Nine more days on the road and, on February 2, 1854, in a landscape of steam, frost and lace, the two towers marking the entrance to Yasnaya Polyana rose up at the end of a white-rutted drive. There was the house, with its neo-classical pediment, its columns, snow-powdered on the side facing the wind, its large, limpid windows; there, 011 the threshold, was the odor of childhood (tart apples and beeswax); there was Aunt Toinette, tiny and wrinkled, her eyes full of tears and light, coming forward, holding out her arms, falling on to the chest of her
"Lyova Ryova."" They wept, kissed, exclaiming how well the other was looking.
That very evening Tolstoy told Aunt Toinette all about his adventures in the Caucasus. He may have bragged a bit, omitted to mention the size of his debts and inflated that of his expectations, but he did so less from conceit than from a desire to give some happiness to the woman who, for so many years, had lived only for her nephews. He felt that his youth and his literary success were a present he was giving her. He scolded her because she kept saying in her letters that she was too lonely and wanted to die. He said she had 110 right to complain, because there he stood before her, bubbling over with optimism and good health. This princely selfishness made her smile. Hand in hand they looked at each other and sighed with love. A well-matched couple, one all youth and fire, the other all weariness and resignation.
Yasnaya Polyana was magnificent in the snow: the frozen Voronka, white ice where the pond used to be, crystal-tined trees. Tolstoy made his landlord's rounds, visited the village elder, ordered a Te Deum sung at the church, checked over the new manager's accounts—he looked honest—went on to the farm at Grumond and concluded from his inspection that everything was in order but that he himself had aged. After spending a few days with his sister Marya at Pokrovskoye, playing the piano and tumbling about with his nephews, he wrote out a will in view of his impending departure for the army, and returned to Aunt Toinette. In the meantime, his three brothers, Nicholas, Sergey and Dmitry, had also arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. It was strange to sec Nicholas in civilian clothes, a shapeless jackct and hands of doubtful cleanliness. Sergey, the family eccentric, was becoming more elegant, ironic and independent than ever. Dmitry was unrecognizable, with a beard bristling around his puff)' face, a dissatisfied expression and blear)' eyes. He had begun to drink, like Nicholas, but even more than Nicholas. Aunt Toinette whispered that he was living the life of a profligate in Moscow. The four brothers decided, either because there were not enough beds to go round or out of sheer stoicism, to sleep together on the bare floor.2
Tolstoy was so intensely happy to be with his family again in the house he was born in that no ill tidings could affect him. On February 13, he read Nekrasov's letter8 advising him not to publish the Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker—"content excellent, but form mediocre"—without turning a hair.
"Your previous work was too promising," Nekrasov wrote, "to follow
• "Leo Cry-Baby."
it up with something so undistinguished." He had to admit that the director of The Contemporary was right, forgot his Story and went to Moscow with his brothers. There they visited their acquaintances, caroused and reveled, and had their photograph taken together. At the right of the row sat Leo Tolstoy, stiff and intent, muttonchop whiskers framing his face, his uniform stretched tightly across his chest, epaulettes jutting out, and thumb stuck into his belt strap. He had just bought a complete outfit: "Greatcoat 135 rubles, accessories 35, boots 10 . . ." A run over to Pokrovskoye to say good-bye to Marya, Valerian, Sergey and Aunt Pelagya, a hop to Sherbatchevka, Dmitry's estate, where Aunt Toinette had hurried to kiss the traveler good-bye and give him her blessing, and it was time to go. The parting was heart-rending. Aunt Toinette cried. Looking at all those tearful faces, Tolstoy could at last tell himself that lie was loved as he wished to be. Happy in his woe, he wrote in his diary, "It was one of the brightest moments of my life."
On March 3, 1854 he set off. From Kursk he traveled to the Rumanian frontier via Poltava, Balta and Kishinev. He began the two- thousand-verst trip by sledge; then, when the snow turned to mud, he changed to a most uncomfortable sort of cart, "smaller and more ill- made than the ones wc use for carting manure at home."4 The drivers spoke nothing but Moldavian. Despairing of making himself understood, Tolstoy was constantly under the impression that they were cheating him. lie reached Bucharest on March 12, worn out and furious at having spent two hundred rubles without being able to account for them.
Two nephews of the commanding officer, Prince Michael Gorcliakov, welcomed the young ensign with all the courtesy lie could wish for and, four clays later, the general in person received him in his palace on his return from a tour of inspection at the front. Strapped into his new uniform, Tolstoy went expecting a formal interview. But Gorchakov treated him as one of the family. "He embraced mc, made me promise to dine with him every day and wants to put me on his staff, but this is not yet ccrtain."5
The ease with which an honorably-born young man could find a comfortable position was a typical feature of Russian life at the end of the last century. Every great family had some representative in good standing at court, to whom it appealed in matters of importance to intercede with the emperor. Letters of recommendation took the place of diplomas and everything worked out in the end thanks to an aide- de-camp uncle or a lady-in-waiting cousin, and, after sowing their wild oats, young men who lacked any other qualification found themselves occupying enviable posts in the army or administration. On the strength of Prince Michael Gorchakov's cordiality, Tolstoy felt that his military career, which had made a slow start in the Caucasus, would now forge swiftly ahead. Accepted by the staff officers as one of themselves he found them brilliant, noble and, in short, absolutely comme il faut.6
A strange thing, this return of his comme il faut obsession after a ten-year lapse. The raw artilleryman of the Caucasus was transformed overnight into a drawing-room officer. Sixty miles away on the opposite bank of the Danube, bloody battles were being fought before Silistra, which was besieged by the Russians, but in the staff city of Bucharest the social whirl was in full swing. Dinners at the prince's house, balls, evenings at the Italian opera and French theater, elegant suppers to the music of a gypsy orchestra, spooning of sherbets in tearooms—the pleasures of life became keener as the threat of death drew near. Having received a little money from his brother-in-law Valerian, Tolstoy considered his position "relatively agreeable." Indeed, he was in so little hurry to change it that he was thoroughly vexed to be sent, just for the form, to spend a few days with a campaign battery at Oltenitsa. The officers he met there seemed coarse and vulgar to him. He took a great dislike to the commander and was overjoyed at the arrival, in the heat of an altercation between them, of a courier bringing notice of his appointment to the staff of a division general. The commander had no choice but to bow and swallow his insults and Tolstoy withdrew, his vanity flattered and his sense of justice queasy. "The higher I rise in the opinion of others, the lower I sink in my own," he wrote.7
As ordnance officcr for General Serzhputovsky he carried orders to various parts of the military zone, after which his chief could find nothing more for him to do and sent him back behind the lines at Bucharest. lie took advantage of his free time to finish correcting the proofs of Boyhood and send the manuscript to Nekrasov. "I have not yet smelled Turkish gunpowder," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "and I am sitting peacefully here in Bucharest, strolling about, playing music and eating ice creams."3 He forgot to add that he was also playing cards and losing steadily.