Leo Tolstoy

Conservatives were no less appalled by what they regarded as a dangerous effort to bring millions of people out from under the control of the establishment during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. For several months Tolstoy served in the newly instituted role of civic arbiter, trying to reconcile the interests of the landowners and peasants in the conflicts that were inevitably emerging as the process of reform was being implemented. He coped with this far less well than he had as a teacher. The peasants usually obstinately refused to hear his arguments, which they probably could not understand, while the nobles hated him intensely. In April 1862 Tolstoy resigned from the office citing health reasons. He also started to feel that he could not fully devote himself to his teaching duties.

The letter to Chicherin shows Tolstoy’s preoccupation not only with teaching, but with the question of what actually could or could not be said in words, and what kind of words can express truth. In his magazine, Tolstoy recorded conversations with children about the meaning of art, about the nature of the state and the law, about Russian history and the Napoleonic wars. These descriptions of the opening of young minds to the complexity of the world, their inherent wisdom and inquisitiveness, their different characters and changing attitude to the knowledge they acquired are among the very best pages written by Tolstoy, at least before he started work on his great novels. Knowing Tolstoy’s characteristic blend of documentary effect and artistic idealization, one can only wonder what was actually happening during these lessons.

He was again full of literary plans. During his European journey he wrote ‘Polikushka’, a morbid story about the recruit draft in a village, the destructive force of money and the immense evil produced by a self-righteous and sentimental landlady who believes she is entitled to improve the morality of her peasants. Tolstoy was also working on The Decembrists, The Cossacks and the village idyll Tikhon and Malanya. The tide of literary inspiration was on the rise, but drafts were lying uselessly in his drawer and new plans were tormenting his mind. At the same time he was teaching children, hiring students, propagating new teaching methods and had managed to convince everyone around, and most importantly, himself, that he had discovered his true path in teaching. Tolstoy faced an extremely difficult choice. History, as usual taking the side of the winner, intervened to help him.

The years immediately after the abolition of serfdom were tumultuous. Many villages around Russia saw disjointed but violent rebellions by peasants who believed that the nobles were concealing from them the actual will of the tsar. The atmosphere in the capital was also tense and the radical movement was growing. In May 1862 a series of powerful fires, believed to be the result of arson, broke out in St Petersburg. The government started an investigation and a wave of new arrests. In June Chernyshevsky was arrested for instigating a peasant uprising and Sovremennik was temporarily closed. On 6 July 1862 Tolstoy’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana was searched by the secret police following entirely false accusations that he was keeping an illegal printing press. Nothing suspicious was found, but in the process the police turned the house and the whole village upside down, looked in the barn and the pond, scared his old aunt Toinette and his sister Maria to death and, most outrageously, read Tolstoy’s intimate diary and correspondence.

Tolstoy was absent from Yasnaya Polyana when the secret police came. Having lost two brothers to consumption, he had become anxious about his own health and travelled to the Bashkir villages on the Volga to drink kumys, the horse milk popular among the locals, which was believed to have healing effects. He received the news about the raid on his way back and felt himself insulted as an aristocrat, an anarchist and a Russian patriot who devoted his life to healing social divisions instead of inflaming them – and first and foremost as a human being. ‘How extraordinarily lucky it was, that I wasn’t there’, he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘if I had been, I should probably be on trial for murder by now.’

The school could not continue. For a while Tolstoy considered ‘expatriating’. He reassured his cousin that he would not join Herzen and get engaged in his subversive activities:

Herzen has his way and I have mine. Nor shall I hide. I shall loudly proclaim that I am selling my estate in order to leave Russia, where it is impossible to know a minute in advance that they won’t chain you up or flog you together with your sister, your wife, and your mother – I am going away. (Ls, I, pp. 162, 160)