These nocturnal meditations were supplemented during the day by the study of the philosophers. He was not satisfied by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" and proposed, in its stead, "I want, therefore I am." Dazzled by this discovery, he even outlined a theory, beginning with the words: "If man did not desire, there would be no man."1'1 And, after finding fault with Descartes, he came in due course to Rousseau. The Confessions thundered through his brain like an earthquake. He learned that he was not alone to harbor a writhing mass of sordid instincts, that all men were probably equally cowardly, covetous, lying, envious and cruel, but that it required great strength of character to own up to it. As for the theory of the benefits of a primitive life as opposed to the evils of civilization: he might have invented it himself. "I thought I was reading my own mind and simply added a few details here and there," he said in Youth.
These reflections inspired him to withdraw into himself and flee his fellows; and Aunt Toinette, watching him wander through the grounds —gazing at nothing, slack-jawed, conversing with some imaginary partner—began to worry. When addressed, he came back from another world, assuming an expression at once dazed and condescending. He, who formerly took such pains with his dress in order to appear comme il faut at all times, now prcachcd simplicity of attire and began to neglect his appcarance. With his own hands, he sewed a dressing gown of coarse linen, which he wore in the day as he meditated and, by means of an ingenious system of flaps which could be unbuttoned and folded back, used at night as bed and blanket. No more shirt, no cravat, no hose: slippers, over bare feet. He did not even change for company. When Aunt Toinette rebuked him for this getup, he angrily retorted that he was above such "vain contingencies." However, the new Diogenes of Yasnaya Polyana was hard-put to overcome the emotions women aroused in him. "I always watched most attentively as the ladies' gowns —especially pink ones—came and went around the pond, across the meadow or in front of the house/'2- lie wrote. And he alternated his philosophical investigations with romanesque readings which were disturbing in quite another way: Eug&ne Sue, Alexandre Dumas and Paul de Kock were his revenge upon reality. "Not only did I not dare suspect the author of lying," he wrote, "but the author himself did not exist for me, and the characters, real and living events, sprang up before my eyes, straight off the printed page. ... I discovered in myself all the passions they described, and I resembled all the characters, both heroes and villains, in every novel, just as a hypochondriac discovers every symptom of ever}' conceivable disease in himself when he reads a treatise on medicine." When his imagination had become white-hot, he closed his book and confronted a void. Not one woman in his life. How long could he be contcnt with the solitary pleasures so dear to Rousseau?
In mid-August, he left Yasnaya Polyana with his brothers, returned to Kazan and, rather than repeat his first year in the Department of Oriental Languages, asked to be transferred to the Law Department. "I do not know whether this will please you or not," he wrote to Aunt Toinette on August 25, 1845, "but I have changed departments and become a student of law. I personally find this science more easy and natural to apply to our private lives than any other and I am consequently very pleased with the change. Now I am going to tell you my plans and the kind of life I want to live. I won't go out in society at all. I will divide my time equally between music, drawing, languages and my courses at the University. May God grant me the determination to carry out my intentions."
On his way through Moscow he had seen his brother Nicholas, attached as a cadet, or "junker,"® to the 14th Artillery Brigade which was stationed not far from the city.
"Poor fellow, he's having a miserable time in the camp, especially as he hasn't a cent, one must find it extremely hard," he exclaimed in the same letter. "And the others! Good God, what yokels, if ever there were any! You need only one glimpse of camp life at first hand to lose all desire for a career in the army."
His decision was already taken: he would be neither officer nor diplomat, but jurist! However, his first law courscs did not provide the intellectual stimulus he had expected from them. lie continued to receive poor marks, and was even put into confinement oncc, for unexplained absence from Professor Ivanov's history lectures. (Him
• A young man from the upper classes serving a sort of military apprenticeship before receiving his officer's commission. N. Tr.
again!) In the vaulted cell with its barred window, he found a fellow law student and undertook to explain to him, with passion, that history was nothing but a "heap of myths and useless, trivial details, sprinkled with dates and names!"
The future author of War and Peace railed on until nightfall against official historians and the "temple of the false science," lighted from below by a tallow candle, gesticulating, his cap in his eyes and his coat unbuttoned, across from his companion who was dropping with sleep.
Despite his relative diligence at his studies, he miraculously scraped through the year-end examinations and departed, elated, for Yasnaya Polyana, determined to turn his hand to estate management during the summer months. Soon after his arrival, he wrote to his brother Nicholas, who had meanwhile been transferred to the Caucasus: "I have been at Yasnaya with the whole family,f which is just as it should be, for two weeks now, and yet I shall not begin to live according to my rules until tomorrow. This 'tomorrow' will make you laugh, yet I still have hope! I must tell you that I am up to my neck in estate management: primo, it keeps me busy and secundo, it amuses me—I am inventing all sorts of machines and improvements. I don't know whether I have told you about the three books I am writing: one is called Miscellany, another What Is Needed for the Welfare of Russia? and Studies of Russian Customs, and the third is Observations on Property Management. . . . My Miscellany will be filled with poetry, philosophy and in general things that are not pretty but are amusing to write." Thus, even before he knew he was going to be a writer, Tolstoy was preoccupied by the three areas he spent the rest of his life exploring: storytelling, educating his fellow men and organizing life on a country estate.
At the level of mental maturity he had now reached, it seemed absurd that he should still be required to live in the home of his guardian, Aunt Pelagva. His brothers Dmitry and Sergey agreed, and so, when they returned to Kazan, they took their leave of the Yushkov household and moved together into a six-room cottagc, rented for seven hundred rubles a year. During his second year in the Law Department Leo Tolstoy, as flighty, unstable and unconcentrated as ever, nevertheless expressed some interest in Professor Vogel's discussions on the death penalty and deigned to attend a few of Professor Meyer's lectures on the history of civil law. His private studies waxed as his class attendance waned. Every minute he stole from the Department was spent in reading and exalting discourse: "Gogol, Rousseau, Pushkin, Goethe's Faust, Hegel . . ." Since January 1847 he had been keeping
f That is, Auut Toinette, Dmitty, Sergey and Marya Tolstoy.
a diary of his thoughts and actions, and cspccially of his resolutions. His idee fixe was to pcrfcct his famous "Rules of Life." It seemed to him that the more clearly he defined perfection, the more chance he had of attaining it. His recipes for virtue covered whole pages. "Get up early (five o'clock), go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock) . . . Eat little and avoid sweets . . . Try to do everything by yourself. . . Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for ever)' week, a goal for ever)' day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater . . ." "Keep away from women . . "Kill desire by work . . ." "Be good, but try to let no one know it . . ." "Always live less expensively than you might . . ." "Change nothing in your style of living even if you bccome ten times richer . . Setting down these aphorisms with the glowing conviction of his eighteen years, Leo Tolstoy believed he would remain true- to them until death. But, at his present degree of intellectual ebullition, the notes in his diary were no longer enough. He drafted a commentary on Rousseau's philosophy, formulated in passing a few caustic remarks about history, "the most backward science of all," outlined an essay on the immortality of the soul, and another in French on the second chapter of BruyЈrc's Characters: and, counseled by Professor Meyer, began a comparative study of the Directives of Catherine II and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. He became enthused by this at-first-glancc forbidding task. But then lie fell ill; was he going to have to give up all literary activity, perhaps for days? Fortunately, it was nothing serious, and at eighteen his vitality was such that the fever itself was fuel for his meditations. Admitted to the university clinic on March 11, 1847, he looked forward happily to a period of uninterrupted study far from acadcmic obligations and worldly temptation. In the calm of the big white hall, he seriously applied his mind, for the first time, to the problem of the lawfulness of power. He accepted the imperial government as a necessity, but he had doubts as to the fate of freedom and justice for the individual under such a system; and he was opposed to capital punishment but advocated the assimilation of enacted law to natural law. "The Directives brought more glory to Catherine than benefit to Russia," he wrote.