Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s next stop was Brussels, where he met the socialist politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,⁷⁵ author of The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), amongst other works, and the former Polish politician Joachim Lelewel, who had taken part in the 1830 Warsaw uprising. He also visited Belgian schools and had his photograph taken. The last portrait, taken in St Petersburg, had shown a serious-looking mustachioed officer with short-cropped hair. For his European travels, Tolstoy had dressed to the nines in long frock-coat and top hat, but was now already sporting the beard that would become an intrinsic part of his identity. After Brussels came his last months of travelling – to Antwerp, Frankfurt, Eisenach and Weimar, where there were more schools to inspect. He was hankering to go home at this point, but he wanted to get as much done as he could while he was in Europe, not knowing when he would return. (Never, as it turned out.) There were further stays in Jena, Dresden and Weimar, where he met Gustav Keller, a young mathematics teacher, whom he invited to come and teach at the Yasnaya Polyana school.⁷⁶ His final stop was Berlin, where he sought out the writer Berthold Auerbach, whose weighty (and now largely forgotten) novel A New Life (1851) had been highly influential on his decision to start his school for the Yasnaya Polyana peasant children in the first place. Tolstoy had clearly identified with its protagonist Eugen Baumann, an aristocrat who becomes a village schoolteacher. Without giving his name, Tolstoy simply marched up to Auerbach and announced ‘Ich bin Eugen Baumann’.⁷⁷ He was very excited to meet Auerbach, recording the event with fifteen exclamation marks in his diary.⁷⁸

On 13 April Tolstoy finally arrived back in St Petersburg. Before returning home he arranged meetings with the Minister of Education in order to ask formal permission to found a pedagogical journal, which was granted (no one in the ministry had any idea at this point quite how subversive Tolstoy’s educational ideas would turn out to be). By May he was back in Yasnaya Polyana and holding classes in the apple orchard, but was restless as usual. At the end of the month, he travelled over to Spasskoye-Lutovinovo to visit Turgenev, who had just finished Fathers and Sons, the novel which explores the clash between the radical new ‘nihilists’ of the 1860s and the old-world generation of the 1840s. Turgenev read it aloud, and Tolstoy found it so boring he fell asleep. Turgenev was mortally offended. A couple of days later an argument flared up between them over a trivial matter when they went to visit Fet at his newly acquired country property. Tolstoy this time felt so insulted that he challenged Turgenev to a duel. He sent for arms from his nearby Nikolskoye estate, which he had inherited from his brother Nikolay, and spent a sleepless night, but the duel was never fought. Neither, though, was the friendship ever fully repaired. There followed a flurry of recriminations, apologies and letters which either failed to arrive at the right place or were read too late, and the situation was exacerbated by rumours of copies of these letters circulating in Moscow. Tolstoy considered Turgenev a coward, despised his liberalism and could not forgive him his lack of passion.⁷⁹ They agreed to cease all communication.