When autumn camc Aunt Toinette and the three orphans returned to Moscow. They were to attend the ceremony of the laying of the cornerstone of Holy Savior Cathedral by Tsar Nicholas I, and to congratulate the eldest Tolstoy son, who had just been admitted to the Department of Philosophy at Moscow University.
During the three-day trip Leo renewed his acquaintance with the Russia of the open roads: jingling bells, crcaking axles and the smell of moth-eaten cloth, long convoys dragging through the dust, pilgrims on foot with their sacks on their backs, swift troikas bearing some ministerial courier, slanting figures engraved 011 the mile-posts. Sometimes they met another caleche, and the boy said to himself, "In two seconds, the faces looking at us with friendly curiosity two lengths away will have flashed past. It seems strange that these faces have nothing to do with me and that I may never see them again."13 Or, unexpectedly, there in the middle of the fields stood the red-roofed house of a country squire. "Who lives in that house?" Leo wondered. "Are there any children, a father and mother, a schoolmaster? Why shouldn't we go up and meet its owners?" Too late! 'ihe house was far behind and a village had taken its place. "It smellcd of smoke and tar and cracknel. . . . The harness bells did not ring out as they did in the open country. Thatched-roofcd isbas filed past on cither side."14
In Moscow, Leo's thirst for new faces and excitement was satisfied beyond his wildest dreams. On September 10, 1838 he saw—from a great distance, it is true—'lsar Nicholas I laving the cornerstone of the cathedral. The military parade that followed thrilled him to the bone. He wanted to march in step with the music and die for his country.
His devotion to the monarchy should by rights have been accompanied by an equal devotion to the Church, but although he was brought up in the Orthodox religion, his faith was not unshakable. Out of respcct for the grownups he believed what they told him about God and the saints but, underneath it all, he was perfectly prepared to believe the opposite, and so he was not unduly astonished when one of his comrades, Volodya Milyutin, sententiously announced that the pupils in his class at the lyc6e had reached the conclusion that God did not exist and that everything they had been taught about Him was "false and made-up." The Tolstoy brothers discusscd the news among themselves and judged it to be interesting, "perhaps even true." Of course Nicholas, now a university student, led the debate with all the authority- of his seventeen years. He had made new friends, with whom lie smoked pipes, exchanged incomprehensible witticisms and laughed noisily while slapping his thighs.
Ignored by these high-powered brains from the University of Moscow, Leo sought in himself an explanation for the mysteries that surrounded him. Even Prosper de St. Thomas, who had been wont to call him "lazy" and a "good-for-nothing," was astonished by his intellectual precocity'. Lazy he still was, for studying galled him; but instead of mathematics, history and geography lessons, he explored his own conscience with a degree of insight that was uncanny in a boy of twelve. Between two games of hide-and-seek, he meditated upon his character, man's destiny, the disintegration of matter and the immortality of the soul. He was bowled over, blinded, by totally contradictory ideas. He had no sooner adopted one set of rules for life than he discovered another, still more attractive. In order to train his will-power and resist pain in the true Stoic manner, he would hold the big Tatishchev dictionary out at arm's length, or, hiding in a storeroom, tear off his shirt and scourge himself with a rope or, after scorching his hands at the stove, plunge them into the snow. The following week, it would be the Epicureans: he decided that death might come upon him unawares at any moment and that, this being the case, the only attitude possible for a man was to make the most of the present with no thought for the morrow. Implementing this conclusion, he neglected his studies, flung away his notebooks and, draped across his bed, devoured light novels and gingerbread until he made himself sick. Sometimes, in a fit of wrath, he would summon God to prove His existence by performing a miracle then and there, and the next minute, not having received a satisfactory response, proclaimed himself an atheist. This coldly rational decision did not prevent him from wondering, when he looked at a circle chalked on the blackboard, whether in view of the existence of symmetry, which is a phenomenon pleasing to the eye, our present life must not be preceded by another, of which we remember nothing, and followed by a third, of which we can guess nothing. Perhaps he had been a horse, before becoming a human. All things considered, however, the philosophical system that appealed to him most was skepticism. "I imagined," he wrote in Boyhood, "that there was nothing and nobody in the universe except me, that objects were not objects but appearances, visible only when I paid attention to them and vanishing the instant I stopped thinking about them. . . . 'Ihere were moments when I became so possessed by this idte fixe that I would whirl around, hoping to ambush the void where I was not."