The brothers Nicholas and Leo left Yásnaya Polyána on 20th April 1851, and spent a couple of weeks in Moscow. The frankness of Leo's intercourse with his Aunt Tatiána is illustrated by the following letter which he wrote, telling her of a visit he paid to Sokólniki, a pleasant outskirt of Moscow on the borders of a pine forest, where a fête is held on May-day.
That he wrote in French is explained by the fact that Tatiána, like many Russian ladies educated early in the nineteenth century, knew French better than she did Russian.
[4]J'ai été à la promenade de Sokólniki par un temps détestable, c'est pourquoi je n'ai rencontré personne des dames de la société, que j'avais envie de voir. Comme vous prétendez que je suis un homme à épreuves, je suis allé parmi les plébs, dans les tentes bohémiennes. Vous pouvez aisément vous figurer le combat intérieur qui s'engagea là-bas pour et contre. Au reste j'en sortis victorieux, c.à d. n'ayant rien donné que ma bénédiction aux joyeux descendants des illustres Pharaons. Nicolas trouve que je suis un compagnon de voyage très agréable, si ce n'était ma propreté. Il se fâche de ce que, comme il le dit, je change de linge 12 fois par jour. Moi je le trouve aussi compagnon très agréable, si ce n'était sa saleté. Je ne sais lequel de nous a raison.
On leaving Moscow, instead of travelling to the Caucasus by the usual route viâ Vorónesh, Nicholas Tolstoy, who liked to do things his own way, decided that they would drive first to Kazán. Here they stayed a week, visiting acquaintances, and that was long enough for Leo to fall in love with a young lady to whom his shyness prevented his expressing his sentiments. He left for the Caucasus bearing his secret with him, and we hear no more of the matter.
From Kazán they drove to Sarátof, where they hired a boat large enough to take their travelling carriage on board, and with a crew of three men, made their way down the Vólga to Astrakhán, sometimes rowing, sometimes sailing, and sometimes drifting with the stream.
The scorn of luxury and social distinctions so prominent in Tolstoy's later philosophy, was at this period more to the taste of his brother Nicholas. A gentleman drove past them in Kazán leaning on his walking-stick with ungloved hands, and that was sufficient to cause Leo to speak of him contemptuously, whereupon Nicholas, in his usual tone of good-natured irony, wanted to know why a man should be despised for not wearing gloves.
From Astrakhán they had still to drive some two hundred and seventy miles to reach Starogládovsk, where Nicholas Tolstoy's battery was stationed. The whole journey from Moscow, including the stay in Kazán, took nearly a month.
It may be convenient here to explain why the Russians were then fighting in the Caucasus. Georgia, situated to the south of the Caucasian Mountains, had been voluntarily annexed to Russia in 1799 to escape the oppression of Persia; and it therefore became politically desirable for Russia to subdue the tribes that separated her from her newly acquired dependency. During the first half of the nineteenth century this task proceeded very slowly, but at the time we are speaking of, Prince Baryatínsky, in command of the Russian forces stationed on the left bank of the river Térek, which flows into the Caspian Sea, was undertaking a series of expeditions against the hostile native tribes. Up to that time the Russians had held hardly anything south of the Térek and north of the Caucasian Mountains, except their own forts and encampments; but in less than another decade, Baryatínsky had captured Shámyl (the famous leader who so long defied Russia) and had subdued the whole country.
Soon after the brothers Tolstoy arrived at Starogládovsk, Nicholas was ordered to the fortified camp at Goryatchevódsk ('Hot Springs'), an advanced post recently established to protect the invalids who availed themselves of those mineral waters.
Here Leo Tolstoy first saw, and was deeply impressed by, the beauty of the magnificent mountain range which he has so well described in The Cossacks. In July 1851 he wrote to his Aunt Tatiána: