"Turgenev is a scoundrel who deserves to be thrashed; I beg you to transmit that to him, as faithfully as you transmit his charming comments to me, despite the fact that I have asked you never to speak of him again. ... I also beg you not to write to me any more, for I shall not open your letters any more than Turgenev's."
On January 7, 1862, Turgcnev read the famous letter of apology which Davidov the bookseller had so long neglccted to forward. He wrote to Fet forthwith:
"Today, at last, I received the letter Tolstoy sent in September via Davidov the bookseller (admirable punctuality of our Russian businessmen!), in which he states that he had insulted me intentionally and apologizes, etc. And almost at the same moment, owing to certain gossip I think I told you about, I challenged him to a duel. All one can concludc from this is that the conjunction of our constellations in the heavens is decidedly unfavorable and it is therefore preferable—as he suggests, moreover—that we do not meet again. But you can write to him, or tell him if you see him, that I, at least (sincerely, and with no hidden meaning), am very fond of him, respect him and follow his progress with keen interest, from afar, whereas at closc range, the results are exactly the opposite. What can we do? We must act as though we lived on different planets or in different centuries."
For seventeen years the two men neither met nor corresponded. Tolstoy's falling-out with Fet, on the other hand, lasted only a few days. In January 1862, Tolstoy saw the poet in a Moscow theater, walked up to him, looked him in the eye, held out his hand and said, "No; I do not want to be angry with you."
When he thought back to this incident it seemed to him like a bad dream he had been living through, with grotesque aftereffects in his waking life. One moment it was he who was demanding an apology and, after receiving it, was sorry he had demanded it; and the next it was Turgenev who, after admitting he was in the wrong, considered himself insulted and insisted upon satisfaction gun in hand. As in a circus act, they leaped 011 and off of their high horses, one in front of the other, in counterpoint. Letters crossed in the mail; clumsy friends botched everything up; the devil take all men-of-lettersl The muzhiks were the only people one could live with!
It was for them and no one else that he had come home. Throughout his row with Turgenev, moreover, he had never ceased thinking of them. The emancipation proclamation had not changed them. The same rags, the same coarse faces, the same suspicious eyes, the same subservient bowing and scraping. Upon reaching Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of May 1861, the master had called them together to explain, in his own way, the provisions of the manifesto of February 19, 1861. Determined to be more liberal than anyone else, he allowed them the maximum under the administrative regulations for his region —3 desyatins (just over 8 acres) of land per person. This left him 628.6 desyatins (just under 1700 acres) at Yasnaya Polyana and 48.15 desyatins (130 acres) in the village of Gretsovka. But were the peasants grateful to him for giving them so much land, and all in single plots? Probably not. For them, the land they cultivated had become their property generations ago, bought by their labor. The master was making them a present of what already belonged to them. At most, they conccdcd that he was not robbing them, like some of the oilier gentry in the district.
Tolstoy was still in Brussels when the governor of Tula appointed him "arbiter of the peace" to settle disputes between landowners and peasants in the fourth precinct of the district of Krapivna. This decision raised a storm of protest among the local aristocracy, for whom the author was a dangerous literal who would support the serfs against the landowners. Under the pressure of the opposition, V. P. Minin, marshal of nobility of the province, had even written to Valuyev, the minister of the interior, asking him to have the appointment revoked. But Lieutenant-General Daragan, the governor of Tula, had spoken to the minister in Tolstoy's defense, calling him "a highly educated man, entirely committed to the task at hand . . . and much respected." Despite the opposition of his peers, the new arbiter of the peace remained in office.
It required great courage and perseverance on his part to perform his duties in the climate of hatred that surrounded him. He took every case seriously, as a matter of principle. Naturally inclined to favor the underdog, he did not want to be unfair to the landowners, whose position might become perilous after the emancipation. In sharing out the land, owners who wanted to salvage their privileges tried to foist off the poorest plots onto the muzhiks or extort illegal payment from them. The muzhiks, on the other hand, were convinced that they should have everything, complained of the arbiter's rulings and said he was not defending their interests energetically enough. Whatever decision his sense of equity led him to adopt, Tolstoy was sure to cause dissatisfaction on both sides. Mrs. Artukhov, a local landowner, had lodged a complaint against her manservant Mark, who wanted to leave her on the grounds that he was now a free man. "The arbiter of the peace Count L. Tolstoy" ruled as follows: "By my order, Mark shall leave immediately, with his wife, and go wherever he pleases. As for you, I have the honor to ask you (1) to pay him three and one half months' wages for the period since the publication of the Emancipation Act, during which he has been illegally detained by you; (2) to pay him damages for the beating still more illegally inflicted upon his wife." Furious at being treated like a common criminal, Mrs. Artukhov appealed to the Assembly of Arbiters of the Peace, which was composed of aristocrats opposed to Tolstoy, who unhesitatingly reversed his decision. But the chancellery of lands, which was the court of last resort, confirmed the original ruling; Mark and his wife received damages and were allowed to go.
Shortly after, Tolstoy had a struggle to prevent the landowner Mi- khailovsky from exacting excessive compensation from some peasants whose horses had destroyed his crops. lie unmasked another landowner, Kostomarov, who was trying to keep his land from the peasants by alleging that they were house-servants and not farmers. He attempted to defend a group of unfortunate peasants whose isbas had burned down and who were without money to rebuild them. He investigated every difficult case in person, negotiated with the villagers and the lord, urged both parties to accept the new situation without vain regrets and useless hopes. One day a delegation of muzhiks came to him and explained that their master had treated them unfairly by giving them a field instead of the pasturcland they coveted. Tolstoy calmly examined the shares of the allocation and concluded:
"I am very sorry I cannot give you satisfaction, but were I to do so, it would be unfair to your landlord."
The peasants looked at each other and scratchcd their heads. Then they began to whine:
"Do something, little father. . . . Have pity on us. . . . If you wanted to, you could fix it. . . ."
Tolstoy turned away to hide his exasperation, and said to the steward standing near him:
"It would be easier to be Amphion and move mountains and forests like Amphion than to make a peasant see reason!"10
However, the landowners determined to have their revenge upon the man they regarded as a traitor to their cause. Not a day went by without some complaint against the arbiter of the peace of the fourth precinct of the district of Krapivna being lodged with the marshal of the nobility, the governor, the minister of the interior or the chancellery of lands. "My activities as arbiter of the peace have furnished little useful material," Tolstoy wrote on June 25, 1861. "They have secured me the undying hatred of all the landowners and ruined my health." And he wrote to Botkin a few months later, "Quite unexpectedly, I have become an arbiter of the peace. And although I have been conscientious and unbiased at all times in the discharge of my duties, I have incurred the fell fury of all the nobility against me. They would like to flog me or drag me up before the judge, and can do neither."11 If only he didn't have to be a bureaucrat, too! But every new case raised a tempest of paper. He was submerged by reports, memoranda, lists, replies to questionnaires. In February 1862, after ten months in office, he asked the chancellery of lands to investigate the complaints against him. Then, on April 30 of that year, he submitted his resignation, for reasons of health. It was acccptcd by a senate decree dated