Tolstoy

From Switzerland Tolstoy travelled to Germany, and on 24 July arrived in Baden-Baden, where his strength of will failed him. He soon lost all his money at the roulette tables, which necessitated humiliating begging letters to Alexandrine, Nekrasov and Turgenev. On 31 July Turgenev arrived in person and gamely bailed his friend out, and for once Tolstoy’s customary derogatory diary entries about him changed to ‘Vanechka is very nice’. Tolstoy then immediately gambled away all the money Turgenev lent him. His plans to travel to Holland and England now went up in smoke as he was forced to retreat to Russia. He also received a letter from home informing him that his sister Masha had separated from her husband, which was another reason for returning home quickly. None of the Tolstoy brothers had particularly liked Valerian Petrovich, but they had not known quite how depraved he was. It now emerged that when he was not away on hunting expeditions, or continuing to spend periods living with his peasant mistress, who had borne him several children, he had been a cruel and despotic husband. Turgenev described Valerian Petrovich as a ‘most disgusting kind of rural Henry VIII’.⁴⁴ The saving grace for Masha, who had stoically put up with her lot for ten years, were her three children. In the summer of 1857, no longer prepared to be the ‘chief sultaness’ in her husband’s harem (Valerian Petrovich had at that point four mistresses, and was openly plotting his next move with one of them should he ‘happen’ to become a widower), Masha decided to leave him. She moved to her part of the Pirogovo estate and became Sergey’s neighbour. Tolstoy went there the day after he arrived home.

Tolstoy was glad to be back at Yasnaya Polyana, but found that the ‘crude, mendacious’ side of Russian life only stood out in sharper relief after the freedoms taken for granted in other countries.⁴⁵ Despite having gravitated towards his fellow countrymen while he had been abroad (a proclivity he shared with many Russian travellers), and despite rejoicing in seeing birch trees again,⁴⁶ Tolstoy found the return to his homeland rather depressing. Imperial Russia was no longer the police state it had been under Nicholas I, but it was still a very long way from embracing the kinds of civil liberties that were the bedrock of Western civilisation. Russia was ‘horrible, horrible, horrible,’ he wrote to Alexandrine, describing to her numerous instances of casual brutality he had witnessed in the course of the first week he had been back. They included seeing a woman beating her servant girl and an official thrashing an old man whom he wrongly believed had tripped him up.⁴⁷ Tolstoy buried himself in Beethoven and the Iliad. He also renewed his efforts to come to a better arrangement with his serfs. Eventually they all transferred from the old corvée system to quit rent (effectively a ‘buy-out’ payment freeing them from their obligation to serve and enabling them to work the land for themselves), though years later he continued to feel guilty for demanding any kind of financial compensation from his serfs in return for allowing them to take over their own land. On what remained of his own property he now used hired labour, and freed all his house serfs.⁴⁸ Much of his experience negotiating with his serfs is reflected in Part Three of Anna Karenina, where Tolstoy describes how Levin’s goodwill is rebuffed by his mistrustful peasants.

In October 1857 Tolstoy set off with Masha and her children to spend the winter in Moscow, settling in the unfashionable merchant quarter, the Zamoskvorechie, where the playwright Ostrovsky lived. Nikolay joined them there, having retired from army service for a second and final time. Tolstoy made two brief visits to St Petersburg that winter. During the nine days he spent in the capital at the end of October he had meetings with the Minister of State Property about a forestry project he had in mind, and spent time with Alexandrine. He also enjoyed a performance of Verdi’s Trovatore (the prestigious St Petersburg Italian Opera was at the zenith of its popularity at the time), but otherwise it was a sobering visit. Tolstoy’s new work had not been met with the acclaim that had greeted his first publications, and by criticising Western bourgeois civilisation in ‘Lucerne’ he was throwing down the gauntlet to critics like Chernyshevsky, who were heavily influenced by Western ideologies. Tolstoy had no interest in making contemporary political and social issues the subject of his writing, and he even toyed with the idea of founding a journal to counter these trends.⁴⁹ He was alienated by the new militant strain in Russian letters which brandished literature as a weapon for social reform, and dismissed aesthetic concerns as outmoded.