When he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana on May 28,1856, he hardly took time to kiss Aunt Toinette, and immediately gave orders to assemble the muzhiks. While he was waiting to speak to them, he jotted hastily down in his diary, "At Yasnaya, life is sad, pleasant, not at all in harmony with my state of mind. Besides, when I compare myself as I now am with my old memories of Yasnaya, I see how far I have progressed toward a literal approach ... in a little while I shall hold a meeting and make a speech. What will come of it?"
He went to the village square with a bad case of actor's stage-fright, and instead of reading out the text he had prepared in St. Petersburg, greeted the serfs massed in front of him with a resounding "Hello!" Then, very simply, he explained his idea to them. A few hours later he came back to his diary, full of optimism: "Everything is all right. The peasants arc delighted to understand me; they see me as a bold, for- ward-looking man and they have confidence in me." The next day, second meeting and first hitch. Living in St. Petersburg, far from the serfs, Tolstoy had gradually forgotten their faults. Now he saw them again, just as they were before—suspicious, obstinate, crafty and stupid. Instead of snatching at a proposal that was so advantageous to them, they hung back, smiled, scratched their heads and said "Thank you" as though it was not their place to say it, asked for time to consider and went away dragging their feet. Hardly containing his anger, Tolstoy talked to them individually, explaining every clause in the contract, and then called them together again to subject tlicin en masse to the fire of his eloquence. There were five of these conferences, during which the project became even more liberal, the purchase-period being reduced from thirty to twenty-four years, The peasants were still unconvinced.
From the house-servants Tolstoy soon learned the reason for their reticence: it was rumored in the villages that at the coronation festivities next August, the tsar was going to free all the serfs and give them the land for nothing. So by offering to lease them the land they already farmed, their master was trying to cheat them, to "stuff them in the sack" as their own saying went. He was a fine fellow, their master, but canny. He knew the laws. He was just trying to take poor innocent folk for a ride. Outraged, Tolstoy determined to have one last heart-to-heart talk with the muzhiks. On June 7, after the meeting, he wrote, "Their obstinacy put mc in such a rage that I could hardly control myself." Three days later, another talk, another failure. Tin's time, there could be no doubt: "They don't want their freedom." 'llieir lord was just as much their slave as they were his. "Two strong men are chained together; each is hurt when the other moves, and there is not enough room for them both to work together."22 The master put his plans back in his pockets: "We shall return to the question in the autumn,"28 he said, without much conviction. And he vented his spleen on that portion of the Russian intellectuals for whom the muzhik was the repository of all ancestral wisdom. Let no one say another word to him about the innate goodness and profound intelligence of the people!
"Ill tell those Slavophils what I think of the grandeur and sacrcdncss of the Mir assemblies,"t he wrote to Nckrasov on June 12, 1856. "What nonsensel I shall show you the minutes of the meetings, I've taken notes." It was no longer the peasants he was pitying now, but the landowners. For if someone did not put a stop to the outrageous pipe- dreams that were sweeping the villages, the serfs would rise up in arms against their masters one day and simply demand the land the tsar had supposedly promised to give them along with their freedom. It would be the beginning of a fearful peasant insurrection. The worst was to be expected from a people as bigoted and cruel as the Russians, and the innovators who were trying to give them what they wanted would be swept under by the wave. Tolstoy personally was not at all tempted by martyrdom. One evening, in a panic, he wrote to Bludov, a minister, warning him against the stupidity of the masses:
"There are two extremely grave and dangerous matters I must bring to your attention: (1) the conviction that a general emancipation is going to take place during the coronation period is firmly rooted among the people, even in the most remote villages; (2) the question of who owns the land populated by the peasants is being decided in most cases in favor of the peasants, who would like to appropriate all of their
t Russian rural community.
lord's property. 'We belong to you, but the land belongs to us.' When, at one of my meetings, they told me to give them all the land and I answered that I would then have to go barefoot, they simply laughed at me. . . . The government is responsible for this state of affairs, because it has evaded the chief question of the day. ... I confess I have never understood why it could not be established that the land belongs to the landlords, and the peasants be freed without giving them the land. . . . Freeing them with the land is not, in my opinion, a solution. Who is to answer these questions that are essential to a solution of the overall problem, namely: how much land shall go to each, or what share of the estate; how is the landlord to receive compensation; over what period of time; who is to pay the compensation? . . . Time is short. ... If the serfs are not free in six months, we are in for a holocaust. Everything is ripe for it. Only one criminal hand is needed to fan the flame of rebellion, and we will all be consumed in the blaze."24
Having foretold the catastrophe, Tolstoy felt doubly relieved: his conscience was at peace because he had offered his people their freedom, and he had squared himself with the authorities by reporting the dangerous mood of the populace. What did still annoy him was the silent triumph of Aunt Toinette. She had opposed his project from the start —as narrow-minded as the peasants, she was, but in a different way; clinging, like them, to the tradition of a paternal relationship between lord and subjects; believing that God had given them to the master like big children to be brought up, protected and occasionally punished. "One hundred years of explaining would not make her see the injustice of serfdom,"25 he wrote on his arrival. And a few days later, on June 12, "I am beginning to develop a silent hatred of my aunt, in spite of all her affection."
He did not like Yasnaya Polyana as much as before. After being sold to pay his gambling debts, the old wooden house in which he was born had been dismantled by the buyer, his neighbor Gorokhov, and put up again twelve miles away, in the hamlet of Dolgoye.* Contrary to Nicholas, he found that its removal had disfigured the estate. A riot of tall weeds and bushes grew in place of the old foundations. Tolstoy now lived with his aunt in one of the two small stone buildings that used to stand on either side of the main house. Within their walls, devoid of memories, he felt out of place, as in the home of strangers. His brothers
• Gorokhov's land was later bought by the neighboring commune and the peasants demolished the house, already badly run-down, for firewood. On December 6, 1807 Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Went to Dolgoyc on the fourth. Was moved by the ruins of the house. A host of memories." and sister were far away. To pass the time, he wrote The Cossacks, corrected Youth, read Pushkin and Gogol, swam in the Voronka, surreptitiously overpowered a peasant girl in the bushes ("Awful lust, amounting to physical illness,"26) and, in the evenings, played solitaire and yawned.
Shortly after his arrival he went to see his sister at Pokrovskoye. Alas; he found her so unattractive that he wrote in his diary, "Masha has bad breath, a serious drawback!"27 At five o'clock the next morning he called for his horse and set off for Spasskoyc, Turgcncv's estate, some fourteen miles away. When he arrived two hours later, his heart pulsing with friendship, Turgenev was not at home. He explored the house while he waited: "There, I could see the roots of the man; it enabled me to understand many things, and reconciled me with him."2* At last, Turgenev returned. Embracings, tears of joy. The grievances of both had been left behind in St. Petersburg. "Lunched, walked, had a very pleasant talk with him, took a nap. . . ."