In January 1855 he was transferred to the 3rd light battery of the 11th Artillery Brigade, stationed on high ground on the banks of the Belbek, seven miles from Sevastopol. His spirits sank the moment he arrived. Into what hole had he fallen? And among what animals? "Philimonov, the commander of my battery, is the dirtiest creature imaginable," he wrote in his diary on January 23, 1855. "Odakhovsky, the senior officcr, is a revolting yellow-livered Pole. The other officers have no personality and let themselves be influenced by their superiors."
In his Reminiscences,however, Odakhovsky was to write, "The slightest remonstrance by a superior automatically provoked an insolent retort or sarcastic comment from Tolstoy." Once again, Tolstoy's haughty demeanor set him apart from his fellows. The shortage of books, absence of people to talk to, the cold, discomfort, remoteness of danger—all of them helped to sour his temper. Now and then, to astound his companions, he would perform some physical feat such as lying on the ground on his back and holding a 175-pound man at arm's length. "He left behind him in the brigade the memory of a good horseman, a high liver and a Hercules,"27 wrote the young officer Krylov. As usual, his favorite pastime was cards. It so happened that the fifteen hundred rubles intended to finance The Military Gazette had just arrived. As the publication had been forbidden, the money was going begging. Tolstoy played stos non-stop for two days and two nights. At dawn on the third day lie had lost his last kopeck: "The result is plain," he wrote in his diary 011 January 28, "I've lost the house at Yasnaya Polyana for good. ... I am so sick of myself that I would like to forget I even exist." And by way of penitence he wrote to Nicholas, who was, of all his brothers, the one able to judge him most harshly: "I have lost all the money—fifteen hundred rubles—that was sent to me. I beg you not to blame me or reproach me for it, either in your letters or behind my back: I am continually blaming myself for this enormous piece of stupidity, and shall not stop until I have made up for it by my work."
Three days later he yielded to temptation again. "February 2. Playing with Mcshcrskv on credit, I lost one hundred fiftv rubles I didn't have."
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"February 6. Played again and lost two hundred silver rubles. I cannot promise to stop playing. I hope to win it back and am in danger of going in over my head. . . . Will propose to play again with Odakhovsky tomorrow, for the last time." "February 12. Lost eighty more rubles. ... I want to try my luck at cards once more." "February 17. Lost another twenty rubles. I shall not play again."
After adding up his losses and throwing in a little nest-egg for good measure, Tolstoy sent another appeal for help to Valerian:
"As you must know from my letter to Nicholas, I have lost the fifteen hundred rubles you sent 111c. Worse yet, I have lost another 575 rubles on credit. I must have the money right away. Be kind enough to sell enough wheat to make up the amount I am lacking and send the money to 111c at Sevastopol. ... I am ashamed and it hurts me to write to you. I ask you not to show this letter to everyone. I have stopped playing."2* To give himself the illusion that he was serving his country even though he was far from the fighting, he began to write a Plan for the Reform of the Army. The moment was well-chosen, for Russia had just learned, to its secret relief, of the death of Nicholas I, on February 18, 1855. With the disappearance of this violent and narrow-minded potentate, the causc of so many police-state exactions, unjust exiles and unsuccessful wars, all who aspired to a little more freedom in the empire began to raise their heads. Ilis successor, Alexander II, was said to favor more humane policies and, 011 the strength of this rumor, 'l'olstoy opened his study with a courageous declaration of principle:
"My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country's honor. . . . We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowcd by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland—words that have been so much misused!—nor valor, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, 011 one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption." He went on to denounce the corporal punishment inflicted upon the soldiers, calling attention to "the large number of Russian officers killed by Russian bullets, or slightly wounded and abandoned to the enemy," and complaining that the generals leading the army had been chosen "not because they had any ability, but because the tsar liked them." It remained to expound the remedies. But it is easier to destroy than to construct. After exhausting his bile in his critique, the author grew bored and abandoned the positive part of his treatise. After all, nobody would listen to him anyway.
Still, the desire to repair, to improve things, would not leave him. Despite his gambling losses, his "fits of lust" and his "criminal sloth," lie felt the soul of an innovator stirring in his breast. Having failed to reform the army, he turned to religion. One evening, between two hands of whist and stos, lie had an illumination that left him breathless, flooded with ineffable happiness. On March 4 he wrote in his diary that he had just had a "grandiose, stupendous" idea. "I feel capable of devoting my life to it. It is the founding of a new religion, suited to the present state of mankind: the religion of Christ, but divested of faith and mysteries, a practical religion, not promising eternal bliss but providing bliss here on earth. I realize that this idea can only become a reality after several generations have worked consciously toward it. One generation will pass on the idea to the next, and one day, through fanaticism or reason, it will prevail."
The whole of Tolstoy's future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral perfection. Unfortunately, on the next line of the same diary: "March 6. Odakhovsky won another two hundred rubles from me, and so my situation has become critical." The prophet awoke from his trance, cards in hand.
The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate. He had a fleeting desire to give Yasnaya Polyana to his brother-in-law outright, in order to free himself from domestic cares and liquidate his debts, and devote the rest of his life to literature—one more castle in the air, like so many others, which he promptly forgot the next day. However, in the state of perpetual mental upheaval in which he lived, one idea remained constant: write. This was the pickct he always came back to, after running about in every direction like a maddened goat at the end of its tether. "The military career is not for me," he wrote on March 11: "the sooner I leave it to devote myself wholly to literature, the better it will be."