I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, Sebastopol in December, 1854, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches—produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because they were not representing one corner only of real life—the corner which accidentally fell under the writer’s observations—but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented—and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy—an interweaving of Dichtung and Wahrheit, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.
Tolstóy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual metre and language of soldiers’ songs, a satirical song in which he described the blunders of the commanders which ended in the Balakláva disaster. The song, written in an admirable popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other Tolstóy.
On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of peace (1856) Tolstóy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and partly at Yásnaya Polyána. In the capital he was received with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a “Sebastopol hero” and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men—officers of the Guard and jeunesse dorée of his own class—which was passed in the restaurants and cafés chantants of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He became at that time friendly with Turguéneff and saw much of him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yásnaya Polyána—the estates of the two great writers being not very far from each other; but, although his friend Turguéneff was taking then a lively part in co-editing with Hérzen the famous revolutionary paper, The Bell (see Chapter VIII.), Tolstóy, seems to have taken no interest in it; and while he was well acquainted with the editing staff of the then famous review, The Contemporary, which was fighting the good fight for the liberation of the peasants and for freedom in general, Tolstóy, for one reason or another, never became friendly with the Radical leaders of that review—Tchernyshévskiy, Dobrolúboff, Mikháiloff, and their friends.
Altogether, the great intellectual and reform movement which was going on then in Russia seems to have left him cold. He did not join the party of reforms. Still less was he inclined to join those young Nihilists whom Turguéneff had portrayed to the best of his ability in Fathers and Sons, or later on in the seventies, the youth whose watchword became: “Be the people,” and with whom Tolstóy has so much in common at the present time. What was the reason of that estrangement we are unable to say. Was it that a deep chasm separated the young epicuræan aristocrat from the ultra-democratic writers, like Dobrolúboff, who worked at spreading socialistic and democratic ideas in Russia, and still more from those who, like Rakhmétoff in Tchernyshévskiy’s novel What is to be done, lived the life of the peasant, thus practising then what Tolstóy began to preach twenty years later?
Or, was it the difference between the two generations—the man of thirty or more, which Tolstóy was, and the young people in their early twenties, possessed of all the haughty intolerance of youth,—which kept them aloof from each other. And was it not, in addition to all this, the result of theories? namely, a fundamental difference in the conceptions of the advanced Russian Radicals, who at that time were mostly admirers of Governmental Jacobinism, and the Populist, the No-Government man which Tolstóy must have already then been, since it distinctly appeared in his negative attitude towards Western civilisation, and especially in the educational work which he began in 1861 in the Yásnaya Polyána school?
The novels which Tolstóy brought out during these years, 1856-1862, do not throw much light upon his state of mind, because, even though they are to a great extent autobiographical, they mostly relate to earlier periods of his life. Thus, he published two more of his Sebastopol war-sketches. All his powers of observation and war-psychology, all his deep comprehension of the Russian soldier, and especially of the plain, un-theatrical hero who really wins the battles, and a profound understanding of that inner spirit of an army upon which depend success and failure: everything, in short, which developed into the beauty and the truthfulness of War and Peace was already manifested in these sketches, which undoubtedly represented a new departure in war-literature the world over.
YOUTH: IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL
Youth, The Morning of a Landed Proprietor, and Lucerne appeared during the same years, but they produced upon us readers, as well as upon the literary critics, a strange and rather unfavourable impression. The great writer remained; and his talent was showing evident signs of growth, while the problems of life which he touched upon were deepening and widening; but the heroes who seemed to represent the ideas of the author himself could not entirely win our sympathies. In Childhood and Boyhood we had had before us the boy Irténeff. Now, in Youth, Irténeff makes the acquaintance of Prince Neklúdoff; they become great friends, and promise, without the slightest reservation, to confess to each other their moral failings. Of course, they do not always keep this promise; but it leads them to continual self-probing, to a repentance one moment which is forgotten the next, and to an unavoidable duality of mind which has the most debilitating effect upon the two young men’s character. The ill results of these moral endeavours Tolstóy did not conceal. He detailed them with the greatest imaginable sincerity, but he seemed nevertheless to keep them before his readers as something desirable; and with this we could not agree.
Youth is certainly the age when higher moral ideals find their way into the mind of the future man or woman; the years when one strives to get rid of the imperfections of boyhood or girlhood; but this aim is never attained in the ways recommended at monasteries and Jesuit schools. The only proper way is to open before the young mind new, broad horizons; to free it from superstitions and fears; to grasp man’s position amidst Nature and Mankind; and especially to feel at one with some great cause and to nurture one’s forces with the view of being able some day to struggle for that cause. Idealism—that is, the capacity of conceiving a poetical love towards something great, and to prepare for it—is the only sure preservation from all that destroys the vital forces of man: vice, dissipation, and so on. This inspiration, this love of an ideal, the Russian youth used to find in the student circles, of which Turguéneff has left us such spirited descriptions. Instead of that, Irténeff and Neklúdoff, remaining during their university years in their splendid aristocratic isolation, are unable to conceive a higher ideal worth living for, and spent their forces in vain endeavours of semi-religious moral improvement, on a plan that may perhaps succeed in the isolation of a monastery, but usually ends in failure amidst the attractions lying round a young man of the world. These failures Tolstóy relates, as usual, with absolute earnestness and sincerity.
The Morning of a Landed Proprietor produced again a strange impression. The story deals with the unsuccessful philanthropic endeavours of a serf-owner who tries to make his serfs happy and wealthy—without ever thinking of beginning where he ought to begin: namely, of setting his slaves free. In those years of liberation of the serfs and enthusiastic hopes, such a story sounded as an anachronism—the more so as it was not known at the time of its appearance that it was a page from Tolstóy’s earlier autobiography relating to the year 1847, when he settled in Yásnaya Polyána, immediately after having left the University, and when extremely few thought of liberating the serfs. It was one of those sketches of which Brandes has so truly said that in them Tolstóy “thinks aloud” about some page of his own life. It thus produced a certain mixed, undefined feeling. And yet one could not but admire in it the same great objective talent that was so striking in Childhood and the Sebastopol sketches. In speaking of peasants who received with distrust the measures with which their lord was going to benefit them, it would have been so easy, so humanly natural, for an educated man to throw upon their ignorance their unwillingness to accept the threshing machine (which, by the way, did not work), or the refusal of a peasant to accept the free gift of a stone house (which was far from the village).... But not a shade of that sort of pleading in favour of the landlord is to be found in the story, and the thinking reader necessarily concludes in favour of the common sense of the peasants.