1849
At this time he made his first attempt to start a school for the peasant children of Yásnaya; but it was closed again two years later when he was in pecuniary difficulties; and it was not till 1862 that he discovered that he had infringed the law by opening it without official permission.
In relation to women, Tolstoy's ideal was a regular and affectionate family life. Women were for him divided into two groups: those sacred ones who could be looked on as possible wives or sisters, and those who, like the gipsy singers, could be paid for and possessed for short periods. To try to wipe out by a money payment any obligation arising from intimate relations, seems to have been his fixed rule. His animal passions were very strong, and late in life I have heard him say that neither drinking, cards, smoking, nor any other bad habit, had been nearly so hard for him to overcome as his desire for women. But he never doubted that that desire was a bad one. To judge him fairly, it must be remembered how loose was the general tone of the society in which he lived, and that the advice given him at this critical time of his life by those who were his natural guides, was not that he should live a chaste life, but that he should attach himself to a woman of good social position. In his Confession he tells us:
The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: 'Rien ne forme un jeune homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut' [Nothing so forms a young man, as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding]. Another happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor. But the greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich girl and become possessed of as many serfs as possible.
We never find Tolstoy involved in any family scandal, or called on to fight a duel about women; but his Diary at this period contains many traces of his struggles and his falls; as when he writes:
Men whom I consider morally lower than myself, do evil better than I.... I live an animal life, though not quite debauched. My occupations are almost all abandoned, and I am greatly depressed in spirit.
His pecuniary affairs became disordered, owing to his gambling and other bad habits, and towards the end of 1850 he thought of trying to earn money by taking on a contract to run the post-station at Toúla, which before railways were built was an undertaking of some importance. Varied however as Tolstoy's abilities unquestionably are, Nature never intended him to be a man of business, and this plan fortunately came to nothing.