Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy confessed that in ‘yielding to the passions’ he felt that the society approved of him. However, most of the dubious habits he acquired, like drinking, feasting and gambling, were more the marks of a hussar than of polished patrician venality. ‘Improving’ liaisons with high-status women evaded Leo. For more than a decade he sought sexual gratification mostly with prostitutes, servants, peasants, Gypsy and Cossack girls. In Youth, the last part of his autobiographical trilogy, we see that ‘les hommes comme il faut’ interested him more than ‘les femmes comme il faut’.

‘I have never been in love with women,’ he wrote in his diary in November 1851:

I have been very often in love with men . . . I fell in love with men before I had any idea of the possibility of pederasty; but even when I knew about it, the possibility of coitus never occurred to me . . . My love for Islavin spoilt the whole of eight months of my life in Petersburg for me . . . I always loved the sort of people who were cool towards me and only took me for what I was worth . . . Beauty always had a lot of influence on my choice; however, there is the case with Dyakov; but I’ll never forget the night we were travelling from Pirogovo, and wrapped up underneath a travelling rug, I wanted to kiss him and cry. There was sensuality in that feeling, but why it took this course it is impossible to decide, because, as I said, my imagination never painted a lubricious picture; on the contrary I have a terrible aversion to all that. (Ds, p. 32)

As in most cases, one can get more insight into Tolstoy’s personality by listening to what he actually says than by attempting to psychoanalyse him. An ideal male, so different socially from the women that aroused his desire, represents a vision of the person the diarist himself painfully and hopelessly aspired to become. Both Tolstoy’s great novels have the same pairing of lead male characters projecting two halves of the authorial alter ego: the good-hearted, passionate but awkward and slightly boorish Pierre and Levin are juxtaposed with the brilliant and polished noblemen Prince Andrei and Vronsky. The latter, typically of their peers, were army officers. Tolstoy’s brother and mentor Nikolai was also doing military service. It was all but inevitable that, at some point, Leo would try to take the same path.

The general view of Yasnaya Polyana, 1897.

Tolstoy’s life in the army falls into two distinct phases: the Caucasus and the Crimea. In April 1851, having lost more at the gambling table than he could afford to repay, Tolstoy followed Nikolai to the Caucasus. For more than two years he was based in the Cossack settlement at Starogladkovskaya, initially as a sort of intern attached to the regiment and then as an artillery officer. During these years he took part in many raids against the Chechens and deeply immersed himself in the exotic Cossack way of life. By the time Tolstoy arrived at the frontier, the war in the Caucasus between the Russian Empire and parts of the indigenous population had been going on for more than thirty years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia had finally managed to prevail over the Ottoman and Persian empires and establish control of the mostly Christian principalities south of the Caucasus Mountains. However, communications with the newly acquired territories were constantly disrupted by rebellious, mostly Islamic, tribes from the mountains.

Russian troops were quartered in the region to keep the local population under control, but the long, porous border forced the authorities to rely upon the military assistance of the Cossacks, the settlers who for generations had combined military service with farming and agricultural activity on communally owned land. For centuries criminals, runaway serfs and those from the margins of society found refuge in the Cossacks’ settlements on the borders of the empire. Fiercely independent, Cossacks were also significantly richer than the peasants in mainland Russia. Many of them, including the inhabitants of Starogladkovskaya, adhered to the Old Belief, an Orthodox confession that had been much persecuted by the official Church since the mid-seventeenth century. Cossack men lived to fight and hunt, leaving many traditionally male preoccupations, including ploughing, planting, herding and reaping, to their women, who were physically strong, morally independent and enjoyed sexual freedom unheard of among Russian lower classes of the time. Many Russian Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century wrote admiringly about the primitive, natural and warrior lifestyle shared by the Cossacks and Caucasian mountain people. Tolstoy, with his escapist temperament and penchant for all that was natural and rebellious, was fascinated by the world he discovered, describing it often in his works. With his new life came an experience that was arguably to affect his writing even more: regular proximity to death.