# Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work/Chapter 13

After his return from abroad, Tolstoy passed through St. Petersburg. In the beginning of May [1861], he was in Moscow, and soon afterward in Yasnaya Polyana.
Russian was then celebrating the coming of a new era, the liberation of the peasantry from serfdom.
All those who were honest, educated, and of progressive opinions turned their energy in the direction of social reform. One of the first among them was Lev Tolstoy.
With the beginning of social work his life became so many- sided that one must turn away from the strict chronology of the story and give a parallel description of his principal kinds of contemporary activity. Every direction that his labors took was connected with facts of his personal and family life.
At the beginning of the 1860s, the social activity of Tolstoy manifested itself chiefly in two spheres: in the administrative as a peace mediator, and in the educational as a teacher, organizer of peasant schools, and educational writer.
We intend to give a description of both branches of activity, but before that it is necessary to narrate some facts of Tolstoy's personal life.
On his return home, he hastened to call on his good neighbors, Fet and Turgenev. A correspondence ensued between them. Turgenev wrote to Fet from Spasskoye:
The letter contained the following note from Tolstoy:
During this visit, an unfortunate event occurred -- the quarrel between Turgenev and Tolstoy. It is very fully described by Fet, from whom we borrow the greater part of the description, adding a few corrections and filling some gaps, in accordance with new materials at our disposal.
Fet had not time to cry out to Turgenev to desist when, pale with wrath the latter said: "If you persist in speaking in this way, I will box your ears." With these words he left the table, and, catching hold of his head in great excitement, stepped into the next room. He came back a second after and said, turning to Fet's wife: "For God's sake, forgive my hasty action, which I deeply repent."
He then left the room again. After this, the visitors took their leave.
At the first halting place from Novoselkiy, the property of P. N. Borisov, Tolstoy sent a letter to Turgenev with a demand for satisfaction. then he went on further to Boguslav, the halting place half way between Bet's estate and his own estate Nikolskoye. He sent for pistols and bullets to Nikolskoye and without waiting for an answer to his first letter, sent a second one with a challenge.
In this letter to Turgenev, he said that he did not care to fight in a vulgar manner, that is to say, when two authors come with a third one, with pistols, and the duel ends in champagne- drinking -- he wanted to fight in real earnest, and he asked Turgenev to come to the frontier with pistols.
Tolstoy spent a sleepless night waiting for an answer.
At last came a letter -- Turgenev's answer to the first letter. Turgenev wrote:
A postscript followed the same day.
Meanwhile, Turgenev thus answered his challenge:
In his desire to reconcile his friends, Fet very likely attempted something of the kind, judging by the following extract from his memoirs:
Some time elapsed, says the Countess S. A. Tolstaya, and while in Moscow, Tolstoy was one day in one of those charming moods which sometimes came over him, full of humility and love, and wishing and striving for the good and great. While in this mood he could not bear to have an enemy. Therefore he wrote a letter to Turgenev on September 25th [1861], in which he expressed his regret that their relations were hostile. "If I offended you," he wrote, "forgive me; I am very unhappy to know I have an enemy."
This letter was sent to the bookseller Davidov, who had business transactions with Turgenev. For some reason it was not delivered to Turgenev in time, and meanwhile he was alarmed by certain silly rumors, which he thus related to Fed in his letter of November 8th [1861] from Paris:
We find the following note in Tolstoy's diary about this letter from Turgenev to Tolstoy:
In another letter to Fet of January 7, 1862, Turgenev writes about the same:
Probably Fet said something to Tolstoy in the way of a message from Turgenev and again caused irritation against himself, of which he informed Turgenev, for the latter wrote to him, among other things, the following:
With this we may wind up the narrative of a deplorable incident, which like a clap of thunder discharged the tension of the atmosphere between the two great men and perhaps helped afterward to bring them together on a more sincere and sounder basis.
We must add that the description of this matter in Garshin's "Reminiscences of Turgenev," printed in the "Historical Review" for November 1883, is full of misstatements as to place and time and was probably not gathered from first-hand sources.
In 1861 and 1862 Tolstoy occupied the post of a Peace Mediator of the fourth section of the Krapivenskiy District. His employment in this capacity is hardly known in literature -- fortunately its memory is still green among some contemporaries, who were at that time intimate with him. Their remarks are undoubtedly of great interest.
The reputation which Tolstoy won as a manager of his own estate on new principles, i.e., those of one who does not oppress and sweat his peasants, had almost proved an obstacle to his getting the above-mentioned appointment. Correspondence passed and information was given in a sense unfavorable to him in reference to the post. We give here the more important extracts from the material in our possession concerning this affair. The Marshal of Nobility of the province, V. P. Minin, wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Valuyev, complaining of the Governor of Tula province Lunskoy for having appointed Tolstoy Peace Mediator. These were his words:
Then the Marshal pointed out the transgression by the Governor of certain formalities as regards the appointment, hoping that these might serve to annul it.
The Minister of the Interior replied to the Marshal of Nobility that there must be some misunderstanding, and he would write about it to the Governor.
In reply to the Minister's inquiry, the Governor sent the following interesting confidential report, which shows that at the time the high official spheres marched in advance of Russian society, which had not yet awakened to the situation:
After this followed the confirmation of the appointment as Peace Mediator by the Senate.
Interesting papers have lately appeared relating to Tolstoy's activity as Peace Mediator.
These materials throw a new light on his personal character, as in all the suits of which records are produced he appears as a true champion of the peasants against the harsh tyranny of the landowners and police officers, and one may easily believe that the fears of the Marshal of the Nobility were not without foundation.
Out of the fifteen suits quoted in those papers, we will choose the most characteristic.
In one case, the landowner, one Mme. Artyukhova, complained of her late house servant, Makr Grigoryev, that he had left her, considering himself a "free man".
On this Tolstoy wrote:
Mme. Artyukhova lodged a complaint before the Assembly of Peace Mediators. As the Assembly consisted of Peace Mediators who disapproved of Tolstoy's proceedings, they set aside his decision in this case, as in many others, and they forwarded the case to the Provincial Court. Fortunately, his course was there viewed wity sympathy, and his decision in this case, as in many others, was confirmed.
So Mark Grigoryev was set free and his wife was compensated for the assault committed by Mme. Artyukhova.
An interesting affair is the case of the damage done by peasants to a field belonging to one Mikhailovskiy.
The peasants tilled the landowner's field, and during their rest allowed the horses to graze in the meadow of a neighboring landowner. The latter complained to Tolstoy. Tolstoy first asked the landowner to forgive the peasants this trespass, hoping probably thus to improve the relations between the landowner and the peasants, who had cause to complain of him. The landowner refused to overlook the damage done, and he requested an assessment of it to be made and the fine to be paid to him, claiming that it should be eighty rubles.
A long correspondence arose out of this case. The landowner Mikhailovskiy, in complaining to the Assembly of Peace Mediators, described Tolstoy's action in this way:
Considering this and other proceedings of Count Tolstoy to be illegal, Mikhailovskiy said:
The District Assembly of the Justices, in view of Mikhailovskiy's petition, requested an explanation from tolstoy, but in a paper under No. 323, of September 16, 1861, he replied that "he did not think it necessary to give any information as regards the petition of Mikhailovskiy, in virtue of paragraphs 29, 31, and 32 of the regulation Act in connection with the courts of peasants' affairs. The resolution passed in this case by the District Assembly, and presented to the Provincial Assembly, was dismissed by the latter without any written report, with the following remark: "To be added to the case."
Another case, slight as it is, shows us clearly how far Tolstoy was from having selfish aims in all these proceedings, and how ready he was to acknowledge a mistake of his own, being guided in his actions only by a sincere wish for justice.
A certain Mme. Zaslonina, a landowner, complained of Tolstoy to the Assembly for having issued a leave-of-absence passport to her house serf. Tolstoy was present at the examination into the affair, and he owned that he committed a blunder and offered to cimpensate the lady for the loss she had suffered.
However, these affairs did not all end in such a satisfactory manner for Tolstoy, as, in making himself the champion of the people's right, he had to face a whole party of serfowners who firmly stuck to their old customs and privileges. Thus the landowner Ossipovich and his former serfs had a dispute as follows: Part of the village had been burned and the landowner would not allow the peasants to build on the same spot but requested them to move their homesteads, refusing at the same time to give them proper allowance for new buildings and to free them from obligatory work and give them the time necessary for restoring their ruined homes.
Toldtoy could see that on the one hand, the demands of the peasants were reasonable, but on the other he knew the pitiful situation of the ruined small landowner, and he did not think him able to satisfy the demands of the peasants. He appealed therefore to the nobles of the district to help their colleague to extricate his needy peasants out of the difficulty or simply to help the peasants directly. Both his proposals were dismissed, and the peasants were urged to comply with all the demands of their landowner.
The suit dragged on for some time, going from one court of justice to another. Tolstoy saw that the case would be decided against the peasants and that his opinion would be disregarded. He then protested again, and when during the hearing of the case before the Assembly he saw that the members of the tribunal intentionally misrepresented the affair, he left the Assembly without signing the resolutions relating to cases which had been heard in his presence, being determined to exhaust all means to procure a decision in the peasants' favor. The Assembly lodged a complaint against him with the Provincial Assembly, but this complaint met with no attention.
Again we see how Kostomarov got possession of the peasants holdings by declaring them to be his house servants; that is to say, to belong to a section of the peasants whom the new law did not provide with land. Tolstoy took their part, and after many trials he succeeded in securing their holdings for them.
The poorer landowners resorted to all sorts of subterfuges in order to give to the peasants the smaller allotments of land, and that of the worst quality. As soon as Tolstoy noticed this tendency, he refused to confirm the charters regulating the mutual relations of landowners and peasants, and he tried his best to annul them.
We need hardly say that Tolstoy's sympathy for the peasants was exceedingly distasteful to the landowners. They proclaimed that Tolstoy had thrown a seed of discord between the landowners and the peasantry, and had finally destroyed the patriarchal relations between them; that he was provoking rebellion among the peasants, who were encouraged by him to commit many unlawful acts; that even the officials of the peasants' administrations, in order to ingratiate themselves with Tolstoy, did not perform the duties imposed upon them by the law, so that the result was perfect anarchy in the villages and innumerable irregularities such as staling, lawlessness, and so forth.
Of course, Tolstoy's proceedings as Peace Mediator made the peasants put implicit confidence in him, and this annoyed the landowners still more, so that he was faced with growing difficulties in his task, and had soon to cease his efforts in the hard struggle.
He felt, in fact, very much dissatisfied. As early as July 1861 he wrote in his diary:
On February 12, 1862, Tolstoy wrote to the provincial Court of Justice on peasant affairs:
It was on March 9th that Tolstoy had accepted the office of Peace Mediator, but he only performed his duties up to April 30th, when under the pretext of illness, he handed them over to the eldest candidate for that post in the 4th Division. The Senate at last informed the Governor of Tula on May 26th, in a document No. 24,124, that a resolution had been passed to discharge the artillery lieutenant, Count Lev Tolstoy, on the grounds of ill health, from the duties of Peace Mediator of the Krapivenskiy District and that this had been confirmed by the Imperial Senate.
The following story, taken from the biography of Loewenfeld, shows how groundless were the assertions of the landowners as to Tolstoy's favoritism toward the peasants. One can see from it that Tolstoy had defended the demands of the landowners with equal fairness when he considered them just.
The memoirs of a friend and relative of Tolstoy, Prince Dmitriy Dmitriyevich Obolenskiy, refer to the same period:
Tolstoy proved incapable in chancellor's office work, but his heart and brain worked well as Peace Mediator, and he has left kind memories of his activity in this direction. But he had greater success, though he met with no fewer obstacles, in the matter of education, which we treat in the following chapters.

## Footnotes

* ↑ A. Fet, "My Reminiscences, Part I" p368
* ↑ A. Fet, "My Reminiscences, Vol. I" p368
* ↑ A. Fet, "My Reminiscences, Vol. I" p368
* ↑ A. Fet, "My Reminiscences" p384
* ↑ D.T. Uspenskiy, "Archive Materials for the Biography of Count L. N. Tolstoy", "Russian Thought", 1903, vol. ix.
* ↑ G. Lowenfeld, Count Tolstoy, his Life and Works, p228