Both Tolstoy and Rousseau were thin-skinned and highly emotional people which led to frequently turbulent relations with their contemporaries. They shared a huge energy and ambition which led them into diverse areas of intellectual and artistic endeavour, and a complete lack of fear in the face of controversy. Their most incisive works were deemed so subversive they were banned by the authorities, and yet neither Rousseau nor Tolstoy, despite their devotion to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, sought revolution, retaining little faith in the efficacy of political activity. Rousseau died shortly before the French Revolution and Tolstoy shortly before the Russian Revolution, events they both inspired and were blamed for. As Robert Wokler writes, Rousseau had a greater impact on his age than almost anyone else in the eighteeenth century:
No other eighteeenth-century thinker contributed more major writings in so wide a range of subjects and forms, nor wrote with such sustained passion and eloquence. No one else managed through both his works and his life to excite or disturb public imagination so deeply. Almost alone among the seminal figures of the Enlightenment, he subjected the main currents of the world he inhabited to censure, even while channelling their direction …27
One could say that Tolstoy almost picked up where Rousseau left off, for the above achievements are also associated with his prodigious legacy.
After his rather dismal first year at university, Tolstoy spent the summer of 1845 at Yasnaya Polyana, during which time he did a lot of reading and thinking. He became interested in the ethical ideas of the pre-Christian Cynics – Greek philosophers who preached, amongst other things, the virtues of a life without material possessions.28 For Aunt Toinette, her nephew Lev now became an ‘incomprehensible creature’ obsessed with plumbing the depths of human existence, and only happy when he met someone prepared to listen to him hold forth passionately about his ideas.29 Tolstoy’s inborn eccentricity had certainly begun to exhibit itself in various ways. under the influence of Rousseau and the philosophical ideas of Diogenes, one of the chief Cynics, he tried to simplify his life. In the fourth century BC Diogenes chose to live an ascetic and self-sufficient life, jettisoning the idea of marriage and family and rejecting laws and conventional social institutions as corrupt and hypocritical. He was famous for sleeping in a tub on the street. Tolstoy made a start by trying to simplify his own life. Apart from giving up wearing socks, he invented a utilitarian one-piece garment which was buttoned up from the inside, serving him as both daytime clothing and bed-linen-cum-blanket. A party of lady visitors to Yasnaya Polyana were slightly nonplussed when they encountered him in this strange garb. Nor was Aunt Toinette entirely convinced by this Russian Diogenes, though had she been alive during the last decades of his life she might well have thought otherwise.
While he was walking incognito in this garment one day, Tolstoy was able to listen in on unguarded conversations amongst his peasants. This was how he first discovered how hated the nobility were by the peasants, and how little respect the peasants accorded their owners.30 It came as a shock for him to hear such sentiments from his own serfs. More shocking to him, though, was the contempt generally shown by the Russian ruling class for the well-being of their serfs, particularly since it was the peasants who habitually had to bail their masters out – literally, in Tolstoy’s case. One warm day during a visit to the Yushkovs’ country estate on the banks of the Volga, Tolstoy took it into his head to impress the young ladies amongst the guests by throwing himself head-first into the large pond near the house, fully dressed, intending to swim to the island in the middle. He had to be rescued from drowning by peasant women who had been gathering hay nearby: they hauled him out of the water with their rakes.31 Tolstoy’s social conscience was beginning to awaken, but it would be a long time yet before he would renounce his aristocratic birthright and become a fully fledged ‘repentant nobleman’.
Tolstoy went to great lengths to try to make a good impression on his contemporaries during his student years, and he also tried enhancing his physical appearance. He was never happy with his looks, but his attempts to improve them did not always meet with very successful results. He once conceived the idea of shaving his eyebrows to make them grow back more bushy, and ended up almost shaving them off completely.32 Shy and lacking in self-confidence, he never quite cut the dashing figure on the dance floor who lived in his imagination, and he was too absent-minded and ungainly to succeed in emulating his suave and debonair brother Sergey. But he nevertheless enjoyed being part of the uppermost echelon of Kazan society, made a few good friends, and even wrote a waltz with one of them.33
Tolstoy had promised Aunt Toinette in the summer of 1845 that he would work hard in his second year at university, and in his leisure time study music, art and languages. ‘I won’t go into society at all,’ he vowed in a letter (‘Je n’irai pas en société du tout’).34 That autumn, however, he went to all the most prestigious social events, including a grand ball held in October 1845 in honour of the visit of Nicholas I’s son-in-law Maximilian, the Duke of Leuchtenberg. And in January 1846 he had to spend a few days in the university jail for persistently failing to attend lectures.35 This oscillation between the setting of unrealistic, puritanical goals for a future life of purity and self-denial and the self-mortification which followed his actual pursuit and enjoyment in the present of a hedonistic social life, is the leitmotif of Tolstoy’s first diary entry, which he famously began in the university’s venereal diseases clinic in March 1847. In fact, one could say that the battle between these two opposing sides of Tolstoy’s personality was the main theme of his entire life as an adult, and certainly fundamental to his creative processes. Simultaneous possession of these two warring impulses was not unique to Tolstoy, but may be seen as the mark of a quintessentially Russian nature. The early-twentieth-century philosophical thinker Nikolay Berdyaev certainly thought along these lines. As he wrote in his book The Origin of Russian Communism, ‘In the typical Russian two elements are always in opposition – the primitive natural paganism of boundless Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, a reaching out towards the other world.’36
In January 1847, when he was eighteen, Tolstoy started compiling a ‘Journal of Daily Activities’, listing on the left-hand side of the page a strict timetable for each day under the heading ‘The Future’. Here he set out exactly which hours he would devote to his coursework, when he would have lunch, when he would study English, go for a walk or play chess. On the right-hand side, marked ‘The Past’, he entered comments on his performance. Thus on good days, when he maintained his self-discipline, he could write that he had kept to his regime, while on others he was forced to admit that he did ‘nothing’, ‘almost nothing’, did things ‘badly’, ‘read Gogol’ or ‘overslept’.37 This journal was maintained until June. At the same time Tolstoy started compiling rules for developing his willpower. These included getting up at five and going to bed no later than ten, with two hours permissible for sleeping during the day. He resolved to eat moderately, and nothing sweet, to walk for an hour every day, to carry out everything he prescribed for himself and visit a brothel only twice a month. In the second tier of his rules he vowed to disregard luxuries and all public opinion not based on reason, and to love those to whom he could be of service. The rules in the third and last tier called on him to do only one thing at a time, and not allow flights of imagination unless necessary.38