When he was young, Tolstoy led a rake’s life, or as he put it himself in A Confession: “I fornicated and practised deceit. Lying, thieving, promiscuity of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder… there was not one crime I did not commit.” (The “murder” refers to his time as a soldier in the army.)
Tolstoy recalled enjoying vodka when he was a student, but in his middle-age he repented and regretted all the follies of his youth. By the time he was sixty, he became obsessed with alcohol abstention, not simply moderation.
Before the state even considered a national temperance movement, Tolstoy founded his own temperance society called the Union Against Drunkenness in 1887. He did not have just the lower classes in his sights, for Tolstoy stressed that the whole nation, regardless of class, had to give up alcohol, an admonition he repeated in 1889 for the benefit of the members of the intelligentsia who had drunk gallons of vodka and behaved badly on the Foundation Day of Moscow University. The student drinking on that day was so colossal that Chekhov said that they drank everything in Moscow and would have drained the river if it had not been frozen.
When Tolstoy’s polemic was read by the students of another university, they dismissed his advice by proposing a toast to his health with the aid of large tumblers of vodka. They then published an account of their activities in a local newspaper to make sure that the old man heard about their Tolstoy-inspired jollies. They remarked that they were young and wanted to enjoy themselves, but that they might consider giving up alcohol when they were old like Tolstoy.
Tolstoy’s views on alcohol were only one part of a new philosophy he adopted from the late 1880s when he underwent a kind of religious conversion during which he gave up all of his vices and became a vegetarian.
The mentions of vodka in War and Peace and Anna Karenina are very few considering the length of the books but occur more frequently in his short stories in which he is sometimes judgmental. Tolstoy more often introduces vodka as a feature of normal domestic or military Russian life, and when he is not being dogmatic, vodka accompanies lively humour in his fiction.
His own moment of revelation about the power of alcohol had come to him when he overheard a cab driver discussing a crime, saying, “it would be a shame to do that if one were not drunk”. He related a true story:
I remember being struck by the evidence of a cook who was tried for murdering a relation of mine, an old lady in whose service he lived. He… wished to go into the bedroom with a knife, but felt that while sober he could not commit the deed he had planned… [because] “when a man’s sober, he’s ashamed”. He turned back, drank two tumblers of vodka he had prepared beforehand, and only then felt himself ready, and committed the crime…
Tolstoy wrote a play called The First Distiller, which was a dramatisation of his short story How the Devil Earned His First Bread, an adaptation of a folk tale. The play, first staged in an open-air theatre near a worker’s factory outside St. Petersburg in 1886, depicts the devil arranging for a peasant to have a surplus of grain at harvest, which at the devil’s suggestion he converts into vodka. After a few bottles of vodka have been drunk, those knocking it back become as wild as beasts, ignoring the earlier entreaties of an old man to leave it alone. Intended as a play for the masses, it was so successful that the censor banned further performances of similar plays.
Despite his public views on alcohol, Tolstoy allowed it in his own house, and for the effects of drunkenness, he needed to look no further than his son Ilya. Sofia, Tolstoy’s much put-upon wife, noted in her diary in 1897 that she warned him and two of his brothers about “the evils of alcohol, strongly urging them not to touch it”, a plea that went unheeded. Although his children were permitted to drink alcohol, when a group of actors arrived to rehearse a play in Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, they found that the fulsome welcome they were given did not extend to strong drink:
A well-spread supper table awaited us. But intoxicants were conspicuously absent, their place being ostentatiously taken by decanters of kvas [a very weak home-made beer]. We, frozen travellers, experienced a feeling akin to disillusionment; but the foresight of one of our party had secured a supply… of what was not allowed at Yasnaya, and we escaped cautiously, in turn, to the entrance hall, and there, in a corner under the stairs (feeling the gnawings of conscience) we warmed ourselves with drams of vodka.
Despite Tolstoy’s disapproval of alcohol, one of his early biographers remembered a walk with the author who “showed how much he sympathised with tipsy peasants. Tolstoy remarked, ‘Ah! But you should see how affectionate they are in their cups. Their fundamental good nature shows itself then. They are full of kindliness and want to embrace you, and are ready to give their souls to serve you.’”
Tolstoy’s sympathies were demonstrated when he recovered land for some peasants that had been stolen from their commune. They thanked him by harvesting his own fields, intending to work for nothing. But Tolstoy paid them well, rewarding the peasants with a dinner and supplies of vodka. However much he was against vodka, as a landowner Tolstoy knew that he had to uphold the traditions that were associated with harvesting.
It was the peasant’s desire for a particular enamel cup, which became known as the “Blood Cup”, which Tolstoy was particularly scathing about, because it was associated with free vodka and beer. It featured when half a million people gathered to celebrate the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896 in the Khodinka field near Moscow. When a signal was given that the free gifts including food and vodka were ready for the taking, the crowd surged forward. Due to bad planning by the organisers, several thousand people were crushed to death in the ensuing stampede.
Tolstoy had condemned the coronation for being “terrible in its absurdity and an insane waste of money” and attacked the young tsar for declaring he would uphold the autocracy of his father. It was uncharacteristically unreasonable of Tolstoy to rebuke the poor for the tragic fiasco when he concluded that it was “quite clear that only those were guilty [who] rushed forward in order to get a piece of cake and a glass of vodka.”
Two years before the coronation, he had written a story about Nicholas II’s accession to the throne called The Young Tsar in which changes for the betterment of the population come to the monarch in a dream. The surprisingly policy-heavy dream includes the relinquishing of control of the tsar’s taverns. It could not be published, but Tolstoy would later redouble his obsession with teetotalism when the state gained complete control of vodka.
He corresponded with Michael Chelysev, the deputy who had spoken at the 1905 duma, who was, like him, a fervent campaigner for total abstinence. In 1909, in one of his last acts, Tolstoy sent a drawing at Chelysev’s request to be used on the labels of all vodka bottles. The Guardian newspaper reported in the previous year that the duma had voted “in favour or removing the Imperial Eagle from the labels of vodka bottles and substituting a skull and cross-bones denoting poison; with appropriate warnings against overindulgence.”
Tolstoy posted his drawing, which is still preserved, but for reasons which are unclear, no such label was ever officially used. The health warning would wait nearly a hundred years before it was widely adopted, but a temperance society label with the Tolstoy design circulated in parts of Russia.
Abandoning poor Sofia, Tolstoy took himself off like an elephant seeking its secret graveyard and became ill at a railway station, where he died in the company of a male secretary. Ten days before, he wrote to his daughter Alexandra, asking for some books including the second volume of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
The two writers never met, and although Dostoevsky admired Tolstoy, the older writer professed to dislike his compatriot’s work. As far as vodka abstinence was concerned, their views diverged. But in his Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky relayed how he had been incensed by the cruelty meted out to a horse when he was a young man waiting for a coach to take him to St. Petersburg. He laid the blame squarely at the foot of vodka:
Directly across the street from the inn was the station building. Suddenly a courier’s troika came flying up to the station entrance and a government courier leapt out… I recall that our driver said that such couriers always drink a glass of vodka at every station, since without it they couldn’t stand up to “the punishment they have to take”. In the meantime a new troika of fresh, spirited horses rolled up to the station and the coachman, a young lad of twenty or so, wearing a red shirt and carrying his coat on his arm, jumped onto the seat. The courier at once flew out of the inn, ran down the steps, and got into the carriage. Before the coachman could even start the horses, the courier stood up and, silently, without any word whatsoever, raised his huge right fist and dealt a painful blow straight down on the back of the coachman’s neck. The coachman jolted forward, raised his whip, and lashed the shaft horse with all his might. The horses started off with a rush, but this did nothing to appease the courier. He was not angry; he was acting according to his own plan… and the terrible fist was raised again, and again it struck the coachman’s neck, and then again and again; and so it continued until the troika disappeared from sight. Naturally the coachman, who could barely hold on because of the blows, kept lashing the horses every second like one gone mad; and at last his blows made the horses fly off as if possessed. Our coachman explained to me that all government couriers travel in almost the same fashion and that this particular one was universally known for it; once he had had his vodka and jumped into the carriage, he would always begin by beating, “always in that same way”, for no reason whatsoever; he would beat in a measured manner, raising and lowering his fist, and “he’ll keep using his fists on the coachman like that for nearly a mile, and then he’ll quit. And if he gets to feeling bored, he might take it up again in the middle of the trip…”
I could never forget the courier, and for a long time thereafter I couldn’t help but explain many of the shameful and cruel things about the Russian People in too one-sided a manner. …the courier is gone, but on the other hand there is “demon-vodka”.
In what way can demon-vodka resemble the courier? It can do so very easily in the way it coarsens and brutalises a man, makes him callous, and turns him away from clear thinking, desensitises him to the power of goodness. A drunkard doesn’t care about kindness to animals; a drunkard will abandon his wife and children. A drunken man came to the wife he had abandoned and whom, along with her children, he had not supported for many months; he demanded vodka and set to beating her to force her to give him still more vodka; the unfortunate woman, compelled to virtual forced labour (just recall what women’s work is and what value we place on it now) and not knowing how to feed her children, seized a knife and stabbed him. This happened recently, and she will be brought to trial… there are hundreds and thousands of such cases – just open a newspaper. But the chief similarity between demon-vodka and the courier is certainly that it, just as fatally and irresistibly, towers over the human will.
…A fire broke out in a village; there was a church in the village, but the tavern keeper came out and shouted that if the villagers abandoned the church and saved his tavern, he would stand them a barrel of vodka. The church burned down, but the tavern was saved. These instances are still trivial compared with the countless horrors yet to come.
Dostoevsky reserved many passages of invective about vodka for his Writer’s Diary, but modified them for his novels. Excessive drinking was not amongst Dostoevsky’s vices although gambling was, and he famously begged on his knees for his wife to hand over her wedding ring to finance his habit. He wrote to a strict daily timetable, which allowed him to receive visitors in the afternoon before enjoying a light meal at three o’clock. Dostoevsky always drank a glass of vodka with it, nibbling a slice of black bread between sips, which he believed was the healthiest way to enjoy the spirit.
When Dostoevsky was imprisoned in Siberia, health was the last consideration for the prisoners who overcame their revulsion at the way vodka was smuggled in. A convict working outside wrapped the vodka-filled intestines of a bullock round his body, over which he arranged his clothes in the hope that the guard would not carry out a body search.
While Dostoevsky was abroad, a sensational crime occurred in Moscow that he followed in the newspapers, as did most of literate Russia. In the early evening dark of 21 November 1869, five members of a revolutionary group known as the “People’s Vengeance” made their way to a Moscow park. They intended to meet a former member, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, an agricultural student who had agreed to help retrieve a printing press hidden in the park near a frozen pond. The leader of the group, Sergei Nechaev, was a fanatic who had quarrelled with Ivanov and, fearing betrayal, planned to murder him.
The accomplices would have set off earlier, but they were delayed because the oldest of the conspirators, the writer Ivan Gavrilovich Pryzhov, unable to contemplate the horrors that were to come without fortification, stopped at a tavern for a generous drink of vodka. A self-confessed alcoholic, Pryzhov was something of an expert on taverns, for he had published the only book on the history of the Russian tavern in 1868.
As soon as Ivanov arrived, the gang emerged from a grotto. Nechaev first tried to strangle the student before opting to shoot him through the head. The body was stripped of all traces of the victim’s identity and forced through a hole in the pond. The conspirators then hurried to a safe house where Nechaev changed out of his blood-stained shirt. He fired at Pryzhov with his gun, narrowly missing his head.
Pryzhov had no doubt that it was not an accident, for he had argued with Nechaev that morning, telling him that he was mad to even think of committing murder. He had tried not to be involved at all. Aged forty-two and twice as old as the others, he was lame and could not see in the dark. Nechaev dismissed his excuses, and Pryzhov was told that he would have to take part – even if he had to be carried to the park.
The body was discovered a few days later. By sheer chance, the police found a list of conspirators and raided their homes. Perhaps anticipating arrest, Pryzhov burned the unpublished material he had compiled on the Russian tavern. The following day, when the police burst into Pryzhov’s Moscow apartment, they grabbed his old trembling dog, which they threw across the room. It ran off and was never seen again. With the exception of Nechaev who escaped to Switzerland, the conspirators were all arrested. Nechaev would later be caught and extradited to Russia in 1872.
Pryzhov spent one and a half years awaiting trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress island at St Petersburg. He had a nervous breakdown while he was there, partially losing his memory. He had prepared a document, “Confessions”, which was read in evidence in court and included a remark that his “whole life had been a dog’s life” and because of Nechaev he would also “die as a dog”. Pryzhov’s lawyer told the court that he was a very unwilling participant in the crime, had only been there because he was threatened and took no part in the murder itself. Stammering and confused, Pryzhov repeatedly told the court that he had made a life study of the Russian people, as if this somehow justified his crimes. He rambled endlessly, blaming his appearance in the dock on society, the injustice of life, Nechaev and many others.
The court was unimpressed, and Pryzhov was sentenced to death. An avowed atheist, he declined the final prayer offered by a priest when he was climbing the steps to the gallows. At the very last moment, he was unexpectedly reprieved and sentenced instead to 12 years hard labour in Siberia, where he was to be exiled for life.
His wife Olga volunteered to go to Siberia with him. She later petitioned the tsar, explaining that her husband’s health was poor and his involvement in the murder had been slight, but her pleas to release him were ignored. When his sentence ended, Pryzhov had only a few years before he died in Siberian exile in 1885. He continued to write to the end, as angry and unforgiving about life as ever.
The Nechaev affair was a cause célèbre in its day, and as information came to light about the crime and its perpetrators, the newspapers published as many details as they were allowed. Pryzhov was tall, bespectacled and had a scrawny beard as well as a permanently nervous stare. He appeared to be an unlikely criminal, but he was not spared publicity. The type of books Pryzhov had published on taverns and the dregs of society confirmed his wickedness to the press. If he had been at all a man, it was charged, he would have prevented the murder, as he was so much older than the other conspirators.
It took many years before it was realised that Pryzhov had made one of the most important contributions to the history of vodka in his History of Taverns in Russia in connection with the History of the Russian People. It was the only book to chart the spirit’s fiery progress from its earliest years in different regions of Russia and Ukraine. It did so in minute detail and was originally conceived as a three volume work. The later works would have covered “the urban drunks, fugitives, thieves and rebels, ordinary people of no official importance”, subjects which no publisher would consider.
For one who had little formal education, his book was a remarkable achievement. Denied a place at Moscow University to study history, he was accepted as a student there under the guise of studying medicine, a subject in which he had no interest. After two years he was sent down for failing his exams, but he somehow managed to stay on and attend history lectures. Eventually he worked as a civil servant, but this ended through no fault of his own, and Pryzhov never found steady employment again.
He often drank when he was working and frequently found himself in his favourite Moscow tavern with vodka as his companion. Depression and poverty were constant features in his life, and he was probably drunk when he tried to drown himself and his dog Leporello, only for a passer-by to rescue them both. Pryzhov was only really comfortable with those he met in taverns and was motivated by bitterness at their shared oppression to write his History of Taverns in Russia. He felt that his situation was little different from the earliest times in Russia when the downtrodden peasants were forced by law to drink in the tsar’s taverns until vodka-drinking descended down through the generations to become an accepted habit of the nation.
The book is marred by the author blaming Jewish vodka traders for selling the spirit – a common attitude then but also reflecting the writer’s fondness for scapegoats. Pryzhov was in rags when he brought the manuscript to a Moscow publisher who was astonished that the man he supposed to be a vagrant had actually written it. A few days later, he accepted the book, paying Pryzhov two hundred and fifty roubles, most of which went towards paying old debts. (Unfortunately, most of the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the book was not reprinted until 1914.) In 1868, his next major project, The Dog in the History of Human Belief, failed to find a publisher. In a last, desperate measure, he sold off his library to a Moscow bookshop where he met a revolutionary who fatefully introduced him to Nechaev.
Pryzhov seemed to Nechaev to be the ideal person to distribute leaflets and recruit members for his anarchist group, for the writer was such a well-known frequenter of taverns in the slummy Khitrov market area of Moscow that his presence there was beyond suspicion. Pryzhov accepted Nechaev’s passionate and largely mendacious account of himself, gullibly believing that the anarchist could achieve great things.
Pryzhov’s father had a distinguished war record and was decorated with an honour that accorded him the status of minor nobility, a position he never used to his advantage. He was therefore unable to advance his son in society, retiring as a doorkeeper to the Moscow Hospital For The Poor where he was on good terms with Dostoevsky’s surgeon father who worked there. (When the latter was allegedly murdered by his own serfs, it was rumoured they had force-fed him vodka until he drowned in it.)
Pryzhov was born in the hospital in 1827, as was the novelist six years earlier. But due to their age and social differences, they were never friends – though it is speculated that they knew each other as children. More fortunate than Pryzhov, the novelist was able to return from his own period of exile in Siberia after being sentenced to four years there for being a member of an intellectual liberal organisation. But like Pryzhov, he had known the horror of the last minute reprieve before execution.
Dostoevsky would base part of his novel, The Devils, on the murder and its protagonists including Pryzhov. One character in the novel reflects Pryzhov’s views such as, “Seas and oceans of vodka are drunk up to support the budget”, while another remarks:
The Russian God has already given up when it comes to cheap booze. The common people are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty, and in the court it’s “either two hundred lashes, or bring us a bucketful of vodka”.
In Crime and Punishment, Katerina Ivanovna was based on a charlatan beggar of whom Pryzhov had written in his book, Beggars in Holy Russia, published in 1860. Most of the beggars in Pryzhov’s account are motivated by greed for vodka, including one Evdokiia, who is always to be found in the same district of Moscow stopping any passer-by to ask:
“Dear brother,” or “Dear sister, you can be blessed for a kopek.” If she gets the kopek, she’ll bless the donor, but if not, she’ll send them to hell, and you know how they’re afraid of these things… When someone invites her in, she sits down on the floor and starts telling tales of apparitions and visions she has seen, after which she’ll ask for some vodka…
Although Pryzhov seemed destined to be remembered only as a failed revolutionary, the importance of his book on Russian taverns has been recognised as a key document of Russian history. Due to inefficient archive spring-cleaning, his manuscripts have recently turned up in odd places, surviving not because they were considered of interest but because no one could be bothered to throw them out. Still regarded by some as a mere eccentric, Pryzhov features as the subject of sympathetic research by a fictional character in a novella, Long Goodbye, by the 20th-century Russian writer Yury Trifonov, who says of Pryzhov that he:
…was willing to sell his manuscripts for a glass of vodka… he was a completely useless character long forgotten by everyone, an unsuccessful rebel, a historian, a drunkard and a parasite, and at the same time a man of great nobility of character.
Ivan Pryzhov