In any case, Tolstoy was unable to complete these works. His preoccupation with taking writing lessons from peasant children betrayed deep dissatisfaction with the course of his own literary activity. He regarded all his new stories like ‘Albert’ and ‘Lucerne’, discussing the inevitable misery and loneliness of a true artist, or the moralistic tale ‘Three Deaths’, or ‘Family Happiness’, where a young woman recalls her romance, conflict and reconciliation with her husband, as outright failures and even ‘abominations’ that he only sent to the magazines for economic reasons. After ‘Family Happiness’ appeared in 1859 he stopped publishing and did his best to conceal from his literary friends that he was writing at all.
Friends, publishers and critics were desperate. Both Turgenev and Fet urged him to resume writing. Nekrasov tried to convince him that he possessed everything needed to write ‘good – simple, calm and clear stories’, not understanding that this is exactly what Tolstoy was reluctant to do. When the critic Alexander Druzhinin, who published the magazine Biblioteka dlia chtenia (Library for Reading), asked Tolstoy for new prose for his magazine, Tolstoy responded that he lacked ‘the content’ that ‘demands to be released and gives audacity, pride and power’ (TP, I, p. 289). He felt ashamed at the age of 31 ‘to write stories, which are very nice and pleasant to read’ (Ls, I, p. 129). He left Russia in 1860, insisting that he had renounced literature and was interested only in methods for teaching in popular schools. However, during this second ‘educational’ trip he started to believe that he had finally discovered the content that he needed.
The rapid changes in the social fabric of Europe that were taking place in the nineteenth century dramatically increased the demand for formal education. An individual could no longer assume he would lead the same life as his parents. The children of the working classes could not rely on the practical training they received from their families. New types of schools were proliferating and new pedagogical ideas being tested. Tolstoy, who was convinced that teaching was his lifelong vocation, was anxious to get first-hand information on the process. The practices he observed left him profoundly disappointed since the European schools he visited were using the same disciplinary practices he loathed at home.
He had another much more personal and traumatic reason for the trip. His eldest brother Nikolai, who since their childhood had served as a guide, mentor and role model for the young Leo, was slowly dying from consumption and the doctors demanded a change of climate. They went initially to the German resort of Bad Soden and then to the south of France, accompanied by their sister Maria and her children. Maria had her share of troubles, her marriage collapsed and her relations with Turgenev went nowhere.
Tolstoy had witnessed people dying and had lost loved ones, but this time he had to experience both. His brother Dmitry also died from consumption in 1856, but Leo was not present at his deathbed and Dmitry never was as close to him as Nikolai. Three weeks after Nikolai’s death Tolstoy wrote to Fet that, while everyone was amazed how quietly his brother had passed away, he was the only one to understand how excruciating it was, as not a single one of the dying man’s feelings had escaped him:
He did not say that he felt the death approaching, but I know he followed its every step and surely knew what still remained to him of life. A few minutes before he died, he dozed off, then suddenly came to and whispered in horror: ‘why, what is that?’ He had seen it – this absorption of the self in nothingness. (Ls, I, p. 141)
The presence of death turned life into an agonizing wait. Tolstoy had acutely felt, perhaps as never before, the pointlessness of existence. At the same time he was fascinated by the mystery of death. In his letter to Sergei, his only brother still alive, he recorded the astonishing impression of beauty and calm on the face of their dead brother released from the terrible suffering of his final days.
From the south of France Tolstoy went to Rome and Florence. Italy had been on the itinerary of his 1857 tour, but he had failed to make it there because of self-inflicted financial problems. In 1860 he was drawn to Italy not so much by its tourist attractions, but by his desire to meet Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a distant relative and a former Decembrist. The ‘martyrs of 1825’, who had sacrificed their privileged positions, families and properties to liberate the serfs, interested Tolstoy through his entire life. In 1895, when the famous painter Ilya Repin asked him to suggest a theme for a historical painting, Tolstoy suggested the five leaders of the uprising being led to the gallows. After Alexander II granted amnesty to the Decembrists in 1856, he began to contemplate a story or novel about them.
One could barely imagine a historical character better suited to Tolstoy’s interests than Volkonsky. A rich aristocrat who owned more than 2,000 serfs, a decorated hero of the Napoleonic wars and a full general, Volkonsky had renounced his dissipated way of life to join the Decembrist conspiracy. Shortly before his arrest he had married Maria Raevskaya, a renowned beauty celebrated by Pushkin, who then followed her husband to Siberia. Having served nearly ten years of hard labour, Volkonsky settled in a remote village where he became a highly successful farmer on the land allotted to him. Later allowed to live in the provincial city of Irkutsk, he preferred the company of merchants and peasants to local high society. He was also deeply eccentric and prone to passionate mystic religiosity.
Trying to recover from the depression that overcame him after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy started to work on The Decembrists, a novel describing the return of an amnestied exile to Moscow in 1856 with his wife and two children. He wanted to contrast the moral vigour of an old man who had experienced terrible hardships with the vanity of Moscow liberal salons, with their empty talk about the problems of the day. He wanted to write about people who remained loyal to their convictions in the face of adversity and proved it with their lives. Both psychologically and linguistically, it was easier for Tolstoy to identify with an old eccentric aristocrat than with peasants or Cossacks. On 16 October 1860, one month after Nikolai’s death, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, ‘The one way to live is to work’ (Ds, p. 142). A month or two later he met Volkonsky and by February 1861 he was able to read three draft chapters of his novel to Turgenev in Paris.
Pleased to see Tolstoy returning to literature, Turgenev enjoyed the chapters. Most likely, he did not see that the new work was directed against him and his literary environment. Three months later, when the two writers met at Fet’s house in Russia, Turgenev proudly told his friends that his natural daughter herself repaired the clothing of beggars. Tolstoy chose not to conceal that he found this repulsive and theatrical. Turgenev promised to ‘punch him in the face’ (Ls, I, p. 150). The quarrel ended with a formal challenge to a duel that, happily for Russian literature, never took place. Relations between the writers, however, were broken, as Tolstoy wrote to Fet in January 1862: ‘Turgenev is a scoundrel who needs thrashing’ (Ls, I, p. 152).
Before heading to Russia, Tolstoy visited London and Brussels. In London he conversed with the political exile and revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen, who was editing the newspaper Bell and the magazine Polar Star, which were smuggled into Russia. The title Polar Star was taken from the Decembrist almanac of the 1820s. In it, Herzen published a great deal of historical material about the Decembrists and chapters from his huge autobiography My Past and Thoughts, where he claimed that his political awakening happened when, at thirteen years old in 1826, he had for the first time heard about the rebels and made the oath to revenge them.