Tolstoy received his first letter from Turgenev just before leaving Sebastopol in November 1855. The two writers had read each other’s work, but never met. Tolstoy was in awe of his elder contemporary, who had been a fixture of the St Petersburg literary scene for almost a decade by the time he made his own debut. A careful re-reading of A Hunter’s Notes during his second summer in Pyatigorsk had produced the lapidary comment in his diary ‘Writing is a bit difficult after him’.1 For his part, Turgenev had immediately perceived Tolstoy’s literary talent, and was deeply flattered that ‘The Wood-Felling’ was dedicated to him (no other writer would receive a dedication from Tolstoy). When Turgenev wrote his first letter to Tolstoy, he felt he was addressing someone he already almost knew, as he had met (and rather fallen for) his sister Masha the previous autumn.2 Her husband Valerian Petrovich’s Pokrovskoye estate was only twelve miles from Turgenev’s ancestral home, and a shared love of hunting had brought the two neighbours into contact. Naturally, when Tolstoy arrived in St Petersburg, the first person he wanted to see was Turgenev. After checking into a hotel and paying a visit to the bath-house, he went straight round to Turgenev’s apartment, only to find the writer on his way out – in the hope of finding him. They exchanged hearty kisses, and Turgenev immediately insisted that Tolstoy share his flat on the Fontanka river.3 It would be Tolstoy’s home for the next month as he readjusted to civilian life.
As a celebrated author and officer who had arrived straight from the front line, Tolstoy was welcomed like a conquering hero by the editors of The Contemporary. There was also an air of mystery about him. Here was a young man who had submitted an unsolicited manuscript from the Caucasus three years earlier, and no one at The Contemporary had actually met him. In fact only a few people even recognised his name, as he had signed all his stories so far with his initials only. Tolstoy was also anxious to meet the new colleagues he had been corresponding with, and he hoped they would be kindred spirits. He had been a callow and impressionable youth when he had last been in St Petersburg, but now he was a published writer, a war hero and a celebrity. On his first day in St Petersburg Turgenev took Tolstoy round to meet Nekrasov (the editorial offices of The Contemporary were located in a building on the other side of the river), and they had lunch and talked and played chess until eight in the evening.4 Nekrasov went into raptures in a letter to a friend, describing Tolstoy as ‘better than his writing’, a ‘falcon’, or perhaps even an ‘eagle’.5 There followed meetings with critics and publishers, and dinners with other writers, including the novelist Ivan Goncharov, then working on his masterpiece Oblomov (1859), and the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Soon Tolstoy was personally acquainted with all the leading lights of Russian literature, who fell over themselves to express how delighted they were by this talented young artillery officer.
Tolstoy found it intoxicating to be back in civilised surroundings, where there was plenty of intellectual stimulation, but he also craved the intoxication of gypsy music and card games, in which he could seek oblivion and shake off the stresses of the last few years. The poet Afanasy Fet visited one day for mid-morning tea with Turgenev and was told by his servant Zakhar that the gleaming sabre in the corner of the hall belonged to Count Tolstoy. Fet and Turgenev then had to spend the next hour talking in whispers, as the count was still asleep on the couch in the drawing room, having been up all night carousing. Turgenev, though only ten years Tolstoy’s senior, had assumed a kind of paternal role in their relationship and explained that it was the same every night, and that he had long since given up on him.6 On 11 December Tolstoy spent all the money he had left throwing a party with gypsy singers at the Hotel Napoleon.7
Of all the writers Tolstoy met during his sojourn in St Petersburg, only Fet became a lasting friend, but even he would fail to make the cut when Tolstoy emerged from his spiritual crisis in the 1880s. Much as they all liked Tolstoy, the writers in St Petersburg soon realised that it was actually not all that easy to get on with him. He came out with such provocative opinions, and seemed to go out of his way to be contrary. Many of the writers associated with The Contemporary were either writing about Shakespeare or translating him, for example, but Tolstoy was simply dismissive of him.8 And the mild-mannered Turgenev soon found himself having violent arguments with Tolstoy. They were two men from the same patrician background, but Tolstoy did not like compromise, and he instinctively recoiled from Turgenev’s refined elegance and spirit of moderation, which were a great disappointment to him. One evening Turgenev read from the manuscript of his first novel, Rudin, to an assembled company. In comparison with A Hunter’s Notes, Tolstoy found it unbelievably contrived, and could not believe how seriously it was received by the other literati present.
Turgenev had not had a particularly easy time. He was a self-confessed Westerniser, so was anxious to see reform and modernisation in Russia along European lines. He had bravely gone against the grain of his upbringing by befriending the radical critic Belinsky, whose reforming zeal stemmed partly from his lowly social origins, and his implicit criticism of serfdom in his A Hunter’s Notes had made him a very dubious figure in the eyes of the tsarist establishment. Turgenev never shied away from standing up for what he believed was right, or from dealing with political issues in his works. He had defiantly published an obituary of Gogol back in 1852, despite knowing that all mention of a writer who had satirised the Fatherland had been forbidden by the censor (the same censor who disfigured Tolstoy’s ‘Sebastopol in May’). For daring to call Gogol ‘great’, Nicholas I had personally ordered Turgenev’s arrest and imprisonment for a month, to be followed by permanent exile to his estate. It had only been thanks to the future Alexander II, who had liked A Hunter’s Notes, that he had been allowed to travel again at the end of 1853. At the time of his meeting with Turgenev, Tolstoy was intent on carving out a career as a novelist himself, but Rudin cut no ice with him.