At the same time, he continued his diary with impassioned solemnity. "It has bccomc plain to me," he wrote, "that the irregular behavior which most people of fashion take to be a consequence of youth is nothing more than an expression of premature spiritual depravity. . . . If a man but leave society and withdraw into himself, a little thought will cause the glasses he has been wearing, through which he saw everything in a false light, to drop from his eyes. . . And further on, "I am beginning to feel a passion for study growing within me. . . . I should be the unhappicst man alive if I did not have a purpose in life. . . ."
lie had a sudden revelation that he could not go on taking courses in the Law Department. He had been too happy working by himself to go back to the tedious discipline of the University. "Strange as it may seem," he wrote later, "my work on the Directives and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws opened up a new field of intellectual activity to mc, whereas the University, with all its rules and regulations, not only did not help mc to study but actually prevented me from doing so."24 He also said, "Men of genius are incapable of studying when they are young, because they unconsciously feel that they must learn everything differently from the mass."25
When he left the clinic he already knew that his true professors were not Ivanov, Meyer and Vogcl, but Montesquieu and Rousseau.
On April 12, 1847, without waiting to take his examinations, he asked the rector for permission to withdraw from the University, for reasons of health—any excuse would do. His request was granted. On April 23, leaving his brothers Sergey and Dmitry to carry on docilely with their studies, he collected his books and papers together and packcd his trunks. According to his habit, he outlined his life for the next two years at Yasnaya Polyana: "Study the entire law course, practical medicine and part of medical theory; also French, Russian, German, English, Italian and Latin, and agriculture, both theory and practice; also history, geography, statistics; and mathematics—(high-school course); write a thesis; reach an average degree of perfection in music and painting; write rules of life."20 His friends from the University accompanied him as far as the ford in the Kazanka River, which was rising. Handshakes, kisses, thumps on the shoulders . . . the coachman was growing restive. The young man climbed up again, looked across to the opposite bank and smiled confidently at the future.
At the University, an inscription scratched with a knife in an iron desk—"Count Leo Tolstoy"—was the only trace of the five and a half years he had spent in Kazan.
5. Wild Oats
The first thing Leo did upon arriving at Yasnaya Polyana was to invite Aunt Toinette back under his roof. At nineteen he was no longer subject to any guardian's dictates and might choose whom he liked to manage his household. The old spinster saw that her moment of revenge upon the intriguer, Pelagya Ivanovna Yushkov, was at hand. She gratefully resumed possession of her two ground-floor rooms, hung up her icons in a corner and stood out her tins of dates, candies, cookics and raisins on her dresser. Soon afterward Sergey and Dmitry also came back to the old house, after passing their university examinations, and Nicholas joined them, having obtained a special furlough for "family affairs." All the Tolstoy sons were now their own masters and the inheritance could be divided up. According to the Russian law of that time, daughters were entitled to only one-fourteenth of the movable goods and one-eighth of the real property of their parents' estate, the remainder being divided equally among the sons. The boys considered these provisions unjust and decided that their sister Marya should receive a fifth of the whole, like themselves. They had discussed the allocation of the land the previous year. Nicholas, the eldest son, had chosen Nikolskove; Sergey, who was a great horse-fancier, took the estate and stud farm of Pirogovo; Marya was given 2440 acres of land and 150 peasants on the same estate; Dmitry received Sherbatchevka in the government of Kursk; and Leo inherited Yasnaya Polyana and a few neighboring hamlets—a total of approximately 4000 acres of land and 330 peasants. When Sergey Tolstoy was asked why his brother Leo had preferred Yasnaya Polyana to all the other lots, he answered, "It was considered the least profitable share of the entire estate." The deed of settlement was signed on July 11, 1847 and the brothers separated immediately afterward, each going off to prospect his claim.
Marya did not stay long, either: in November of that year she married her cousin Valerian Pctrovich Tolstoy and settled on the Pokrovskoye estate with him.
Now sole and absolute master of Yasnaya Polyana and its inhabitants, Leo Tolstoy began to plumb the extent of his responsibilities a little more ever)' day. First, lie decided to modernize the farming methods, and ordered a mechanical threshing machine built to his own specifications. At its inaugural demonstration for the peasants, the contraption throbbed, whistled, wheezed and threshed nothing. Deflated, Tolstoy moved on from technology to welfare. From afar, the thought of the reformation he would carry out on his land had positively intoxicated him. Close up, he was less sure of his theories. The stewards heard him out with obsequious smiles as he expounded his projects for social reform, and when he had finished talking they presented him with accounts which were so entangled that he no longer knew whether they were all crooks or himself a hopeless fool. He was too unsure of himself to argue, shout and throw the riff-raff out of his office, and so in the end, battle-weary, he grudgingly endorsed what he would rather have damned. Similarly, when he tried to give the muzhiks a vision of a more elevated and prosperous way of life, he felt he was infringing upon their time-worn ways. They met his exhortations and his benevolent concern with a staggering force of inertia. Centuries of serfdom had atrophied their brains. Cringing and blinking, their faces baked by sun and dirt, they refused to abandon their status as beasts of burden for a better life. "Master, our young master!" they respectfully murmured. And when his back was turned they called him a madman.