At any rate by New Year I expect to change my way of life, which I confess wearies me intolerably. Stupid officers, stupid conversations, and nothing else. If there were but a single man to whom one could open one's soul! Tourgénef is right: 'What irony there is in solitude,'—one becomes palpably stupid oneself. Although Nikólenka has gone off with the hounds—Heaven knows why (Epíshka[13] and I often call him 'a pig' for so doing)—I go out hunting alone for whole days at a time from morning to evening, with a setter. That is my only pleasure—and not a pleasure but a narcotic. One tires oneself out, gets famished, sleeps like the dead, and a day has passed. When you have an opportunity, or are yourself in Moscow, buy me Dickens' David Copperfield in English, and send me Sadler's English Dictionary which is among my books.
Of the entries in his Diary at this time, we may note the following:
All the prayers I have invented I replace by the one prayer, 'Our Father.' All the requests I can make to God are far more loftily expressed and more worthily of Him, in the words 'Thy Kingdom come, as in heaven so on earth.'
About this time he completed his Memoirs of a Billiard Marker, and sent it to the Contemporary with a letter expressing his own dissatisfaction with the hasty workmanship of the story; it did not appear till more than a year later. He was also now at work on Boyhood.
Seventeen years after Tolstoy had left the Caucasus, an officer stationed at Starogládovsk found his memory still fresh among the Cossacks, and saw Mariána (comparatively aged by that time), as well as several elderly Cossack hunters who had shot wild fowl and wild boars with Tolstoy. In his regiment he left the reputation of being an excellent narrator, who enthralled every one by his conversation.
1854
Not till January 1854 did the long-expected order arrive allowing him to pass the examination (a pure formality at that time) entitling him to become an officer. On the 19th he left for home, and on 2nd February reached Yásnaya, where he enjoyed a three weeks' stay with his Aunt Tatiána, his brother, and a friend. On this journey he encountered a severe storm, to which we owe The Snow Storm, published a couple of years later, and probably also much of the storm description in Master and Man, written in later life.
The Russo-Turkish war had now begun in earnest, and, as a result of his application, he received orders to join the army of the Danube, which he set out accordingly to do.
Of the Caucasian period of his life, as of his University days, Tolstoy has at different times expressed himself differently. To Birukóf, in 1905, he spoke of it as one of the best times of his life, notwithstanding all his deflections from his dimly recognised ideals. Yet two years earlier, writing of the four periods of his life, he had spoken of 'the terrible twenty years of coarse dissipation, the service of ambition, vanity, and above all, of lust,' which followed after the age of fourteen.
But what it comes to is, that Tolstoy is a man of moods, and judges himself and others, sometimes by ordinary and sometimes by extraordinary standards.