That spring he worked hard on two further stories, which were both published in The Contemporary. The first was ‘The Snowstorm’, which appeared in March, an artistically ambitious and visionary work inspired by the atrocious weather he had encountered during his journey home from the Caucasus in January 1854. ‘The Two Hussars’ was a gambling tale with a moral which compared two generations of the Russian nobility. It was dedicated to Tolstoy’s sister Masha and appeared in May. As far as the editors of The Contemporary were concerned, Tolstoy was still their star writer, and at some point that spring he signed a contract with the journal. Along with Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Grigorovich, the journal’s three other most valued writers, Tolstoy promised first refusal on new works for the next four years, in return for a share of its profits.14
Tolstoy came to regret signing that contract. His headstrong and eccentric views had been met with raised eyebrows and pursed lips during his first meetings with the Petersburg literary fraternity, but after he came back from Moscow in January there were remonstrations and then arguments, some of which became very heated, particularly with Turgenev. Tolstoy took offence easily, but he also gave offence easily. He was younger than his new friends, and sometimes seemed to be contrary just for the sake of it – he liked being outrageous. And then were arguments on subjects he had strong and dogmatic views about, such as the ‘woman question’. The first major conflict arose in early February over the prolific French novelist George Sand, whom Turgenev greatly admired for her bravery and independent spirit. Tolstoy believed in the institution of marriage, and was not an adherent of women’s emancipation (the ‘girls’ he visited in Petersburg’s brothels were another matter, of course). It was a particularly charged argument, because of the menage à trois arrangement maintained by Nekrasov and his co-editor Panayev, whose wife Advotya was Nekrasov’s mistress, as Tolstoy well knew. Another altercation with one of Nekrasov’s colleagues on 19 March even led Tolstoy to challenge him to a duel. The challenge went unanswered, and for a while Tolstoy considered giving up literature and moving back to the country.15
Tolstoy did try to fit in and be part of the collective. At the end of March he arranged for a group photograph to be taken to mark the visit to St Petersburg of Alexander Ostrovsky, a promising new playwright.16 This was quite an event, as Sergey Levitsky, the pioneer of Russian photography, had only just set up his studio on Nevsky Prospekt. In time he would receive an imperial warrant to photograph the Romanovs, but one of his most famous photographs remained the portrait organised by Tolstoy, the only writer in the shot wearing army uniform. Levitsky had studied in Paris and set up a studio there before returning to Russia, and he was an interesting man in his own right: apart from being Alexander Herzen’s cousin, he had taken celebrated photographs of the Caucasus in the late 1840s, and much later on would inadvertently provoke Tolstoy into suddenly taking Orthodox Christianity very seriously. The 1856 photograph of The Contemporary’s writers became a permanent fixture on the wall of Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana.
Tolstoy would get to know Ostrovsky better a few years later, when he rented a house near to where he lived in Moscow. Ostrovsky’s father was a Moscow lawyer, and he came from a far less privileged background than Tolstoy and Turgenev. His first play, Bankruptcy, had been personally censored in 1850 by Nicholas I, who had been so appalled by its depiction of Russian merchants as dishonest that he had placed the playwright under police surveillance. Ostrovsky’s first stage success had come in 1853 with the production of his third play, Don’t Get Into Someone Else’s Sleigh, and he was now about to widen his horizons. In the optimistic climate following Nicholas I’s death, the Tsar’s liberal-minded younger brother Grand Duke Konstantin, who was in charge of the Marine Ministry, hatched an enlightened plan to send a group of eight young writers, rather than bureaucrats, on an expedition down the Volga to study the lives of those who fished and navigated its waters. Ostrovsky was one of the eight, and he left for the Volga in April 1856, as soon as the police surveillance on him was lifted.
April 1856 was also an important month for Tolstoy. At the end of March Alexander II had given the famous speech in Moscow in which he declared that it was better to abolish serfdom ‘from above’ than to wait for it to abolish itself ‘from below’. The prospect of the Russian peasantry being freed was sensational news, and spread rapidly throughout the country.17 Tolstoy immediately began to sketch out a project to free his serfs, having by this time joined the distinguished ranks of the Russian gentry whose awakened social conscience caused them to become ‘repentant noblemen’. The first had been the eighteenth-century writer Alexander Radishchev, whom Catherine the Great exiled to Siberia in 1790 for exposing the evil of serfdom in his book A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. As a credulous young man, Radishchev had believed the myth that Catherine was enlightened and just. He had enjoyed an elite education, and so was frequently exposed to the ‘richness and splendour’ of the Russian court which for the British visitor William Coxe in the 1780s almost surpassed description.18
Radishchev was consequently shocked after the opulence of St Petersburg to discover quite how wretched the living conditions of the Russian peasantry really were when he left the city and began his journey to Moscow. He now began to see the immorality of the whole edifice of the tsarist autocracy for the first time, and also the role of the Russian nobility in supporting such an inhumane system, as becomes abundantly clear in the following passage:
Twice every week all of the Russian Empire is informed that N. N. or B. B. is unable or unwilling to pay what he has borrowed, taken or what is demanded from him. The borrowed money has been gambled away, traveled away, spent away, eaten away, drunk away, given away or has perished in fire and water … Any case will do for the announcement which reads: At ten o’clock this morning, on order of the county court or city magistrate, the real estate of retired captain T … consisting of house no. X, in such and such a district, and six male and female souls, will be sold at auction … Everyone is interested in a bargain. The day and hour of the sale has arrived. Buyers are assembling from all around. In the hall where the sale is to take place, the condemned are standing motionless. An old man of 75 years, leaning on an elmwood cane, is anxious to find out into whose hands his fate will pass, who will close his eyes. He served with the Master’s father in the Crimean campaign under Field Marshal Munnich. At the battle of Frankfurt he carried his wounded master off the field of battle on his shoulders. Returning home, he became the tutor for his young master. In [the Master’s] childhood, he had saved the boy from drowning, jumping into the river into which he had fallen while crossing on a ferry, and putting his life at risk, pulled him out. In [the Master’s] youth he had bailed him out of prison where he had been confined for his debts incurred while serving as a junior officer …19
It was Radishchev’s book (republished by Herzen in London in 1858) which launched the birth of Russia’s intellectual aristocracy – its intelligentsia. For the most progressive members of this class of Russians defined by their opposition to the state, of whom the editorial staff on The Contemporary were amongst their number, the abolition of serfdom was the single burning issue which needed to be addressed. Only writers had dared to broach this and other sensitive topics before the accession of Alexander II, hence their hallowed status in Russia, and the noble tradition of the writer as the moral voice of the nation would in time be continued by Tolstoy.