Tolstoy

While Tolstoy enjoyed a euphoric summer of love in 1858, his sister Masha was pining. A tentative romance had sprung up between her and Turgenev since their first meeting in 1854, and now that she was free of her dreadful husband, she was keen for it to blossom. Turgenev had failed to come to back to Russia that year, however, and she was upset and lonely. Tolstoy, who knew all about Turgenev’s devotion to the married opera singer Pauline Viardot, whom he followed around Europe, was incensed on Masha’s behalf, feeling it very wrong to have made overtures to a young lady he had no intention of marrying.⁶⁰ It was a major factor in his rapidly deteriorating relationship with Turgenev.

In the winter, when Tolstoy could not so easily go on the prowl looking for Aksinya, he hunted animals. In late December 1858 he and his brother Nikolay were invited to go bear hunting with some friends – it was traditional to hunt bears in Russia while they were hibernating.⁶¹ On the first day, armed with two rifles and a dagger, Tolstoy killed a bear, but on the second a bear nearly killed him after being frightened by the sound of a gunshot. Tolstoy was left with a permanent scar on his forehead and an anecdote to dine out on for the rest of his life (which he later wrote up as a story for children). Being of stern mettle, he was, of course, undeterred by his injury, and a few weeks later killed the bear which had attacked him.⁶² The bearskin ended up as a rug for Yasnaya Polyana. That spring Tolstoy also went wolf and fox hunting. He had not completely abandoned writing since settling at Yasnaya Polyana. In January 1859 he published a story called ‘Three Deaths’. A parable of art and morality which compares the deaths of a coachman, a tree and a cantankerous noblewoman, it is of a piece with ‘Lucerne’ and ‘Albert’, and also met a cool and uncomprehending reception. A much longer work published that year was the short novel Family Happiness, whose plot (older man marries a much younger girl who is his ward) clearly drew on his experiences with Valeria Arseneva. He was later very displeased with this work, which was also not particularly popular with the reading public, but it has many interesting qualities, not the least of which is the fact that it is narrated by a woman. It is also in this work more than any other that Tolstoy seems to be wrestling with the father figure of Turgenev as a writer, in a determined attempt to emerge from his shadow.⁶³

Tolstoy’s popularity with Russian readers may have dipped slightly, but his fiction was beginning to command princely sums. Tolstoy was paid 1,500 roubles by Mikhail Katkov for Family Happiness, which was published in the journal he edited, the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy immediately went and blew the lot during a session of Chinese billiards (a game similar to bagatelle, played on a board).⁶⁴ He would not publish any more fiction for almost three years, as what really claimed his attention now was popular education. When Tolstoy had come to the realisation that the peasants had so far resisted his efforts to improve their conditions because were they were simply too uneducated even to understand that he was working in their best interests, he resolved to teach them how to read and write. Less than six per cent of the rural population were literate in the 1850s.⁶⁵ There were no state schools in the countryside, even at the primary level, and what little tuition there was on offer from a village priest or a retired soldier (learning to read and write was one of the few benefits of army service) was primitive and had to be paid for. Teachers taught unimaginatively by rote, with the assistance of corporal punishment. Landowners were under no obligation to educate their serfs, and it is not surprising that in a country where the peasants were treated almost as a sub-human species, very few did. Tolstoy did not see the point in introducing railways, telegraphs and other forms of modernisation to Russia while there was no public education.⁶⁶