19. khramov [household]. Six mouths to feed and one baby, one worker. Animals: 2 horses, 3 cows, 5 sheep. Sown: 9 and a half acres and nothing has grown. Debt: 28 roubles and 48 kopecks…110
Tolstoy’s letter was published on 17 August, while the family was travelling home to Yasnaya Polyana, and quickly reproduced in many other newspapers. It was the factual detail of Tolstoy’s inventory which struck Russian readers, for he was not just warning of imminent tragedy on a large scale, but providing some of the very first statistical information about the peasantry ever collected. Liberal politicians in Europe had been championing the collection of empirical data from populations as a valuable tool of social progress since the early nineteenth century, but the spectre of politics had severely impeded the development of the new discipline of statistics in Russia. Nicholas I had been so cautious about Russian society being placed under the microscope (particularly where serfdom and state institutions were concerned) that he had simply censored a lot of statistical work. As a consequence, next to no statistical knowledge of the Russian peasantry was acquired prior to the Emancipation of Serfdom Act of 1861, despite peasants representing the vast majority of the population. Attitudes predictably changed in the 1860s, but it was not until the 1880s that poorly paid members of the intelligentsia began conducting censuses in villages on behalf of the zemstvo (local government), and it was not until 1897 that the first national census took place. Tolstoy’s letter about the famine in 1873 caused a national outcry, and resulted in donations of nearly 2 million roubles and 344,000 kilograms of grain. Through these donations, which came both from central government and from the populace at large, much of the suffering was either prevented or alleviated. This was Tolstoy’s first clarion call about the reality of many Russian peasants’ lives, and it would not be his last.
9
NOVELIST
At that time he read a lot of English family novels and sometimes joked about them, saying, ‘These novels always end up with him putting his arm round her waist, then they get married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy. These novelists end their novels with him and her getting married. But a novel should not be about what happens before they get married, but what happens after they get married.’
Reminiscence of Tolstoy’s son Sergey1
TOLSTOY HAD BEEN ITCHING to get back to fiction ever since he delivered the manuscript of the last part of his ABC to the printers in February 1872. This time there was none of the restless casting around for a subject as there had been at the end of War and Peace. Tolstoy now knew exactly where he was going, but his imagination was not yet captured by the unruly curls of a beguilingly beautiful society woman destined to become one of the greatest of literary heroines. His mind was instead occupied by the relentless energy and alcohol-fuelled sadism of a seven-foot-tall syphilitic buffoon who also happened to be Russia’s first great revolutionary: Peter the Great. To be fair, Tolstoy only uncovered these traits during the course of his painstaking research, but they led him to the realisation that he no longer wanted to write a novel about the ‘tsar-reformer’. It was this discovery which made him receptive to the chance flash of inspiration which then launched Anna Karenina, but it came at the end of a very serious engagement with the available sources on late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Russian history. Tolstoy tried to start his novel about Peter the Great thirty-three times.2
Tolstoy was not the only Russian artist interested in Peter the Great in 1872, for this was when the composer Musorgsky started to plan an ambitious new historical opera set at the time of Peter’s accession. But there was a particular reason why Peter I was in the public eye that year: it was the bicentenary of his birth. Nicholas I had actively encouraged the cult of Peter’s personality during his reign, and the anniversary was celebrated with due pomp and circumstance. A new battleship was named after Peter, a statue of him was put up in Petrozavodsk (St Petersburg was not the only city he founded bearing his name), and Tchaikovsky wrote a cantata in honour of the occasion, to name just some of ways in which the bicentenary was marked. There was also a flurry of new publications – 1,049 to be exact,3 and a great deal of eulogy from Russian historians, some of whom were still inclined to see Alexander II, the country’s next ‘great reformer’, as a latter-day Peter. Amongst those who idolised Peter the Great was the nation’s leading historian, Professor Sergey Solovyov, newly appointed as Rector of Moscow university. ‘Two hundred years have passed since the day that the great man was born,’ he intoned in the first of his twelve ‘Public Lectures about Peter the Great’ in 1872. ‘Everywhere one hears the words: we must celebrate the bicentenary of this great man; it is our duty, our holy, patriotic duty, because this great man is one of us, a Russian man.’4
Solovyov was a scholar of Tolstoyan industry who also published on a Tolstoyan scale. He had read the twelve volumes of karamzin’s pioneering History of the Russian State (1806–1826) at least a dozen times by the time he was thirteen, and then in 1851 he started publishing his own history of Russia – a project which would absorb him until his death in 1879. karamzin had covered Russian history up until the accession of the first Romanov tsar in 1613, but the twenty-nine volumes of Solovyov’s History of Russia from the Earliest Times extended the survey up to 1774, the year of the Pugachev Rebellion (which was brutally crushed by Catherine the Great). Tolstoy, of course, read Solovyov’s magisterial history very carefully, and particularly those volumes concerning the reign of Peter the Great. Solovyov sought to present a unified view of Russia’s evolution as a nation. As a pronounced Westerniser who believed in historical progress, he saw Peter’s reforms as a natural and inevitable development which had placed Russia on the path to the rule of law, and brought her closer to European civilisation. For Tolstoy, however, Solovyov’s history revealed pre-Petrine Russia as a country of ‘cruelty, theft, beatings, coarseness, and an inability to do anything’, and it signally failed in his opinion to acknowledge the contribution of the people in turning Russia into the great and united state that made such great strides in the eighteenth century. He was inevitably critical of yet another history which seemed to concentrate on the policies and actions of Russia’s rulers.5 Tolstoy shared Solovyov’s admiration for Peter’s down-to-earth tastes, but not much else.
In order to gain a sense of what it was like to live in Russia during Peter’s reign, Tolstoy surrounded himself with an enormous number of books and articles. They ranged from the thirty volumes of Ivan Golikov’s reverent Deeds of Peter the Great, Wise Reformer of Russia, published at the end of the eighteenth century, to the latest contemporary portraits by Slavophile historians, whose attitude to Peter’s reign was far more ambivalent. And then there were studies by historians such as Mikhail Semevsky, who respected Peter’s achievements but was repelled by his sacrilegious, Rabelaisian behaviour. General histories, monographs, memoirs, diaries, letters – Tolstoy devoured everything he could lay his hands on.6 He also perused pictures and contemporary portraits.