Leo Tolstoy

The Decembrists, as the conspirators came to be known, constituted a tiny minority of the nobility but the most aristocratic families were particularly prominent in their ranks. This self-sacrifice by the most privileged members of an emerging society seized the country’s imagination. In the absence of any political representation or moral guidance from a Church that had long been subservient to the state, literature became the single most important channel for shaping and expressing public opinion. In 1820s and ’30s Russia the dawn of the Romantic age with its search for a national spirit strongly reinforced the perception of the writer as a voice speaking on behalf of the nation before the authorities.

The early 1850s was both a difficult and exciting time to start a literary career. Emperor Nicholas I, eager to suppress any hint of dissent after the European revolutions of 1848, had begun a new round of political repression. Among many others, the young Fedor Dostoevsky was arrested, sentenced to death, pardoned on the brink of execution and sent to Siberia. Censorship became exceptionally severe. ‘Why bother’, said one censor surprised at the temerity of authors who persisted in writing, ‘when we have already decided not to allow anything?’² The reading public, however, shared a feeling that the end of an epoch was approaching and major changes were in the air. New works were eagerly awaited from a cohort of young writers, including the novelists Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Goncharov, the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, whose plays would come to form the backbone of Russian national theatre.

New writers discussed actual social problems, defying outdated Romantic conventions. They gathered around Sovremennik (The Contemporary), a literary magazine started in the 1830s by the poet Alexander Pushkin and later edited by Nikolai Nekrasov, one of the most universally popular poets of his age, who wrote mostly about the hard lives of Russian peasants. The publication in Sovremennik of Tolstoy’s first novel, Childhood, coincided with the death of Nikolai Gogol, the leading writer of the previous generation, and the arrest of Ivan Turgenev, the most prominent voice of a new generation, for his obituary of Gogol. One can hardly imagine a more powerful symbol both of continuity and change.

Tolstoy’s choice of subject-matter for his literary debut was a brilliant move, both artistically and tactically. The vision of childhood as a lost paradise was one of the most powerful myths of Romantic culture, overwhelmed by nostalgia for a golden age of innocence and unity with nature. In the social landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, one could not imagine a better setting for this world of bliss than a nobleman’s country estate. Rousseau had located the utopian world of Clarence in such an estate. Karl Moor, the charismatic hero of Schiller’s The Robbers, is heir to a family castle to which he longs in vain to return. Yet if Schiller, the son of a doctor, can be said to have launched this trope into Romantic literature, it was Tolstoy, as one to the manor born, who would flesh it out with details from a world he knew so intimately well.

Russia was preparing to part with its Golden Age and was feeling nostalgic in advance. Childhood memories could serve as a safe haven under any censorship regime. At the same time they did not provoke animosity among a liberal or even a radical audience because Tolstoy found an innovative approach to this highly traditional topic. At first he intended to write his book as a conventional memoir, but a grown-up memoirist in the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to see the inhuman social fabric that lay beneath the idyll he was describing. Very soon Tolstoy shifted to the reconstruction of the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of a ten-year-old boy, one of the first such endeavours in world literature. Placing his book on the thin borderline between the autobiographical and fictional, he managed to present his personal experience as universal without losing a feeling of total authenticity. Later this technique would become the unmistakable trademark of Tolstoy’s narratives.

Doubts about his potential as a writer tortured Tolstoy throughout work on his first masterpiece. ‘I am doing nothing and thinking about the landlady,’ he complained on 30 May 1852. ‘Have I the talent to compare with modern Russian writers? Decidedly not.’ Two days later his opinion somewhat shifted:

Although there will be spelling mistakes in Childhood it will still be tolerable. My only thought about it is there are worse stories. I’m still not convinced, however, that I lack talent. I think I lack patience, experience and clarity, and there is nothing great about my feelings or my thoughts – I still have doubts, however, about the latter. (Ds, pp. 44–5)