When his ardor cooled, he forgot all about his matrimonial plans and began seriously considering joining the army. But there again, he did not want to be too hasty. At the beginning of August his detachment returned to the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa and he took advantage of this momentary lull to revise his life principles once more: "On August 28—my birthday—I shall be twenty-three years old. From that
f It was an absolutely elementary rule of courtesy in Russia that a person must be addressed by his own first name, followed by that of his father.
day forward I want to live according to the goal I have set myself. Tomorrow I shall think about all this at leisure; but, starting right now, I shall return to my diary, write down my schedule of activities, and make a table summarizing the faults 1 have to correct, according to Franklin's method. . . . Beginning at sunrise I shall do my accounts and organize my papers and books and work in progress; then I shall collect my thoughts and begin to copy the first chapter of my book.13 After lunch (I shall eat little), Study of the Tatar language, drawing, marksmanship, gymnastics and reading."14
As he set down these directives in his diary for the twentieth time, Tolstoy was doubtless unaware that lie had inherited his mania from his mother, whom he could not remember: when she was young she, too, had been much preoccupied by her words and deeds, and had written edifying maxims and attempted to transform her moral principles into an exact science. But she, in so doing, was thinking of the happiness of her loved ones, whereas Tolstoy, eternally concerned with himself, was aiming only at his own improvement.
Life at Starogladkovskaya was quiet, but not dull. It was the psychology of the inhabitants, rather than the relatively ordinary countryside, that fascinated Leo Iolstoy. Nothing in common with the resigned and cunning muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. The Cossacks had never been serfs, and valued freedom and bravery above all else. They hated the hillsman who killed their brother less than the simple Russian soldier who was camping on their land to help them defend their village. Their best weapons and finest horses were bought or stolen from their enemies. Out of affectation, they even aped the hillsmen's dress and willingly spoke their language. "And even so," wrote Tolstoy, "this little Christian nation buried in a remote corner of the world, surrounded by half-savage Moslem tribes and soldiers, considered itself to possess a high degree of civilization and did not acknowledge anyone as a real man who was not also a Cossack."1* In all the stanitsas scattered along the river, the men divided their time between turns on guard duty, campaign service, fishing and hunting, thus leaving the hardest domestic chores to the women—which only increased their authority in the household. Although the Cossack men pretended to treat their women like slaves, oriental fashion, they actually respected and feared them. The women wore the Circassian costume—Tatar shirt, short stitched jacket, light, flat-heeled shoes—but they tied kerchiefs around their heads in the Russian manner. 'ITieir homes were clean. Unmarried girls were allowed much freedom in their relations with men.
Leo Tolstoy lived with an old Cossack named Epishka (Epiphany
Sekhin), who had taken an immediate liking to him. At ninety, Epishka was a hearty hulk of a man with a bulging chest, Herculean shoulders and a wide beard as white as a swan's plumage. Enchanted with this character, Tolstoy transplanted him bodily into The Cossacks, under the name of Uncle Eroshka: "He wore a ragged smock stuffed into his trousers, deerskin shoes laced over the bands wrapped around his calves, and a stiff little white fur bonnet. Slung across his back on one side were a pheasant-decoy and a bag containing a pullet and a merlin for luring hawks, and on the other, dangling from a strap, was a wildcat he had killed; from his belt hung little pouches for bullets, gunpowder and bread, a horse's tail to drive off the mosquitoes, a big dagger in a torn sheath stained with old blood, and two dead pheasants."16 Tolstoy spent long evenings with his host, who waxed loquacious in his cups. Elbows on the table, face brick-red, eyes sparkling in a network of deep wrinkles, Epishka talked on and on, and around him a complex aroma began to thicken, "strong, but not at all unpleasant, compounded of chikhir, t vodka, gunpowder and congealed blood."17 He told of his wild youth, his battles and hunts. He had never worked with his hands. Nature had always provided for him. He was a drunkard, a pillager, and an expert at catching horses in the hills, and he feared neither man nor beast: "Look at me, I'm as poor as Job, I have no wife nor garden nor children, nothing—just a gun, a sparrow hawk and three dogs, but I have never complaincd of anything and I never shall. I live in the forest, I look around me—every thing I see is mine. I come home and I sing a song."18 Sitting across from his young guest, who was asking himself so many questions about good and evil, he also said, with a roar of laughter that tore his white beard apart, "God crcated everything for the joy of man. There is no such thing as sin anywhere. Do as the animals do. They live in the Tatar's bulrushes and in ours. Their home is where they are. What God gives them, they cat!"19 From there it was only a step to claiming that it was wrong to worry about scducing girls, and Epishka took it in his stride. He even offered to procure distraction for Tolstoy. And when the young man halfheartedly objected to such practices, he cried, "Where's the sin in it? Is it a sin to look at a pretty girl? Have a good time with her? Is it a sin to love her? Is that how tilings are where you live? No, my friend, that's no sin, it's salvation! God creatcd you, and he created the girls, too. So it is no sin to look at a pretty girl. She was created to be loved and to give pleasure!"20
How long did Tolstoy resist Epishka's counsel? Trying to subdue the
$ A primitive red wine.
demands of the flesh, he went out hunting with the old pander. Game was abundant—pheasant, bustard, snipe, teal, gray hare, fox, and even buffalo, deer and wolf. All went well as long as he was out in the blind, but once back in the stanitsa the young man's heart raced at the mere smell of the smoke from the fires of the village huts. He stared at the fair-skinned, black-eyed girls, imagined the outline of a panting breast beneath a blouse. Some of them came prowling around the soldiers' huts in the evening and sold themselves for a few coins; others wanted a little persuasion before they would let themselves be pushed down onto a bed of leaves, mouth open and eyes closed. In his diary, Tolstoy recorded the fluctuating temperature of his lust: "I.ast night a Cossack girl came to sec me. I hardly slept all night. . . "That drunkard Epishka told me Salomonida looked like an easy mark. I would want to
take her awav and scrub her first. . . "I absolutclv must have a
/ /
woman. Lechery gives me 110 peace. . . "2S "I have no perseverance or stability in anything. If I persevered in my passions for women I would have conquests and memories to look back 011; if I persevered in my abstinence I could be proud of my self-control. Eschew wine and women. The pleasure one gets from them is so slight and uncertain and the remorse so great! . . "No, that's all wrong! My desires are natural. I only find fault with them because I am in an unnatural position: unmarried at twenty-three! Nothing can help me, except will-power and my prayers to God to save me from temptation."^