Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

Now he intended, though only nineteen, to devote himself to his peasants. He went back to his property with great zeal for reform. He knew of the sufferings of the serfs, the famines and revolts. For a time he worked among them and learned to know all about their lives. But he was too young, and lacked patience at present to do much good. After six months, rather discouraged and disappointed, he was off on a different experience. He made his home now at St. Petersburg, where he was most frivolous and idle. He understood quite well what a stupid life he was leading, and in a religious book he wrote in after years, called “My Confession,” he says that though he honestly desired to be good, he stood alone in his search after goodness. Every time he expressed the longings of his heart for a virtuous life, he met with contempt and mocking laughter, but every time he was frivolous or wicked, he was praised and encouraged.

Yet on the whole this gay life at St. Petersburg was not altogether useless. It taught him something, and he was not really spoilt by it. He was big enough and intelligent enough to see the utter futility and uselessness of such a life. It gave him, he says, a scorn for aristocracy and the life of rich people generally, whose whole existence was “a mania of selfishness.”

Tolstoy’s favorite brother Nicholas, who was serving in the Russian army, saw what an unsatisfactory state his brother was in, and so persuaded Leo to become a soldier and join him in the Caucasus. This Leo was only too glad to do. He says in a letter at that time, “God willing, I will amend and become a steady man at last.”

Now, the open-air, primitive life in this part of Russia quite restored Tolstoy to himself, and he began to write. His first book, “Childhood,” was written and published while he was there. This novel, though not strictly speaking a history of his own childhood, is mostly about his own youthful life; the incidents that occur in it are many of them true, and the characters are taken from friends and relatives. It is a very wonderful book, as showing how vividly Tolstoy remembered his own feelings as a child, how intensely he must have felt and suffered, and what his powers of thought and observation must have been. He continued this book, and brought out later other volumes entitled “Boyhood” and “Youth.” They are all three full of beautiful things. Tolstoy also wrote about the Caucasus, a novel called “The Cossacks,” a romantic story of the strange, wild people who inhabit this part of Russia.

At the time of the Crimean War, Tolstoy experienced as a soldier the horrors of battle. He was at the siege of Sebastopol, and wrote the book of that name. It made a great sensation when it came out, soon after the war was over. Its profound understanding of the feelings of men who were constantly facing death and danger, and of those who were dying, made a deep impression on people.

Tolstoy, from seeing war, formed his very strong opinions against it. He became from that time one of the most passionate apostles of peace. He saw how much that is splendid is sometimes brought out in people who face the terrors of war, but, on the other hand, he saw its fearful uselessness, the waste of noble human beings, the suffering it causes everywhere, and the destruction, in some, of all human feeling. “It is not suffering and death that are terrible,” says Tolstoy, “but that which allows people to inflict suffering and death.”

Tolstoy after Sebastopol left the army and went back to St. Petersburg, this time to live in a literary circle, where he was welcomed by distinguished authors as the most promising writer of the day. Nobody, after reading “Childhood” or “Sebastopol,” could fail to see Tolstoy’s marvelous genius for seeing things as they are, and his gift of expression. But he grew impatient in this circle, for his views were too advanced and his love of truth too strong. He could not agree with people, and he could not pretend to agree with them. So he was thought quarrelsome and conceited, and his opinions absurd. He was always questioning things, such as the meaning of existence, and whether he himself was of any use; he would take nothing as a matter of course. Already, before he was twenty-seven, he had conceived the great idea of devoting his life to founding a new Religion—the Religion of Christianity, in fact, but cleansed of all its dogmas, which have nothing to do with Christianity: a practical religion, giving happiness on earth, not merely the promise of future happiness.

And another great question absorbed him, the question of emancipating the serfs. Peasants who worked on the land in Russia were held much as slaves, and were the absolute property of their masters, forced to work for them so many days a week before they might do any work for themselves. Tolstoy violently took the side of the peasants in all that concerned them, and his purpose in life was more or less fixed from this time onward. Like our other great man of noble birth, William of Orange, who worked on the side of the people, he was determined to leave no stone unturned until the conditions of the poor had been improved and justice done them.

Now, in order to learn more of the habits and customs of other countries, and principally their systems of education, Tolstoy went abroad and visited France, Germany, and England. Then, returning to his home, he settled down as a land-owner and managed his own estates.

In 1861 the serfs were liberated by the Czar Alexander II.