He tells us that artistic talent in literature influenced him more than any political or social tendency; and this is quite in accord both with his highly artistic nature and with his general apathy towards public affairs. There was a Slavophil theory (built to justify things as they were) which proclaimed it natural for a Slavonic people to leave the task of governing to its rulers, while retaining its intellectual freedom to disapprove of what was done amiss; and though Tolstoy never joined the Slavophils, this has been very much his own attitude on the matter.
Even in early childhood he had appreciated some of Poúshkin's poems, such as To the Sea and To Napoleon, and had learned them by heart and recited them with feeling; but curiously enough it was the perusal of Mérimée's French prose translation of Poúshkin's Gipsies that, after he was grown up, aroused Tolstoy's keen admiration of Poúshkin's mastery of clear, simple, direct language. Later in life Tolstoy used to say that Poúshkin's prose stories, such as The Captain's Daughter, are his best works; but he never lost his appreciation of Poúshkin's power of expression in verse. In his Diary (4th January 1857) he wrote:
I dined at Bótkin's with Panáef alone; he read me Poúshkin; I went into Bótkin's study and wrote a letter to Tourgénef, and then I sat down on the sofa and wept causeless but blissful tears. I am positively happy all this time, intoxicated with the rapidity of my moral progress.
Despite his headstrong outbursts and many vacillations, he seems to have been always a welcome guest in almost any society he cared to frequent, and none of his critics has spoken as harshly of him as he speaks of himself when describing these
terrible twenty years of coarse dissipation, the service of ambition, vanity, and above all of lust.... It is true that not all my life was so terribly bad as this twenty-year period from fourteen to thirty-four; and it is true that even that period of my life was not the continuous evil that during a recent illness it appeared to me to be. Even during those years, strivings towards goodness awoke in me, though they did not last long, and were soon choked by passions nothing could restrain.
In his Confession, written more than twenty years later, when speaking of his religious beliefs at this time, Tolstoy tells us:
With all my soul I wished to be good; but I was young, passionate, and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, namely, to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule; but as soon as I yielded to nasty passions I was praised and encouraged.
Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger and revenge—were all respected.... I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war, and challenged men to duels in order to kill them; I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder—there was no crime I did not commit, and people approved of my conduct, and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.
So I lived for ten years.
During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to show the evil. And I did so. How often in my writings did I contrive to hide under the guise of indifference or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness, which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this, and was praised.