Leo Tolstoy

Having declined the opportunity to become the children’s stepmother, Ergolskaya also lost the right to be their legal guardian. The sisters of Tolstoy’s father were both considered closer to their nephews. When one aunt, Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in 1841 the children were entrusted to another, Pelageya (Polina) Yushkova, who lived in Kazan. This town on the Volga river, home to one of the six universities in the Russian Empire, seemed a suitable place for the growing children. Kazan was a natural centre for Oriental studies, given that the town and its surrounding region was home to the Volga Tatars, the empire’s largest Muslim minority. After failing to gain admission on his first attempt, Leo was admitted to the Faculty of Oriental Languages when he applied again in 1844.

The main challenges of Tolstoy’s teenage life coincided with the five and a half years he lived in Kazan. First and foremost, he had to handle the conflict between his powerful sexuality and a no less powerful desire for chastity. He knew very well that it was Eros that had ruined the primordial innocence of humanity. In Childhood, Tolstoy describes with the lofty tenderness of an experienced man the emerging erotic feelings of a ten-year-old boy suddenly kissing a girl’s naked shoulder. Expelled from the paradise of early childhood, he must now deal with less touching and delicate emotions.

In Kazan Tolstoy was relatively free from the control of his relatives. Although not rich, he still had money to spend. At the same time, he was extremely shy and unsure of himself, especially in the company of women of his own social standing. Inevitably this combination of factors made him a regular visitor to brothels. Introduced to paid sex by his elder brother at the age of fifteen, Leo would later recall standing weeping by the bed after losing his virginity. This tension between irresistible lust and revulsion, chiefly for his own bestiality, became a recurrent emotional theme, first in his diaries and then in his prose.

Tellingly, it was while being treated for gonorrhoea at the university clinic in 1847 that Tolstoy began the diary he would continue to keep, on and off, for the next sixty years. The most significant interruption coincided with the period he was working on his two main novels. The diary exposes to harsh scrutiny not only the author’s deeds, but his secret thoughts and desires. The level of maniacal self-absorption and self-flagellation to which Tolstoy subjects himself can be shocking to a modern reader. Seeking to live by the highest moral criteria, he sets himself impossible tasks and, time and again, chastises himself for failing to meet them. Reading the diary, one is reminded of Philippe Lejeune’s observation that ‘a diary is rarely a self-portrait, or if it is taken as one, it sometimes seems like a caricature.’¹

Tolstoy’s diary does not represent the person we come to know from many of his letters and the memoirs of his friends and family members: charmingly or caustically witty, tenderly, if sometimes awkwardly, caring about the people he loved, actively generous and kind. The most difficult and sometimes unappealing traits of Tolstoy’s personality most strongly reveal themselves in the intimate spheres of his life: the diary and in his relations with his wife. Often these two spheres overlap.

In his first diary entry we can already observe the outline of Tolstoy’s future struggles with his own persona:

I’ve come to see clearly that the disorderly life that the majority of fashionable people take to be a consequence of youth is nothing other than a consequence of the early corruption of the soul . . . Let a man withdraw from society, let him retreat into himself, and his reason will soon cast aside the spectacles which showed him everything in distorted form and his view of things will become so clear that he will be unable to understand how he had not seen it before. Let reason do its work and it will indicate to you your destiny, and will give you rules with which you can confidently enter society . . . Form your reason so that it would be coherent with the whole, the source of everything, and not with the part, i.e. the society of people, then the society as a part won’t have an influence on you. It is easier to write ten volumes of philosophy than to put one single principle into practice. (Ds, p. 4; CW, XLVI, p. 3)