Tolstoy

There was no area of Russia so dependent on the outcome of the harvest each year as Samara province, he wrote in his letter. Everywhere he had gone, he wrote, he had encountered the same situation: signs of approaching famine which threatened to engulf ninety per cent of the population in the province: ‘There are no men anywhere, they have all gone off to look for work, leaving at home thin women, with thin and ailing children, and old people. There is still grain, but it is running out; dogs, cats, calves, and chickens are thin and hungry, while beggars keep coming up to the window and they are given tiny crusts or refused.’¹⁰⁹ Aware that the authorities’ preferred course of action was simply to ignore this disaster (they had already tried to pin the blame for the approaching famine on the peasants by arguing it was due to their drunkenness and laziness), Tolstoy included in his letter all the data he had collected, verified in writing by the local priest, and endorsed with a stamp by the village elder, who of course was illiterate. His research had been very thorough:

1. Savinkin [household]. Old man of 65 and old woman, 2 sons, one married, 2 girls. 7 mouths to feed, 2 workers. No animals: no horse, no cow, no sheep. The last horses were stolen, the cow died last year, the sheep have been sold. They sowed eleven acres [last year]. Nothing grew, so there was nothing to sow [this year]. No stores of grain. Poll tax of 30 roubles due for the last two periods; for loans from last year 10 and a half roubles; private debt for borrowing train 13 roubles; total 53 and a half roubles…

19. khramov [household]. Six mouths to feed and one baby, one worker. Animals: 2 horses, 3 cows, 5 sheep. Sown: 9 and a half acres and nothing has grown. Debt: 28 roubles and 48 kopecks…¹¹⁰

Tolstoy’s letter was published on 17 August, while the family was travelling home to Yasnaya Polyana, and quickly reproduced in many other newspapers. It was the factual detail of Tolstoy’s inventory which struck Russian readers, for he was not just warning of imminent tragedy on a large scale, but providing some of the very first statistical information about the peasantry ever collected. Liberal politicians in Europe had been championing the collection of empirical data from populations as a valuable tool of social progress since the early nineteenth century, but the spectre of politics had severely impeded the development of the new discipline of statistics in Russia. Nicholas I had been so cautious about Russian society being placed under the microscope (particularly where serfdom and state institutions were concerned) that he had simply censored a lot of statistical work. As a consequence, next to no statistical knowledge of the Russian peasantry was acquired prior to the Emancipation of Serfdom Act of 1861, despite peasants representing the vast majority of the population. Attitudes predictably changed in the 1860s, but it was not until the 1880s that poorly paid members of the intelligentsia began conducting censuses in villages on behalf of the zemstvo (local government), and it was not until 1897 that the first national census took place. Tolstoy’s letter about the famine in 1873 caused a national outcry, and resulted in donations of nearly 2 million roubles and 344,000 kilograms of grain. Through these donations, which came both from central government and from the populace at large, much of the suffering was either prevented or alleviated. This was Tolstoy’s first clarion call about the reality of many Russian peasants’ lives, and it would not be his last.

9

NOVELIST

At that time he read a lot of English family novels and sometimes joked about them, saying, ‘These novels always end up with him putting his arm round her waist, then they get married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy. These novelists end their novels with him and her getting married. But a novel should not be about what happens before they get married, but what happens after they get married.’

Reminiscence of Tolstoy’s son Sergey¹