Leo Tolstoy

In March 1856 Alexander II told representatives of the Moscow nobility that the abolition of serfdom was inevitable and needed to be implemented from above before the peasants started to liberate themselves by force. The reform would require Herculean efforts. Land in Russia was owned by the nobles, thus transferring it to peasants would amount to an outright confiscation of property, while liberating serfs without land would immediately create millions of rural poor in a state that lacked a bureaucratic infrastructure that could cope with them. The emperor created a secret commission to deal with the issue, but at the same time urged nobles to take the initiative and settle the issue themselves on their own estates.

In May 1856, equally fed up with writers, wenches and aristocrats, Tolstoy went to Yasnaya Polyana to become a model emancipator. He drafted his plan of liberation and hoped to create a solution that could be replicated by many others. Unfortunately, the peasants were unable to believe that a landowner could offer them an honest deal. They expected a better arrangement from the tsar whom they still trusted. Tolstoy, who was sure that his settlement plan was much more generous than anything the crown would ever be able or willing to offer, was frustrated and incensed. The bitter experience of this miscommunication is evoked in his story ‘The Morning of a Landowner’. The young noble protagonist spends the day trying to alleviate the misery of his peasants and ends it with a ‘mixed feeling of tiredness, shame, powerlessness and repentance’ (CW, IV, p. 167).

The writers of Sovremennik: Tolstoy standing on the left, Turgenev sitting second left, 1856.

On 10 January 1857 Tolstoy received a passport and, for the first time in his life, went abroad. He travelled first to Paris, the acknowledged cultural capital of Europe. After staying there for two months, Tolstoy suddenly left ‘for moral reasons’ and rushed to Switzerland to see the landscapes glorified by Rousseau. There he also met his good friend and second cousin once removed, Alexandra Tolstoy, lady-in-waiting to the new empress. Tolstoy had enjoyed visiting Paris theatres and concerts, but his general impressions were negative. He was especially repulsed by and could never forget a public execution he had witnessed. The self-confident and unabashed sexual licence also created an unfavourable impression on him. Alexandra recalled that the first thing her cousin told her was that in the pension where he lived nineteen couples out of 36 (that is, slightly over half) were unmarried (LNT & AAT, p. 12). One can probably doubt the figures – Tolstoy could hardly have been able to perform an exhaustive sociological survey – but the emotion was genuine. These reactions require an explanation. Why should a man who has witnessed hundreds of deaths on the battlefield be so profoundly shocked by the execution of a convicted murderer? Why was a regular customer of brothels so easily scandalized by mere cohabitation?

Both feelings, however, had the same roots. In a letter from Paris to the critic Vasily Botkin, Tolstoy wrote that he had seen ‘many horrible things in war . . . but if a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes, it would not have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant’ (Ls, I, p. 95). It was the formal, procedural character of the killing that he found so disgusting. In the same way, he was accustomed to struggles with his own sexuality and to succumbing to lust, which caused him ‘physical pain’. He could not, however, reconcile himself with what he regarded as normalized vice that was completely content with itself. He could clearly see the first manifestations of an impersonal modern state so different from the despotism and arbitrariness of Russia, and he did not like it. The stay in Paris strongly contributed to Tolstoy’s anarchistic ideology. In the same letter to Botkin, he claimed that ‘any state is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens’ (Ls, I, pp. 95–6) and that he believed in moral, religious and artistic laws that were not mandatory, but not in political ones.