Page 61 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Elective English–I

Notes were balls and galas to attend and other such manly pursuits as drinking, gambling and
visiting brothels. Tolstoy did not have much success as a student, but he would become a
polyglot with at least some working knowledge of a dozen languages. He did not respond to
the universities’ conventional system of learning and left in 1847 without obtaining his degree.
Back at Yasnya Polyana and during the next few years Tolstoy agonised about what next to
do with his life. He expressed his aspirations, confusion and disappointments in his diary and
correspondence with his brothers and friends. He attempted to set the estates’ affairs in order
but again was caught up in the life of a young nobleman, travelling between the estate and
Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was addicted to gambling, racking up huge debts and having
to sell possessions to pay them off including parts of his estate. He would go on drinking
binges, associating with various characters of ill-repute that his Aunt Tatyana repeatedly
warned him about. To her and a few other confidantes he often confessed his remorse when
sober and wrote in his diary; “I am living a completely brutish life….I have abandoned almost
all my occupations and have greatly fallen in spirit. (ibid, Ch. VI)” He took to wearing peasant
clothes including a style of blouse that would later be named after him, ‘tolstovkas’. He again
attempted university exams in the hope that he would obtain a position with the government,
but also pondered the alternative, to serve in the army.
When his brother Nikolay, who was now an officer in the Caucasian army, came to visit
Yasnya Polyana for a short while, Tolstoy seized the opportunity to change his life. In the
spring of 1851 they left for the Caucasus region at the southern edge of Russia. The unglamorous
nomadic life they led, travelling through or staying in Cossack and Caucasian villages, meeting
the simple folk who populated them, exalting in the mountainous vistas, and meeting the
hardy souls who traversed and defended these regions left their indelible mark on Tolstoy.
Having long corresponded with his Aunts, he now turned his pen to writing fiction. The first
novel of his autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1852) was published in the magazine Sovremennik
which would serialise many more of his works. It was highly lauded and Tolstoy was encouraged
to continue with Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857), although, after his religious conversion he
admitted that the series was insincere and a clumsy confusion of truth with fiction (ibid,
Introduction).
In 1854, during the Crimean War Tolstoy transferred to Wallachia to fight against the French,
British and Ottoman Empire to defend Sevastapol. The battle inspired Sevastopol Sketches
written between 1855 and 1856, published in three installments in The Contemporary magazine.
In 1855 he left the army, the same year he heard about his brother Dmitry’s illness. He arrived
at his beside just before he succumbed to tuberculosis, the same disease to take his brother
Nikolay’s life on 20 September 1860. Again Tolstoy was in limbo, torn between his ‘unrestrained
passions’ and setting forth a realistic plan for his life. He had tried unsuccessfully to educate
the hundreds of muzhiks or peasants who tended his fields, founding a school for the children
in the family estate’s Kuzminsky House, but it proved to be frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful.
He set off on travels throughout Western Europe. By this time Childhood had been translated
to English and Tolstoy was a well-known author, enjoying a Counts’ life as a bachelor. When
he was unable to pay a gambling debt of 1,000 rubles to publisher Katkov, incurred while
playing billiards with him, Tolstoy relinquished his unfinished manuscript of The Cossacks
which was printed as-is in the January 1863 issue of the magazine The Russian Messenger.
Again Tolstoy vacillated between bouts of sobriety and debauch;
“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted the substance
wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and
deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all
were committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my
equals to be a comparatively moral man. Such was my life for ten years.” (ibid, Ch. VI)

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