Despite all his good intentions, by autumn 1850 Tolstoy had once again succumbed to drinking, gambling and spending time with the gypsies in Tula. There were some huge losses at cards this time: 4,000 roubles on one occasion.34 Another change of routine was called for, so in December 1850 he again departed for Moscow, where he got out his diary and started compiling rules once more. Some of them were unrealistic (‘play the piano for four hours every day’), some were practical (‘do exercise every day’, ‘say as little as you can about yourself’, ‘speak loudly and clearly’), some were idealistic (‘don’t have women’), some were quite odd (‘before a ball do a lot of thinking and writing’), and some were just plain silly (‘don’t read novels’).35 Tolstoy also drew up elaborate rules for card playing – this time he intended to play cards seriously, and gamble only with people richer than him.36 He went to a lot of balls that winter (there were rules about dancing too), as he wanted to mingle with the haut monde of Moscow society and find a wife. It would in fact be a long time before he found the right person to marry, but his socialising meant he was up to date with all the latest intrigues, and so was able to send Aunt Toinette long letters telling her all the gossip doing the rounds of the Moscow salons – such as the scandal surrounding the evidence which implicated Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s aristocratic Russian mistress in the notorious murder of her French rival.37
Toinette greatly enjoyed the letters she received from her favourite nephew. On 27 January 1851 she told him in one of her replies that he wrote so engagingly, and so naturally, that it was if he was standing there before her. But she was concerned about the aimlessness of his life, and his worrying gambling habit. She reminded him reproachfully that he had come back to join his family for Christmas, but had preferred to play cards all night in Tula rather than spend time with his brother Nikolay, who was back ‘in Russia’, as he put it, on leave from the Caucasus for the first time in nearly four years. Aunt Toinette also despaired of Sergey (‘If he had a job which occupied him seriously, he would not have given into that mad passion for the gypsy girl’), and she hoped Lev would find some purpose in his life, and not enter into a marriage of convenience just to pay off his debts.38 She beseeched Tolstoy to take himself in hand.39 He was beginning to. He was already painfully aware of the emptiness of Moscow society, and he had begun to think seriously about writing fiction. It was in December 1850 that he declared in his diary that he wanted to write a story about the gypsies.40
From the very beginning, Tolstoy’s ability to hold up a mirror to his blemishes (looking in the mirror too frequently was another habit he faulted himself for at this time) would be fundamental to his powers of psychological analysis. On 8 March 1851 he began keeping a ‘Franklin Journal’ as a way of monitoring his moral lapses. Benjamin Franklin had described his technique of drawing up a table of virtues, and marking those he had failed to demonstrate each day, in his autobiography Mémoires de la vie privée, which was published in Paris in 1791.41 Whether he had finally found his resolve, or whether the arrival of spring simply fired him with new energy, Tolstoy now became rigorous about writing in his own diary every day, convinced that acknowledging his moral failings was half the battle to eliminating them. He was quite successful at keeping up regular gymnastics and fencing lessons, but his behaviour rarely passed muster: the words ‘laziness’, ‘cowardice’, ‘gluttony’, ‘false modesty’ and ‘self-deception’ punctuate his diary entries during these months as a regular admonishment of his lack of moral fibre.
As he began experimenting with fiction for the first time, Tolstoy became more reclusive, and he also started to spend even more time reading. Earlier in the year he had been working his way through Montesquieu; now he read Lamartine’s newly published Histoire des Girondins (1847), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1769). During the spring of 1851 he began to be more observant not only of the turbulent emotional and intellectual processes going on inside his head, but of life around him. What Tolstoy had in mind when he embarked on the first draft of Childhood, which would become his first published work, was an original kind of Bildungsroman in four parts, to be entitled Four Epochs of Development. under the clear influence of David Copperfield,42 and also Laurence Sterne, amongst many other influences, Tolstoy’s goal was to explore the psychological experiences of a young boy growing to adulthood. As with almost every work of fiction he ever published, Tolstoy drew on his own life as raw material for the evocation of particular scenes from two days in his character Nikolenka’s childhood. It is important to recognise that his own life was the means and not the end, but as the Tolstoy scholar Richard Gustafson has put it, ‘this distortion of personal experience conceals only to reveal’,43 since sincerity and emotional truth were always Tolstoy’s ultimate goal. Childhood is deceptively simple. In order for it to work, Tolstoy had to come up with a convincing narrative voice, thus one of the first problems he wrestled with was whether to have an adult narrator, and risk his story seeming like a memoir, or have the child Nikolenka himself tell the story of his life, which posed dilemmas of a different kind.44 Tolstoy’s artistic techniques were already sophisticated. The fact that he wrote to a friend in Petersburg that spring to ask if he might help negotiate the literary censor was a sign that he was taking his writing seriously.45
Nikolay came to visit him in Moscow that March. The end of his furlough was fast approaching, and he suggested that his brother accompany him back to the Caucasus. Tolstoy immediately agreed, and at the beginning of April he left Moscow and returned to Yasnaya Polyana. The Caucasus offered Tolstoy the opportunity to start from a clean slate. It was a chance to leave behind his debts and his bad habits, and embrace a life of danger and adventure on the most dangerous frontier of the Russian Empire. The famous daguerreotype taken of the two brothers that spring shows the future writer clean-shaven, sitting tensely in rather scruffy clothes, his hands resting on a cane, fixing the viewer with a penetrating stare, while the more relaxed, phlegmatic Nikolay sits beside him in his army uniform, nonchalantly resting his elbow on the back of his brother’s chair. By the end of the month the brothers were on the road, deciding to take a scenic route via Kazan, to catch up with family and friends. They took along two Yasnaya Polyana serfs as their personal servants: Alexey Orekhov and Ivan Suvorov (Alyoshka and Vanyushka).
After a pleasant week in Kazan, during which time Tolstoy’s head was turned by the demure and pretty Zinaida Molostvova, the brothers headed south. On 30 May, after a glorious week sailing down the Volga from Saratov to Astrakhan and a further week on horses, they finally arrived in Starogladkovskaya, in present-day Chechnya. That same evening Tolstoy got out his diary. ‘How did I end up here?’ he asked himself. ‘I don’t know. And why am I here? Also I don’t know.’46 As it turned out, Starogladkovskaya was to be Tolstoy’s base for the next two and a half years, and the time he spent there was to be the making of him. By the time he left the Caucasus he would be a commissioned officer in the imperial army and a published writer. His firsthand experience of warfare in the Caucasus, furthermore, would prove to be invaluable when he later came to write the battle scenes in War and Peace.