The early 1850s was both a difficult and exciting time to start a literary career. Emperor Nicholas I, eager to suppress any hint of dissent after the European revolutions of 1848, had begun a new round of political repression. Among many others, the young Fedor Dostoevsky was arrested, sentenced to death, pardoned on the brink of execution and sent to Siberia. Censorship became exceptionally severe. ‘Why bother’, said one censor surprised at the temerity of authors who persisted in writing, ‘when we have already decided not to allow anything?’2 The reading public, however, shared a feeling that the end of an epoch was approaching and major changes were in the air. New works were eagerly awaited from a cohort of young writers, including the novelists Ivan Turgenev and Ivan Goncharov, the great satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, whose plays would come to form the backbone of Russian national theatre.
New writers discussed actual social problems, defying outdated Romantic conventions. They gathered around Sovremennik (The Contemporary), a literary magazine started in the 1830s by the poet Alexander Pushkin and later edited by Nikolai Nekrasov, one of the most universally popular poets of his age, who wrote mostly about the hard lives of Russian peasants. The publication in Sovremennik of Tolstoy’s first novel, Childhood, coincided with the death of Nikolai Gogol, the leading writer of the previous generation, and the arrest of Ivan Turgenev, the most prominent voice of a new generation, for his obituary of Gogol. One can hardly imagine a more powerful symbol both of continuity and change.
Tolstoy’s choice of subject-matter for his literary debut was a brilliant move, both artistically and tactically. The vision of childhood as a lost paradise was one of the most powerful myths of Romantic culture, overwhelmed by nostalgia for a golden age of innocence and unity with nature. In the social landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, one could not imagine a better setting for this world of bliss than a nobleman’s country estate. Rousseau had located the utopian world of Clarence in such an estate. Karl Moor, the charismatic hero of Schiller’s The Robbers, is heir to a family castle to which he longs in vain to return. Yet if Schiller, the son of a doctor, can be said to have launched this trope into Romantic literature, it was Tolstoy, as one to the manor born, who would flesh it out with details from a world he knew so intimately well.
Russia was preparing to part with its Golden Age and was feeling nostalgic in advance. Childhood memories could serve as a safe haven under any censorship regime. At the same time they did not provoke animosity among a liberal or even a radical audience because Tolstoy found an innovative approach to this highly traditional topic. At first he intended to write his book as a conventional memoir, but a grown-up memoirist in the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to see the inhuman social fabric that lay beneath the idyll he was describing. Very soon Tolstoy shifted to the reconstruction of the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of a ten-year-old boy, one of the first such endeavours in world literature. Placing his book on the thin borderline between the autobiographical and fictional, he managed to present his personal experience as universal without losing a feeling of total authenticity. Later this technique would become the unmistakable trademark of Tolstoy’s narratives.
Doubts about his potential as a writer tortured Tolstoy throughout work on his first masterpiece. ‘I am doing nothing and thinking about the landlady,’ he complained on 30 May 1852. ‘Have I the talent to compare with modern Russian writers? Decidedly not.’ Two days later his opinion somewhat shifted:
Although there will be spelling mistakes in Childhood it will still be tolerable. My only thought about it is there are worse stories. I’m still not convinced, however, that I lack talent. I think I lack patience, experience and clarity, and there is nothing great about my feelings or my thoughts – I still have doubts, however, about the latter. (Ds, pp. 44–5)
Tolstoy sent the completed novel to Nekrasov accompanied by a letter marked by his characteristic mixture of extreme shyness and thinly veiled arrogance. He included in the envelope money to pay for return delivery in case of rejection and, in case of acceptance, asked for his initials to be used instead of his full name. He agreed in advance to any cuts Nekrasov would like to make, but insisted that his novel should be published ‘without additions and changes’ (TP, I, p. 50). Nekrasov’s reaction was more than obliging. He immediately published Childhood in the next issue of Sovremennik, expressed his interest in the following parts of the book and praised it highly in a letter to Turgenev, who also quickly came to admire the young writer’s talent.
The critics were equally enthusiastic. Reading the reviews in a peasant hut, Tolstoy, as he later told his wife, was ‘strangled by tears of rapture’.3 In his diaries, apart from reproaching himself for idleness, gambling and sensuality, ‘that did not give him a moment’s peace’, Tolstoy recorded his new belief in a ‘brilliant literary career that is open’ to him if he can ‘work hard’ (Ds, p. 56) and abstain from sex. He was to prove right on one score, even if sexual abstinence remained beyond his power. Tolstoy’s work on Boyhood, a continuation of Childhood, was very intensive, but this did not prevent him from feeling a ‘hopeless aversion’ both to his story and to himself. Boyhood, published in Sovremennik in October 1854, was received with nearly the same kind of acclaim as Childhood. The public was eagerly awaiting new work from this already famous author. Tolstoy would not fail to satisfy their expectations. The new work that was to take his fame to a new level would emerge at a different period in his life when he had lived through sea changes in Russian history that would enrich his experience.
In 1853 the ailing emperor, Nicholas I, declared war on Turkey believing that he could realize a long-cherished imperial dream of establishing Russian control over the parts of the Ottoman Empire located in Europe, their Orthodox populations and the straits leading to the Mediterranean. The emperor failed to make allowance for the strength of European opposition to Russian expansion. This allowed Britain and France to forgo their ancient rivalry and back the Turks in a united military coalition. An Anglo-French army invaded the Crimea and besieged Sebastopol, Russia’s main naval port on the Black Sea.
Decaying autocrats hoping to bury their failures beneath a wave of popular enthusiasm will often go to war. The strategy invariably works well at the early stages of the adventure. Russia in the 1850s was no exception. Tolstoy himself was not immune to outbursts of patriotic feeling. When the start of the Crimean War found him in the Caucasus far from the main battlefields, he applied to be transferred and was sent to the Russian army fighting in Romania. Having found out that nothing of real importance was happening there as well, he applied again for a transfer and, in November 1854, joined Russian troops in the Crimea. His first impressions were favourable. He admired the heroic spirit of the common soldiers and junior officers and was certain the enemy would not be able to capture the city. Within two weeks, however, he had changed his mind and became ‘more convinced than before that Russia must either fall or be completely transformed’ (Ds, p. 83). He considered proposing far-reaching military reforms, but then reverted to the activity he knew best.