FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS.
(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Nisbet & Co., from “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” by P. A. Sergyeenko)
synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”—which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857—tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It is of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.
COUNT TOLSTOY, HIS WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS
The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.
After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel to be called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this favourite stage of classic Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), dating from the same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A