Fet tells us that as soon as he met Tolstoy he noticed his instinctive defiance of all accepted opinions; and at Nekrásof's lodgings, the first time he saw Tolstoy and Tourgénef together, he witnessed the desperation to which the former reduced the latter by his biting retorts.

'I can't admit,' said Tolstoy, 'that what you say expresses your convictions. If I stand at the door with a dagger or a sword, and say, "While I am alive no one shall enter here," that shows conviction. But you, here, try to conceal the true inwardness of your thoughts from one another, and call that conviction!'

'Why do you come here?' squeaked Tourgénef, panting, his voice rising to a falsetto (as always happened when he was disputing). 'Your banner is not here! Go! Go to the salon of Princess B——!'

'Why should I ask you, where I am to go? Besides, empty talk won't become conviction, merely because I am, or am not here,' replied Tolstoy.

Though he cared little for politics, Fet's sympathies inclined to the Conservative side, and he found himself in accord with Tolstoy rather than with Tourgénef and the other Contemporarians; but Fet's stay in Petersburg at this time was a short one, and he therefore saw little of Tolstoy. D. V. Grigoróvitch, the novelist, however, reported to him another scene which also occurred at Nekrásof's lodging.

You can't imagine what it was like! Great Heavens! said Grigoróvitch. Tourgénef squeaked and squeaked, holding his hand to his throat, and with the eyes of a dying gazelle whispered: 'I can stand no more! I have bronchitis!' and began walking to and fro through the three rooms.—'Bronchitis is an imaginary illness,' growls Tolstoy after him: 'Bronchitis is a metal!'

Of course Nekrásof's heart sank: he feared to lose either of these valuable contributors to the Contemporary. We were all agitated, and at our wits' end to know what to say. Tolstoy, in the middle room, lay sulking on the morocco sofa; while Tourgénef, spreading the tails of his short coat and with his hands in his pockets, strode to and fro through the three rooms. To avert a catastrophe, I went to the sofa and said, 'Tolstoy, old chap, don't get excited! You don't know how he esteems and loves you!'

'I won't allow him to do anything to spite me!' exclaimed Tolstoy with dilated nostrils. 'There! Now he keeps marching past me on purpose, wagging his democratic haunches!'

The rest of the evidence is of much the same nature. Of desire to agree, there was hardly a trace in Tolstoy, who never doubted his own sincerity and seldom credited that quality to others. The aristocratic influences that surrounded his upbringing never induced him to be lenient to men of his own class, such as Tourgénef; but they led him to judge harshly and unsympathetically new men who were pushing their way to the front by their own ability. Fet, in his Mémoires, speaks with regret of the fact that the educated classes ('the Intelligents') attracted by Liberal ideas which made for the Emancipation of the serfs, formed so strong a current of opinion that even the literature produced by the nobility (and he claims that the nobles supplied all the truly artistic literature) advocated changes which struck at the root of the most fundamental privileges of their class. This tendency, he tells us, revolted 'Tolstoy's fresh, unwarped instinct.'

Grigoróvitch, in his Literary Memoirs, tells us that, knowing how out of sympathy Tolstoy was with Petersburg, and how evident it was that everything in Petersburg irritated him, he was surprised to find that the latter took permanent lodgings there. Grigoróvitch, himself a Contemporarian, had met Tolstoy in Moscow, and coming across him again in Petersburg, and hearing that he was invited to dine with the staff of the Contemporary, but did not yet know any of the members intimately, agreed to accompany him.