Tolstoy had become a confirmed opponent of serfdom while he was in Sebastopol, but his views were no doubt further influenced by the conversations he had with Nekrasov and his new colleagues. After many meetings and consultations, including with the historian and liberal thinker Konstantin Kavelin, whose proposal for the emancipation of the serfs had been circulating in samizdat form for the previous year, Tolstoy went to discuss his own emancipation plan with a senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His intention was to give his serfs complete personal freedom, and to sell the land to them over a thirty-year period for 150 roubles for each desya-tina (2.7 acres). The Ministry was not yet ready to make decisions on such matters at this point, but Tolstoy was firmly resolved.
Although he was promoted in March 1856 to the rank of lieutenant for his bravery in Sebastopol,20 Tolstoy had little interest in continuing his military career. He immediately put in a petition for an eleven-month leave. The winter months he had spent in Petersburg had been exceptionally busy. He had largely managed to curb his degenerate habits and had worked hard on his writing, but there were a few cultural outings. The flat he had taken on Ofitserskaya Street was close to the city’s two main opera houses, and on 4 May he sat in the same box as the composer at the premiere of Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka at the Circus-Theatre (home to the Russian opera, and forerunner of the Mariinsky Theatre).21 Later in the month he took the train out to Pavlovsk, and is bound to have been at the second concert given that season by Johann Strauss Jr and his orchestra. Pavlovsk had become an important concert venue after the opening of the railway link with St Petersburg in 1837 (the first in Russia). The country’s first railway station – called, for reasons that are not entirely clear, a vokzal after the English ‘Vauxhall’ – included a spacious and well-appointed pavilion where the performance of light music had turned into regular orchestral concerts during the summer months, and one of the first signs of the liberalisation of Russian society under Alexander II was the invitation to the ‘Waltz King’ to come to Russia. The arrival in Russia of dance music seemed to augur well for the new reign. On 16 May, the day after he went to Pavlovsk, Tolstoy was finally given permission to go on leave, which meant he could finally head back to Yasnaya Polyana and put his emancipation plans into action. Within two days he had packed his bags and departed.
By the end of May, after stopping in Moscow for a few days, and visiting the Trinity St Sergius Monastery with his aunt Polina, Tolstoy was finally back in Yasnaya Polyana. He had not lived at home for about five years, and he initially found it hard to readjust. First of all he had to get used to the gaping hole where his family home had stood, and it was strange living in one of the house’s two identical wings. Secondly, after all the liberal talk in St Petersburg, the very idea of his being a landowner with serfs now seemed utterly repellent to him. He even found it difficult being with dear old ancien régime Aunt Toinette at first, as even she seemed ‘unpleasant’.22 Tolstoy immediately called a meeting with his peasants to propose his scheme for freeing them, but, to his surprise, they were suspicious of his motives, and did not give him a definitive response. The peasants were convinced they would be given their freedom when the new tsar was crowned, and so believed Tolstoy’s offer of a contract was just a cunning ruse to swindle them. After several more meetings they refused all his revised offers. It was very frustrating for him, as he had not anticipated such distrust.23 He resolved to put his emancipation plans to one side.
Tolstoy threw his energies instead into reading (Dickens’s Little Dorrit was one book he immersed himself in that summer) and writing. Mostly he worked on Youth, the third and final volume of the quartet of short novels he had originally planned about the early life of a young noble, and the first draft of what came to be the novella A Landowner’s Morning, in which he focused on Russian peasants for the first time. During the summer months Tolstoy also went on visits to his sister Masha and her husband, and rode over from their house to visit Turgenev at his estate at Spasskoye. His brother Nikolay by this time was back in the Caucasus. Despite having resigned from the army in 1854, the following summer he had applied to rejoin, and he had been posted back to Starogladkovskaya.24 Sergey was briefly in the army too at this time, and Tolstoy was reunited with him in July in Mtsensk, where he was serving with the Life-Guards 4th Imperial Family Rifle Regiment (he had joined the army in March 1855, presumably on a wave of patriotic fervour engendered by the Crimean War, but he had already begun to tire of it, and was about to resign).25
What claimed most of Tolstoy’s attention that summer was romance. His old university friend Dmitry Dyakov had suggested he marry Valeria Arseneva, a twenty-year-old neighbour who had become his ward upon the death of her father in 1854. Her family home was five miles away from Yasnaya Polyana on the road to Tula, and Tolstoy started making frequent visits, and cultivating her as a potential bride. It was an awkward relationship, as Tolstoy was not prepared to accept Valeria as she was – he wanted to mould her according to his ideal of womanhood. He was dreadfully disappointed when she seemed to take too much interest in dresses and dancing, while she seemed to have little idea of what he wanted from her. Reading between the lines of the many entries Tolstoy made in his diary about her, it appears his feelings of affection for Valeria were mostly wishful thinking. He wanted to be in love with her, and sometime he was ‘almost’ in love with her, but it was all too contrived.26 All the time that he was courting her that summer, he found it impossible to restrain his guilt-provoking urges to pursue peasant women.27
By the onset of autumn 1856 Tolstoy had finished dictating Youth to a copyist and received author’s copies of his first books: War Stories (which brought together his Sebastopol tales together with ‘The Raid’ and ‘The Wood-Felling’), Childhood and Boyhood. He had also submitted his letter of resignation to the army on the grounds of illness, and by the end of November he was once again a civilian.28 On 1 November he set off for Moscow, and then on to St Petersburg, still seeing Valeria as his future wife. The poor girl continued all autumn to receive patronising letters instructing her on what her role was to be, which was a mother (mat’) but not a queen bee (matka), and he asked her whether she understood the difference.29 Some of the letters were long and very attentive, but some of the de-haut-en-bas directives were jaw-dropping in their self-righteous hypocrisy, when one bears in mind his own record. ‘Your chief defect is weakness of character, and all your other minor faults proceed from it,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘Work on improving your willpower. Take yourself in hand and do battle with your bad habits.’30 Tolstoy’s already lukewarm ardour cooled further that autumn, and at the end of 1856 he wrote her a brusque letter breaking off relations, leaving her understandably feeling hurt and confused. In January he wrote a contrite letter of apology, but even then his admission of guilt before himself came before his admission of guilt before her.31
Before Tolstoy had signed his contract with The Contemporary he had promised a story to the journal Notes of the Fatherland, which was its main rival, and he spent much of his time in Petersburg that autumn working further on the story he had extracted from his unfinished Novel of a Russian Landowner, which he had been tinkering with ever since he had been in the Caucasus. In A Landowner’s Morning, which was published in December, he fictionalised his own experiences in trying to improve the life of his serfs. In its concern to deal seriously with Russian peasants as fictional characters, it was a kind of A Hunter’s Notes a decade further on, but under the new tsar, so much more could now be said. Importantly, A Landowner’s Morning met with the approval of The Contemporary’s new critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who published a lengthy and influential review of Tolstoy’s work to date in the journal’s December issue.