Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy both enjoyed and loathed his new-found celebrity. In St Petersburg he was welcomed in the most exclusive literary circles and aristocratic salons. Turgenev, the doyen of Russian literature, invited Tolstoy to stay at his house and was ready to go to Yasnaya Polyana to introduce himself. Willing to acclaim this new genius and recognize his pre-eminence, Turgenev nonetheless wanted to guide his younger colleague, believing that this rough diamond needed polish. Tolstoy, however, was the last person to accept any sort of patronage. He was always ready to argue against received wisdom, especially when pronounced by important people and in an authoritative manner. George Sand was worshipped by Russian radicals for her powerful defence of gender equality, but memoirists recall Tolstoy arguing that her female heroines, if they really existed, should be dragged along the streets of St Petersburg. Another time he insisted that only a man who had imbibed pompous nonsense could admire Homer and Shakespeare. Still, these provocative statements represented minor eccentricities compared with his categorical denial that literary people surrounding him in St Petersburg had any convictions at all.

Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana.

The contributors to Sovremennik, gathering at Nekrasov’s house, were incensed, certain not only of the firmness of their convictions, but that these mattered for the future of Russia:

‘Why then do you come to us’, said Turgenev in a choking high voice (which always happened during passionate debates), recalls a memoirist. ‘You don’t belong here. Go to princess Belosel’skaia-Belozerskaia!’

‘Why should I ask you where to go!’ Tolstoy replied. ‘And even if I leave, the idle talk won’t turn into convictions.’⁵

For Tolstoy convictions were not a matter for intellectual debates or political articles, but a question of life and death; one should be ready to die for them. He was eager to show his new friends that he preferred not only high society but outright debauchery to literary conversations. As usual, he would afterwards reproach himself for wasting his life so uselessly and foolishly:

We went to Pavlovsk. Disgusting! Wenches. Stupid music, wenches, an artificial nightingale, wenches, heat, cigarette smoke, wenches, vodka, cheese, wild shrieks, wenches, wenches, wenches! Everyone tried to pretend they were enjoying themselves, and they liked the wenches, but without success. (Ds, p. 101).

For a while St Petersburg writers were ready to tolerate Tolstoy’s insolence and dissipated way of life out of respect for his genius. A romance between Tolstoy’s married sister and Turgenev did not help relations with the latter, which continued under strain before finally breaking down in 1861. The quarrel lasted for seventeen years and ended only in 1878 in a touching, if somewhat halfhearted, reconciliation.

Another literary acquaintance that Tolstoy made in St Petersburg soon developed into a lifetime friendship. Afanasii Fet, one of Russia’s finest lyrical poets, who described in his memoirs Tolstoy’s quarrels with Turgenev, was the adopted son of a provincial landowner, Afanasii Shenshin. In a bout of passion, the elder Shenshin had abducted a young German woman, Scharlotta Fet, from her first husband when she was already pregnant. Fet’s close friends including Tolstoy believed that his parents were of Jewish origin. Defying all marital laws, Shenshin contrived to marry Scharlotta, but fourteen years later the forgery was discovered and he had to disinherit the boy, depriving him of noble status, property and even his surname. Deeply traumatized, Fet for many years desperately tried to regain his lost name and social position, initially through military service and then with the help of a loveless marriage of convention and skilful estate management. To achieve these goals he abandoned Maria Lazich, the greatest love of his life, who was hopelessly poor. Tragically, Maria died shortly afterwards (we shall never know whether it was an accident or suicide). At the same time Fet wrote poems full of passionate and tender love for this world coupled with a no less powerful longing for the other. Tolstoy could appreciate this odd combination of poetical madness and militant rationality like no one else. However, he never was able or wanted to take both these qualities apart and to confine them to separate spheres of his life. Already in St Petersburg he was envisaging for himself a new social role.