate anger aroused in Tolstoy by the miserliness of the Schweizerhof’s wealthy guests was initially expressed in a letter to one of his friends, and then turned into a story. But ‘Lucerne’ was pointedly not written in the Schweizerhof, as the hotel likes to claim, but in the modest pension he moved into straight afterwards.⁴³ Indeed, as a symbol of bourgeois Western civilisation, it is the object of the passionate invective unleashed in that story. Tolstoy read it to Nekrasov soon after arriving back in St Petersburg on the steamer he had boarded in the Prussian port of Stettin. ‘Lucerne’ was published in The Contemporary in September 1857 to a mixed response.