Ivan Churis' isba was on the very verge of collapse, but when the master, appalled at such destitution, offered to build him a new one, the fellow pleaded to be allowed to stay on in his old hovel, with his filth and his eccentricities. Yukhvanka wanted to sell his horse, claiming it was too old to work; but when Leo went to buy the animal, just to do the man a favor, lie saw that there was nothing the matter with it: the muzhik only wanted to get rid of it bccause he was too lazy to farm his field. Karp, the coachmaker, and his sons whined that their trade brought them next to nothing in comparison with the farmers, but when Tolstoy offered to rent them eighty acres of his own land to work, on very favorable terms, they refused, suspecting their young master of trying to make a profit at their expense. There was no school in the village, and besides, nobody in it knew how to read. Negligence, ignorance, disease, sloth and cunning prevailed. They muddled along from day to day and harvest to harvest, and nothing was done to better the condition of anyone. Could one lone man budge this mountain of wretchedness? And yet, how was one to avoid getting involved with it? The serfs overran their lord's existence—he was as much theirs as they were his. If he did not go to see them in their village, they came to him in his handsome house. "Assembled before the steps," Tolstoy wrote, "were a woman in bloodstained rags, screaming that her father- in-law had tried to kill her; two brothers who had been quarreling over the division of their property for two years, glaring at each other with loathing; a grizzled, unshaven old house-servant with the shaking hands of a drunkard, whom his son, the gardener, had brought to the master to be scolded; a muzhik who had run his wife out of his house because she had not done a stroke of work all spring; and the wife in question, sick and sobbing, not uttering a word, sitting there on the grass in front of the steps, holding out her swollen leg wrapped in dirty rags."1 The young master swallowed his distaste, swelled out his chest and, calling upon the vast stores of his inexperience, scolded some and consoled others; then, with a feeling compounded of weariness, shame, helplessness and remorse, he went back to his room.2
However, although he deplored the wretched lives of his serfs, Tolstoy did not condemn serfdom itself. "The idea that the serfs should be liberated was quite unheard-of in our circle in the forties," he wrote in his Reminiscences. "The hereditary ownership of serfs seemed an indispensable fact of life." After losing his illusions as to the opportuneness of the reforms he had dreamed of carrying out, lie came to think it was better for the muzhiks to go on vegetating and the stewards fleecing them, and the estate to slumber on. "My peasants are no better off, and it grows harder for me to bear every day," said his hero Nekhlyudov in A Landlord's Morning. "Ah, if only I had seen my projects crowned with success, or gratefully accepted . . . But no: I sec nothing but pointless routine, vice, mistrust, impotence. I am wasting the best years of my life." And also, "It is easier to find happiness for oneself than to give it to others."
In the country, as in town, Tolstoy went on reading everything that came into his hands, and took notes on a wide variety of subjects. Ever precise, he drew up a list of his literary discoveries over the years, marking opposite each the degree of admiration it had aroused in him:
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (immense influence).
Sterne's Sentimental Voyage (very great influence).
Rousseau's Confessions (immense influence). Emile (immense influence).
La Nouvelle blelo'ise (very great influence).
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (very great influence).
Schiller's The Robbers (very great influence).
Gogol's The Overcoat, Ivan Ivanovich, The Nevsky Prospect (great influence).
Vii (immense influence). Dead Souls (very great influence).
Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (very great influence).
Druzhnin's Pauline Saks (very great influence).
Grigorovich's Anton Goremyka (very great influence).
Dickens' David Copperfield (immense influence).
Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times (very great influence).
Prcscott's Conquest of Mexico (great influence).
At least two works in this motley collection dealt with the muzhiks: Anton Goremyka and A Sportsman's Sketches. Tolstoy marveled to see that in Grigorovich's latest book the muzhik was no longer regarded as "a part of the landscape/' but as a "teacher of life," and that the writer spoke of this humble hero "with love, respect and even a sort of trembling compassion."3 As for Turgenev's tales: Tolstoy was equally enchanted by the charm of their style and the liberality of their equali- tarian ideas. He later said that A Sportsman's Sketches, Anton Goremyka and Uncle Tom's Cabin had been instrumental in abolishing slavery from the world.4
At the moment, however, a different form of slavery' was bothering Tolstoy: that of the flesh. He raged against himself for being so susceptible to the diabolical allure of women. "How difficult it is for a man," he wrote in his diary on June 14, 1847, "to cultivate the good in him when he is surrounded by nothing but evil influences." While he was striving to get the upper hand of his spring fever—treacherously abetted by the warm weather, the twittering birds and the sight of the peasant girls working in the fields—little Dunyasha arrived at Yasnaya Polyana with her husband at her side.* For him, she had always been like a sister; the thought that she might also be a woman had never entered his head. And here she was, a young bride, back to spend a few nights under his roof. A room was prepared for the couple. Tolstoy could not refrain from imagining scenes of lascivious intimacy lictwecn her and her husband. "Yesterday I was in an excellent frame of mind," he wrote on June 15, "and would no doubt have remained so until evening, if the arrival of Dunyasha and her husband had not affected mc so strongly that I had to forego the satisfaction of being pleased with myself."
•Dunyasha Temyashov (Dunycchka), ward of Leo Tolstoy's father, had gone with the family to Kazan and married there.
The expressions "I am pleased with myself" and "I am not pleased with myself" reeur often in his writing, and arc probably code-words to cover up reprehensible practices. His splendid health and prodigious appetite for life demanded, or so he thought, these solitary "purges." Otherwise he would have succumbed to temptations yet more base. But no sooner had he divested himself in this manner of his obsession with women than the creatures reappeared, more shameless than ever, in his imagination, revenging themselves upon him for trying to do without them. He indignantly undertook to confound them with dialectics, posing as the champion of a sacred cause. The next day, June 16, he was still unable to forget Dunyasha: "Will a day ever come when I shall no longer be dependent upon external contingencies? In my opinion this would be a huge stride toward perfection. . . . Now I shall set myself the following rule: regard the company of women as a nccessary social evil and avoid them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who causes us to lose our natural qualities of courage, resoluteness, reason and justice, etc., if not women?"
He felt better after writing down this peremptory excommunication. But then, a strange feeling of disenchantment stole over him, he no longer saw any point in continuing to record his daily impressions: without a sigh, he put the notebook away in a drawer along with some other papers, and was not to resume his diary until three years later.