Tolstoy

Tolstoy had not been in the capital for seventeen years, and he did not like it any more in 1878 than in 1861. Alexandrine had offered Tolstoy accommodation with her brother on Mokhovaya Street, but he decided to stay with his old friend and mother-in-law Lyubov Bers in her apartment on Ertelev Lane, which was also right in the heart of the city. He arrived on 6 March and was back home within the week, disappointing many acquaintances who had hoped to see him (such as the painter kramskoy), but he packed a lot into his four days in St Petersburg. He made a chilling visit to the St Peter and Paul Fortress, where the governor showed him the irons the Decembrists had been clamped in, but the cells where they had actually been held in 1825 were off-limits to all visitors except the Tsar and the chief of police. When he later drove past the equestrian statue of Nicholas I which had been erected in St Isaac’s Square, Tolstoy realised that his revulsion for the man who in his opinion had destroyed the best part of the Russian aristocracy had increased.³⁹ A much more enjoyable visit was to the Imperial Public Library, where Tolstoy went to see Nikolay Strakhov and to meet the indomitable critic Vladimir Stasov, who had himself been imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress in 1849 for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle. Tolstoy was not so interested in Stasov the tireless and sometimes also tiresome propagandist of Russian national art as in Stasov the librarian, who had first been appointed specifically to research the reign of Nicholas I. For Tolstoy he was one more useful contact who could help him track down valuable historical sources.

Another notable event during Tolstoy’s visit to St Petersburg was his attendance at one of the public lectures on the topic of ‘divine humanity’ given by a young religious philosopher with flowing locks called Vladimir Solovyov (son of the famous historian Sergey Mikhailovich). It was a notable event, not because Tolstoy found the lecture interesting (he dismissed it as ‘childish nonsense’⁴⁰), but because it was the only occasion on which he and Dostoyevsky were in spitting distance of each other. Strakhov was a friend of both the great writers, but he honoured Tolstoy’s request not to introduce him to anyone, and so the two passed like ships in the night, to their subsequent mutual regret. Much later, Tolstoy described in letters the horrible experience of having to sit in a stuffy hall which was packed so full that there were even high-society ladies in evening dress perched on window ledges. As someone who went out of his way to avoid being part of the crowd, and who disdained having anything to do with polite society or fashion, his blood must have boiled at having to wait until the emaciated figure of the twenty-four-year-old philosopher decided to make a grand theatrical entrance in his billowing white silk cravat. Tolstoy certainly did not have the patience to sit and listen to some boy ‘with a huge head consisting of hair and eyes’ spout pretentious pseudo-profundities. After the first string of German quotations and references to cherubim and seraphim, he got up and walked out, leaving Strakhov to carry on listening to the ‘ravings of a lunatic’.⁴¹ The rest of Tolstoy’s time in St Petersburg was taken up with concluding his property deal and meeting historians, including Mikhail Semevsky, editor of the important journal Russian Antiquity, who promised to send him unpublished Decembrist memoirs from its extensive archives.⁴² Otherwise Tolstoy spent time with family. Apart from Sonya’s younger brothers Pyotr, Stepan and Vyacheslav, the one person Tolstoy wanted to see during his stay in Petersburg was Alexandrine, whom he had not seen since 1860. They had several long and (for her) reassuring conversations about religion, and Alexandrine noted in her diary how happy she was to see him after so many years. Indeed, she had initially feared she might expire under the weight of all the things she wanted to share with him. Tolstoy seemed nicer to her than ever before, and on the day he left Petersburg, she registered in her diary their discussions about religion:

After many years of seeking the truth, he has finally reached the jetty. He has constructed this jetty of course in his own way, but the One leading him is nevertheless the same One and Only Comforter. Lev is now at the beginning of a new work, and I am sure this confession of his faith, or rather the confession of his new faith will now be reflected in it.⁴³

One positive outcome of Tolstoy’s new Christian outlook was his desire to save his soul, as he put it, which meant being at peace with the world. There was, of course, one conspicuous person he needed to make his peace with, and that was Turgenev.