There were also numerous other foreign authors who stimulated Tolstoy’s imagination during these formative years. He could justly be proud of acquiring a sufficient command of English to read writers like Dickens in the original (one rule he appears to have managed to abide by). David Copperfield (1850) was the Dickens novel Tolstoy most enjoyed as a young man, and he also greatly admired Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768). Both Dickens and Sterne were powerful influences on Tolstoy when he first embarked on writing fiction. He was still quite eclectic in his tastes however, enjoying William Prescott’s epic History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and Schiller’s play The Robbers (1781).13 It was Rousseau who still captivated him most, however. The Confessions, Emile and The New Héloïse were instrumental in his moral education.14 Beyond some of the books on his reading list, we know little else about Tolstoy’s life in the late 1840s, but we do know that he brought his beloved Aunt Toinette back to live at Yasnaya Polyana. For a while her sister Elizaveta lived at Yasnaya Polyana too, otherwise she was based with her son Valerian Petrovich and new daughter-in-law Maria. Elizaveta’s place at Yasnaya Polyana was permanently taken by Natalya Petrovna, an impoverished widow who became Toinette’s companion (no Russian estate was complete without its meek and deferential prizhivaltsy, who were always acutely conscious of their status as dependants). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Aunt Toinette to Tolstoy during his early twenties. She was his rock, and the most frequent recipient of his letters when he was away. It was she who kept him on an even keel, and she was also the one to entreat him to take up writing. She believed in his talent.
In October 1848 Tolstoy suddenly upped sticks and moved to Moscow, ostensibly to prepare for his law examinations, which he had finally decided to take. He rented the annexe of a building occupied by some friends in the Arbat area, not far from where he had lived as a boy. Having not been in the city since his childhood, he was excited to be back, but he never went anywhere near his law books. Instead, he was lured by the bright lights of the city into experiencing Moscow high society. He was twenty years old and well educated, he was the owner of a handsome country estate, he had a title and an income – in short, he was an eligible bachelor, welcomed in all the best drawing rooms in the city. It was all very flattering to the ego, although Tolstoy’s vanity was checked by shyness and an acute self-consciousness about his looks which caused him to feel awkward in polite society. Without the inconvenience of a job, or even any real obligation to study, Tolstoy led a completely hedonistic life that winter, during which time he developed a passion for playing cards, or rather for gambling. It was a passion which would last for well over a decade, and was an expensive habit which brought some serious personal consequences in its wake.
Tolstoy was far from the first Russian nobleman to acquire a gambling addiction – he had some illustrious forebears here, not least amongst his own family. The deeply ingrained recklessness of Russian gamblers (which led some foreign visitors to assume that betting was a national pastime) may have been attributable to the need to assert a degree of independence in Russia’s repressive and rigidly hierarchical society, where even private life was subject to state surveillance. Russian writers seemed particularly susceptible to gambling, and many made it a theme of their work.15 Pushkin, author of the quintessential gambling story ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1834), staked money on his own poetry and ended up having to surrender precious manuscripts.16 ‘The Fatalist’, one of the stories in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, is devoted to a game of Russian roulette, while the principal characters of Gogol’s play The Gamblers (1836) are two incorrigible card sharps. Turgenev grew up with a father who gambled, and there was a room at their family estate which his mother called the ‘casino’. Along with Gogol, he was a rare example of a Russian writer able to resist the lure of the betting tables in German casinos. Dostoyevsky, author of the classic novella The Gambler (1867), had an addiction to excitement which led him on one occasion to gamble everything he had, leaving him with nothing but the shirt on his back.
Gambling certainly ran in Tolstoy’s family. While his none-too-bright paternal grandfather was one of the most incompetent gamblers who ever lived, stories of the outrageous stunts pulled by his notorious ‘American’ cousin Fyodor Ivanovich were still circulating in Moscow years after his death in 1846. Tolstoy’s gambling compulsion was not helped by another deeply rooted Russian trait amongst the educated classes: an indifference to money which bordered on contempt. He soon ran up large debts and was left feeling very dissatisfied with himself. As he wrote to Aunt Toinette in December 1848, his life of excess had left him world-weary, and longing for the country air again: ‘I have been completely corrupted in this social world, all that annoys me terribly at the moment, and I am dreaming again of my life in the country which I hope to resume soon’ (‘Je me suis tout à fait débauché dans cette vie du monde, à présent tout cela m’embête affreusement et je rêve de nouveau à ma vie de campagne que je compte reprendre bientôt.’)17 Instead of returning to Yasnaya Polyana, however, Tolstoy decided on a whim to go to St Petersburg in January 1849, just because some friends were going there.
The impressionable young Tolstoy had never been to the Russian capital, which was a far more sophisticated and aristocratic city than provincial Moscow, and he straight away decided he wanted to settle there. He took a room in the Hotel Napoleon, on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Vosnesensky Streets (it is now the Angleterre Hotel). If he was lucky, he would have been given a room facing the largest church in Russia – construction of the neoclassical St Isaac’s Cathedral was then nearing completion. When he was settled, Tolstoy sat down to write a long letter to his brother Sergey, telling him St Petersburg was having a good effect on him. Everyone was always busy doing things, he wrote, and their industry was rubbing off on him: he was finally planning to take his law exams at the university. Afterwards, he continued in his letter, he planned to take up a job in the civil service. If necessary, he told Sergey, he was prepared to start at the bottom of the Table of Ranks if he failed his exams. No one in the nobility could avoid being hierarchically classified in the table of fourteen ranks that Peter the Great had originally instituted for the court, the civil service and the armed forces. It had led to an obsession with official status which was subjected to magnificent ridicule by Gogol in his story ‘The Nose’ (1836). Tolstoy went on to say that he was aware his brother would greet his assurances that he had changed with some scepticism, having heard the same story twenty times before. He hastened to tell him that this time he really had changed in quite a different way from the way he had changed on previous occasions, and it was no longer just a question of good intentions. For the first time, he declared, he had understood that he could not live on philosophy alone, and needed to undertake practical activities. He did need some money so that he could pay off his gambling debts, however – 1,200 roubles, to be precise – and he asked Sergey to sell off a birch forest at Yasnaya Polyana.18 Selling off bits of his inheritance would become a regular occurrence over the next few years.