In May 1844, when he was sixteen, Tolstoy formally applied to the rector of Kazan university, Nikolay Lobachevsky (a mathematician famous for developing non-Euclidean geometry) for permission to take the various entrance exams. Tolstoy’s letter of application launches the twenty-five volumes of his letters in his Collected Works. As ever, Tolstoy wanted to be different, and instead of applying to study mathematics like his brothers, he elected to join the Faculty of Oriental Languages, whose scholarly achievements were already renowned. It was a smart move. By 1828, the year of Tolstoy’s birth, the faculty had professorships in Persian, Arabic and Turkish, and by the time he became a student, chairs in Mongolian, Mandarin Chinese, Armenian and Sanskrit had been added. Thanks to Lobachevsky’s active support, the teaching of oriental languages at Kazan university was of a quality unsurpassed anywhere in Europe.19 Tolstoy was thinking of his future career in making this choice: his plan at this stage was to join the diplomatic service (although when one bears in mind the direction his life took, a less suitable spokesman for Russian imperial policy is hard to imagine).20 First, however, he had to pass several exams. Tolstoy excelled in his French exam, and did well in German, English, Arabic and Turkish (though he later claimed to have no memory of the last three). He also received good results for mathematics, logic, Russian literature and religious studies, which, like most people of his background, he did not take seriously at all. Much later, in an early draft of Confession, he wrote that the whole edifice of theology collapsed for him as soon as he took an interest in philosophy when he was sixteen, and began to see that the catechism was a ‘lie’.21 Tolstoy did poorly in his Latin exam, having been unable to translate even two lines of an ode by Horace, and even worse in statistics and geography, his superlative command of the French language clearly not accompanied by even a basic familiarity with the country where it was the mother tongue. His performance in history was also execrable, and he later added the comment in the manuscript of Pavel Biryukov’s biography: ‘I knew nothing.’22 As a result, he was forced to resit these last two exams, and had to spend the summer in Kazan rather than Yasnaya Polyana, where he would much rather have been. In September 1844, however, just after his brother Nikolay graduated, he was admitted as a student.
Tolstoy’s university career was not distinguished. He had never before attended an educational institution, so mingling with other students in lecture halls was a novelty at first. It clearly soon wore off, though, despite Tolstoy having the chance to study with the distinguished orientalist Professor Mirza Kazem-Bek, whose scholarship was world-renowned. He ended up failing his first-year exams, which meant having to repeat the year. Rather than face this indignity, he decided to transfer to the less distinguished Law Faculty, but of course had to start from scratch again as a first-year student. He justified this change of direction in a letter he wrote to Aunt Toinette in August 1845, just before the start of the academic year, by maintaining that law was a more practical choice in view of its application in daily life (‘je trouve que l’application de cette science est plus facile et plus naturelle que toute autre à notre vie privée’).23
If Tolstoy did not respond well to the demands placed on him by his tutors at Kazan university, it was because he wanted to be in control of his own educational curriculum. He had already began to read seriously on his own. Occasionally there are references to novels he enjoyed in the scant literature documenting his Kazan years, such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, two contemporary ‘best-sellers’ by Alexandre Dumas which had just been published in France for the first time, and were also popular in Russia.24 Dumas’s earlier novel The Fencing Teacher, meanwhile, had been banned in Russia by Nicholas I for describing the events of the Decembrist uprising, and the subsequent exile to Siberia of its leaders, as was its author (Dumas was unable to visit Russia until 1858, during the reign of Alexander II). The Russian novel was still in its infancy at this time, but when Tolstoy stumbled upon Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin at a friend’s house during these years, he was so entranced that he sat up all night reading it, and started immediately reading it a second time when he got to the end.25
Tolstoy later drew up a list of the books which had the greatest influence on him between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The most influential Russian works included Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Notes. Amongst the foreign volumes we find Schiller’s The Robbers and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. Others that made a ‘huge’ impression on him were Dickens’s David Copperfield, the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ in the Gospel according to St Matthew, and Rousseau’s Confessions and Emile.26 Tolstoy was sometimes inaccurate about dates, and certainly in this case, as David Copperfield was first published in 1850, but it is nevertheless interesting to see the early appearance of Rousseau on his literary horizon.
It was philosophy which most excited the young Tolstoy during his student years, and it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) who probably exercised more influence on Tolstoy than any other thinker over the course of his lifetime. This influence can be seen in Tolstoy’s later condemnation of human civilisation for its corruption of human behaviour and distortion of man’s true nature (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750, and Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 1755), in his promotion of a radical child-centred education in a natural environment and his rejection of organised religion in favour of belief based on personal conscience (Émile, ou de l’éducation, 1762), in his fictional exploration of marital relations and family life (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) and in his advocacy of greater social equality (Du contrat social, 1762). Tolstoy also took a page out of Rousseau’s posthumously published Les Confessions (1781–1788) when writing his own autobiographical works, emulating the candour and rigour of the French-Swiss thinker’s unsparing self-analysis, not to mention the egocentric belief that the truth he discovered about himself had universal application. It is no wonder that Tolstoy saw himself in Rousseau, who also lost his mother at a young age, and followed a number of different paths in his life before finding his metier. Both figures are united by soaring genius, overweening vanity, a dogged, noble but often misguided sincerity, and a lamentable lack of a sense of humour, the latter being the single thing which sometimes makes the study of Tolstoy’s life and works slightly hard-going.