Leo Tolstoy

Death for Tolstoy was an obsession no less powerful than sex. Having first met death so early in his life, Leo could never avoid thinking about it, waiting for it, fearing and desiring it at the same time. For the soldiers, tribesmen and Cossacks he encountered in the Caucasus, death was a routine experience. Now Tolstoy had plenty of opportunity to watch people dying and, perhaps more importantly, to observe how they lived so close to death: braving it, ignoring it as an everyday preoccupation, coping with the loss of those who had spoken to them only a day, an hour, a few minutes before.

Nearly a decade after his experience in the Caucasus, Tolstoy wrote ‘Three Deaths’, a story that compares the death of a noble lady full of resentment, envy and condemnation for those remaining alive, with the death of a peasant fully reconciled with his own mortality, and that of a tree that readily frees its place for new vegetation. The ability of living creatures to accept death is, Tolstoy suggests, inversely related to how strongly they perceive their own uniqueness in the world. Tolstoy passionately wished to develop a peasant-like, if not tree-like, attitude to death and dissolve himself into a universal life that does not differentiate between individual beings, but his habit of painful soul-searching, need for self-assertion and quest for personal greatness were equally strong.

On 29 March 1852, while at Starogladkovskaya, he wrote in his diary:

I am tormented by the pettiness of my life. – I feel that it is because I am petty myself – but I still have the strength to despise myself, and my life. There is something in me that makes me believe that I wasn’t born to be the same as other people . . . I am still tormented by thirst . . . not for fame – I don’t want fame and I despise it – but to have a big influence on people’s happiness and usefulness. Shall I simply die with this hopeless wish? (Ds, p. 40)

From the beginning Tolstoy’s self-reproach was inseparable from his burning ambition. In the Caucasus he regularly exposed this connection in his diary as he began to suspect that he had stumbled upon the green stick of fable. From late August 1851, before he even left for the Caucasus, Tolstoy had secretly begun to work on his first story. A failed student, dissipated landowner and low-ranking officer was discovering himself as a writer.

It was less exceptional in nineteenth-century Russia for a professional writer to emerge from the ranks of the nobility than in the rest of Western Europe. The Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century had forced the nobility to not only change their facial hair, clothes and manners, but to acquire better education suitable for their new European lifestyles. A new educated elite that constituted the Russian nobility embraced and internalized the Petrine reforms, striving to put itself on an equal footing with its European peers. Europeanized Russian nobles not only produced the formidable officer corps that triumphed over Napoleon, but created the unique culture of Russia’s Golden Age.

Still, these remarkable achievements stood on the foundation of serfdom. Only nobles could own land. They enjoyed nearly unlimited power over the peasants living on their estates. This extended to more than just the fruits of their labour. Serfs could be bought, sold, sent to military service or penal institutions, punished physically or financially and their families could be broken up at their owner’s whim. Under Peter the Great and his immediate successors, when state service was mandatory for the nobles, everyone was subject to at least some form of servitude. This changed in 1762 when the nobility was allowed to choose whether to serve or not. This new freedom unleashed the cultural creativity of the most educated scions of the Russian nobility just as the Enlightenment took flight. The new ideas from Europe were starkly opposed to the moral affront of serfdom. As Russia entered the Golden Age, this contrast began to gnaw at the consciences of the nobility’s brightest minds.

Young officers returning from the Napoleonic wars saw themselves as the liberators of Europe. Now more acutely aware of the lack of freedom at home, they started forming conspiratorial groups to liberate Russia. At first they aspired to help Emperor Alexander I overcome the resistance of the conservatives to the belated reforms. Later a core of conspirators started planning a full-scale military coup d’état. In December 1825, after the emperor’s death, rebellious officers brought their regiments to the Palace Square in St Petersburg and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new monarch. After a day of turmoil, the insurrection was dispersed with cannon. Six months later, with no formal trial, five plot leaders were sent to the gallows and dozens more to hard labour and exile in Siberia.