Tolstoy

Tolstoy remained in Hyères with Masha and the children until the end of the year, and then in early 1861 travelled on to Nice and Florence, where he was excited to meet the recently amnestied Decembrist Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who was his distant relative and now an old man. From Florence Tolstoy travelled to Livorno, and then to Naples and Rome, where he met the painter Nikolay Ge, with whom he would later become great friends.⁶⁹ Tolstoy enjoyed seeing Italy, but his great passion at this time was still for pedagogy. In February he arrived in Paris, where he he set off to visit French schools, armed with a letter of recommendation from the Russian Ministry of Education. He also accumulated large numbers of books on pedagogy which were duly shipped back to Yasnaya Polyana. Then on 1 March he travelled on to London for his first visit to England, where he suffered severe toothache and confirmed his prejudices against the English. There is sadly very little documentation about Tolstoy’s only visit to England, but we do know that the well-connected lawyer and journalist Henry Reeve sponsored his honorary membership of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall from 5 March to 6 April 1861.⁷⁰

The most important meeting for Tolstoy in London was with the socialist thinker Alexander Herzen, who had emigrated from Russia in 1847. In 1852 Herzen had settled in London, where he first founded the Free Russian Press and then in 1857 the important newspaper The Bell, which campaigned for reform in Russia. Tolstoy made the journey to Herzen’s handsome detached residence, Orsett House (located on Westbourne Terrace, near Padding-ton), several times during the sixteen days he spent in England. On 7 March Herzen wrote to Turgenev to tell him he had already quarrelled with Tolstoy, who was in his opinion ‘stubborn’ and talked ‘nonsense’, but was nevertheless an ‘ingenuous, good person’.⁷¹ On 11 March Tolstoy spent three hours at the Houses of Parliament, where he heard the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, give a speech on naval policy, which he found very boring. Of far greater interest to him was the reading given the following evening at St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, by Charles Dickens, who was one of his favourite writers (as he was for many Russians). But his priority was to learn about British education. On 12 March, having been assisted by Matthew Arnold, an inspector of schools who had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, Tolstoy visited the Practising School at the College of St Mark in Chelsea, where he asked the boys in Class 3B to write an essay for him. He took their work back home to Russia.⁷² Arnold arranged for Tolstoy to visit primary schools in Bethnal Green, Brentford, Spitalfields, Hoxton, Westminster and Stratford, but Tolstoy did not keep a diary during his visit to Britain, and it is not clear whether he visited any of them. We do know, however, that he made several useful visits to the library attached to the South Kensington Museum, which contained many interesting pedagogical materials. The future Victoria and Albert Museum had opened its doors two years earlier.

On 17 March (5 March in Russia), the day that Tolstoy left London, the Emancipation of Serfdom manifesto, which had been signed on 3 March (19 February), on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II’s accession to the throne, was finally published.⁷³ The manifesto had been written by Metropolitan Filaret in a deliberately grandiloquent language suitable to be read in every church and published in every newspaper and Tolstoy was indignant, realising the peasants would never understand it. He was also angered by its tone, which seemed to suggest the manifesto was granting a favour rather than rectifying a grave injustice.⁷⁴ He was right to be angry. The peasants were no longer the property of landowners, but the terms by which they were freed left them no better off than before.