THE MOVE TO KAZAN spelled the end of Tolstoy’s innocence. When he was fourteen, he lost his virginity, and he would later define the subsequent twenty years as a period of ‘crude dissolute living in the service of ambition, vanity, and, above all, lust’.2 The five and half years Tolstoy spent in Kazan were certainly not the happiest in his life, and few of his memories of this time were fond ones. Nevertheless, it was during his adolescence that he embarked on the intense self-analysis which culminated in the writing of his first fictional masterpieces. From the outset, Tolstoy conducted his self-analysis on the page. At the age of eighteen, shortly before he left Kazan to return home to Yasnaya Polyana, he began to keep a diary. It was with his first diary entries in March 1847 that his turbulent creative journey began, rather than with the completion of his first piece of fiction in 1851, or the publication of his first work a year later. This diary, which was to become the engine-room of his writing and which he kept on and off for the rest of his life, became increasingly voluminous in his last decade and fills fourteen volumes of his collected works.
As with the move to Moscow in 1837, the Tolstoys’ relocation to Kazan in November 1841 was a major undertaking, even without accompanying adults. The smallest and most remote of the Tolstoy properties was sold to pay outstanding debts, and then the family’s belongings were loaded on to a number of barges to make their slow way down to Kazan via the Oka and Volga rivers. The family’s belongings, of course, included numerous serfs, including tailors, decorators, carpenters and cooks, on whom they would depend for their well-being in their new home. The four brothers and their sister set off later, and travelled overland by sleigh, via Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and the Chuvash capital of Cheboksary, one of the ports on the Volga. They settled upon arrival in Kazan into the ground and mezzanine floors of a centrally located house; their landlords occupied the top floor. It was not far from the river and one of the city’s monasteries, but its windows looked out on to the prison. The Tolstoys’ servants had separate lodgings.3
Kazan was not like other Russian cities, as would have been immediately apparent to the new arrivals, for there were minarets alongside the domes of its many churches. until 1552 Kazan had been the centre of a powerful Tatar khanate which had gradually adopted Islam as its state religion. After Kazan was conquered by Ivan the Terrible (who celebrated his first great victory over former Mongol lands by building the oriental-looking St Basil’s in Moscow’s Red Square), the city was populated by Russians, and its small remaining Tatar population would henceforth become a persecuted minority. The miraculous survival, after one of the city’s many fires, of the venerated icon of Our Lady of Kazan in 1579 is testament to the vigour with which the new Russianisation policy was pursued in this former Islamic kingdom. And the fact that it was to Our Lady of Kazan that the Russian army’s commander-in-chief Mikhail Suvorov appealed for help after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, meanwhile, is testament to the esteem in which this icon came to be held. In 1813 Suvorov was for this reason buried in the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg; it was here that a precious copy of the original icon was kept, and it now became the chief memorial to Russia’s victory over Napoleon in the city.
Kazan never lost its Tatar character entirely. Catherine the Great had permitted mosques to be built again in Kazan towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the university founded in the city in 1804 rapidly became a major centre for oriental studies. The very foundation of Kazan university, where all the Tolstoy boys became students, speaks volumes about the city’s importance nationally. until Alexander I’s famous 1804 statute, the only universities in the Russian Empire were located in Moscow, Dorpat and Vilna, the last two of which provided an education delivered in German and primarily for the benefit of their elite Baltic German populations. In 1804, these three were joined by two new universities in European Russia (St Petersburg and the ukrainian city of Kharkov), and a third in the distinctly Asian setting of Kazan, some 750 miles south-east of St Petersburg. It was also in Kazan that the first state lycée was founded outside Moscow and St Petersburg, but as the Russian nobility preferred to educate their offspring at home, the younger male Tolstoys continued to be privately taught after moving to Kazan.
