TOLSTOY was not only a prolific writer, but a writer given to producing numerous plot outlines, drafts and re-drafts, and unfinished sections of works which either never came to fruition or were re-absorbed into the making of other stories or novels. The ninety volumes of the Russian-language Jubilee Edition (1928–58) contain, as well as Tolstoy’s letters and diaries, a great quantity of this type of material, much of it of interest only to specialists. The two texts printed below, apparently not translated into English before, are included in the present edition both because they are documents of some biographical and literary value, and because readers of biographies and critical studies of Tolstoy in English may well come across references to them.
The first and much better-known of the two, A History of Yesterday, is a fragment written in a few days in late March 1851, some four weeks before Lev Tolstoy left with his brother Nikolai for the Caucasus, where (from November 1851 to July 1852) he was to write the fourth, final draft of his first published work, Childhood. Childhood looks like a thinly disguised autobiography, but is actually a complex blend of borrowed experiences, personal recollections and fiction. In A History of Yesterday, on the other hand, Tolstoy has, in Eikhenbaum’s words, ‘not yet severed the umbilical cord which connects the story to his diaries’. A History of Yesterday is much nearer to autobiography, or rather to Tolstoy’s diaries, of which there are surviving volumes for parts of 1847 and 1850, most of 1851 and nearly all of 1852.
A. N. Wilson points out the very close relationship between the opening section of the story and the diary’s record of the evening of 24 March 1851, which Tolstoy spent playing cards at the Moscow house of his cousin Alexander Volkonsky, and flirting with Alexander’s wife, Louisa Ivanovna. The story’s account of this social evening, with a minute dissection of the narrator’s thoughts and his conversation (spoken and implied) with his hostess, is followed by a description of his journey home. This includes a short essay on cab-drivers and their characteristics: the populist note and the details of verbal abuse and Russian nicknames are strongly reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Having brought his bachelor narrator home, Tolstoy plunges him into a long and typically heavy-footed disquisition on the diary or journal form itself, and its usefulness – or its futility – as a tool of moral self-improvement. This is the first in a long line of similar meditations in Tolstoy’s fiction, though by no means the first in his own diaries. It leads in turn to a detailed account of the processes of falling asleep, dreaming and waking up. The account of the experience is much more entertaining than the leaden analysis which follows: Proust’s treatment of very similar material sixty years later yielded a far more beautiful result. The text concludes with a much shorter fragment ‘written on another day’, a day which seems to bear no relation whatever to the Yesterday of the title, about the narrator’s projected journey down the Volga to Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. Even this small fragment again partially reflects Tolstoy’s own life experience: he and Nikolai accomplished a three-week section of their journey to the Caucasus on a boat which took them down the Volga, not from Moscow but from Saratov to Astrakhan. (It is characteristic of Tolstoy’s endless and economical recycling of the raw material of experience that a similar journey down the Volga is undertaken by the Polish exiles escaping from Siberia in the late story What For?)
