Finally, after writing three fragments of it, Tolstoy abandoned this novel, to which he had devoted much time. The subject was one he could hardly have dealt with frankly without getting into trouble with the Censor; and he had been refused permission to study the State Archives; but in the following passage Behrs gives another, and a curiously characteristic, reason for Tolstoy's decision:
He affirmed that the Decembrist insurrection was a result of the influence of French nobles, a large number of whom had emigrated to Russia after the French Revolution. As tutors in aristocratic families, they educated the whole Russian nobility, which explains the fact that many of the Decembrists were Catholics. The belief that the movement was due to foreign influence, and was not a purely national one, sufficed to prevent Tolstoy from sympathising with it.
Another letter to Fet again shows the direction in which Tolstoy's mind was working:
6 April 1878.
I have received your delightful and long letter, dear Afanásy Afanásyevitch. Do not praise me. Really you see in me too much good, and in others too much bad. One thing in me is good: that I understand you and therefore love you. But though I love you as you are, I am always angry with you for this, that 'Martha is anxious about many things; but one thing is needful.' And in you that one thing is very strong, but somehow you disdain it and are more concerned about arranging a billiard room. Don't suppose that I refer to poems: though I expect them to come too! But it is not of them I speak; they will come in spite of the billiards; I am speaking of a conception of the world which would make it unnecessary to be angry at the stupidity of mortals. Were you and I to be pounded together in a mortar and moulded into two people, we should make a capital pair. But at present you are so attached to the things of this life, that should they some day fail you, it will go hard with you; while I am so indifferent to them, that life becomes uninteresting, and I depress others by an eternal pouring 'from void into vacuum'! Do not suppose that I have gone mad; I am merely out of sorts, but hope you will love me though I be black.
The prolonged mental struggle through which Tolstoy passed with great suffering during the years 1874-78, was quite evident to those about him, at least from 1876 onward. Not merely did he go regularly to church, and shut himself up in his study morning and evening to pray, but his former high spirits subsided, and his desire to become meek and humble was plainly noticeable. One result of his altered attitude was, that he felt keenly that it was wrong to have an enemy. Accordingly he wrote Tourgénef to that effect, and held out to him the right hand of friendship.
Paris, 8 May 1878.
Dear Leo Nikoláyevitch,—I only to-day received your letter, addressed poste-restante. It gladdened and touched me very much. With the greatest readiness will I renew our former friendship, and I warmly press the hand you hold out to me. You are quite right in supposing me to have no hostile feelings towards you. If ever they existed they have long since disappeared, and the recollection of you only remains as of a man to whom I am sincerely attached, and of a writer whose first steps it was my good fortune to be the first to hail, and each new work from whom has always aroused in me the liveliest interest. I am heartily glad of the cessation of the misunderstandings that arose between us.
I hope this summer to be in the Government of Orlóf, and in that case we shall of course see one another. Till then, I wish you all that is good, and once more press your hand in friendship.