Tolstoy

In February 1858 Tolstoy wrote to Nekrasov to tell him he wanted to end his contract with The Contemporary,⁵⁰ and when he went to St Petersburg for a brief visit in March he handed over the manuscript of his last work to appear in the journal.⁵¹ Like ‘Lucerne’, the story ‘Albert’ is about an impoverished musician, and had taken Tolstoy over a year to finish. Notwithstanding the delay caused by the censor, Nekrasov took his time, publishing ‘Albert’ in the August issue of The Contemporary, which was its nearest equivalent to a ‘graveyard slot’ as the journal no longer wanted to solicit this kind of fiction.⁵² ‘Albert’ is also another profession de foi in the sense that it expresses Tolstoy’s belief that art should deal with eternal moral truth (istina) rather than the ephemeral truth of political ideology (pravda). His defiant defence of beauty was his way of responding to the challenge issued by Chernyshevsky, and it is probably not a coincidence that during his visit to St Petersburg in March he went to the Hermitage. One of the few highlights of Nicholas I’s cultural policy was his decision to open the Hermitage as a public museum in 1852.⁵³ Tolstoy was impressed most of all by Ruisdael’s landscapes, Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son and The Descent from the Cross by Rubens.

During the winter season Tolstoy took another stand on behalf of the fine arts by helping to organise regular Saturday concerts, and even tried to set up a ‘quartet society’.⁵⁴ He also was still hunting for a wife, and in December 1857 he had started homing in on the poet Tyutchev’s young daughter Ekaterina. He was also slightly attracted to another young woman called Praskovya Shcherbatova, but in the end, despite Turgenev hearing rumours in Rome that his dalliance with Ekaterina Tyutcheva was becoming serious, he married neither of them.⁵⁵ Their names came in useful later on, however. Ekaterina Tyutcheva and her sister Darya were known affectionately as Dolly and Kitty, and they had an elder sister called Anna. In Anna Karenina, Kitty’s surname is Shcherbatskaya, which is not so far off Shcherbatova.⁵⁶ In April 1858 Tolstoy headed back to Yasnaya Polyana. He had spent the previous winter participating in conventional social activities, but he was now about to make a break with the life he had led since returning from Sebastopol and settle permanently in the country.

Tolstoy did not stop writing in the summer of 1858, but this was the time of year he now preferred to devote to working on the land. He now threw himself into farming, acquiring the most modern ploughs and the best fertilisers, and reading up on the latest developments in agriculture. He occupied himself with forestry, planting trees in the Yasnaya Polyana park and selling peach, plum and pear trees that had been cultivated in his greenhouses. He worked in the vegetable garden and in the fields, ploughing, sowing and reaping, and also did a lot of physical exercise to keep fit and maintain his strength. As his brother Nikolay commented, he always wanted to ‘embrace everything all at once, without leaving anything out, even gymnastics’. Sometimes the steward would come up to Yasnaya Polyana to receive instructions, and be greeted by Tolstoy hanging red-faced upside down from a bar he had installed outside the window of his study.⁵⁷

That summer another side of Tolstoy’s physicality manifested itself when he fell in love, more deeply than he had ever been before, with a young peasant girl from a village six miles from Yasnaya Polyana. Aksinya Bazykina had a largely absent husband, and Tolstoy found it hard to resist her charms. Their relationship was a serious one, and lasted for over a year. Later Aksinya gave birth to a son, who was regarded by everyone at Yasnaya Polyana as Tolstoy’s illegitimate son (Timofey grew up to be a tall young man with fair hair and grey eyes, and he worked for Tolstoy as a coachman).⁵⁸ In his diaries Tolstoy recorded his trysts with ‘A.’ in the forest, and the times when he waited for her in vain, in one entry admitting to feeling more like a husband than a ‘stag’.⁵⁹ At the end of his life, he would come to experience feelings of bitter remorse over the affair, which he sublimated in the writing of his late story ‘The Devil’.