Tolstoy полностью

By the end of May, after stopping in Moscow for a few days, and visiting the Trinity St Sergius Monastery with his aunt Polina, Tolstoy was finally back in Yasnaya Polyana. He had not lived at home for about five years, and he initially found it hard to readjust. First of all he had to get used to the gaping hole where his family home had stood, and it was strange living in one of the house’s two identical wings. Secondly, after all the liberal talk in St Petersburg, the very idea of his being a landowner with serfs now seemed utterly repellent to him. He even found it difficult being with dear old ancien régime Aunt Toinette at first, as even she seemed ‘unpleasant’.²² Tolstoy immediately called a meeting with his peasants to propose his scheme for freeing them, but, to his surprise, they were suspicious of his motives, and did not give him a definitive response. The peasants were convinced they would be given their freedom when the new tsar was crowned, and so believed Tolstoy’s offer of a contract was just a cunning ruse to swindle them. After several more meetings they refused all his revised offers. It was very frustrating for him, as he had not anticipated such distrust.²³ He resolved to put his emancipation plans to one side.

Tolstoy threw his energies instead into reading (Dickens’s Little Dorrit was one book he immersed himself in that summer) and writing. Mostly he worked on Youth, the third and final volume of the quartet of short novels he had originally planned about the early life of a young noble, and the first draft of what came to be the novella A Landowner’s Morning, in which he focused on Russian peasants for the first time. During the summer months Tolstoy also went on visits to his sister Masha and her husband, and rode over from their house to visit Turgenev at his estate at Spasskoye. His brother Nikolay by this time was back in the Caucasus. Despite having resigned from the army in 1854, the following summer he had applied to rejoin, and he had been posted back to Starogladkovskaya.²⁴ Sergey was briefly in the army too at this time, and Tolstoy was reunited with him in July in Mtsensk, where he was serving with the Life-Guards 4th Imperial Family Rifle Regiment (he had joined the army in March 1855, presumably on a wave of patriotic fervour engendered by the Crimean War, but he had already begun to tire of it, and was about to resign).²⁵

What claimed most of Tolstoy’s attention that summer was romance. His old university friend Dmitry Dyakov had suggested he marry Valeria Arseneva, a twenty-year-old neighbour who had become his ward upon the death of her father in 1854. Her family home was five miles away from Yasnaya Polyana on the road to Tula, and Tolstoy started making frequent visits, and cultivating her as a potential bride. It was an awkward relationship, as Tolstoy was not prepared to accept Valeria as she was – he wanted to mould her according to his ideal of womanhood. He was dreadfully disappointed when she seemed to take too much interest in dresses and dancing, while she seemed to have little idea of what he wanted from her. Reading between the lines of the many entries Tolstoy made in his diary about her, it appears his feelings of affection for Valeria were mostly wishful thinking. He wanted to be in love with her, and sometime he was ‘almost’ in love with her, but it was all too contrived.²⁶ All the time that he was courting her that summer, he found it impossible to restrain his guilt-provoking urges to pursue peasant women.²⁷