Upon reaching Zurich, however, on July 8 (20), he changed his mind and veered off toward Schaffhausen, Fricdrichshafcn and Stuttgart. One evening he looked out of his train window and saw the moon 011 his right—a good omen! This favorable impression was heightened by an acquaintance he made 011 the train: a Frenchman, M. Ogicr,
who said he was a banker, wanted to become a member of the Assemble and was on his way to Baden-Baden, which was famous for its gambling tables. Tolstoy followed him. On July 12 (24) he was hard at it. On July 13 (25) he wrote in his diary, "Roulette from morning to night. Lost, but made it up toward the end of the day. At the house, the Frenchman [OgicrJ and a girl." On July 14 (26), "Roulette until six in the evening. Lost everything." "Everything" was three thousand francs.t M. Ogicr, the banker, accompanied him to his lodgings and stayed in his room until three in the morning, talking of love, poetry and politics. "Revolting," noted Tolstoy. "I would rather be a foul stinking creature with a goiter and no nose, the lowest of the idiots or the most hideous monster alive, than a moral abortion such as he." But the next day he shamelessly confessed that the "moral abortion" had bailed him out of a tight spot: "Borrowed two hundred rubles from the Frenchman and lost them at once. He has gone." What to do? Polonsky, the poet, was also at Baden-Baden; Tolstoy put the touch on him, but all he got was two hundred francs. Botkin, quickly alerted by letter, proved more liberal. He sent money from Lucerne. Tolstoy breathed again, bathed, went to the casino and noted in his diary that evening, July 16 (28): "Lost every cent, you pig!" For forty- eight hours, his pockets empty, he fumed with frustration at being kept away from the wheeclass="underline" "Surrounded by human offal. And the biggest offal of all is me." (July 18 [30].) At last, the next day, Turgenev, who had also been called to the rescue, descended upon Baden- Baden like the Savior. Bearded, tender and melancholy, he was still shuffling along in the wake of Pauline Viardot. The two friends greeted each other rapturously. Turgenev scolded his troglodyte and lent him enough to tide him over.
A fresh fit of the fever swept over Tolstoy. Not a minute to losel He ran to the casino, his heart pounding wildly, played one number after another and watchcd the croupier rake away every stake, and staggered out of the room. Turgenev's features registered dismay when he heard the news. "Vanichka32 is very kind," wrote Tolstoy. "I feel ashamed of myself in his presence."
That day events took another turn for the worse: a letter came to the hotel, from Sergey, announcing that their sister Marya, whose husband's misconduct had become open knowledge, had left him for good. "I do not intend to be the favorite sultana in his harem," she said. She had taken her offspring and gone to live on her estate at Pokrovskoyc. "I nearly choked when I heard it," said Tolstoy. He stood up for his
J Approximately $1650.
sister, but winced at the thought of the scandal, the broken home, the children's divided affections. The combination of family problems and lack of funds determined him to go back to Russia. He took the train to Frankfort, where he rejoined the inestimable Alexandra ("A wonder 1 A delight! Never met such a woman"), borrowed enough from her to continue his journey, reached Dresden ("Pleasant town"), where he cncountcrcd Raphael's Sistine Madonna, who enchanted him, and Princess Lvov, who disappointed him. In Paris he had wanted to marry her; in Dresden lie had no use for her. She was too intelligent, "in the Russian manner," and surrounded by too many "young puppies." And yet, he liked her. "I was," he wrote Alexandra, "in the right state of mind for falling in love, having lost at roulette, being dissatisfied with myself and having nothing to do. It is my theory that love answers a need to forget oneself and that is why, like sleep, it comcs upon you more readily when you are displeased with yourself or unhappy. Princess Lvov is pretty, bright, honest and good company. I tried with all my might to fall in love with her; I saw her often, and . . . nothing! Am I a monster? I am probably lacking something!"33
On July 26 (August 7) he went from Dresden to Berlin; on July 27 (August 8), he boarded a ship at Stettin; on July 30 (August 11), after four uneventful days at sea, he reached St. Petersburg. He gambled again on the trip, and had to borrow a few rubles from Pushchin the moment he arrived. Temporarily solvent, he abandoned himself to the joy of seeing Nekrasov, Panaycv and the other writers, and finding himself once more on native soiclass="underline" "Blue morning—with dew and birch trees—Russian morning. How good it is!" he wrote on July 31, 1857. But on August 6, "Russia revolts me!" And he went to Yasnaya Polyana.
2. A Few Fake Starts
Perhaps, all the while Tolstoy had been disparaging depraved France, soulless Switzerland and vulgar Germany, he had actually been letting himself be contaminated by their Western ways; for upon his return, after seven months abroad, certain injustices in his native land struck him more forcibly than before. It was as though his skin had grown thinner while he was away, or bccomc infected with that sickly European sensitivity. "Yasnaya Polyana is a miracle," he wrote 011 the evening of his arrival (August 8, 1857). "It is sweet and sad to be here, but Russia definitely disgusts mc. I am beginning to feel hemmed in by the crude and hypocritical atmosphere here. . . . Beatings and floggings! . . ." The next day, after a trip to Pirogovo: "The wretchedness of the people and sufferings of the animals are atrocious." Every day some new incident confirmed his feeling that things were going wrong around him and that everyone was powerless to stop them. In less than a week he saw a woman striking a servant with a stick in the street, a civil servant half-killing a seventy-year-old muzhik whose telega had caught on his coach, the village elder at Yasnaya Polyana thrashing a gardener and sending him barefoot across the limefields to watch the herds, a landlord at Ozerki entertaining himself by getting his peasants drunk, the district commissioner exacting a cart of hay in return for issuing a passport to one of the count's servants . . . "In Petersburg and Moscow everybody is shouting about something," he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, "everybody is up in arms waiting for a miracle to happen, while out here in the country, patriarchal barbarism, theft and arbitrary rule go on as before. . . . For a long time I had to fight against a feeling of aversion for my country; now I am beginning to accustom myself to all the horrors that make up the human condition. . . . Fortunately, there is one salvation: morality, the world of the arts, poetry and human relations. There, nobody bothers me, policeman or town councillor. I am alone. Outside the wind howls, outside all is mud and cold; I am here, I play Beethoven and shed tears of tenderness; or I read the Iliad, or I create my own men and women and live with them, covering sheets of paper . .
Sometimes, of course, in a fit of temper, all this virtuousncss went flying out the window and, "relapsing into a deplorable habit," as he put it himself, he would strike one of his serfs or have him flogged by the country police. Afterward, he sometimes begged the culprit's pardon and slipped him three rubles in compensation, which left the muzhik utterly bewildered, and the master unsatisfied as well.2 They contemplated each other across a chasm. While waiting for the day when he would be able to impose happiness upon mankind, Tolstoy decided to reforest his estate. He bought two thousand fir trees, five thousand pines and two thousand larches, and supervised their planting.