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Sergey was indeed sceptical of his brother’s protestations, and rightly so. He was particularly worried that his younger brother would start gambling again in St Petersburg, where he stood to lose spectacularly large sums to unscrupulous players. Sergey repeatedly implored Tolstoy in letters he sent him that spring to start work, and on no account to play cards. He was generally concerned about Tolstoy’s lack of discipline at this time, as well as that of his brother’s servant Fyodor, who had stolen money from him, pawned some silver spoons and then spent all the money his master had given him to redeem them on drink.19 Actually, none of the Tolstoy brothers seemed to be coping well with suddenly coming into money: Dmitry’s gardener had stolen 7,000 roubles which he had foolishly left in the estate office at Shcherbachevka, and Sergey was himself spending considerable sums in pursuit of Maria (Masha) Shishkina, a girl in the famous Tula gypsy choir, with whom he was madly in love.20 But that was small fry compared to his brother Lev’s recidivism. On 1 May 1849, Tolstoy sent Sergey a letter which he instructed him to read alone:

Seryozha.

I imagine you are already saying that I am the most empty-headed fellow [Sergey’s pet phrase for Tolstoy], and you will be telling the truth. God knows what I have gone and done! I set off for no reason to Petersburg, did nothing worthwhile there, just spent a heap of money and got into debt. It’s stupid. It’s unbelievably stupid. You won’t believe how much it’s tormenting me. The main thing are the debts which I have to pay, and as soon as possible, because if I don’t pay them soon, I will lose my reputation on top of the money. Do this, I beg you: without telling the aunts and Andrey [Sobolev, the estate manager] why and what for, sell [the village of] Vorotinka to either uvarov or Seleznev …21

Since he had arrived in St Petersburg, Tolstoy had taken two law exams, but then had got bored and given up. His latest half-baked scheme was to join the army as a volunteer.

As soon as the news had reached St Petersburg from France in March 1848 that King Louis Philippe had been overthrown and a republic had been proclaimed, an alarmed Nicholas I had started mobilising his troops. The 1848 French Revolution launched a wave of insurrections across Europe, and Nicholas I was particularly alarmed when revolution broke out in areas of the Habsburg Empire such as Hungary (which shared a border with Russia). The dreaded ‘Gendarme of Europe’ was thus only too happy to accept the invitation of the Austrian government to help restore order in Hungary by despatching four infantry regiments and an artillery brigade in May 1849, not least because there were two Poles in charge of the Hungarian troops who had been in exile since their own failed uprising against Russian rule in 1831. The solipsistic and rash Tolstoy was oblivious to all the politics, however. He was dreaming of military glory. He now set his sights on joining the Horse Guards, and perhaps even receiving his commission as an officer before completing the standard two-year period of service.22 It was another plan that was not thought through.

Just over a week later Tolstoy wrote again to Sergey to tell him he was, in fact, not going to join the army now, and had gone back to his previous plan of taking his law exams. He also asked Sergey about the possibility of his serf Alexey Petukhov working for him, offering to take care of his family and pay him ten roubles a month (a sum which puts into perspective the thousands of roubles he sometimes lost at cards).23 Sergey had been dutifully biting his lip and helping his brother out over the previous months, and he did not bother giving him any advice now, knowing in advance that it would not be heeded. But he did exhort Tolstoy to come back home and sort himself out. ‘You say that stupid things only happen once in one’s life, and if only that were so!’ he wrote, warning him that he was in danger of squandering his entire assets.24 To Aunt Toinette, before whom he felt ashamed, Tolstoy wrote that he had dropped his earlier idea of working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was intending to come back and prepare for his exams at Yasnaya Polyana. Sometime either at the end of May or the beginning of June in 1849, just as the northern capital’s famed ‘white nights’ were about to reach their peak, he set out to travel home, first to Moscow and then on towards Tula. He was leaving behind a number of creditors, and his unpaid debts would gnaw at his conscience over the next few years.

One person who saw nothing of the white nights that summer was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the talented but impoverished young writer who had published a story bearing the name ‘White Nights’ the previous year. He was languishing in a jail cell that barely let in any light at all. The week before Tolstoy sent his grovelling letter to Sergey, the tsarist secret police had descended on Dostoyevsky’s flat to arrest him. In a coincidence worthy of his later masterpieces, he had been living in the building which faced the Hotel Napoleon on the other side of the street. Dostoyevsky was one of twenty-four members of the left-wing intelligentsia group called the Petrashevsky Circle who were all engaged to varying degrees in the struggle for political freedoms and civil rights. Their crime was to have met on Friday evenings to discuss such incendiary topics as socialism, the abolition of serfdom and censorship. In the suffocating, paranoid climate of Nicholas I’s Russia, even discussing such topics was tantamount to conspiracy, particularly in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions. At the Circle’s last meeting, on 15 April 1849, someone had read out the celebrated letter to Gogol composed by the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. This was an outspoken and fearless document, written on the eve Belinsky’s untimely death, in which he castigated the writer for his seemingly spineless defence of Russian absolutism and all it stood for. Belinsky had written the letter in Germany in 1847, while dying of tuberculosis, and handwritten samizdat copies had spread like wildfire amongst the progressive intelligentsia after being smuggled into Russia.

Dostoyevsky and his comrades were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the notorious, dank prison where Peter the Great’s son, Tolstoy’s ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich and the Decembrists had all been held. While Tolstoy was still strutting about St Petersburg in suits made by the city’s best tailor, and dining at its finest restaurants (it is no surprise who his creditors were), Dostoyevsky was communing with fleas, lice, cockroaches and rats in a damp, dark cell. At the end of 1849 he was clamped in irons and sentenced to four years of hard labour in Siberia.25 The two giants of Russian literature would spend their lives coming close to each other but never meeting, either physically or ideologically. For one thing Dostoyevsky was socially Tolstoy’s inferior, and for another, he was his main rival, but they would also come to espouse radically different worldviews.