His colleagues found the neophyte's candor utterly enchanting. I low was it possible to be so gifted and so little a man of letters? The first thing they had to do was to acquaint him with the ideological quarrel
f All writers, poets, journalists. The biographical notes at the end of this book give the essential facts about them and some of the other people who played a part in Tolstoy's life.
that was tearing the capital's elite asunder. In one C3mp were the "Westerners," who considered Russia a backward country in comparison with the West and thought she should seek regeneration by following the example of Europe. In the other were the Slavophils, who denied all alleged intellectual superiority of Europe and held that the Russians were too unique and exceptional a people to find their salvation from any foreign sourcc. The former drifted readily from a passion for European painting into an appreciation of the merits of democracy, and the latter from a reverence for the old Slavic traditions into adoration of the tsar, "blessed of God." Each side had its militants; wild-eyed informants told Tolstoy all their names. Between the two camps hung the bulk of the undecided moderates—liberal Slavophils or monarchist Westerners. On The Contemporary, staunch Westerners formed the majority. A few contributors, however, were already eying other less distinguished but more literary reviews. Rival editors were outbidding each other for the best writers. This whole little menagerie was seething with emulation, vanity and jealousy. In the middle of the aviary, with the preening and pecking going on all around him, stood Tolstoy, solidly planted on his two legs; he felt that he belonged to a different species. After the horrors of war, he wanted only one thing: a good time. Juggling ideas was all very well for the impotent or the satiated; what he needed was reality, succulent and immediate. His appetite for pleasure shockcd Turgcncv, who was highly refined and inclined to resignation in matters of the heart. Once or twicc he accompanied his guest on his revels and returned home aghast. He could not understand how the author of Sevastopol could sink so low, drinking himself into a stupor, singing with the gypsies, frequenting brothels. To be sure, Tolstoy subsequently repented of his nights on the town, but the reproofs he heaped upon his own head always covered a disgusted and angry desire to begin again. "Went to Pavlovsk," he wrote in his diary4 "Disgusting. Girls, silly music, girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls! Everybody tries to look as though he is having a good time and likes the girls, but in vain." And, proud of his uniform, it annoyed him to see "drunken, nasty" civilians trying to carry on like "true officers." For, although he claimed to loathe the military profession, he felt nothing but contcmpt for the townsmen in their dress suits who had never spent a night on sentry duty or seen a comrade shot down at their side. An inferior race, with stuffed paunches and sensitive bchinds, pen pushers, intriguers, clods. Those without money were as contemptible
t Pavlovsk, a pleasure spot seventeen miles outside St. Petersburg. The entry in the diary is dated May 14, 1856.
as those who had "what it takes." Turgenev belonged to the latter category. After being charmed by him, Tolstoy turned on him and criticized him with vindictive severity. What futility in this overripe man. His handsome clothes, his perfume, his honeyed ways with women, his anxiousncss to please, his faith in the future of science, his refined dinners. lie had paid a thousand rubles for his serf cook and was eternally bragging about his talents. To show that he was different from all these high-minded, weak-muscled gentlemen, Tolstoy brushed his hair back from his forehead and wore his mustache in a droop, which, he fancied, gave his mouth a determined and forbidding expression. And thus lie appears, in a photograph taken 011 February 15, 1856, standing stiffly, his arms folded across his chest, in a group of amiable colleagues striking languid poses: Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Druzhnin, Grigorovich and Goncharov.
One morning the young poet Fet, a fervent admirer of Ivan Turgenev, camc to call on him and was surprised to sec a sword decorated with the ribbon of the Order of St. Anne hanging in the hall.
"Whose sword is that?" he asked Zakhar, the servant.
The latter motioned the young man to lower his voice, pointed to a door down the hallway on the left and whispered:
"It belongs to Count Tolstoy. He is staying with us."
Fet went into the study, where Turgenev was drinking tea "Petersburg-fashion." I lis movements were relaxed, his features calm and his expression affable, but he kept glancing toward the door. "During the hour I spent with him," wrote Fet, "we talked in undertones in order not to awake the count, who was sleeping in the next room. 'It is like this all the time,' said Turgenev with a smile. 'He came here straight from his battery at Sevastopol, moved in with me and plunged into a headlong spree. Orgies, gypsies, cards all night long, and then he sleeps like a dead man until two in the afternoon. At first, I tried to restrain him, but now I've given up.'"
As Turgenev was rather sweet on Marya Tolstoy, whom he had met the year before in the country, he hid his annoyance at his guest's crude behavior for some time. But the more lie restrained himself, the more Tolstoy delighted in provoking him. Their quarrels, amusing at first, rapidly turned venomous. The moment other people were present, they could not abide each other, and Tolstoy's need to contradict everyone else was becoming sccond nature to him. It was as though, by systematic opposition, he might prove his own existence to himself. He seemed to say, "I think—the opposite of everyone else—therefore I ain!" On more than one occasion Fet, in consternation, witnessed grotesque sccncs between the two men. Stung by Tolstoy's remark on the lack of convictions among writers, Turgenev began sputtering with rage and gesticulating wildly, while Tolstoy, deadly calm, pinned him with the fire of his gray eyes and dryly proceeded:
"I refuse to believe that your words express a true conviction. Here I stand, with a dagger in my hand or a sword, and I say, 'So long as I live no one shall enter this room!' That is a conviction. But you all try to hide your real thoughts from each other, and you call that a conviction!"
"Then why do you come here among us?" cried Turgenev in a voice that squeaked with rage. "This is not the place for you! Go to Princess "
"I don't need to ask you where to go!" retorted Tolstoy. "And it isn't my presence here or anywhere else that is going to change your empty chattcr into real convictions."0
Grigorovich, another contributor to The Contemporary, gives an account of a scenc in Nckrasov's apartment: "Turgenev shrieks and clutches at his throat and whispers with his dying-gazelle eyes, 'I can't take any morel I've got bronchitis!' and begins striding up and down all three rooms. 'Bronchitis!' growls Tolstoy. 'Bronchitis is an imaginary disease! Bronchitis is a metal!' Nekrasov, the master of the house, stands there with his heart in his throat. He is just as frightened of losing Turgenev as he is of losing Tolstoy, because both are a precious boon to The Contemporary, and he tries to arbitrate. We are all at our wit's end and don't know what to say. Tolstoy is lying full-length on the sofa in the middle room, sulking. Turgenev, the tails of his short coat spread wide, keeps marching back and forth with his hands in his pockets. Trying to ward off catastrophe, I come up to the sofa and say, Tolstoy, dear fellow, don't work yourself up so. You know Turgenev loves and respects you!' 'I shall not permit him/ says Tolstoy with flaring nostrils, 'to go on eternally doing every thing he can to provoke me. Look at him now, pacing up and down on purpose, wiggling his democratic thighs in front of mc!' "7