How was it, when writing those lines, that he was not tempted to skim through the pages of his diary? He might have observed that he had previously dragged himself through the mire with the same relish he was now deploying to exalt his virtues. But, accustomed as he was to switching from angel to beast, he would not have been surprised by this inconsistency: after all, it is necessary to touch bottom before one can spring back up to the surface. Now up, now down, Tolstoy was constitutionally incapable of following a middle course.
In any event, lie had had all he could take of the Caucasus; and as though in response to his desire for action, Nicholas I declared war on Turkey (October 20 [November 1], 1853). Russian troops, led by Paskevich, had entered the Danube Principalities four months before. France and England were up in arms, blustering and protesting in Support of the sultan. Since Tolstoy's resignation had been refused, he decided to ask for a transfer to Moldavia. But he had to be commissioned first. Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, alerted in Kazan, pulled her most influential strings; Tolstoy himself wrote to Prince Sergey Gorchakov, asking for a recommendation to Sergey's brother, Princc Michacl Gorchakov, general in the Danube army under the supreme command of Field Marshal Paskevich. But the mail was slow, the clerks in the offices swamped by paper. On November 26, 1853, with his fate still undecided, Tolstoy complained to his brother Sergey:
"I am counting on a change in my way of life next year. The life I am leading here has become intolerable. Stupid officers, stupid conversations, stupid officers, stupid conversations, nothing else. . . . Even though Nicholas, God knows why, took the hounds with him (Epishka and I call him an s.o.b. for doing it), I still go out hunting day after clay, all alone from morning to night, with one pointer. It's my only pleasure—not even a pleasure, but a way of wearing myself out. You're exhausted, you're hungry, you reach the house, you fall asleep like a lump of lead, and there's one more day gone."
A month later he confided in Aunt Toinette: "No friends, no occupation, no interest in anything around me. I am watching the best years of my life go by, bringing nothing to me or anyone else, and l>ccause of my sensitivity this position, which might be tolerable to someone else, is becoming increasingly trying. The price 1 am paying for my wayward youth is a high one."89
Tolstoy had not really wasted his time in the Caucasus, although he liked to say so. His suitcases were bulging with sheafs of manuscripts. In Boyhood, written in the first person like Childhood, he studied the awakening of a personality at grips with its first challenges. The Novel of a Russian Lord recounted the adventures of a young nobleman who, after trying to achieve his ideal of justice and brotherhood in the country, was discouraged by the apathy of his muzhiks, turned to the joys of family life and realized in the end that true happiness lay in sacrificing one's individual interests to the general interest.70 The Raid, A Wood-Felling, The Fugitive were short stories inspired by his military experiences. In Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker he described his despairing state on the eve of his departure for the Caucasus, when he
was fed up with himself and did not know where to seek salvation: "I am enmeshed in slimy nets and I can neither free myself nor learn to bear them." In A Holy Night, it was Moscow under the snow, a ball, young love.
Even these minor or unfinished works revealed the author's exceptional talent, his gift for true sight and true speech, the pitiless candor of his approach to the world. However, at this stage of his travels, he needed a change of scenery to provide him with a new source of inspiration; the writer, as much as the man, was looking forward to the Army of the Danube as a fund of fresh experience. On January 12, 1854 he learned that he would be allowed to take the officer's examination for the rank of ensignt (a mere formality) and was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade, in Moldavia. Overjoyed, he decided to set off as soon as possible, making a little detour (nearly seven hundred miles) to say hello to his aunt and brothers at Yasnaya Polyana. Lieutenant- Colonel Alexeyev approved his application for a furlough and advanced him one hundred and twenty-five rubles for the trip.
For a week, Tolstoy celebrated his promotion drinking dzhonka.t On the day of his departure he had a Te Deum sung, "out of vanity," handed some small change to the poor, "out of ostentation," and, just as he was about to climb into the carriage, suddenly felt a sorrow beyond words instead of the relief he had been expecting. His companions-at- arms were all standing at the side of the road, and his ktmak Sado, and Uncle Fpishka, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev, the "pretentious imbecile." Looking at them he realized that he had unconsciously come to love the people he was about to leave, as well as the country. "I explained this change in my attitude by the fact that in military servicc in the Caucasus, as in other intimate surroundings, a man docs not learn how to choose the best people, but how to find the good qualities in uninteresting ones,"71 he later wrote. As the horses moved forward, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexeyev swept the back of his hand roughly across his tears. Tolstoy turned his head away. Was he to lose them all forever? No; already lie dimly sensed that the Cossacks and the Chechens, Maryanka and Sado and Epishka and all the others would soon come back to life in a book.
Two days later he wrote, with customary self-assurance: "There is one fact I must remind myself of as often as possible: at thirty, Thack-
t In the Russian army, an ensign (praporshik) is the lowest-ranking commissioned officer, coming before second lieutenant.
I A rum drink into which flaming lumps of sugar are plunged.
eray was just preparing to write his first book® and Alexandre Dumas writes two a week. Show nothing to anyone before publication. One hears more unfounded criticism than useful advice/' And, yielding to his penchant for observation he added without any transition: "Inhere is a particular type of young soldier who has backward-bending legs."
• Thackcray actually began to write around the age of twenty, and was thirty-six when Vanity Fair, his first novel, was published.
2. Sevastopol
Russia lay buried deep in snow. The relays followed each other, identical, with myopic windows peering out beneath big white roofs, stacks of frozen straw in the courtyards, shivering grooms scurrying around the horses, hulking, silent coachmen. On the sixth day of the trip, one hundred vcrsts from Novocherkassk, Tolstoy's sledge was caught in a blizzard. Whirling funnels of snow sped across the bare fields, sky and earth bccamc indistinguishable and the eardrums ached from the screaming wind. No more road, no more horizon; in a cloud of vapor, the horse's head swayed back and forth under the wooden arch, the runners sank deep into cottony nothingness and the cold became so intense that not even the vodka he downed could keep the passenger warm. After heading his team blindly in every direction, the driver admitted that he was lost. Night was coming on. What to do? Stop and wait? Freeze to death, in other words. '1 he tormented horse stumbled on through the squalls until dawn. Tolstoy vowed to base a story on this adventure if he came out of it alive.1 For a writer, even fear can be grist to the mill. Dawn paled in the sky at last, the wind dropped and the smoke of a village appeared in the distance. Back among men once again, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "To Succeed in life one must be brave, resolute and keep a cool head."