t A primitive form of tea compressed into bricks and broken apart before boiling.
were undoubtedly hoping to find. Furious to end their search empty- handed, they rushed around the schools, seized the books and the pupils' notebooks and arrested the nine students who were teaching the young muzhiks in the master's absence. Suddenly they fetched up short in front of a camera—almost an unknown object in Russia at that time.
"What's being photographed around here?" asked the officer in charge of the detachment.
"Herzen himself," a student retorted.
His witticism nearly cost him his freedom. Fortunately, everyone's papers were in order. They would not be detained. But just in case, a constable added the names of those present to his list of suspects. Meanwhile, Aunt Toinette and Marya Tolstoy had managed to lay their hands 011 a few forbidden books and some letters from Herzen; Peterson, one of the teachers, was instructed to hide them in a safe place. The police were already on their way back to Yasnaya Polyana, where they demanded food and drink and ordered their horses to be looked after.
They camped in the house for two days, treating everyone as a suspect, coming into rooms without knocking, pawing over the library books and linen and accounts, prying into the family secrets, peering into wastepaper baskets, under the lid of the piano and behind the toilet, talking in loud voices, guffawing and slamming doors. From Yasnaya Polyana they moved 011 to Nikolskoye, where all they found for their pains were the private diaries of the deceased Nicholas. Slim pickings after forty-eight hours of searching.
Colonel Durnovo was not happy. This whole business had been cm- barked upon too lightly. The police had been watching Tolstoy for a long time; although his activities were not actually illegal, his fondness for the muzhiks was overconspicuous and he proclaimed his love of freedom altogether too loudly. Many landowners, vexed by his hostility toward them during his term as arbiter of the peace, had vowed his downfall. It was undoubtedly one of them who had written to Voykov, colonel of the Moscow police, accusing Tolstoy of harboring at Yasnaya Polyana a student known to have circulated anti-government tracts. Shipov, a police stool-pigeon who was sent to have a look around a short time later, had certified that Tolstoy was paying "a score of students," all liberals, out of his own pocket, that he had ordered and received printing equipment, and that they were preparing to send out a subversive manifesto in August, for the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Russia. "There are secret doors in his house," wrote the spy, "and hidden staircases, and at night the residence is guarded by a large number of sentinels." Of course, Sbipov himself had just been arrested for "indiscretion and drunkenness" at the time he was making these remarkable allegations, but the authorities could not be certain there was no truth in what he said. Prince Dolgorukov, national chief of constabulary, consulted Alexander II and then instructed Colonel Dur- novo to lead the investigation in person. At all costs, they must loeate that secret printing equipment, those lithographic stones and those stacks of proclamations.
When Colonel Durnovo had been convinced of his error, he apologized to Aunt Toinette and assured her that she could relax, but advised her to see that her nephew stayed well away from politics, for they had their eye 011 him. Besides, they might need to come back in a little while. . . . The peasants and house-servants were terrified by this invasion of blue uniforms on their master's estate, and wondered what dreadful crime he had committed. Overnight, he had ceased to be infallible. Ought they to go on sending their children to a school of which the tsar disapproved?
Unconcerned by the crisis he had just provoked, Colonel Durnovo wrote to Prince Dolgorukov, on July 14, 1S62. "A search of Count Tolstoy's house revealed it to be very modestly furnished, containing no sccret doors, hidden staircases or lithographic stones or telegraph. . . . I found 110 compromising papers, either at Yasnaya Polyana or at Nikol- skoye. . . . Count Tolstoy is very haughty with his neighbors and has made enemies of the local landowners by systematically defending the muzhiks during his term as arbiter of the peace. . . . His relations with the peasants are remarkably simple and he is on very friendly terms with the children at the school."
Upon reaching Moscow on July 20, 1862, in the best of spirits after his kumys treatment, Tolstoy learned of the search: his manuscripts, letters, his private diary subjected to the lewd prying of a bunch of cops! His hearth profaned, his integrity challenged before every peasant on his estate—he was not going to stand for that! hilled with a truly lordly wrath, he wrote to his aunt, babushka Alexandra Tolstoy, who represented the court in his eves:
"A nice lot, your pals! All those Patapovs and Dolgorukovs and Arakcheyevs—they are your pals, aren't they? . . . One of your friends, some stinking colonel, has read the letters and private diaries I intended to leave at my death to the person dearest to me in the world. ... It was my good fortune, and that of your friend, that I was not home at the time—I would have killed him! ... If only there were some way to avoid these brigands, who wash their checks and hands with perfumed soap and smile so benevolently. If I am to live much longer, I
shall have to shut myself away in a monaster)', not to pray to God—a waste of time, in my view—but in order not to see any more of the moral ignominy of these people swollen with conceit and this society with its epaulettes and crinolines. IIow can you, a decent human being, go on living in St. Petersburg? ... Do you have cataracts, is that why you don't see?"
On July 31, 1863, he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana and heard all the details from Aunt Toinette. He let his rage accumulate for a week. When it had reached boiling point, he wrote a second letter to Alexandra Tolstoy:
"I will not and cannot let the matter rest. Everything that was a source of joy and satisfaction to me has been ruined. Already the peasants have ccascd to regard me as an honest man—a reputation it took me years to acquire—and are treating me as a criminal, an arsonist or counterfeiter who had to finagle his way out of a tight spot. . . . 'Aha, old boy, they've caught you!' they think. 'That's enough of your speeches about honesty and justice. You almost got sent up yourself.' . . . And the landowners, I need hardly add, are chortling with glee. After consulting Pcrovsky, or Alexis Tolstoy or whomever you will, write to me, I beg you, as soon as you can. Tell me how to draft my letter and through whom I should send it to the tsar. I have only one choice: cither I must obtain reparation, as public as the offense (it's already too late to patch up the matter quietly), or else leave the country, which I am firmly resolved to do. I shall not join Herzcn. He has his life and I have mine. I shall not hide, and I shall make it known to all that I am selling my property in order to leave Russia, where nobody can be sure one minute that he will not be thrown into irons and flogged the next, along with his sister and wife and mother."