Leo Tolstoy

From the south of France Tolstoy went to Rome and Florence. Italy had been on the itinerary of his 1857 tour, but he had failed to make it there because of self-inflicted financial problems. In 1860 he was drawn to Italy not so much by its tourist attractions, but by his desire to meet Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a distant relative and a former Decembrist. The ‘martyrs of 1825’, who had sacrificed their privileged positions, families and properties to liberate the serfs, interested Tolstoy through his entire life. In 1895, when the famous painter Ilya Repin asked him to suggest a theme for a historical painting, Tolstoy suggested the five leaders of the uprising being led to the gallows. After Alexander II granted amnesty to the Decembrists in 1856, he began to contemplate a story or novel about them.

One could barely imagine a historical character better suited to Tolstoy’s interests than Volkonsky. A rich aristocrat who owned more than 2,000 serfs, a decorated hero of the Napoleonic wars and a full general, Volkonsky had renounced his dissipated way of life to join the Decembrist conspiracy. Shortly before his arrest he had married Maria Raevskaya, a renowned beauty celebrated by Pushkin, who then followed her husband to Siberia. Having served nearly ten years of hard labour, Volkonsky settled in a remote village where he became a highly successful farmer on the land allotted to him. Later allowed to live in the provincial city of Irkutsk, he preferred the company of merchants and peasants to local high society. He was also deeply eccentric and prone to passionate mystic religiosity.

Trying to recover from the depression that overcame him after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy started to work on The Decembrists, a novel describing the return of an amnestied exile to Moscow in 1856 with his wife and two children. He wanted to contrast the moral vigour of an old man who had experienced terrible hardships with the vanity of Moscow liberal salons, with their empty talk about the problems of the day. He wanted to write about people who remained loyal to their convictions in the face of adversity and proved it with their lives. Both psychologically and linguistically, it was easier for Tolstoy to identify with an old eccentric aristocrat than with peasants or Cossacks. On 16 October 1860, one month after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, ‘The one way to live is to work’ (Ds, p. 142). A month or two later he met Volkonsky and by February 1861 he was able to read three draft chapters of his novel to Turgenev in Paris.

Pleased to see Tolstoy returning to literature, Turgenev enjoyed the chapters. Most likely, he did not see that the new work was directed against him and his literary environment. Three months later, when the two writers met at Fet’s house in Russia, Turgenev proudly told his friends that his natural daughter herself repaired the clothing of beggars. Tolstoy chose not to conceal that he found this repulsive and theatrical. Turgenev promised to ‘punch him in the face’ (Ls, I, p. 150). The quarrel ended with a formal challenge to a duel that, happily for Russian literature, never took place. Relations between the writers, however, were broken, as Tolstoy wrote to Fet in January 1862: ‘Turgenev is a scoundrel who needs thrashing’ (Ls, I, p. 152).

Before heading to Russia, Tolstoy visited London and Brussels. In London he conversed with the political exile and revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen, who was editing the newspaper Bell and the magazine Polar Star, which were smuggled into Russia. The title Polar Star was taken from the Decembrist almanac of the 1820s. In it, Herzen published a great deal of historical material about the Decembrists and chapters from his huge autobiography My Past and Thoughts, where he claimed that his political awakening happened when, at thirteen years old in 1826, he had for the first time heard about the rebels and made the oath to revenge them.

Tolstoy’s political views were different from Herzen’s. Their perception of the Decembrists also differed a lot, but the fascination with the heroic self-sacrifice was equally strong. Tolstoy intended to discuss his future novel with the famous exile, but for unknown reasons, never did. He only wrote about his novel in a letter to Herzen sent from Brussels on 14 March 1861. In the same letter, Tolstoy asked whether Herzen had already read the proclamation abolishing serfdom that had finally been issued in Russia on 19 February 1861. Produced after five years of fierce debates, feuds and conflicts among different high-ranking courtiers and bureaucrats, clans and interest groups, this was a muddled compromise. Tolstoy was predictably disappointed. As he put it, ‘the peasants won’t understand a word, and we won’t believe a word’ (Ls, I, p. 145). Still, he could not fail to grasp that the world around him had irrevocably changed.