Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on 28 August 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his mother’s estate some 130 miles to the south west of Moscow. His mother, born Princess Marya Volkonskaya, died before Tolstoy was two years old, and his father, Count Nikolay Tolstoy, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and veteran of 1812, only survived her by seven years. Tolstoy, who was the fourth of their five children, was left an orphan at the age of nine, and was brought up by two married aunts, the second of whom lived in Kazan, which was to become the Tolstoys’ home from 1841 to 1847. In 1844 he succeeded with some difficulty in passing the entrance examinations to Kazan University, and began to study Oriental languages with the intention of becoming a diplomat. A year later he transferred to the Law Faculty, but his initial enthusiasm for the subject soon wore off, and although he passed his first-year examinations well enough, his erratic attendance in his second year coupled with a somewhat dissolute life and an attack of venereal disease led to his withdrawing from the university on grounds of ‘ill health and domestic circumstances’. The circumstances referred to in his letter of withdrawal concerned the final division of his parents’ estates between himself and his brothers and sister, as a result of which Tolstoy inherited Yasnaya Polyana and four other estates, a total of some 5,400 acres of land together with 330 male serfs and their families. His diary for 1847, as well as expressing at length his views about Catherine II’s Instructions to the commission engaged in drafting a new Code of Laws which had been a special subject of study at Kazan University, also records the first stages of his new life as a landowner at Yasnaya Polyana and his determination to define the nature and scope of his future activities and to draw up rules of behaviour which would enable him to develop his mental, physical and moral faculties along the lines he desired. As a boy, he later recalled, he had been greatly impressed by reading the story of Joseph in the Bible, various tales from the Arabian Nights, the Russian byliny or heroic poems and the poetry of Pushkin. In his teens he became an avid disciple of Rousseau. Among other foreign authors he greatly admired Dickens, Sterne and Schiller, while nearer home he singled out Pushkin, Gogol and the early Turgenev as writers who had made a great impact on him. He also acknowledged the enormous influence on him at the time of St Matthew’s Gospel and especially the Sermon on the Mount.
In autumn 1848 Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for Moscow, and spent the winter in frivolous society pursuits. Early in 1849 he moved to Petersburg, but after spending a few weeks preparing to take the entrance examinations for the Law Faculty at Petersburg University and at the same time losing considerable sums of money at cards, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana and opened a school for the peasant children on his estate. For the next two years he continued to live in the country, with occasional excursions into Tula and Moscow society, devoting much time to music, cards and gymnastics and taking his first tentative steps as a writer. In 1851 he wrote the unfinished and unpublished A History of Yesterday, a Sternean, digressive, self-conscious analysis of the life of a single day. He also translated most of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and began work on his own autobiographical novel Childhood. There are no diary entries for the period June 1847 to June 1850, although a few letters have survived from these years. The diaries for 1850–51 single out what he felt to be his greatest failings – vanity, irresolution, sensuality, cowardice and laziness; they also reveal his growing dissatisfaction with his way of life and the wish to make a fresh start. The opportunity came in April 1851 when his brother Nikolay was due to return from leave to his army unit in the Caucasus, and Tolstoy decided at short notice to accompany him. Soon after arriving in the Caucasus Tolstoy took part as a volunteer in an expedition against a local village (Georgia had been annexed by Russia in 1801 but the mountain tribes living in the north were still proving troublesome), and towards the end of 1851 he moved to Tiflis in order to prepare for examinations which would qualify him to join the army as a cadet.
Tolstoy entered the army proper in 1852 and for the next two years he was attached to an artillery brigade stationed in the Cossack village of Starogladkovskaya in the North Caucasus. He took part in a number of expeditions against the Chechen tribe led by the redoubtable Shamil, in the course of which he narrowly escaped death and capture. He received his commission in 1854 and was soon transferred to active service on the Danube, where hostilities had broken out between Russia and Turkey the previous autumn. He reached Bucharest in March 1854, but saw little fighting, serving for most of the time as a staff officer and being generally in poor health, as a result of which he underwent two operations before returning to Russia in September 1854, in the same month as British and French troops landed in the Crimea. He immediately applied to be posted there and reached Sevastopol in November when it was already under siege by the Allies. He spent the next year in the Crimea and was briefly in charge of a gun battery on the outskirts of Sevastopol during some of the heaviest fighting of the war. After the town had fallen he was despatched as a courier to Petersburg, but soon afterwards he sent in his resignation from the army, which became effective in 1856.
Tolstoy’s army service was by no means a full-time occupation. There was ample time for reading, writing, travel, music, gambling, womanising and many other activities. Reading for pleasure meant mainly fiction and history, with a little poetry thrown in, and with the exception of Rousseau it was largely confined to the nineteenth century, although embracing English, French and German authors no less than Russian. Tolstoy’s growing urge to be a writer himself was stimulated not only by what he read, but also by what he lived through in the Caucasus and Crimea and the unexpected amount of leisure time at his disposal. His first published story, Childhood, appeared in 1852, followed by The Raid in 1853 and Boyhood in 1854. In 1855 he published Sevastopol in December, Sevastopol in May and The Wood-felling, all drawing heavily on his own experiences as an army officer, and Sevastopol in August followed in 1856. As he said many years later when recalling his military career: ‘I didn’t become a general in the army, but I did in literature.’
Tolstoy’s diaries for the years 1851–5 take on a more conscious literary flavour as he comes to realise that literature was to be his true vocation. That they were the germ of his early fiction is a commonplace which nobody now would seriously dispute.