A new French tutor arrived at Yasnaya Polyana a few months after Alex-eyev in January 1878. Hiding behind the false identity of ‘Monsieur Nief’ was the militant young anarchist Vicomte Jules Montels, who had served as colonel of the 12th Federated Legion in the Paris Commune in 1871. After its two-month reign of power came to an end, Montels had fled to Geneva, where he became an active member of the French exile group of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), its ‘propaganda and socialist-revolutionary action section’ to be precise. In 1877, after six years of living with a death-sentence on his head, he found himself in Moscow getting on a train to Tula, disguised as ‘Monsieur Nief’. He had been recommended to the Tolstoys by the wife of the Russian priest in Geneva. Sonya had some justification for later exclaiming to her husband, ‘You found me two nihilists!’ Yasnaya Polyana was beginning to turn into a hotbed of radical left-wing politics.
The Tolstoys learned the full story about their enigmatic French tutor only after he had left their employ in late 1879. In 1880 the Communards were amnestied and the dapper, mustachioed Vicomte Montels returned to France, taking with him the Tolstoys’ French-Swiss governess Lucie Gachet. They later married and then moved to Tunisia, where Montels became editor of the Tunis Journal. Mademoiselle Gachet had arrived as a French teacher for Tanya and Masha in September 1876,38 at around the same time as the latest English governess Annie Phillips, and had first been hotly pursued by the family’s Russian tutor Vladimir Rozhdestvensky. The Tolstoys had been amongst the first Russians to acquire an English croquet set when they became available in Moscow in the 1870s, and they became avid players on warm summer evenings when the air was cooler. Rozhdestvensky took a particular delight in hitting Lucie Gachet’s ball in the direction of the pond, telling her he was sending it to the frogs. Like Jules Rey, he had a drink problem, and was soon dismissed, no doubt to Mlle Gachet’s relief. Sergey Tolstoy extended sympathy towards the family’s young male tutors when he was writing his memoirs much later. They were always on display, as he put it, occupying a difficult position somewhere between servants and employers, and they were usually rather bored. As a consequence, when they were not at loggerheads with each other they tended to develop infatuations with the family’s pretty young governesses.
Having sorted out the family’s teachers at the beginning of 1878, Tolstoy was keen to get back to fiction, and his religious views did not yet interfere with those plans. Some twenty years after writing War and Peace, he was keen to write another historical novel, and he was still fixated on the Decembrist Uprising. Back in the early 1860s Tolstoy had found himself going back in time from the 1825 uprising to the 1812 war with Napoleon, and finally to the events of 1805 before feeling he was at the right place to begin. But he had got no further than the immediate aftermath of 1812 in War and Peace, so he had never followed Pierre Bezukhov’s transformation into a Decembrist, or written about the uprising. Now, in the late 1870s, he began to be drawn to the events surrounding Nicholas I’s accession, and to the Russo-Turkish War of 1829. At the same time he was also interested in writing a novel about Russian peasant settlers colonising new lands, such as the territories east of the Volga near Samara and Orenburg with which he was personally familiar. He was excited by the prospect of somehow combining both these topics, and 1878 was a year of frenetic activity in which he gathered a mass of historical material and oral testimony in order first to bring the period alive for himself. In February 1878 Tolstoy went to Moscow on a foraging expedition, and held the first of many meetings with various Decembrists and their descendants. He also started marshalling his friends in libraries and archives to send him materials, which meant renewing his contact with Pyotr Bartenev, the editor of the journal Russian Archive, and depending, as usual, on Strakhov. He also began bombarding relatives with contacts in high places (such as Alexandrine and Sonya’s uncle Alexander Bers) with requests for help with primary sources. Tolstoy had further meetings with Decembrists in Moscow in March before travelling on St Petersburg to continue his research, and also tie up a new property deal which enabled him to enlarge his Samara estate by over 10,000 acres.
Tolstoy had not been in the capital for seventeen years, and he did not like it any more in 1878 than in 1861. Alexandrine had offered Tolstoy accommodation with her brother on Mokhovaya Street, but he decided to stay with his old friend and mother-in-law Lyubov Bers in her apartment on Ertelev Lane, which was also right in the heart of the city. He arrived on 6 March and was back home within the week, disappointing many acquaintances who had hoped to see him (such as the painter kramskoy), but he packed a lot into his four days in St Petersburg. He made a chilling visit to the St Peter and Paul Fortress, where the governor showed him the irons the Decembrists had been clamped in, but the cells where they had actually been held in 1825 were off-limits to all visitors except the Tsar and the chief of police. When he later drove past the equestrian statue of Nicholas I which had been erected in St Isaac’s Square, Tolstoy realised that his revulsion for the man who in his opinion had destroyed the best part of the Russian aristocracy had increased.39 A much more enjoyable visit was to the Imperial Public Library, where Tolstoy went to see Nikolay Strakhov and to meet the indomitable critic Vladimir Stasov, who had himself been imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress in 1849 for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle. Tolstoy was not so interested in Stasov the tireless and sometimes also tiresome propagandist of Russian national art as in Stasov the librarian, who had first been appointed specifically to research the reign of Nicholas I. For Tolstoy he was one more useful contact who could help him track down valuable historical sources.
Another notable event during Tolstoy’s visit to St Petersburg was his attendance at one of the public lectures on the topic of ‘divine humanity’ given by a young religious philosopher with flowing locks called Vladimir Solovyov (son of the famous historian Sergey Mikhailovich). It was a notable event, not because Tolstoy found the lecture interesting (he dismissed it as ‘childish nonsense’40), but because it was the only occasion on which he and Dostoyevsky were in spitting distance of each other. Strakhov was a friend of both the great writers, but he honoured Tolstoy’s request not to introduce him to anyone, and so the two passed like ships in the night, to their subsequent mutual regret. Much later, Tolstoy described in letters the horrible experience of having to sit in a stuffy hall which was packed so full that there were even high-society ladies in evening dress perched on window ledges. As someone who went out of his way to avoid being part of the crowd, and who disdained having anything to do with polite society or fashion, his blood must have boiled at having to wait until the emaciated figure of the twenty-four-year-old philosopher decided to make a grand theatrical entrance in his billowing white silk cravat. Tolstoy certainly did not have the patience to sit and listen to some boy ‘with a huge head consisting of hair and eyes’ spout pretentious pseudo-profundities. After the first string of German quotations and references to cherubim and seraphim, he got up and walked out, leaving Strakhov to carry on listening to the ‘ravings of a lunatic’.41 The rest of Tolstoy’s time in St Petersburg was taken up with concluding his property deal and meeting historians, including Mikhail Semevsky, editor of the important journal Russian Antiquity, who promised to send him unpublished Decembrist memoirs from its extensive archives.42 Otherwise Tolstoy spent time with family. Apart from Sonya’s younger brothers Pyotr, Stepan and Vyacheslav, the one person Tolstoy wanted to see during his stay in Petersburg was Alexandrine, whom he had not seen since 1860. They had several long and (for her) reassuring conversations about religion, and Alexandrine noted in her diary how happy she was to see him after so many years. Indeed, she had initially feared she might expire under the weight of all the things she wanted to share with him. Tolstoy seemed nicer to her than ever before, and on the day he left Petersburg, she registered in her diary their discussions about religion: