Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky were the same age, and they both sought the abolition of serfdom, but there was nothing else they had in common. Chernyshevsky came from a new breed of a political radicals whose real goal was revolution. Both he and the younger Alexander Dobrolyubov, who joined The Contemporary in 1857, came from the same social and ideological stock as Belinsky, but they were dismissive of the ineffectual idealists of Turgenev’s generation. As children of clergy, they were raznochintsy – a class which often denoted educated members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds, and they were far more dogmatic about the need for art to serve a political purpose than Nekrasov and Panayev. Chernyshevsky had set the new agenda for The Contemporary in his 1855 essay The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in which he declared that ‘beauty is life’, and proclaimed art to be inferior to science.32 In his review of Tolstoy’s work, Chernyshevsky defined his technique in following the development of the evanescent thoughts and feelings of his characters as the ‘dialectics of the soul’, and compared it to the ability of certain painters ‘to capture a flickering reflection of light on rustling leaves’ or ‘the play of colours in the changing outlines of clouds’.33 By this he meant that Tolstoy was not so much interested in the end result of a psychological process as in the process itself. It was a deliberately flattering review, but it was clear that Tolstoy would not respond warmly to Chernyshevsky’s utilitarian views about art. As a result of Nekrasov’s support of his radical younger colleagues, the left-wing political agenda of The Contemporary now started to be prioritised over artistic criteria, and this would lead to the journal losing all its top writers to the Russian Messenger in Moscow, Tolstoy included.
Once Tolstoy received his resignation papers from the army at the end of November, he was free to leave St Petersburg for good. He had set himself two goals, and accomplished both. Firstly, he had ‘tested’ his feelings for Valeria Arseneva, and proved to himself they had no substance, and secondly, he had completed Youth and submitted it for publication in January 1857. All he had to do now was obtain a foreign passport so that he could make his first trip abroad. After a month of tedious bureaucratic procedures, he was ready to set off for Moscow to prepare for his trip, and on 9 November (21 November according to the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe), he arrived in Paris at the end of a twelve-day journey. He had decided to travel alone, without a servant. The same evening, after unpacking his bags at the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, he set off to go to the traditional ‘Samedi Gras’ ball at the Paris Opéra, where he joined Nekrasov and Turgenev.
Tolstoy’s six weeks in Paris were coloured by his meetings with Turgenev, whom he saw most days. By and large, they got on. Turgenev was spending more and more time abroad and knew the city extremely well, so would have been a marvellous guide. Tolstoy surrendered himself to sightseeing – the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Musée de Cluny, Napoleon’s tomb at the Hôtel des Invalides (‘terrible deification’),34 the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and then trips out to Versailles, to Fontainebleau and further afield to Dijon. He also saw a lot of shows. He went to the Théâtre Français to see Molière and Racine, he heard Rigoletto, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Fille du régiment at the Italian Opera, an operetta at the Bouffes Parisiens and watched a farce at the Théâtre des Variétés. He also went to lectures at the Sorbonne. And then early in the morning of 25 March he went to witness a public execution by guillotine, an experience which traumatised him so much that he could no longer stay in Paris. Despite having had plans to go on to London (he had been taking English lessons in Paris), he headed instead for Geneva, for a reunion with Alexandrine and her sister, who were holidaying there along with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna.35 He told his sister by letter that he had arrived just before the end of Great Lent, and had fasted in order to take communion.36
Relieved to have escaped from ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, as he referred to Paris, Tolstoy spent the next three and half months restoring his spirits in Switzerland. He also picked up his pen again, and caught up with his reading, which was eclectic, and included Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, De Tocqueville, Proudhon, Balzac, Las Cases’ memoirs of Napoleon, and Goethe. Turgenev still found Tolstoy very bemusing. ‘He’s a strange person,’ he confided in a letter to a friend. ‘I’ve never met anyone like him, and don’t quite understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic, nobleman – something reminiscent of Rousseau, but more honest than Rousseau – highly moral and at the same time unattractive.’37 Turgenev did understand Tolstoy better than most, and, knowing his low boredom threshold, predicted that his friend would soon tire of Lake Geneva. In fact, Tolstoy enjoyed his stay in Switzerland. It is true he did not stay still for very long, but the company of Alexandrine was very congenial. After two weeks they took a ferry across the lake to Clarens, from where he wrote excitedly to Aunt Toinette, telling her it was the same village where Rousseau’s Julie had lived in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The scenery was ravishing. ‘I won’t try to describe to you the beauty of this country, particularly at the moment, when everything is in leaf and blossoming’ (‘Je n’essayerais pas de vous dépeindre la beauté de ce pays surtout à présent quand tout est en feuilles et en fleurs’), he wrote, telling her he found it impossible to detach his gaze from the lake. He spent most of his time going on walks, or just looking out of the window in his room.38
From Clarens there were excursions to Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux and Chillon, with walks in the mountains and picnics with other Russian visitors. At the end of May Alexandrine and her sister went back to Geneva and Tolstoy went on a walking tour in the Alps, taking with him for company Sasha Polivanov, the eleven-year-old son of some Russian acquaintances, as well as his diary and a supply of paper in his knapsack. It was the first time he had been in the mountains since being stationed in the Caucasus five years earlier, but the tranquillity of the picture-book Alpine pastures full of narcissi and well-fed cows with bells round their necks was a far cry from Chechnya. When the travellers got to Grindelwald, where Tolstoy went down a glacier, he started writing up his travel notes, thinking they could be published in some form or other in The Contemporary. The main focus of Tolstoy’s writing in Switzerland, however, was the story which would eventually become The Cossacks.
Turgenev was right about Tolstoy being restless. Soon after returning from his eleven-day walking tour he was off again, to Bern and Fribourg. A few days after that he went back to Geneva, then on to Chambéry in Savoie, and many other places which brought the Savoyard vicar from Rousseau’s Emile to mind. In Turin, Tolstoy met up with his friends the Botkins and Alexander Druzhinin. The return journey to Switzerland took Tolstoy first to Ivrea, followed by two ascents of Monte Rosa. Then came stops in Pont Saint-Martin, Gressoney and Chambave, and a night in the famous hospice founded by St Bernard in 1049, located at the highest point of the Great St Bernard Pass (the oldest in the Alps). Before descending, he looked round the monastery church and inspected the St Bernard dogs, who had been part of the monastery since the seventeenth century, and had saved the lives of hundreds of travellers stuck in avalanches.39 Then it was back down into Switzerland, via the glorious Pissevache waterfall. The 114 metre-high fall had been visited by Rousseau and, in 1779, inspired Goethe to flights of rhetoric. By this stage, Tolstoy was making only brief notes in his diary, and his own enigmatic verdict on the waterfall was ‘tumbling rye’.40 Down on the lake at Villeneuve, Tolstoy caught a ferry back to Clarens.41