Tolstoy later regretted the absence of moral guidance in his early teenage years in Kazan. On 1 January 1900 he confided to his diary that he had done a lot of bad things when he was young out of a desire to copy his elders, who drank, smoked and led debauched lives.14 Dmitry, of course, whom their brother Nikolay characterised as an extreme ‘eccentric’, was not included in their number: he practised complete abstention until the age of twenty-five, which in those days, according to Tolstoy, was a great rarity, particularly as far as relations with women were concerned.15 This was certainly not true of Sergey, however, who was Dmitry’s polar opposite, and a major influence on their youngest brother Lev’s waywardness. Of all the brothers, Sergey was the most talented and good-looking, and if Tolstoy loved and ‘respected’ Nikolay, and was on ‘comradely’ terms with Dmitry, he ‘admired and copied’ Sergey. Indeed, as he famously puts it at one point in his memoirs, he actually ‘wanted to be him’.16 Sergey had a reputation for being gregarious and good-humoured, and for singing continually. Where Tolstoy was painfully shy and acutely self-conscious, which interfered with his enjoyment of life, Sergey was an extrovert whose egotism made him supremely oblivious of whether his behaviour and appearance aroused approval or disapproval. For this reason he was all the more attractive to his younger brother, for whom he was a mysterious and unfathomable exotic species. Tolstoy started copying Sergey in early childhood, first by rearing different kinds of speckled and tufted hens and painting pictures of them.17 During his adolescence in Kazan, it was Sergey who led Tolstoy into debauchery.18
In May 1844, when he was sixteen, Tolstoy formally applied to the rector of Kazan university, Nikolay Lobachevsky (a mathematician famous for developing non-Euclidean geometry) for permission to take the various entrance exams. Tolstoy’s letter of application launches the twenty-five volumes of his letters in his Collected Works. As ever, Tolstoy wanted to be different, and instead of applying to study mathematics like his brothers, he elected to join the Faculty of Oriental Languages, whose scholarly achievements were already renowned. It was a smart move. By 1828, the year of Tolstoy’s birth, the faculty had professorships in Persian, Arabic and Turkish, and by the time he became a student, chairs in Mongolian, Mandarin Chinese, Armenian and Sanskrit had been added. Thanks to Lobachevsky’s active support, the teaching of oriental languages at Kazan university was of a quality unsurpassed anywhere in Europe.19 Tolstoy was thinking of his future career in making this choice: his plan at this stage was to join the diplomatic service (although when one bears in mind the direction his life took, a less suitable spokesman for Russian imperial policy is hard to imagine).20 First, however, he had to pass several exams. Tolstoy excelled in his French exam, and did well in German, English, Arabic and Turkish (though he later claimed to have no memory of the last three). He also received good results for mathematics, logic, Russian literature and religious studies, which, like most people of his background, he did not take seriously at all. Much later, in an early draft of Confession, he wrote that the whole edifice of theology collapsed for him as soon as he took an interest in philosophy when he was sixteen, and began to see that the catechism was a ‘lie’.21 Tolstoy did poorly in his Latin exam, having been unable to translate even two lines of an ode by Horace, and even worse in statistics and geography, his superlative command of the French language clearly not accompanied by even a basic familiarity with the country where it was the mother tongue. His performance in history was also execrable, and he later added the comment in the manuscript of Pavel Biryukov’s biography: ‘I knew nothing.’22 As a result, he was forced to resit these last two exams, and had to spend the summer in Kazan rather than Yasnaya Polyana, where he would much rather have been. In September 1844, however, just after his brother Nikolay graduated, he was admitted as a student.
